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  1. beiser

    Apple is Dodgy

    look, this is the stupidest thing i’ve heard in a long time. i don’t think i can do anything if this is what i’m up against. i think it’s time for me to flounce. loads of good grime mixtapes here but i think something’s gone rotten. too many five pint nights and late nights at raves and...
  2. beiser

    Apple is Dodgy

    you gonna break up huawei, alibaba and tencent too? you’ve either turned this into a global imperial power fantasy or a kind of self-annihilation.
  3. beiser

    Apple is Dodgy

    who is wealth getting concentrated in? isn’t it the shareholders, who are widely distributed? Is it the execs? They make big salaries, but they’re comparatively restrained given the scale of the company. Is it the employees, who typically make less than they would at a competitor? If you break...
  4. beiser

    Apple is Dodgy

    if you break them up, you don’t abolish the mobile phone, you just increase dependence on the supply chain, which decreases the capability to audit suppliers. that would surely mean more slave labor in the supply chain. the opposite of a solution.
  5. beiser

    Apple is Dodgy

    on the object-level of supply chain responsibility, I can tell you that Apple is better than the rest of the lot. it’s not clear that they’re good _enough_, just that the focus on them is because they hover as an abstraction above the rest of the industry in our minds, and not due to any...
  6. beiser

    Apple is Dodgy

    this is it—there’s no disagreement, no claim that Gus isn’t right, only that it’s gauche to argue such a true thing as he has, when it means not treating the tech companies with ritual disdain
  7. beiser

    Apple is Dodgy

    this is the bizarro syndrome where the european bourgeiosie’s feigned distain for wealth has trickled down to the european middle classes, manifesting as a kind of haughty disregard for material reality, an insistence on an abstract “finer bits of the quality of life” even as the entire...
  8. beiser

    Apple is Dodgy

    come on man this is just bad faith … where is the quality of life question here, what is the counterfactual with better QoL
  9. beiser

    Apple is Dodgy

    once upon a time i worked at hq. with my sordid past revealed, i expect that luka will never let me hear the end of it.
  10. beiser

    Apple is Dodgy

    Don’t do this. Old mechanical drives are unreliable, and will sometimes silently fail—so you risk losing it all fairly quick. The amount of space you’ll get off one of these is less than you’d get on a thumb drive that costs less than the adapter. If you’re looking for a good use for these...
  11. beiser

    Apple is Dodgy

    Most companies prioritize their ability to attribute revenue to a single source, and therefore plan individual products as if they are independent companies. Apple prioritizes their ability to maximize capital infrastructure, and therefore has little ability to attribute outcomes to any...
  12. beiser

    Apple is Dodgy

    Two distinctions: - At Apple, the beneficience happens on the top level. The whole company is trying to maximize outcomes. In a typical company, that happens within the divisional level—as the Computer Products Division at Samsung, you’re trying to max out Computer Satisfaction, so you might not...
  13. beiser

    Apple is Dodgy

    A piece of software is a sort of bureaucracy, and therefore it encodes a certain set of restrictions onto the life of the user of it. As a result, what you need to make good software is a theory of representation. Linux operates on a kind of anarchist theory that leans heavily on the idea that...
  14. beiser

    Apple is Dodgy

    Apple is unusually interesting as an example for theories of value; they consistently refuse to play by the same rules as other companies. One of my favorite theories of them comes from perhaps the only early Apple employee who was a Trotskyist; this whole piece is good but the important part is...
  15. beiser

    Apple is Dodgy

    i think of apple as a techno-capital leviathan run by a fashion house, engaged in a struggle for techno-power against nation states and occasionally eking out a win.
  16. beiser

    Apple is Dodgy

    the iCloud backup question is funny. it’s documented and can be turned off, but it is true that your counterparties need to as well in order to keep things properly secure. when I really need it, it’s easier to just go to Signal for something properly OTR. It’s not a back door though, in the...
  17. beiser

    Inevitable (?) office party thread

    Went to one "holiday party" in the summer. (Commerce world—holiday season is peak time, so you move it out.) Very strange vibe. Very clear who was on the engineering side, and who was in business. Bit of an older, more established crowd, many folks well besuited or in very impressive cocktail...
  18. beiser

    Why Conspiracy Theories?

    I appreciate the password ones—it's a service that automatically lets you know when a password has leaked! Very useful!
  19. beiser

    The Great Dissensus Migration

    I’m still missing my cursor and selection on the “New Dissensus” theme
  20. beiser

    The Elon Musk Thread

    guy in the video who isn't elon
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