I think this is a short sighted and unfair view of native apps.
It is significantly difficult to provide fluent and fast “native” like experience with WebApps because of browser related overheads.
Another advantage of native apps, at least on iOS, is that they magically “receive” updates in the form of updates to the OS, I.e. when Apple updates the underlying iOS APIs, the apps can directly take advantage of the updates without any developer updates.
Apps also automatically adopt the new OS UI updates if they use native APIs. For example, many apps were dark-mode ready with little to no developer updates when Apple rolled out dark mode.
Reading this article left me more and more annoyed with every paragraph.
To quote from the article:
> Because the boiling point of water depends on altitude, you could take it to a very, very high place and the same calorific value might well boil the water.
I agree that approaching it like this is possible. But, “possible” doesn’t mean that it is sensible.
Philosophically speaking, if such things like above are allowed, then it should also be allowed to simply heat this water to very high temperature (like 99 C) with another apparatus such as a stove and then finally boil it with the candles. That is, use a stove instead of a rocket.
It is also possible to conceive of an apparatus with heating elements and photodiodes. This apparatus will run the heaters and heat the water when its photodiode detect the light from the candle. So, in effect, the candle is responsible for heating the water.
Here’s what I’m trying to say: we need to accept some constraints and reject some possibilities in order to answer anything. If there are no constraints, then anything is possible. But, we know that this is not how the universe works.
Finally, I hope to never read anything from this author again. Ironically for this person, maybe they should consider the possibility that their ”science” is BS, aka bullshit.
It's a silly example but he does give a constraint. The one constraint is that the heat has to come from the candles. The purpose is to illustrate that even if one variable is constrained, there are other variables that may not be constrained, that you had assumed were static (altitude, pressure). It's just an example which illustrates a point of the article: try and think of something you had assumed was fixed and change that instead of working with the parameters you thought you had. Not a bad idea overall.
He absolutely does not. He said "using only the candles and a box of matches". He never says "as a heat source". There's nothing in the problem as given that would indicate moving the water to someplace low pressure is within the rules but moving it to someplace hot is not.
You didn't get the gist of the article: many constraints are artificial or plain mental. And you have to think outside the worn trousers to determine where that is the case.
Spotify does seem to be in an interesting position where it gets to piggyback on Apple's whole infrastructure and ecosystem without paying Apple anything. That should count for something...
I find this argument kind of ridiculous - yes, access to Apple's APIs does bring value to its app developers, but crucially, the app developers increase the value proposition of Apple's product by being available on the platform.
It would be just as fair in this case to say that Apple should be paying Spotify for making their app available on the App Store.
Luckily, by custom there is another solution - the platform providers charge nothing and let their customers decide what software to use, and the developers targeting the platform do not charge for developing their software for the platform. As it has worked forever on Windows, Linux, Android, MacOS, etc.
This is a weird argument. Apple released a functionally comparable product to Spotify with about $2b of investment in Beats. Only one company on the planet has been able to create a functionally comparable product to iPhone, and that’s stretching the definition and required huge expense.
It’s pretty clear that Spotify’s value add to Apple is tiny while the reverse is much larger.
Spotify wouldn’t have a business in the counter-factual world where they were never allowed in App Store, while Apple Music would clearly exist. Their business model innovation was fairly limited; streaming music services began in the late 90s.
It's also not just APIs. I would argue more importantly, Apple has cultivated a platform with the most affluent users. Otherwise Spotify wouldn't care if they were on the minority platform in the EU. Apple's argument is the work they have done to get high paying users on the iOS platform is worth something to people who want to sell to that group.
It's a great question. Clear lines are always hard, but something has differentiated the two. And it may be less about what Apple has done, and more that Google is not a very good product company.
IMO, having used both platforms, Apple hardware and ecosystem/platform works better for me. /shrug
> I find this argument kind of ridiculous - yes, access to Apple's APIs does bring value to its app developers, but crucially, the app developers increase the value proposition of Apple's product by being available on the platform.
And yet, in retail, it's common for product brands to pay for shelf space. There's a recognition that the place users are, is worth paying to be in.
Meanwhile, Steam shows what just the storefront part of such a platform should cost a developer, and interestingly, that open market price is higher than Apple's ask.
I find this argument kind of ridiculous - yes, app developers (such as Spotify) bring value proposition to Apple's products by being available on the platform. But, apps (such as Spotify) probably wouldn't exist and wouldn't have access to the immense value of an App Store and its tooling if Apple didn't exist.
Luckily, by custom there is another solution - respect each other boundaries and stop acting like whiny little children.
> Luckily, by custom there is another solution - respect each other boundaries and stop acting like whiny little children.
So where does the Apple Music subscription entering the market to compete with Spotify (which came first), without having to pay itself 30%, nor being prevented from advertising how to subscribe in the first place, fit in to that narrative?
For any interesting market that props up on the App Store, Apple is free to: start by extracting 30% from everything in said market; then, develop its own competing product at a technical advantage (with access to private APIs) and a comercial advantage (avoiding said 30% fees); and, finally, bundle and market the shit out of their own thing, all the while restricting other's marketing (with steering and MFN rules).
And according to some people, this is all perfectly fine behaviour, by Apple standards.
As Matwood pointed out in a sibling comment, the real value of being on the App Store is the ecosystem of highly affluent consumers that Apple has cultivated.
Which has would be worthless without apps like Spotify. Do you also think that Apple is entitled to 30% of anything bought with their browser? Should Microsoft be entitled to the same on windows and their browser?
If the Appstore is so good Apple should not be worried about competition by allowing side loading or alternative Appstores.
You could flip that argument around and say that Spotify might have been worthless without the App Store to grow their userbase. I don't actually subscribe to that viewpoint myself, but I do think many on HN take the benefits of publishing on the App Store for granted.
> Should Microsoft be entitled to the same on windows and their browser?
I don't know, maybe? I'm sure people would riot if they tried it now, but if Microsoft had set that precedent from the start would we be here discussing this today?
You could, and any other music service could compete with Spotify on pricing. The difference here is that Apple also compete with Spotify with their own music service while they also want a 30% cut on Spotifys income.
And Apple would still demand 30% of it. Not sure how Spotify's fee structure has anything to do with Apple's fans' arguments that they're totally not behaving anticompetitively.
It’s a symbiotic relationship but not a symmetrical one.
In the beginning Apple needed the devs more than vice versa, but now it’s definitely the other way around.
Note the “more” part, it’s still a symbiotic relationship.
Apple couldn’t have made the iPhone successful without third party devs, but it’s doubtful Spotify could’ve been as successful as they are without access to the iPhone.
As an app developer for iOS myself I can say that Apple’s frameworks have been invaluable to me, especially the improvements and additions in the last few years have significantly made my work easier.
Not only that, because overtime I’ve become friends with some of the engineers that work on them, I also know how much time and money goes into them, at least on an individual engineer level.
So it seems fair to me that Apple gets paid for their IP. But I’m not interested in paying huge fees upfront like what was common when developing for game consoles, nor am I interested in paying potentially huge fees like the CTF.
To me, the best option is a revenue based commission. When I do well, Apple does well, but when I don’t I won’t owe Apple anything. This also motivates them to keep investing in frameworks, because with good frameworks I can make better and more successful apps, which then benefit them.
It also allows me to take risks and try out new things or even give away my work for free.
Personally I was already happy with 30% and that’s what I signed up for at the time. The 15% I pay now is of course even better, but it’s not like I passed on those savings to my customers.
If I ever get so successful that I hit $1m in revenue then I’ll be more than happy to pay the 30%, because I will have been successful in part because of the tools provided by them.
Or put differently, that success will be in part a consequence of what happened before I hit $1m, when I was still paying the 15%.
I’ve got friends that have launched their apps on Android as well, but those earnings are a rounding error compared to their iOS earnings and their apps are heavily being pirated on Android.
I can’t quantify what it is that Apple does different that it entices customers to spend money on apps (other than the lack of piracy perhaps), but it’d be silly to pretend like it doesn’t benefit developers to a degree that it warrants Apple getting something in return for that, in addition to the tool-based justification.
Apple accrues benefit from having Spotify in the App Store because it makes iPhones better. An iPhone with no apps is less useful than an Android phone with many apps. This should be a win/win scenario where both parties get value from the platform (they do!)
Also - Apple is welcome to just charge a fee for the costs they feel appropriate for the development platform and App Store distribution. However, that fee (one-off R&D, and per-download bandwidth) seems pretty marginal. I wish Apple had the guts to actually charge everyone to Core Technology Fee (50 euro cents per download), rather than requiring EU developers to opt into it https://developer.apple.com/support/core-technology-fee/
This is just showing poor understandings of personal boundaries.
Yes, Apple is piggybacking on various ISPs infrastructure. That is a deal the ISPs explicitly allowed everyone to do and marketed as a selling point for others to use in their services.
Apple is simply trying to enforce its own boundaries which it established before Spotify came into the picture.
Comparing a legal monopoly (utilities) to a privately developed computing product is a bit absurd. What easement rights and wireless spectrum did the EU grant iPhone?
Apple risked their resources and created the whole ecosystem before Spotify even existed. It's not like Apple put a gun to the heads of Spotify executives and forced them to use the App Store. It's the executives who reviewed Apple's terms and then decided that investing in Apple's ecosystem would be useful for Spotify.
How should Spotify reach iOS users? Through gimped PWAs? Through non-existent thrid-party app stores? Your argument makes it seem like Spotify has a choice when trying to reach a large part of the market. The don't.
I am just going to flip this argument. Hope this gets my message across eloquently.
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How should Apple make a return on its investment? Through apps such as Spotify, who don't want to pay a dime? Through Governments, who are actively trying to sabotage it? Your arguments make it seem like Apple has a choice when trying to monetise a large part of the market. They don't.
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I think you are taking the efforts it takes to build an App store user base as granted. Microsoft is spending billions to build one with nothing to show for it. Google managed to build something half decent and it continues to be envious of Apple.
App Store and iOS existed independently of Spotify. Spotify decided to invest into Apple's ecosystem, by their own conviction. Apple didn't force them. Spotify, as a behemoth, and a large part of their market, probably only exists due to Apple. Therefore, any arguments to the effect of "it is unfair to Spotify" are difficult to consider.
Your flipped argument doesn't work. Apple gets tons of money from... the people who buy the phones! The actual users! That they then consider these users to be a captive audience who can't be trusted to use the device they paid a lot of money for, is the questionable situation. Why can't these people engage in business with Spotify to use it on their device, that they paid for, without Apple coming back and asking for more money?
Can you image MS starts charging everyone (including everything done in the browser) because they are using Win32? Lol. The whole point of the OS is to provide API/ABIs and customers already paid for that.
I know. All those poor iPhone owners who bought them so they could use the millions of apps created by developers for free for Apple, and the same devs who also get rinsed on hardware and other costs. Apple get absolutely nothing out of any of this.
People seem to have lost all understandings of boundaries.
Bunch of people suing Apple because they don't like how their iPhones back up to iCloud is an equivalent of a child throwing tantrums because their favourite toy won't accept other batteries it wasn't designed for.
It's not like Apple put a gun to anyone's head to force them to buy iPhones and Apple has been clear about how their devices work from the get-go. If people are salty about how iPhones work, they should choose to buy other devices or pound sand. Because, some people actually like how their iDevices work with the closed-loop integrations it offers.
Apple has lost all understanding of boundaries. Just because they make a pretty phone with a good camera, they shouldn't be allowed to dictate literally every other aspect of one's digital life.
Your car doesn't limit which brand of tires you buy or which streets you take. Your TV doesn't limit what channels you watch. Why should your phone be any different?
Your cheese spray doesn't allow backups either? Cars starting to copy Apples anticonsumer practices is a legit problem but the argument op made was clear.
The other response is right; Apple is the one who lost sight of boundaries. They thought they were smart fighting Dutch regulators and French tax authorities right up until their regulators played hardball with the market. Now Tim Cook is in full-throttle damage control mode, and the iPhone is skating on ice thin enough to threaten market access.
The good news is, Apple has a clear-cut path to compliance that really only interferes with their business ambitions. If they can set aside some of their arbitrary limitations, even optionally, then the iPhone can continue to be sold alongside other smartphones. But nobody owes Apple access to a market they intend to abuse; you've lost all understandings of boundaries if you believe that kind of Ayn Rand nonsense.
> is an equivalent of a child throwing tantrums because their favourite toy won't accept other batteries it wasn't designed for.
You either misunderstand why people are angry, or you're deliberately leaving out the details that make this important.
These are grown adults who are rightfully angry that their smartphone limits it's software compatibility to exploit them. In your backwards analogy, it's more like a child being confused that they can't use their favorite toy because the proprietary AAA batteries cost 30-50x more than a normal battery. That is called market manipulation, and it can be illegal if sufficient damages are proven.
I simply think that you have poor understandings of boundaries.
Setting aside the remarks about Apple vs EU regulators, which, by the way I think are in bad taste, but I won't get into it here because then we might get distracted, I think that the people who are angry because "it's more like a child ... a normal battery" are wrong because Apple has been transparent from the start about how their ecosystem works and before people invest in this ecosystem.
It's not like Apple mislead a bunch of people to the effect of "one can use standard AAA batteries in this toy" to close a sale and then told them something to the effect of "sorry, it only accepts proprietary batteries".
Therefore, I think that you have poor understandings of the boundaries of these relationships.
I'm sincerely sorry if I offended any Apple employees in the process. Otherwise I'm not really sure what "bad taste" you could be referring to. Maybe I scared off a few $AAPL shareholders by suggesting the obvious? Help me at least understand my mistake before we ignore it.
> It's not like Apple mislead a bunch of people
Nor did Microsoft when they sold Windows with Netscape-inhibiting features. Nor did Ma Bell when they modified telephones to work on their network. Both of those ended with the courts recommending a company breakup, Apple is going to need a stronger defense if it's purely based on non-deception.
Apple's arbitrary limitation of basic capabilities cannot persist in a competitive market. The USB-C regulation was proof that Apple can acquiesce, the world did not crumble because Lightning or MFi is now depreciated. Similarly, holding Apple to minimum standards shouldn't threaten their bottom line if they truly offer superior first-party services. Their kicking and screaming more or less confirms that Apple's profitability hinges on total control, not premium differentiation.
> Therefore, I think that you have poor understandings of the boundaries of these relationships.
It's based on my understanding of the history and precedent of US and European antitrust rulings. If that doesn't apply to your jurisdiction then maybe you're right. In the majority of Apple's meaningful markets, their service revenue is seriously threatened.
My main issue with the EU regulators dictating how companies should handle their products is due to the fact that there is plenty of evidence to show that their regulation activities have equal chance of not working and actually working. The best example I can recall at this moment is the whole GDPR saga. Far too many people are tired of the pop-ups than the number of people GDPR has served.
I completely accept the history associated with Microsoft and Bell. But I also do not discount the possibilities that, sometimes, the regulators are wrong. There is plenty of criticisms of those verdicts in the pages of history already which don't need to paraphrased here again.
If Apple's limitations are uncompetitive, then Apple will simply die. No harm no foul. It is actually great for people because it opens opportunity to disrupt the market. Therefore, I think that ultimately, letting Apple do its own thing is actually the best thing to do. Let them decide how they want to handle their company.
> But I also do not discount the possibilities that, sometimes, the regulators are wrong.
On which grounds? Wrong as-in, you disagree with their interpretation of the law, or as-in disagree with their punishment? Or do you have evidence the regulators lacked?
The greatest lawyers in the world were payed yacht-club money to figure this out, and the furthest they got was saving Microsoft from a breakup. I don't agree with every law or court decision either, but in hindsight it almost feels like the US hasn't done enough antitrust regulation. Google and Apple are both well overdue for a reckoning.
> If Apple's limitations are uncompetitive, then Apple will simply die.
Well, not exactly. Pretty much every single modern antitrust lawsuit has arisen because the company in question won't die. Anticompetitive behavior often benefits users to entice them into defending a broken system, like offering ActiveX or free long-distance service. Again, neither of those things necessarily "killed" their parent company (nor effectively functioned as a defense in court).
> Let them decide how they want to handle their company.
That's a good note to leave things off on. Likewise, let Europe's constituent states decide how to handle their markets and neither of us will end up disappointed.
GDPR is about far more than some browser pop-ups - it severely limits the extent to which companies can harvest and share your information, even if you blindly click through those consent boxes. It confers a bunch of rights to citizens for discovering and controlling who has their data. Most importantly, it creates a disincentive for companies to be lax in securing the data they do have.
IIRC, Nigerian Government depegged their currency with respect to the dollar, which caused their currency to market correct, thus, devaluing itself.
Keep me honest, if the above is correct, this seems like a dishonest attempt by the Nigerian Government to extort Binance into paying for their poor policies and finances.
It's like claiming a food delivery company is personally responsible for increased fuel prices, when all they do is pay their drivers market rates to deliver food.
Bullshit. Completely unrelated.
I hope Binance retorts Nigerian Government to pound sand.
It seems that we tend to treat wealth inequality as some sort of judgement of fairness and unfairness. That is: the lower wealth inequality, the more fair.
I think projecting the quality of fairness is a false hope.
The Dutch are the tallest people in the world and Asians tend to be the smallest. Remember that oxygen and food are also resources in the world. Consequently, the Dutch inherently use more food and oxygen to maintain their bigger bodies compared to the Asians.
As such, it is unfair to an Asian person that their Dutch friend use so much more, if we were to judge them based on fairness.
Now, just to mess with the reader's mind, I'll flip my own case by saying that since there are many more Asians than the Dutch, it's unfair to the Dutch that Asians consume so much of food and oxygen.
I hope that the reader gets my point that projection of any sort of fairness is an exercise in vain.
I think that if we want to grow up, we need to grow beyond fairness and unfairness. We need to looks for things beyond these realms of false projection.
Personally, I have accepted the idea that some people have more wealth than others and some less. I neither despise those people nor I love them. I feel content with whatever life has given me. Now, that is not to say that I don't desire to be richer. I do and I continue to act in my own favour. It's just that I do not feel sad that I have less than others or hate someone if they are richer.
I don't know what your argument about tallness is supposed to mean. Fairness has nothing to do with people being equal in physical attributes, however it does have to do with being equal in front of the law and how to influence law and the ability to improve one's economic situation (or the chance to loose it).
That is what is being eroded by the wealth inequality. The wealthy are significantly insulated from the law, are shaping laws that further reduce their chance of loosing wealth, increasing their wealth in the process and reducing everyone else's economic opportunity.
For a society this creates an unstable situation, if all economic (and political) power sits in the hands of only a few that creates unrest often leading to a violent overturn of the situation (or trying to counteract via totalitarian measures).
As a side note, you say you're content with not being wealthy, but how far would this content stretch, would you be content if you are so poor that you'd struggle to feed your kids?
It's also a poor analogy in that the average Dutch person is around 15% taller than the average person in Timor-Leste, which Google informs me has the smallest height difference. If the disparity in wealth were on the order of 15%, I don't think there'd be nearly as much complaint.
Instead, in many countries, it's not uncommon for some people to be sitting on a hundred, a thousand, even a million times as much money as others. The disparity is so great that it's difficult to fully visualise - hence why you get videos of people like Tom Scott driving around trying to demonstrate just how different these sorts of numbers are.
More importantly, wealth scales in a strange way. Becoming a billionaire didn't just entitle you to more exotic holidays or vehicles or mansions than your millionaire peers, it brings incredible ability to influence politics and the world, with next to no accountability from the people whose lives you are affecting. You can buy media companies on a whim. You can demand meetings with politicians. You can make economic threats in order to get your own way. And, unlike politicians, there is no democratic process to elect you or remove you.
The analogy is, therefore, absurd. The premise is that, if you have an issue with wealth inequality, you have an issue with inequality universally, at all scales. But it misses the point that the issue with wealth inequality isn't that the numbers aren't an identical, it's that extreme wealth actively causes problems.
I hear your comments and agree with your data about the 15% difference (personally, this number doesn't even matter, what matters is just the fact that there is some form of observable difference) even though I haven't verified it.
I'd like to give you a thought exercise, if you be so kind to me. I'd like for you to take that Dutch argument and replace Dutch with "human adult" and Asian with "human baby" (assume it's a booming population where babies outnumber adults) and see if your reasoning serve you well.
Seriously what sort of weird equivalence are you trying to create. Apart from the fact that it doesn't even make sense, it doesn't match in terms of scales (sure a baby is 10 times smaller, whatever that means), we are talking about the richest having 5 million times as much as the average (in the US). So your next thought experiment is "ah let's compare an adult with an individual cell"?
You talk about wealth (and inequality) so much yet you fail to see that food and oxygen is also a form of wealth. We, the humans, in fact, had barter system, food and oxygen before we invented money.
I don't think that analogy works well either, given that humans often put a lot of effort into caring for human babies in order that they are able to make it to adulthood (thus achieving "equality" as per your analogy).
I think it might be easier for you to explain your point if you didn't describe it in analogy, and instead described it directly. The criticism is that large (i.e. several orders of magnitude) wealth gaps are bad for society, and that they cause tremendous power imbalances in what would otherwise be a democratic society.
Purely in terms of wealth inequality, and not through analogy, why do you disagree with this criticism?
I hear your thoughts on equality before the law and everything. I think it is coming with a good motivation, cute even, but, dare I say, not everybody deserves to be treated equally, if we were even willing to tussle for the sake of equality (and by extension, fairness, see my previous comment).
There are capitalists in this world. There are communists in this world. There are Christians in this world. There are Muslims in this world.
I'm not taking any sides. I'm just saying that it is impossible for all of them to be right... Because they are mutually exclusive ideologies/religions. Someone is bound to be wrong. Therefore, someone deserves to be treated poorly by the law. Infact, dare I say, all these 4 groups are being a bit childish. Also, "totalitarian" is also another such group. Anyway, personally, for the current situation of the world, I think that the world needs at least one adult leader at the helm. In other words, dare I say, a single leader. No, definitely not someone who believes in totalitarianism.
Finally, personally, I think that if I fail to feed my children properly, then, it's either a failure on the part of society to educate me properly or to manage the resources. I am, afterall, a product my society.
Sure moral relativity everything is equivalent, there is no morality. I assume you're OK with someone stealing all your things, because it's OK in their moral framework.
Also you might want to actually watch the movie. The whole point about growing inequality is that society is failing to provide economic opportunity because inequality is going through the roof. Education will not help you because of the economic realities.
If someone culture is to be honest and not steal, they don't. But having an ideology is not a invitation to force ones own values on to other people. I'd like to live in a honest world and that's the part of the world I limit myself to. I do not force my views onto others or claim to speak for other cultures.
Secondly, in response to your second paragraph, I'd like to quote another sibling comment of mine already in this thread.
I think that if we want to grow up, we need to grow beyond fairness and unfairness.
Fair or unfair... it's nice to live in a region where one can leave their house without stepping over homeless people, without having one's car stolen or vandalized, without one worrying about being mugged, and where one's surroundings are vibrant and picturesque. That is not life in a country with high wealth inequality.
I'm going to tell you a story. A story, I'm afraid, that might leave you even more confused. But, I hope it serve us well.
Sometime in the 1960s (don't quote me on the year), there was plenty of scientific research coming out that cholesterol is bad for your heart's health. Doctors were recommending to completely avoid cholesterol. Governments were in the process of banning it.
It got so bad that for decades people were avoiding food with cholesterol like plague. Companies were actively seeking to substitute it with other things or artificially remove it from their products.
Then, I think in the 2000s (again, don't quote), to everyone's surprise, research started coming out that there seem to be even stronger links of those heart disease with trans fat.
So much so that trans fat actually got banned across countries in the world by many governments by 2010s. Even higher that cholesterol.
Anyway, upon reviewing the old research about cholesterol, researchers learnt that food with high trans fats also tends to be high in cholesterol. I mean, it makes sense, they are both fats... And most food have a complex combination of many fats (among other things). But really, the cause was not cholesterol, it was trans fat.
So, in the cross fire between reasoning (and heart disease) and evidence (caused by trans fat), cholesterol got shot, for no good reason.
It's one of those things, that is, if you know, you know. If you don't, then you don't. Unfortunately for us, I don't feel good about revealing too much about it (or myself). Sorry.
Nihilism is a family of views within philosophy which rejects generally accepted or fundamental aspects of human existence, such as knowledge, morality, or meaning.
Or fairness. Exhibited by this quote of yours:
>I think that if we want to grow up, we need to grow beyond fairness and unfairness.
You might not be a nihilist, but nihilism is 100% what you are preaching here in defense of wealth inequality.
If you're not, it's somehow even worse. And, it reminds me of this rather brilliant scene in the big lebowski:
Walter Sobchak: No, without a hostage, there is no ransom. That's what ransom is. Those are the fucking rules.
Nihilist #2: His girlfriend gave up her toe!
Nihilist #3: She though we'd be getting million dollars!
Nihilist #2: Iss not fair!
Walter Sobchak: Fair! WHO'S THE FUCKING NIHILIST HERE! WHAT ARE YOU, A BUNCH OF FUCKING CRYBABIES?
I'm fully aware of nihilism. I think it's childish.
I think we don't know if there a meaning to life and we might never have an answer. If such a meaning exists, I think that humans simply are not equipped to reason about the meaning of their own existence.
> Okaaaay, but I don't see how that view which you hold can be reconciled with this view which you also espoused:
We don't share perspective. Therefore, we can't see what the other is seeing. One thing I am taking away from this conversation is that at least one of us need to study better.
> I'm feeling a lot like Walter right now.
The thing about feelings is that our feelings are arbitrary. One can feel intense hatred for a waiter who served the food a little too late, and intense love for a political leader who promotes honor-killing to maintain status quo. To some, it sounds bad and to others it sounds good.
This is actually a pretty good take when it comes down to it.
I'm reminded of the "businessman and the fisherman" parable.
Wealth and GDP isn't everything. And they definitely aren't moral judgements. People don't just deserve to have more because they have little to start with.
I'm trying to pull my sister and her family out of poverty; the partner doesn't want to work any more than mowing lawns, and they go to the beach on Sundays. That's all they want out of life
This seems to be a standard "serial processing to parallel distributed processing" story, with job generator, broker, processor etc, every grandma used to share.
The "monopoly" arguments never made sense to me. I think, for the people who purchase phones, it's not like Apple put a gun to their head and forced them buy iDevice(s). They had complete freedom to choose between investing into alternative platforms.
It is significantly difficult to provide fluent and fast “native” like experience with WebApps because of browser related overheads.
Another advantage of native apps, at least on iOS, is that they magically “receive” updates in the form of updates to the OS, I.e. when Apple updates the underlying iOS APIs, the apps can directly take advantage of the updates without any developer updates.
Apps also automatically adopt the new OS UI updates if they use native APIs. For example, many apps were dark-mode ready with little to no developer updates when Apple rolled out dark mode.
These are just the few advantages of native apps.