That makes very little sense to me. When your Subversion server is gone, you're hosed. When your Git forge is down, you take any old SSH shell account anywhere, push and keep working.
I like Musk companies more than most here it seems, I think he’s a net positive to the world. But (admittedly sans hard evidence) he absolutely gives me the vibe he’d train on my source code without my permission. I simply don’t trust him in this arena.
So there is more to lose than just the service being unreliable.
As a person he's either a poser or a neo-nazi.
As a government agent he's responsible for many deaths and as of yet untold harm.
Tesla was one of the earliest EV manufacturers, but these days they're overpriced and will be remembered for panel gaps and being destroyed by a car wash.
SpaceX has done a lot for that sector, but will mostly be remembered as the company that fucked astrophotography with 10s of thousands of satellites.
And Twitter has been dragged into irrelevance so badly it was being called a "reverse startup."
Neuralink seems to be going nowhere...
I can forgive him ransacking the federal government, exploiting workers in everything he does, building data centers that pollute like a cartoon villain, backing a fascist takeover of the US and similar ones all over the world, and openly sig-heiling, but I can't forgive him training on my source code!!!
Acorn is one of the very, very few remaining pieces of software where the update notification popping up makes me go "Oh nice, what's this then?" instead of filling me with existential dread.
I hardly do anything graphics-related these days, but I still buy each and every new full version, just because it has become so damn rare to see good software that isn't paternalistic to outright adversarial towards its own users.
I've never forgotten this SIGGRAPH demo from almost twenty years ago, in which the authors effectively switch camera and light source computationally (... in a static scene) [1]
Ever since then, I have viewed scenes such as the "lingerie store scene" from Enemy of the State [2] with a little bit less eye rolling...
They started throttling devices based on battery age after "Batterygate" in 2016, after a wave of news that their phones were suddenly shutting off on high load because the batteries terminal voltage dropped. They do not "artificially slow down before a new release".
The were sued because in their typical arrogance, they neglected to _tell_ people about that. They did not lose, they settled a class action suit.
As a result, they made battery management and state a lot more transparent in iOS, as they should have done in the first place.
Claiming malicious planned obsolescence, as you did, requires facts not in evidence.
Of course they did. My iPad 2 worked perfectly up until iOS6 and crawled to a screeching halt after upgrading to iOS7. Constant lags, freezes, sometimes even crashes of the same apps which worked fine a week before. And to protect consumers even more, Apple blocks firmware downgrade, despite old version working just fine for years later.
Try iOS 26, you'll see what it means in practice, you will get a phone with worse battery life, slower operating system and no path to downgrade, only way is to upgrade your phone to the next big thing.
If it's not malicious, then it's gross incompetence, but at the end of the day, it will still eventually require to purchase a new Apple device, when a downgrade would have been enough.
It's a long-term issue, because even if it will get fixed in two years, then the battery damages due to severe drain are permanent, and this is to be paid with your pocket, or again... upgrade to a new iPhone.
It's not the first cycle like this, slower software is deployed to all iPhones, older iPhones lag, and you have to purchase the fresh new iPhone.
==
"Apple implemented unfair commercial practices", the Italian competition authority said in a statement (after fining Apple).
The companies encouraged users to upgrade operating system software but did not make clear the increased demands that new software would make on smartphones, according to the authority.
This "caused serious malfunctions and significantly reduced performance", which provoked users into upgrading their devices, the authority said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45963943
==
This is about the generic software updates.
The main issue is that you have no path to downgrade, no way to use your own OS, and your only choice is to hope for an update from Apple that will revert back your device to its normal way of working, or, purchase a new phone, which won't have this issue.
It's literally impossible that they have not noticed, so if not planned obsolescence, at least, it is intentional degradation of existing products (or that their team is not able to notice...)
It's rather the other proof around that we would like to see, that Apple did not know the impact of what they are doing. If they knew, you know what it means.
> They did not lose, they settled a class action suit.
I mean... settling means you lost, almost by definition. You were sued and then paid the person who sued you. Settling is the result of almost all lawsuits where the company knows they were at fault - why would you go to trial if you know you're going to lose?
Now, don't get me wrong - your overall point could still be correct. Many companies who still do believe themselves to not be at fault, offer a settlement purely for the reason that it's cheaper in terms of legal fees (or perhaps less of a PR nuisance, or just generally lower-risk) than going to trial.
> I mean... settling means you lost, almost by definition.
No, since "settling" is something both sides do, if it were losing, it would be both sides losing.
Settling is a decision to compromise to mitigate the cost of litigation (and in the US, which does not have loser pays as the default rule, that can be quite expensive even if you win) as well as the risk of loss. You can’t really characterize it as being more "winning" or "losing" for anyone one party without a much more detailed consideration of the specific terms and the expected costs of litigation, etc.
> You can’t really characterize it as being more "winning" or "losing" for anyone one party without a much more detailed consideration of the specific terms and the expected costs of litigation, etc.
Yeah... you can. The party suing received $500 million. That's a win.
Yes, a settlement has to be agreed on by both sides, but that doesn't mean the party suing didn't win. It just means that, maybe they could have won more.
Where you and the parent commenter are correct is that, the result of this case is not the same as a court verdict regarding the legality of Apple's conduct. That part true - if we're talking about "was Apple truly intentionally killing their phones to get you to buy a new one", the outcome of the case says nothing about that.
But to make a statement like "they didn't lose, they settled" is just misleading. Almost every company that has ever done something illegal settled, that's not an argument either. This case had at least enough merit to spook Apple into coughing up over half a billion dollars ($500 million to the class action and $100 million to the coalition of state attorneys general who sued Apple for deceptive practices). (Again, not proof of guilt but at least evidence of the claims having some merit.) In the grand scheme of things they definitely lost.
Never mind cleaning up, you also have to understand the language just to judge and review the LLMs output. How else are you to separate good design and implementation from a bad one?
> I've done the same with my artwork over the years, hoping that someone would come along and collab or "remix" my art into something new and interesting. I don't do promotion, so it hasn't occurred, but the idea was inspired by NIN and I think it's an amazing idea that can really build a community.
You know, right this second I am listening to a MIDI recreation of the soundtrack to a very obscure German Atari ST puzzle game from '84. Something somebody recreated where I would be surprised if more than 500 people in the world ever heard the original.
Even though you might never learn of it, given the vast number of people out there, it is entirely likely that what you did already touched somebody out there. You do not need to have built a community in order to have done something of significance.
Sorry to get back to you so long after you posted, but I really appreciate your comment! Also a huge fan of Atari computers (I learned my first programming on my dad's Atari 130XE 8-bit around 1990, quite a while after it went out of popularity).
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