Veraxus

…are they going to apply this rule to Nintendo or Sony…

They absolutely should. Closed ecosystems should be illegal. They are literally an intentional form of unethical, predatory trust.

Oh, did GM just step in it this time. Being stupid and removing important features is one thing, but straight-up defamation like this is another.

Google and Apple’s lawyers must be salivating a river right now.

Are you implying that there is anything else that matters?

Jetbrains IDEs have “Live Templates” that I use extensively.

For little notes and snippets (especially CLI snippets) I use an app called Stashpad, which I LOVE.

I really like Orion, which is based on WebKit… but it’s Mac only. 😢

Remember, Firefox is great and has no dependency on upstream Google code.

Use Firefox.

If only I could get wifi to work on a linux partition, it would be the perfect linux machine.

ESH, and it’s the ordinary, innocent people caught in the middle who pay the most greatest price.

That doesn’t work with AI for a variety of technical and practical reasons.

Two people could, completely coincidentally, generate something that is so similar that it looks the same at a glance… even with dramatically different prompts on dramatically different models.

No, the output of an AI is fundamentally “coincidental” and should not be subject to copyright. Human intent and authorship MUST be a significant factor. An artist can still use AI in their workflow, but their direct involvement and manipulation must be meaningfully “transformative” for copyright to apply in a fair and equitable way.

Agreed. I believe in a strong public domain and militantly protected fair use; AFAIC, all unaltered AI output should be considered public domain. Direct human authorship (or “substantially transformative” modification) is the benchmark for where copyright should apply.

Exactly, Apple is comparing, er… bananas and kumquats.

Digital zoom is trash and nobody wants it. It is not an indicator of any lack of interest in OPTICAL zoom.

And they should. If you aren’t going to California, Hawaii, or Massachusetts… you should be careful about vetting the state you plan on visiting. Things have gotten very nasty in “red states” over the last few years.

There are rumors that Prigozhin ordered them to move on Moscow in the event of his untimely death.

I’d take that with a heaping pinch of salt, though… and even if true, it doesn’t mean they’ll comply.

The way I see it, if you make enough money to buy a nice, moderate house in California or Hawaii once per year, you are already making too much money. My cutoff would probably be closer to $2-3M… though I’d be willing to go higher if paired with an annual “wealth tax”… say, if you have a value of over - for example - $20M (incl. stocks and any other non-liquid assets) you must pay 20% of any excess value in taxes annually. That would be on top of the 95% multimillionaire income tax.

We need a 95% tax bracket for anyone that makes more than a few million/year.

Same. Apple’s leather cases have never aged well for me. They start to tear and fray, and never get that “distinguished leather” look that leather products usually get with time. If you want a leather case for your phone, there are plenty of third parties and indie creators that make great alternatives that actually do age well.

Yes, but if the public were to benefit from free things too much, they might consume less paid content. Worse, they might realize that realize that non-profit enterprises are a better investment than for-profit ones. We just can’t have that.

This is pretty basic math. Just think about Monopoly (yes, the board game).

Housing is a finite resource. You can buy it or you can rent it. When you buy, you build equity. When you rent, it’s pure expenditure.

So what happens when nobody can buy? They are forced to rent. Demand for rentals rises, which allows landlords to raise their rents.

So how does someone with very deep pockets turn this to their advantage?

First, starting one metropolitan area at a time, you buy up everything you can. If you coordinate with other investors, all the better. The goal is to strangle supply for buyers and prevent anyone who can’t pay cash upfront from making a purchase. When people are unable to buy, they are forced to rent. So supply is down for buyers but demand is up for renters. Renters also aren’t building equity, when means it is perpetually more difficult for them to buy in the future as long as they kept away from the equity opportunity. So you now control the entire regional market on both the supply side and the demand side.

But what if you have more rental property than people willing to pay your asking price? Do you lower your prices? First of all, that rarely happens - because as an investor, you target places that already have lower supply than natural demand. If you have to occasionally let a property go unoccupied for a few months, it’s still no biggie… you keep those prices high and do not, under any circumstances, devalue the market (for your own sake as well as your investment cronies). To avoid accusations of collusion and price fixing, you farm out your rates to a third party service that all your cronies also use: RealPage. It’s not collusion or price fixing if you use a middleman, right? So now you are making bank on rental rates that will see a full return on your (higher than the properties value) investment in 15 years or less.

This has been going on for well over a decade, and these “investors” are now printing money on some of their earliest purchases, with no intention of EVER putting anything back on the market.

TL;DR; Buy all the supply, force plebes to rent, control the prices, profit. Just like Monopoly.

They are not being bought by regular people like you - they are being bought by investment companies, hedge funds, and filthy rich investors… all for the the sole purpose of turning them into rentals.

By turning them into rentals, they keep supply low which increases prices… which prevents people from buying, keeping rental demand high, which also lets them charge exorbitant rental rates. They are gaming both sides of the system to ensure that us peasants can be milked dry over a fundamental human need.

As a Californian, I take GREAT offense at the idea of gendering “dude”.

There is no more gender neutral term than “dude.” You’re dude. I’m dude. He’s dude. She’s dude. They are dudes. The weather is dude. Animals… dudes. Kids: dudes. Elderly: dudes. Girls are dudes. Boys are dudes. Men and women are dudes. Google is dude. Your smart phone… also dude. Parking meter? Dude.

You can use it for anything… but do not gender it.