According to Matt Damon (in one of many interviews) a lot of movies were produced with the second revenue stream (vhs/dvd) being part of the calculations, that is why we now get a lot less variety and alternative movies made, that second revenue stream doesn’t exist any more (I assume streaming pays very little in comparison).
True, but how much of that second stream exists after say 5 years? For most movies it is zero - they aren't pressing the DVD anymore and all stores that once had no longer do (except for second hand stores which don't give money to the studio)
I call XY on this. The problem is inherit in LLMs and the solution is something else altogether, not just allowing companies to ignore the law and lobby for changing said law after the fact.
It sounds good in theory, seeing it Sweden any time soon seems unlikely since our banks got together to do their own thing a long time ago, but we’ll see.
However, I would like to have a word with whoever was responsible for their website (https://wero-wallet.eu), it looks like they’re pushing galaxy gas to kids… not everything has to be overly branded, especially not finance.
The web site has a great design, reminiscent of both comic books and fast-food menus. High contrast, legible if quirky fonts, all this should contribute to a mass appeal.
Yes, IMHO, the idea that it's not the high-brow, high-ceremony, high-stakes finance is an important part of the message. "Look, it's a simple daily tool, a degree in accounting is not required."
Nice and clean. The standard corporate palette of black on white with blue accents. Looks like so many others though, and lacks the fast food vibes which usually involve warm tones from yellow to red. Open bk.com or mcdonalds.com to understand what I mean.
High contrast is great, the typography and visual language is what irks me. What does space ships have to do with financial safety and why do they feel to tell me what money is used for? ”Buying popcorn”, yes you can buy things with money.
Things like forcing users to download the privacy policy (true.pdf) also seems weird, display it in the browser…
It feels like a marketing campaign site from early 2010 and I just think it’s a very strange language for something as important and relevant as financial transactions.
Still took nine years and missing a few of the big banks according to their site, and with some serious fees for transfers. I’m not saying it’s not going to happen, I just won’t be expecting it any time soon.
I just wish we’d stop using words like intelligence or reasoning when talking about LLMs, since they do neither. Reasoning requires you to be able to reconsider every step of the way and continuously take in information, an LLM is dead set in its tracks, it might branch or loop around a bit, but it’s still the same track.
As for intelligence, well, there’s clearly none, even if at first the magic trick might fool you.
Why is it Apple that has to pay for what Ireland did wrong? Genuinely curious here, it's not like Ireland is some random dude on the internet selling stolen goods and Apple should've known better.
I think this is a common practice in every country. If the tax payer is at fault, the tax payer pays. If the treasury is at fault, the tax payer still pays.
Sure, but Ireland doesn’t get the money, the EU does, so it’s not actually correcting the taxes but rather redistribute them, which seems like a bit of totalitarian approach to regulation. Ireland did not want the money back.
Ireland gets the money. The EU is making Apple pay us. And yes we didn't want it - mainly for reputational reasons and partly because our argument was "we never done it".
But Ireland refused, so the fault still lies with Ireland in this case. I mean the EU is full of tax elimination or subsidies for targeted companies, far beyond this case, so it seems that this is more about Apple than the actual taxes.
The target of the case is wrong, it should be Ireland, not Apple. Many companies have unique (to them) tax benefits across the entire EU, some hidden under things like “electricity subsidies”. If the company pay what the country mandates, then the rest should be between the country and the EU, not the EU and the company.
They are setting up an example for other companies doing same. Fuck with EU taxes, we will fuck you up (and lets be honest here, 13 billions absolutely nothing for Apple given 500+ million wealthy market they cater to).
Law often does that to perpetrators. Ireland tried to save the shady deal by refusing the money it should have received (corruption in plain sight, with these sums its not unexpected it goes to highest places plus something about saving nation's public face), so this is how they got about it.
Not sure its 100% best process but overall a very good move and precedent for future.
This means 3.39% of their worldwide revenue, and an even bigger share of their profits. It's not negligible at all, even though it's just collecting taxes late without a penalty.
Isn't that more than the EU defence budget from 2022? Not gonna lie, I'm kinda a little scared now. I realise that there's less than a 1 in 1 billion chance Apple is gonna set up its own military and attack the EU, but still...
Combined defense budgets of all individual member states was 214 billion in 2023. That's 'spending budget', not revenue like the 300 something billion of Apple's revenue cited above.
If you're referring to a single pot of money that exists to support Research and Development, you would typically refer to that as "The European Defence Fund" as "entire EU defence fund budget" would be interpreted differently.
True, but IMO it's a bit misleading because you were using as a point of comparison something that sounded like the military budget of Europe without specifying that it's something completely different (that people probably never heard of — at least I didn't and neither did my grandparent). I'm not saying it's intentional or anything, just wanted to point it out.
Of course Apple should've known better. Their lawyers warned them about the risks of these deals (I do not have internal knowledge, I just know they did, they do to everyone who enters into deals like this). For years (rather, decades) everybody bet on this being too widespread to be corrected like it is now. You can't really blame them for trying, but in the end, this is the corporate/tax version of 'fuck around, find out'.
Apple is selling to the whole of EU. Is it unreasonable to conclude that they should have known to follow the EU laws rather engaging in a tax scheme offered by Ireland?
I'm not entirely sure what to think myself about the fairness of this. But going forward I definitely prefer that corporations will have to be careful about engaging in unfair tax deals in the EU.
Otherwise those corporations would just be looking for the next country to take advantage of - risk free.
Amazon got away with it and so did Fiat, smaller sums and in Luxembourg and Netherlands, still, company specific tax deals based in country specific laws.
Apple clearly picked the wrong horse, but unless there’s actual reform (which will likely cause a whole slew of other issues) the tax setup of multinational companies will carry on, maybe not risk free, but it’s still a win for them long term no matter what.
Replaceable or user replaceable, quite the important distinction. Don’t know of any phone you can’t replace the battery, quite hard to do yourself though on a lot of them.
> The regulation provides that by 2027 portable batteries incorporated into appliances should be removable and replaceable by the end-user, leaving sufficient time for operators to adapt the design of their products to this requirement. This is an important provision for consumers. Light means of transport batteries will need to be replaceable by an independent professional.
Thanks for the link. This will make most of what’s being sold today incompatible with the legislation, it’s going to be interesting to see how this works out for things that are not phones, probably back to AA batteries and finicky plastic lids.
Although, I've had my xcover6 pro for 2 years now. it's been in water several times, dropped many times (I think the back bursting off does indeed help dissipate energy). The screen is still fine (well, some minor scratches that I think are due to putting it in same pocket as my keys far too often), and I've not had any issues. As far as I can tell the battery is sealed off from everything that is important, and there is a rubber gasket around the battery as well. I have a second backup battery for it, and I can rapidly swap between the 2 in a few seconds. The back is a little plain and ugly, but I don't see why it couldn't be snazzed up to apple standards (metal shell or whatever) and still be a quick replacement.
Any tool that wants to replace esbuild for me will have to write as good, or better, release notes. The cost of broken tooling and bad change logs (in other words, bad versions) are many orders of magnitude more expensive than the cost of staying on esbuild.
NPM is anything but fun, I’ve seen tertiary dependencies cause complete application failures due to bad patch version releases.
Packages depending on packages not maintained or containing security issues.
I don’t know how many times Next has released broken updates without any mention of it in their change log and then you find a GH issue where it’s essentially “works on vercel hosting”…
Easy to find developers is often touted as a plus, but the process for making sure you get the right ones are scarce, and JS code bases almost always ends up as complete spaghetti as a result. As someone doing JavaScript for a very long time my statement is that it’s one of the hardest ecosystems to get right and it requires exceptional developers to do so, unfortunately it’s also where many start their journey and without exposure to other technologies becoming great at it is very hard.
The fact that I can do `mix hex.outdated` and get a code diff on dependency changes makes me smile every time, compared to the insanity that is updating npm packages in any sizeable project with hundreds of updates weekly.
It's funny how this works, I will never work with Next.js ever again (after doing it for years at multiple companies), I find it to be a total mess. Compared to how José Valim and Chris McCord (and others) lead Elixir and Phoenix and Vercel / Meta handles Next.js and React is night and day and I have close to zero trust in the latter. But then again, Next.js a tool to sell Vercel hosting and React has its own roadmap to cater to Meta, both of these are obvious perfectly valid and it's not a secret so people can make their own choices.
I don't know how many times I've done a minor update of Next just to have some undocumented internal change break everything, and reading their release logs are a joke, who thought it would be a good idea to just dump badly written git-commits and call it a day?
As an anecdotal warning, unless your team consists of TypeScript masters with extremely strict ethics you will end up with type safety issues too, they will just be harder to find (and if things go bad crash your runtime or client execution) :)
Being easy to hire for has actually been a massive downside personally, it's very hard work finding people who actually know how to build a good React app, not to mention a Next.js ditto, but you'll get an near infinite number of applicants with skills "matching".
Jump to Elixir might be a bit too much. You could get strong type safety and scalability with ASP.NET Core without sacrificing productivity you are used to (it's also way faster than BEAM).
