There were a number of exciting announcements from Apple at WWDC 2024, from macOS Sequoia to Apple Intelligence. However, a subtle addition to Xcode 16 — the development environment for Apple platforms, like iOS and macOS — is a feature called Predictive Code Completion. Unfortunately, if you bought into Apple's claim that...
Authoritarian capitalism is not the most effective form of capitalism. It is the most effective for those that are already on top, but for the market as a whole (and especially for the society around that market), it's going to be worse in the long run.
Companies that are protected from competition by an authoritarian government will be able to extract higher profits in the short term, but their products and services will become worse in the long term, which not only harms their customers, but also the company's chances of selling their products on actually competitive markets. The American car makers are a good example of this imo.
Companies that are protected from having to pay fair wages and/or providing good working conditions, will be faced with labor shortages if the workers have alternatives, or with a depressed consumer market because the people have less money/time to spend on consuming things.
I consider as most effective, the system that is most effective for the whole market in the long term, not the system that only works best for a few in that market. And yes, I realize that authoritarian market intervention is great for maximizing short term profits for those few companies/persons, but if the rest of the market suffers in the long term because of it (and they are), then we're dealing with rent seeking and that's pretty commonly accepted to be bad in the long term. Bad for society, but also bad for wealth creation. And if it's bad for wealth creation, then it's definitely not effective capitalism. This is why I consider authoritarian capitalism to not be the most effective form of capitalism.
And yeah, I'm aware that the USA is on this trajectory. Other western democracies are too, but of those that are, I think it's still mostly to a lesser extent than the USA.
About China: China's competiveness has significantly regressed in the last few years. Xi Jinping's authoritarian and imperialistic policies have not been good for business. Under Xi Jinping guanxi is also much more important again than it was under Hun Jintao: companies have no real rights, they too are dependant on maintaining relations and obeying the government. If they fail to maintain relations or if they bet on the wrong political horse, then the company leadership will be gone pretty fast.
This is also something that many people outside of the USA don't understand: 49% of the americans are not voting for the Trump/republican shit show that they see in their foreign media, but rather for a heavily editorialized image of the person and party.
This pier has got to be one of the most expensive examples of virtue signaling ever. Since Israel controls the land that the pier connects to, aid that comes off this pier would always get the exact same treatment as aid that hits an Israeli overland checkpoint, the pier is a pointless + very costly edifice.
Imo the only reason that it exists is so that the USA government can claim to be helping by throwing money at the problem, without actually doing anything about the problem.
The Verge published this spam article about the "best printers of 2024" to demonstrate how terrible Google's search results are. It now appears as the top non-sponsored post if you search "best printer" on Google....
I found that Qwant gives decent results in my native non English language, results similar in quality to Google, but way better than DDG which often just gives English results.
I didn't read every little bit as well, but that was my take away as well. I saw an emotially invested CEO who could not bear seeing his baby dragged through the mud, and so he wanted to provide a counterpoint to what he saw as misinformation and accusations, but in a polite professional manner. My first instinct would be that he would have been wasting his time with that, but seeing as his comments got posted and they make a more convincing level headed argument then the accusations, maybe it was worth it.
In February, HouseFresh managing editor Gisele Navarro called out publishers like BuzzFeed and Rolling Stone as some of the culprits that publish content about air purifiers despite a lack of expertise — but Google rewards these sites with high rankings all the same. The result is a search results page filled with SEO-first...
Windows 7 is good compared to Vista, but bad compared to Windows Xp SP 1 or SP 2 (in my memory at least).
Windows 10 is good compared to Windows 8, but bad compared to Windows 7.
After a couple more years of MS pushing win 11, we'll probably get a win 12 that is less good than win 10, but better than win 11, so thanks to people's short term memory, it will then be considered "good", but anyone with a memory and some critical thinking ability will recognize it as shite.
I'm going to disagree on this one, at least for me personally using the base functions of the different windows versions was never a problem. Even when completely ignoring the UI changes (including the always increasingly messier system configuration pages), Windows has definitely been regressing.
The user transition from win XP to win 7 was completely smooth for me, it didn't feel different at all. It's only after using it a bit that the downsides became obvious: I remember that file search worked less good, they had made a bit of a mess of config screens and the bloat needed more ram. But it came with a smashing chess program. It felt like there was some minor regression, but it wasn't a trainwreck.
Windows 8 upon first startup was awful since that was the first time that MS wanted to force the user to create a cloud account through dark pattern design. Even if I had not grown up in a time when my operating system did not use dark patterns against me, I would still be pissed off when I encountered it for the first time. Once I got past that hurdle, the Os was usable and problems only emerged when I tried to do more things.
Things like closing a stuck full screen game with task manager, which didn't work because the new task manager would not come on top. Or the new store app, which installed "apps" that were not "programs" and could fe not be uninstalled in a normal way.
From my first experiences with windows 10 I remember that out of the box you could not control when it would update. That pc would wake up in the middle of the night despite the settings saying that it shouldn't and I had to dig deep till I found how to make it behave permanently. Then at a later point I also made the mistake of using the recommended OneDrive sync system for my documents folder and nearly lost all my personal files, fortunately I had a backup on an external hard disk. And the main goal of Windows search was no longer to find files, but instead to trick users into opening bing, to boost microsoft quarterly statistics.
Microsoft has been adding more and more dark pattern design into Windows, it's not a case of "old man yells at clouds", it has really been getting worse and worse with each new release.
And Microsoft firing their qa team and using their customers as canaries is definitely not helping either. So many issues that should have never gone life.
So apart from coercing inmates to do for profit work for pennies (other countries would call it slave labour), some inmates also get to pay for the privilege on top of that.
Even Apple finally admits that 8GB RAM isn't enough ( www.xda-developers.com )
There were a number of exciting announcements from Apple at WWDC 2024, from macOS Sequoia to Apple Intelligence. However, a subtle addition to Xcode 16 — the development environment for Apple platforms, like iOS and macOS — is a feature called Predictive Code Completion. Unfortunately, if you bought into Apple's claim that...
Microsoft really wants Local accounts gone after it erases its guide on how to create them ( www.xda-developers.com )
Microsoft removes guide on converting Microsoft accounts to Local, pushing for Microsoft sign-ins....
Crypto Scammers Are Targeting Trump’s MAGA Supporters ( www.wired.com )
That has to be fake ( sh.itjust.works )
Pentagon says none of the aid unloaded from US pier off coast of Gaza has been delivered to broader Palestinian population ( edition.cnn.com )
The Verge shows how Google search is useless ( www.theverge.com )
The Verge published this spam article about the "best printers of 2024" to demonstrate how terrible Google's search results are. It now appears as the top non-sponsored post if you search "best printer" on Google....
Kagi silently removed all references to Google's index from their website
Hi!...
Google Search is getting even worse for independent sites ( www.theverge.com )
In February, HouseFresh managing editor Gisele Navarro called out publishers like BuzzFeed and Rolling Stone as some of the culprits that publish content about air purifiers despite a lack of expertise — but Google rewards these sites with high rankings all the same. The result is a search results page filled with SEO-first...
Windows 11 just isn't enticing Windows 10 users to upgrade, and its market share is actually falling ( www.pcgamer.com )
TIL 40 states in the US charge you $20-$80 a day for being incarcerated in prison. ( en.m.wikipedia.org )
Very weird that I am so old and have literally never heard this mentioned in a TV show or book or movie or anything....