I thought this was a new Chuck Tingle novel.

The description is a vast oversimplification of the fall of the Roman Empire, of course.

Like the game Monopoly, unrestrained capitalism will always end up with a few people owning almost all the value while everyone else live in poverty, and it will always end up in systemic collapse because you can’t get infinite value out of finite resources. At some point the game will be over.

But unrestrained capitalism doesn’t exist, even in today’s very unequal world. There are forces that undo the momentum of capitalism, including taxation, regulation, trade barriers, and public goods and services. Some countries do this better than others.

I happen to think that regulated capitalism, balanced by a heavy emphasis of wealth taxation and investment in public goods and services, is better than any other system that relies on non-monetary control of resources. It can be sustainable, but not in its current state.

I think so.

Apps can get woken up when a remote notification arrives that has the content-available key. Apps are woken up in background mode, at which point they have a few seconds to do whatever they need to do to refresh their content cache. This, of course, often leads to the app making a connection to the server, which exposes the user’s IP address.

I think the sin here is that some apps always set the content-available key regardless of whether there is content to be retrieved or not. That turns the notification into a surveillance tool, allowing the app to check in periodically.

The open secret of Open Source is that successful projects are largely the playground of capitalists. Who has the time to develop and maintain a whole mobile OS with all of the services people have come to expect, for no compensation? Surely the money flows in from interested parties who can then use the software to their advantage.

Much of the fundamental pieces of iOS and macOS is open source too. Darwin/XNU are open-source, but no one is under the impression that any of this effort is to benefit anyone other than Apple. Sure, Darwin-based alternative OSes exist, but let’s not kid ourselves that they are anything but curiosities, waiting to be derailed by Apple when they get too large.

I don’t think Ridley Scott knows how AI works.

Yeah, it’s all about incentives. Google’s behavior is what the law incentivizes.

Cadillac and Mercedes have had thermal cameras on their cars since the early 2000s. There is probably enough data from their vehicles to see if this technology actually helps reduce collisions at night.

DMCA is such a shitty law. But companies like Google choose the safe route and believe every DMCA claim without first using humans to investigate them (because that will cost more money), and this is the result.

I pity the independent creators and makers who get fake DMCA takedowns all the time while Google does nothing to protect them.

If Google really wants to save themselves from this kind of trouble, maybe spend some lobbying money to get DMCA repealed.

One week of bug fixing ought to fix it.

That’s not what “soft skills” means, Satya.

I can smell the bullshit before even clicking the link. We aren’t “meant” to do anything. We adapt.

I will sleep well tonight.

Misleading headline: it has not yet passed. It passed both the house and senate, but has not been signed by Gavin Newsom.

Slow news day at Business Insider, I see.

I wrote a similar blog post recently, about magnetic tapes in minivans. https://www.humancode.us/2023/02/03/a-minivan-full-of-magnetic-tape.html