I’ve noticed most of the complaints are about the Pro plan. Anecdotally I pay for the $200 Max plan and haven’t noticed anything radically different re: tokens or thinking time (availability is still a crapshoot)
I am certainly not saying people should “spend more money,” more like the Claude Code access in the Pro plan seems kind of like false advertising. Since it’s technically usable, but not really.
> I am certainly not saying people should “spend more money,” more like the Claude Code access in the Pro plan seems kind of like false advertising
Its particularly noticeable when for a long time you could work an 8 hour day in codex on ChatGPT´s $20/month plan (though they too started tightening the screws a couple of weeks back)
I worked there and the answer is the engineering talent isn't great, in addition to being very unfocused, and tons of pointless org churn. Bitbucket pipelines/workers was originally implemented, essentially, by two guys (I know, because I sat 2 rows of desks apart from them!) if that tells you anything. I doubt there was more than one person actively maintaining it for the past decade, if they didn't get laid off recently. That office doesn't even physically exist anymore, and the people are long gone.
Apple seems to slightly care about supporting Codeweavers/CrossOver from things I've seen, which indirectly makes Wine, Rosetta 2, and GPTK "important enough to support" since they're important features
I don't like companies forcing their newest features on me noisily and constantly trying to ship new features and see what sticks so you can't trust whether a feature advertised one week will even be there the next.
However, I have even less patience for companies forcing paid-for third-party ads down my throat on a paid product. Slack at least doesn't sell my eyeballs. Facebook, Twitter, Google's ads are worse to me than new feature dialogues.
Which brings me to Apple. I pay for a $1k+ device, and yet the app store's first result is always a sponsored bit of spam, adware, or sometimes even malware (like the fake ledger wallet on iOS, that was a sponsored result for a crypto stealer). On my other devices, I can at least choose to not use ad-ridden BS (like on android you can use F-Droid and AuroraStore, on Linux my package manager has no ads), but on iOS it's harder to avoid.
Apple hasn't sunk to Google levels in terms of ads, but they've crossed a line.
I agree. App store is really horrible. Why is it that when I'm searching for a first party or a very very popular, the first result and many of the other results are weird scammy malware like things? I don't particularly care about the stupid homepage ads tho, I think thats just because I have "personalize app store recommendations" turned off.
Search inside Settings (both mac and ios) was also really really stupid for a long while. Why are you taking me to some random accessibility toggle when I'm looking for "displays" ? But I checked right now and it's good.
I get it but... well I think of App Store as... a store. I don't have to go there.
I'm actually pretty disappointed in the lack of discovery available in the App Store, but I rarely go there. I'm fine with advertising being there. I wish it was better but I'm not offended that there is paid promotion in a store.
>comes up with other banks, BankNames US app (not the country
you are in)
>revolut etc (cant use in the country you are in)
>ten minutes later
even worse when its your telecomm telling you to install their Official App so you can pay your bills or they will cut your cellular service, and you cant find it
I don’t see what that has to do with (increased) advertising on the App Store (IMO search there never has been good) or the comment you replied to in which colechristensen said: “I'm actually pretty disappointed in the lack of discovery available”.
I think paid advertising may even help improve discoverability on the App Store because, instead of making 10 or 20 to do list apps and hoping to get them to rank high by a combination of sheer luck and SEO tricks, scammers may only make one, and pay to get that to the top of the list.
In super markets product placement is affected by two factors: how much producers are willing to pay for a good spot (e.g. by offering lower wholesale prices if the product gets a more visible place) and vetting by the store owner.
I don’t think different solutions exist in the App Store. Apple doesn’t want to do much vetting, making advertising the only thing that may help (and yes, it would be awesome if there were a store that did do much vetting, but that requires a world where many different stores exist, and we aren’t there (yet))
> I think paid advertising may even help improve discoverability on the App Store
So my grandmother searching "Powerpoint" and getting malware instead of the microsoft app is good actually?
Let me compare some search terms and see if ads are giving me "better" results:
* ublock - surfshark vpn
* wordle - spammy adware word game
* slack - spammy adware game
* microsoft word - spammy spyware office app (not the one made by MS)
* every bank I could think of - different financial app
Like, this isn't a good user experience. The ads aren't relevant, even when you type in a hyper-popular app's name exactly, something like 80% of the time a competitor has sniped the top spot.
For the "microsoft word" search, the spam app had an identical logo to word, and I have no doubt many people have been fooled. If you look at the reviews, some of the 1 star reviews are detailed complaints, and all the 5 star reviews are inhuman sounding "This helped me do my job" and "great app" reviews.
> I don’t think different solutions exist in the App Store
Sorting roughly by popularity and reviews, and also doing a little more to combat fake reviews, seems like it would be better. It at least would mean that if I searched "bank name" my bank's app would come up, since for every bank I tried the first non-ad result was in fact the bank in question.
It would save grandmothers around the world who just click on the first result.
So you're saying a hypothetically well implemented advertisement service could be better than a hypothetical poorly implemented ranking service.
The reality is right now we have a poorly implemented advertisement service that shows malware, and if you ignore the ads and look at the search results based on relevance, they're clearly better.
The claim "A good ad service would be good" is a truism, but that's not the reality we live in.
As someone who recently moved to NL from the US I encounter this issue about once a week and it’s blocking me from doing serious things like paying for parking, taxes, utilities or government services, all of which have apps that are only available on the Dutch app store.
I have a separate Dutch Apple ID I can switch to, but each time I log out I risk accidentally deleting all my data.
> all of which have apps that are only available on the Dutch app store.
This isn’t really on Apple though. Blame the companies/developers for geo gating their apps. It’s a simple checkbox in the store to make it available for other countries.
I get an app recommendation from a friend, I go to the App Store and search for it. I have to be super careful about which link I'm actually clicking on and which app I'm installing, because the App Store is riddled with spam and malware.
I wouldn't mind, except that Apple charge 30% of everything with the justification that they are keeping the ecosystem free of spam and malware...
I’ve been installing apps from the App Store for more than a decade and have never ever accidentally downloaded spam or malware. I’m sure it’s there but it’s really not “riddled” with it in my experience searching for apps. What it’s riddled with is subscription-based apps whose free tier is worthless
I haven't noticed this at all and I wonder if you're mistaking curation for advertising? When I open up the App Store I get a panel written "games we love" and a listing of indie games that are clearly not paid for ads. The ads in search are visibly marked as ads, and while I don't particularly like ads in general, they are pretty easy to avoid.
Mine is Moneris Go, and the top review is titled "Garbage App!!!!" lol
Honestly the last time I remember using the App Store was years ago and I can't recall if they had ads or not. Imo it's distasteful and I wish they didn't have them. Still leagues better than the fucking ads in the start menu which caused me to give up on gaming and Windows forever.
If I open the app store and search "Gemini", the first result is "ChatGPT (advertisement)"
If I search for my bank, I get another bank. If I search for "Wordle", I get a bunch of ad-supported spamware (both the ad and non-ad results) before the real NYT Games app.
The app store has ads in search results. This is the primary way that my technologically inept relatives end up with the wrong app installed btw, is by searching and clicking the first result, and getting complete trash adware.
Apple should be ashamed of selling out their users.
Apple keeps nagging me to upgrade to godawful Tahoe. Every time there’s a system update (which includes Safari, Safari TP, CLT etc. updates) Tahoe is always default checked. Even when I specifically click on a Sequoia point update, the Tahoe update is always checked instead of that point release. This has way more destructive potential than “try our new AI feature” in apps.
To add insult to injury, the one AI feature that I may want to evaluate—Claude Code integration in Xcode—is gated behind Tahoe upgrade, even though it has absolutely no reason to do so, given that every other IDE integrates AI features just fine on any recent OS.
Edit: Oh and I’m not getting bombarded in Slack at all, maybe because my company doesn’t pay for any of the AI stuff there. Last time I got a banner or something like that was months ago.
This right here is why I uninstalled Google Maps from my phone. Them pushing the AI-generated Know Before You Go that you can't turn off and blocks you from getting to reviews written _by humans who went to that restaurant_ is absurd. And this is getting normalized everywhere. Amazon with Rufus. Uber with their AI-first support. Google Workspace with Gemini EVERYWHERE (that requires hoops to properly turn off). Lots of sites with their "Ask $HUMAN_NAME" features.
Agreed. As someone who spent thousands of dollars at early Massdrop, when they switched to 'basically just a store' + their branded products the goods weren't as appealing and I eventually just stopped visiting. And that makes sense if you think about it: if a group buy gets fully funded people obviously want it.
They ended up having a lot of non-group buy things like extremely esoteric keycaps probably only a couple dozen people on earth are willing to spend money on.
TBH I went through SERE school (aircrew) and I questioned its value, since the training is in eastern Washington/northern Idaho area mountainous woodland environment and all the evasion they showed us relied on that kind of cover and "bushcraft"
And you know, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran are definitely not eastern Washington lol
Iran isn't just central Tehran. Look up the Zagros Mountains and the Alborz Mountains. Or just look at a picture of the northern Tehran skyline, it is at the foot of the Alborz, a huge mountain range. There's plenty of woodlands and forest too. Some parts of the Hyrcanian forests get over 50 inches of annual rainfall, which isn't Forks, WA, but it is substantial.
Not really, if you're entering Iranian airspace from the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, or Europe, you're flying over either the Zagros Mountains or the Alborz Mountains. Unless you crash/eject in a city, you're almost certainly going to be in the mountains. Look at a map.
You'd get additional specific training for deployments and the skills are transferrable. But obviously they can't train everyone in every biome that we have, otherwise you'd spend a whole year just flying around to different areas of the country to train and on a 4-year contract it's just not going to work time-wise.
This is the view outside of Fairchild AFB, which runs the training course in question.
Wikipedia reports that Spokane has a Mediterranean climate, as does Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province where this F-15 is reported to have been shot down.
WA has a crazy collection of microclimates. Ho oh rainforest, alpine at the various mountains, Yakima desert, mild and wet near Seattle, dry plains in the east of Cascades, etc.
far from pc but i grew up hunting along the snake and the old guys always called those hills "Bin Ladens" bc it looked like the pictures of where news reported he was hiding
Sounds like typical one-sized-fits-all, checkbox military nonsense. Perhaps there are better and/or climate-specific SERE courses in one or more services? Because if it's ineffective, it's a waste of time and money more so than usual and puts expensive-to-replace personnel at risk.
Seems like it's all about vacating the area and busting out the CSEL (or NGSR when materialized) personal SAR comms is the best way out, or it may well turn into a weeks(s) long, nonstop spy-shit ordeal getting out. Perhaps some forethought and packing with knowledge and specific local-appropriate items (and chunk of cash) would help more than MIL-STD Walmart camping aisle prepper bullshit.
I think our navy is mostly designed for prestige too, but it seems like you could use the current carriers to transport like a million disposable drones?
> it seems like you could use the current carriers to transport like a million disposable drones?
To what end? You can use them as an extremely expensive cargo ship, sure. But if you're talking about launching drones off of our carriers, you have the problem that whatever you are in drone range of is also in drone range of you.
Drones have limited range. Perhaps a submarine would be better: sneak close to your target, raise a pipe from the sub to the surface, then launch a bunch of drones from it.
Limited range? Shaheds have over 2000 kilometers more than tomahawks.
And btw, if you can get a submarince close to your target, torpedoes and missiles are going to be much more effective than drones.
Space is limited on platforms, a submarine might have space for 60 drones or 30 missiles, given the immense cost of the submarine, going with the missiles is the right call.
The trucks launching shaheds that iran is using can fit like 5 such drones, a similar truck could probably fit 2 to 4 cruise missiles the only reason they are using drones is the rapid production and cost associated with drones instead of the cruise missiles.
Driving your submarines into a narrow area with limited depth is driving right into a bottleneck trap.
It may be hard to locate a submarine out in the deep open sea, not so much if they are limited in escape routes. Some $50 microphones in the water will be able to pick up submarine activity and if the sub is in range of sending out drones it is in range of being detected by drones equipped with simple magnetic sensors. And that is assuming they can't put an active bit of sonar on two or three drones and drop them in the sea and triangulate it to within a few hundred feet to start with.
That still doesn't make them easy to take out, but the cost of potentially losing a submarine is so massive that it doesn't make sense to risk them to start with.
I am certainly not saying people should “spend more money,” more like the Claude Code access in the Pro plan seems kind of like false advertising. Since it’s technically usable, but not really.
reply