Events like this remind me of Apple’s slide at the iPad announcement. It had street signs labeled “technology” and “liberal arts” and they discussed the intersection between the two.
It can seem like a bunch of hippie crap but it really emphasised that we need more than just technology and engineering (and business engagement metric bean counters) driving decisions.
So much incredible technology behind the scenes and for what? This shit?
We need people with more perspective and humanity in the driving seat.
You can access those simpler chronological feeds in Facebook under More > Feeds. They still insert sponsored posts in that feed, but you can block them with browser extensions.
The annoying part is that if you load the feed url from a bookmark, at least on mobile, it reloads to the home page anyway. So you need to navigate to it manually each time. Never used to be this way. I guess they’ll remove the “feeds” feature soon enough anyway.
The new “Hide Distracting Items” feature in iOS18 Safari has been a godsend for me. Just tap on the offending overlay/prompt and watch it disappear into the digital ether.
Even with ad blockers, these sign in prompts are becoming increasingly common and annoying.
Blocking Google and Reddit sign in popups especially have restored some of my sanity.
My uneducated assumption based on their docs is that it drops DOM elements or something, rather than network requests. The UI seems to be that you select things you want to be rid of, and the browser makes it so. They state that frequently-changing parts of the page, including ads, don’t get filtered, presumably because whatever they filter on is statically defined structure.
It allowed me to block the initial cookie overlay, which then allowed me to read the 'article'. Scrolling down the page triggered a popup which I could then block. Works pretty well!
1990s Google would then have used "distracting item" stats to adjust website ranks downwards had they done the same thing in Chrome (and had Chrome existed). Ironically, this article describes Google as now being the source of such a distracting item.
I think Apple’s strategy here is going to pay off. Provide a box with an actual fast processor in it, a simple Home Screen with no ads, and an OS with no tracking. Somehow this is a revolutionary idea in this industry.
But slowly I’m seeing more people recommending the AppleTV, even amongst enthusiast circles which tend to be rather anti-Apple.
Kind of the opposite. I had heard of it happening, so looked for evidence, and found that HN post asking for evidence, with that random post seemingly the only bit supplied.
Shouldn't be hard to honeypot your TV into doing that - just set up a network and check if the TV connects to it, or set up sniffing at the gateway and see if there's any traffic that seems unaccounted for (as in not coming from your set-top box and suspiciously large for the periodic software update checks).
Yeah TV is not something everyone wants to play around with. Not even nerds. Especially if you have a partner which just want to watch tv. You just want to relax and watch tv without any issues.
I don't have much hands-on experience of Apple TV's, but the internet is full of mentions of a "Limit Ad Tracking" option that defaults to off (more tracking).
Reminds me of the (now removed) article on encrypting saved games in the Godot game engine:
> Because the world today is not the world of yesterday. A capitalist
oligarchy runs the world and forces us to consume in order to keep the
gears of this rotten society on track. As such, the biggest market for
video game consumption today is the mobile one. It is a market of poor
souls forced to compulsively consume digital content in order to forget
the misery of their everyday life, commute, or just any other brief
free moment they have that they are not using to produce goods or
services for the ruling class. These individuals need to keep focusing
on their video games (because not doing so will fill them with
tremendous existential angst), so they go as far as spending money on
them to extend their experience, and their preferred way of doing so is
through in-app purchases and virtual currency.
> But what if someone were to find a way to edit the saved games and
assign the items and currency without effort? That would be terrible,
because it would help players consume the content much faster, and therefore
run out of it sooner than expected. If that happens, they will have
nothing that prevents them from thinking, and the tremendous agony of realizing
their own irrelevance would again take over their life.
> No, we definitely do not want that to happen, so let's see how to
encrypt savegames and protect the world order.
The examples are so horrendous I thought it was satire. I can’t wait for genome, cryptocurrency, and nuclear power startups to “move fast and break things” and screw up so badly and remind us why we had these regulations to begin with.
The NRC (and most other regulatory bodies) predate Chevron deference, so you should count on them sticking around and still doing their thing. A nuclear startup could try taking them to court to circumvent all their rules and build naked nuclear piles in residential neighborhoods or something, but even if they got a federal judge to go along with that, it should be an easy political win for legislators to smack it down with some new more specific laws.
And although the regulatory interpretation of those laws could also be challenged in court, successfully doing so shouldn't be considered a given. Judges generally do have some sense you know, as a class they decide important matters in boring uncontroversial ways across the country every days. The controversial outcomes that make news cycles are newsworthy specifically because they're unusual.
Than the United States Congress? They're absolutely more effective. Congress may have been an innovative design in 1787, but it's grown into such a pile of misaligned incentives that it's almost completely dysfunctional.
As for corruption, I suspect agencies may be more or less corrupt on an individual basis. I don't have any hard data, but I suspect they're less corrupt on average. The Supreme Court has, repeatedly, given Congress members the go-ahead to be almost as corrupt as they want, while they're harsher on executive branch agencies.
Is 23 And Me supplying you with an analysis of your genome horrendous? Giving medical advice based on that while not being an MD might be a wrong thing, but that's not what's discussed, and it is regulated differently.
Crypto currencies may be a wrong and dangerous thing (paying for stolen goods and hit jobs, etc), but KYC rules are not derived from the Chevron ruling.
Nuclear safety is indeed important, but forcing nuclear power stations to lower their radiation levels below the natural background levels of places like Denver, CO does not seem reasonable, but does seem like an undue burden.
> Is 23 And Me supplying you with an analysis of your genome horrendous?
No, but forever storing it, cross-matching it with others, and eventually leaking this data is horrendous.
If 23 And Me was just a genome analysis for preventive healthcare company you wouldn't be citing it because that's not "exciting" enough but it'd be as useful as it can be without the harmful side of collecting this biometric data at such scale.
But won't a preventive healthcare company be subject to these same risks of cross-matching and leaking?
Also, not that 23 And Me were secretive about all that, they advertised the cross-matching before you order the kit, and data leak risks is something one should automatically consider when sharing any private data with anyone at all.'
If there is any harm done, it's not in telling people how much Neanderthal DNA they have, and not even in cross-matching them when they voluntarily sign up for that.
> But won't a preventive healthcare company be subject to these same risks of cross-matching and leaking?
For cross-matching no, why would they be cataloguing genealogy trees if they didn't provide that service? Or if they did for any necessary further analysis/research (like tracing some evolution of genetic defect) it could be anonymised and discarded after use.
For leaking data, I agree there would be a risk but not providing services that require the genetic data to be available at all times for 23 And Me would lessen the issue. Either simply discard the data when not necessary anymore for the healthcare assessment; or if they wanted to keep it for the convenience of the customer then it could be encrypted with some key only the customer has access to, and which if needed the customer could provide for their service request.
Voluntarily signing up for it shouldn't remove all ethical issues from 23 And Me, a common person as a customer is not an all-knowing being who is informed enough about all the potential risks of giving such data to a company. It's not reasonable to expect that every customer is well informed about that.
Or, it can remind us why we have Congress in the first place.
Another article trending here is talking about what a great power grab it is by the supreme Court, which is true in a sense, but mostly it is saying to the Congress that you actually have to do your job.
Congress did their job. They granted authority to regulatory agencies who are much better equipped to make these sorts of decisions. Regulatory agencies employ scientists and subject matter experts in their relevant fields.
Our congresspeople are a mixture of serious people and clowns who are very good at saying outrageous things to get on television. Even the serious people cannot possibly be well-rounded enough to have the kind of expertise necessary to write perfectly detailed regulations for every possible field.
Could I come up with some regulations related to tech? Sure. But it would be a terrible idea to ask me to write financial, medical, or environmental regulations.
Like I said, Congress did their jobs. Sometimes delegating to experts is the smartest move.
Where congress explicitly delegates authority it will be respected and that is not chevron deference, chevron deference means that when a law is ambiguous it means the court should interpret the ambiguity as congress delegating their authority to the regulator within reason.
It is not possible except in some simple cases to make those laws completely specify every detail and cover every case when dealing with large complex topics, so there will almost always be cases where those executing the law will need to have some gaps filled in order to carry the law.
That was true long before Chevron, true during Chevron, and is still true.
This isn't the end of regulation, this is just the end of unelected agencies making up rules as they please. All this changes is that congress has to do their job.
It's for shareholders. Microsoft and Nvidia have a bigger market cap than Apple now, thanks to the AI investor boom. Apple need to show they can be all about AI, too. But Apple have the institutional culture to maintain privacy.
This is exactly what I was thinking during the entire keynote. It was blatantly the WWSC (worldwide shareholder conference) and hackernews commenters are eating it up.
Don't get me wrong, I've always appreciated apples on device ml/AI features, those have always been powerful, interesting and private but these announcements feel very rushed, it's literally a few weeks after Microsoft's announcements.
They've basically done almost exactly what Microsoft announced with a better UX and a pinky promise about privacy. How are they going to pay for all of that compute? Is this going to be adjusted into the price of the iPhones and MacBook? and then a subscription layer is going to be added to continue paying for it? I don't feel comfortable with the fact that my phone is basically extending it's hardware to the cloud. No matter how "private" it is it's just discomforting to know that apple will be doing inference on things seemingly randomly to "extend" compute capabilities.
Also what on earth is apple high on, integrating a third party API into the OS, how does that even make sense. Google was always a separate app, or a setting in safari, you didn't have Google integrated at an OS level heck you don't have that on Android. It feels very discomforting to know that today my phone could phone home to somewhere other than iCloud.
I set up my own media server and run Infuse on the AppleTV. For my wife and kids, it's the ultimate setup.
Everything is in one place (not spread across different apps), the UI is consistent and not buggy (official apps can be terrible at times). All they do is put in a request to dad and their TV show or movie appears shortly after in the "newly added" section on the TV. Not only that, but content doesn't disappear from one service without warning. It's always going to be there, and I get to curate the kids content.
It require piracy, and the kids don't know that, but it's the only way to get this setup.
Not OP, but I'm not going to pay money and spend more time and effort to still break the law for the eventual-same result. Ripping DVDs and Bluray disks requires breaking the encryption. The keys have leaked, it's relatively easy, but it's still objectively illegal here in the great white North.
YouTube search has to be one of the worst offenders.
It will intentionally insert unrelated videos into search results, in an obvious attempt to boost your engagement. And it probably works. I have no doubt it’s possible for Google (a damn search company) to make a more capable YouTube search, but it’s clearly not aligned with their interest of increasing some retention KPIs.
You mean, when you search Youtube for "Galvanic Corrosion Explained" you don't want clickbait nonsense like "Elon Musk fires employees in twitter meeting DUB" or "Cybertruck Crash Test is HORRIFYING, Here’s Why" ??
Fuck no. One of the biggest quality of life improvements other than ditching YouTube entirely is turning off the auto play mode and only watching specifically what you were looking for.
It can seem like a bunch of hippie crap but it really emphasised that we need more than just technology and engineering (and business engagement metric bean counters) driving decisions.
So much incredible technology behind the scenes and for what? This shit?
We need people with more perspective and humanity in the driving seat.