I seem to remember Jeep saying manual window winders were actually more expensive once you factor in the costs of having them as an option given how cheap electric ones are when they dropped them for the new Wrangler. Might still be cheaper if you only manufacture with them and don’t offer electric but the price difference can’t be that high.
I never had a manual window winder fail to work, but electric window buttons breaking or the motor getting stuck (e.g. in icy conditions) has happened at some point in every car I've owned.
The convenience factor hugely outweighs the rare failures for me, but I could see why someone buying a Wrangler for its intended purpose might actually prefer the manual option.
> I simply took the approach of reverse engineering the EC firmware, binary patching it, flashing that back, and getting on with life. Skill issue.
There is no simply here.
You can’t list a litany of niche skills before implying that’s just life and it’s everyone fault they don’t have the time and knowledge to just, you know, casually reverse engineer and patch a binary.
Well, first, you have to consider that the Roman republic was never really democratic but was at the hand of a small aristocracy which had sometimes but rarely the interest of the Romans at all, let alone the non citizen inhabitants.
But even, then it is definitely not accurate. Augustus gained powers through the numerous conflicts which followed Caesar murder at a time when the Republic was already challenged thanks to legions he more or less inherited (oversimplification) from Caesar. He was given powers by the Senate through what we would call rubber stamping only after his military power was inescapable.
> Most customers do want it this way, but Apple still allows to exchange comfort for privacy […] more than an empty promise, or what other vendors provide.
That’s pretty much exactly what all the other vendors in the market provide: insecure and spying by default.
I don’t really understand why Apple should somehow get good points for their stance on privacy when they are actually doing pretty much the same thing than everyone else.
While I'm not on the Apple bandwagon, there is a difference between insecure by default and active spying. Even as a Pixel user, I'm fairly confident that my data would be (ab)used less on the Apple side.
Users want convenience, and security always brings inconveniences (e.g., inter-client sync, no chat data before a client logged in first time, etc.).
Some vendors might provide convenience because they want to have your data. Others might provide you the convenience because you as a user want it, but see the resulting data as nothing but a liability.
Some providers are known to have the majority of their business be based around such data, whereas others might have little to no presence in that field.
> that my data would be (ab)used less on the Apple side.
Honest question, apart for the marketing, why?
Does Apple collect your data? Yes.
Does Apple operate an advertising platform and give itself a large amount of rights on your data for advertisement purpose? Yes.
Is Apple an American company and therefore subject to the non sensical and draconian USA spying laws? Yes.
I don’t really see how Apple is better than Google here. Both are pretty much equally bad.
None of your points is about whether or not the company spies or not. You also conflate the malice of the country they are in with the malice of the company itself.
Google's primary business is and have always been ads, and they practically invented the kind of global tracking we have all come to know and hate. Google actively tries to expand tracking and ad exposure to their own benefit. See the Google TV Streamer home screen as an example of their ad behaviors.
Apple has a miniscule ad business, and from the estimates I can find, the money in that is just a fraction of the Google search sponsorship they get (which counts towards the revenue of the same "services" bracket as their own ads). Apple actively tries to limit tracking, pissing other ad companies like Meta off. See the Apple TV home screen as an example of their ad behaviors.
In general, having access to data and using it are entirely orthogonal, and many companies that have your data consider it a liability they would much rather be without - it's just sometimes hard to provide a service without data passing through, and not everything can reasonably be E2E (either for technical or UX reasons).
> many companies that have your data consider it a liability they would much rather be without - it's just sometimes hard to provide a service without data passing through
Apple collects much more data than needed for the service. They also make it practically impossible to use the phones without giving a ton of personal information:
There's a big difference between "expanding miniscule business unit" and company whose entire identity is that, so much so they're willing to pay the first company several time the revenue of their ad business every year just to decide a default setting that might boost their ad business.
And once more, you're conflating access to information and spying.
> you're conflating access to information and spying
So what's the difference? In this particular case, the access is unwanted and unnecessary, i.e. it very much looks like spying to me.
> There's a big difference between "expanding miniscule business unit" and
Apple is a for-profit company, not a charity. They collected a ton of personal data on everyone and are continuously expanding their ad business. How naive you must be to trust that they're on the side of users forever? It's the same discussion on HN every time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39928611
That you don't want anyone to see any data doesn't make people you give your data spies. Your doctor knows a lot of personal details about you (i.e., has your data), but that doesn't make them a spy - they'd probably prefer not knowing, but they couldn't do their for-profit job otherwise.
If you fail to understand that holding or processing user data as part of providing a service is different from making a business out of selling and/or analyzing said user data, then there isn't much to discuss.
Does a small ad business use personal data? Sure, but there sure are differences in how and the extend. How blind you must be to not see that.
> holding or processing user data as part of providing a service
Did you read my link? The Apple's data collection is far beyond what they need to provide the service. Unlike the doctor. This is my main point.
> Does a small ad business use personal data?
Again, you are missing the point. Look at the trend, not the current state. The ad business is expanding, and you can't be sure that it stays small for long. See also: enshittification, https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/
As discrimination based on religion is illegal in most of the world, it’s also probably exposing the person asking and the company to a lot of potential legal risk. It’s a big no where I live and part of the things you are explicitly trained to never ask about.
Nobody claims the pope. This is a weird take. We are not talking about some sport celebrity.
It’s true that the man was born in the USA and was a bishop in Peru. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Peruvian catholics were happy to have a pope who lived their country.
> The Peruvians definitely seem to be happy about it
I don’t really see that from the articles you linked.
It’s all quotes about how the Pope is Peruvian (definitely true as he indeed has the Peruvian nationality) and how Peruvian people feel blessed in that.
Even your last article reinforces that he is a dual citizen with knowledge of both culture which obviously makes people joyful.
I have yet to see people argue if he is more American or more Peruvian apart from here.
There is no such thing as European independence. Europe is a continent, not a political entity.
The EU is a political entity which happens to be reconsidering its independence from the US. The UK very much is not and is kowtowing favours hoping to get a good deal.
Because more people know about Pluto than Eris or Sedna. And we know that Pluto is the furthest away planet (sue me). So 15x Pluto is much easier to visualize in context of the entire solar system than 700x Earth. My cosmological knowledge is above average, but I don't know off the top of my head if 700 AU is super-duper far away or still in the range of the gas giants.
> And we know that Pluto is the furthest away planet (sue me)
I don't need to sue you. It's just entirely incorrect by any sane definitions of a planet. It's not the further if you include similar bodies or not a planet. As I have no interest in saving American misplaced pride (because let's not kid ourself it's about anything else), I don't see the point of spreading misinformation.
> Because more people know about Pluto than Eris or Sedna
Only if you were born before it was retrograded which will be less and less likely as time goes on.
> My cosmological knowledge is above average, but I don't know off the top of my head if 700 AU is super-duper far away or still in the range of the gas giants.
I'm not convinced that giving it in multiple of the distance between Pluto and the sun is in any way more useful than distance between the Earth and the sun or that it helps conceptualise the distance relative to the gas giants.
Anyway, Pluto orbit is highly excentric so you have 20AU of wiggle room here when considering distance.
I know it's not a planet, hence my sarcastic "sue me". I suppose the self-irony didn't work too well over text. My point was that many people still know about Pluto as a body that's at the edge of many people's everyday conceptualizations of the solar system, and I argue that makes it a more useful tool for helping people intuitively understand the particular distances involved.
> Only if you were born before it was retrograded which will be less and less likely as time goes on.
I admit my age plays into it. Though I am curious about the role Pluto has in modern primary school, do you know? I understand that it now has the same technical status as Eris et al., but I think it's still a fantastic example of how scientific understanding develops and changes. Not on par with discarding heliocentricity, but a very practical example of ongoing changes still present in our own time.
> As I have no interest in saving American misplaced pride (because let's not kid ourself it's about anything else)
I don't understand how this ties into American pride (nor am I American), what did I miss?
> I don't understand how this ties into American pride (nor am I American), what did I miss?
Pluto was the only planet discovered by an American and most of the people who are extremely attached to it tend to feel that removing Pluto as a planet is somehow taking something away from the USA.
As far as I know, the topic barely exists at all in other countries.
Thanks for explaining, I've never heard about this. In my social circle, nobody would seriously try to argue that it should still count as a "real" planet, but we still refer to Pluto-as-planet in an affectionate, nostalgic way.
F# is a nice language if you want to use the dotnet ecosystem but it’s basically Ocaml without anything that makes Ocaml interesting (parametrised modules).
Besides parametrized modules what else do you think F# is missing? To me it seems like a 10x more powerful choice because of much richer GUI and web framework choices, great tooling and high flexibility as a language (computation expressions, does scripting, multitasking/multithreading and even low-level (when needed) quite well).
> style and naming conventions are almost as important and on that front ocaml's are also among the worst in the world
I’m a bit lost because Ocaml has a Pascal-like syntax (I find it nice but I generally dislike B syntax and am amongst the rare bread of developer who didn’t start with a language using it) and an extremely nice naming convention. Ocaml strongly discourages overloading, weird operators and shortly named variables unless they are local and used for a short time or an idiom like the default type of a module being named t. Everything has a long name in a module with a long name. It’s extremely nice.
Ocaml has the same ALGOL roots as Pascal (which is what I meant by Pascal like) and you can see the influence in the syntax: words pairing for blocks (begin/end, do/done), same use of ":". Keywords are quite close.
It obviously went through ML but you can tell the influence.
If you compare OCaml and Standard ML, which came before it, it seems like OCaml is a lot like SML but with some changed syntax for convenience, and imperative features syntax for featyres that were technically supported by SML but still awkward, and I think it's in those imperative parts where they most resemble Pascal and Algol. They added "begin" and "end" as keywords equivalent to parentheses, they added for loops, and classes, and changed array syntax to resemble other languages more (by using square brackets to indicate an array subscript).
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