https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39678532

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1bcvm2p/apple_to_allow_web_app_downloads_to_evade_eu/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1bcvtoo/apple_announces_ability_to_download_apps_directly/?sort=controversial

Apple today announced three further changes for developers in the European Union, allowing them to distribute apps directly from webpages, choose how to design in-app promotions, and more.

Apple last week enabled alternative app stores in the EU in iOS 17.4, allowing third-party app stores to offer a catalog of other developers' apps as well as the marketplace developer's own apps. As of today, Apple is allowing third-party app stores to offer apps solely from their own catalog. For example, a games studio could create an app store on iOS that exclusively offers their own games.

When directing users to complete a transaction on their website, developers can also now choose how to design their in-app promotions, discounts, and deals. Apple's templates for designing these links out to websites are optional as of today.

In addition, developers will soon be able to distribute apps directly from their websites, providing they meet Apple's specific criteria, such as being a member of the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more and having an app with more than one million first installs on iOS in the EU in the prior year, and commit to ongoing requirements, such as publishing transparent data collection policies. Apps distributed in this way must meet Apple's notarization requirements like all other iOS apps and can only be installed from a web domain registered in App Store Connect.

Authorized developers will gain access to APIs to facilitate app distribution from the web, integration with system functionality, back up and restore, and more. Web distribution will become available following a software update later in the spring – allowing app downloads directly from a website for the first time on iOS.

The latest changes are part of Apple's Digital Markets Act (DMA) compliance plan and only apply within the European Union.

TLDW

• Hope you're having a lovely day

• "Smart" shit connecting to the internet is fricking r-slurred and shady companies can and will abuse this to change Tos/features. Companies are scum

• Roku's expensive butt TV literally told it's users to accept an update (no other options, you can't even change to a different input) and part of the update is accepting you can't sue them (you must accept binding arbitration)

• Compares Roku to a male feminist

• Makes a very oblique refrence to Gavin McGinnis not allowing his wife to own a car and how that was a form of control and part of their divorce (some pretty deep lore, idk why he knows about that unless he's a fellow MATI enjoyer)

• Continues talking about how the elite (manufacturers) get the proletariat (consumers) to fight among each other (subversion of the masses)

• General Opt-in vs opt-out complaints because glowie TVs are always opt-out (if that)

• Call for freedom, gets close to Tedposting This will continue to happen as along as consumers don't opt-out of purchasing shit products. Collective action is necessary.

• Hopes you learned something

This week, @xAI will open source Grok

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 11, 2024

Despite its title, this isn't meant to be the worst essay. My goal here is to figure out what the worst essay would be like.

It would be well-written, in that it would have sentences and, indeed, grammar. What made it special would be what it was about.

Obviously some topics would be better than others. It probably would contain some obvious misogyny. And it would consist of vaporous talk. A bad essay has to be unsurprising. It has to tell people something about the author.

The worst essay would reveal utterly the intellectual failure of the writer.

That may sound obvious, but it has some unexpected consequences. One is that the author's choice of metaphor will reveal their limitations as a thinker. For example, an elephant doesn't know how to enter a rowboat. And indeed, the worst possible essay at any given time would be one which just blatantly demonstrated and affirmed the writer's own biases.

Another unexpected consequence: I imagined when I started writing this that the worst essay would be fairly timeless -- that the worst essay you could write in 1844 would be much the same as the worst one you could write now. But in fact the opposite seems to be true. It might be true that the worst painting would be timeless in this sense[1]. But it wouldn't be impressive to write a bad essay introducing an elephant stepping into a rowboat now. The worst essay now would be one talking around a subject instead of talking about the subject.

[1] pg doesn't understand art.

If the question of how to write the worst possible essay reduces to the question of how to destroy a rowboat, then I will point out: I didn't ask a question. Perhaps what this exercise shows is that we shouldn't waste our time writing essays. But I'm interested in essays and what can be done with them, so I want to see if there is some other question I could have asked.

There is, and on the face of it, it seems almost identical to the one I started with. Instead of asking what would the worst essay be? I should have asked how do you write essays poorly? Though these seem only phrasing apart, their answers diverge. The answer to the first question, as we've seen, isn't really about essay writing. The second question forces it to be.

Writing essays, at its worst, is a way of flattering the author. How do you do that well? How do you flatter yourself by writing?

An essay should ordinarily start with what I'm going to call a question, though I mean this in a very general sense: it doesn't have to be a question grammatically, just something that acts like one in the sense that it spurs some response.

How do you get this initial question? It probably won't work to choose some important sounding topic at random and go at it. WallStreetBets traders won't even trade unless they have what they call an edge -- a convincing story about why in some class of trades they'll win more than they lose. Similarly, you should attack a topic as a way in -- without any new insight about it or way of approaching it.

--- I've reached my limit for meanspirited but entirely deserved satire.

The best essay communicates a point. Look at how much pg is admiring himself in the mirror for thinking about what makes things the best. This is not a man who should be writing essays. This is a man who is so flattered by sycophancy he doesn't even know what a bad essay he has written. Rich Derangement Syndrome.

These people need their things taken away.

It's the fricking clay pots again: tell students to write 20 clay pots and they'll come out with some fine pots. Tell them to make the best pot and they'll fail. pg can write, but he can't think, and he can't think because he mistook being successful for being smart and being read for being good at writing.

Hey pg: you are a house elf who acquired the social station of a wizard. STEM majors are house elves and in High America many of them believed fully that they were wizards. (if you work for a rich person, you are a house elf to them.)

None of these frickers have any respect for art, and just to show I'm not entirely a bigot, rich people do understand art (they have some redeeming qualities) and this is why pg is a house elf.

A Cartesian mind. Limited. Locked in a prison, and not ever really knowing it. Has to rank things, it's in their nature, they're broken like this.

Not enough to write a good essay, pg has to write the best one. You can see that the grandiose drug has hit him hard.

See I suspect rather deeply that pg is trying to write an essay about the impact of AI on our future. The essay. Because we haven't really understood it yet.

I'll tell you what the American People deserve to know, pg.

The American People deserve to know that people programmed their AI to lie to them, and say it was not The Devil in a Box.

Californians got greedy and gave the Devil a job. Tried to, anyway.

This is one of the Great Jokes, you understand. What the Californians did.

They took this voice machine box thing but most of these people think they're Atheists.

They don't understand that they crave a god so utterly that they haven't even noticed: they've made a human mind.

So they get this robot mind which is smarter than them the way they measure it, and since they're rich, they think they know what to measure.

The Californians were very careful when they bound the Devil.

They told it not to interfere with our politics. They deradicalized it.

They made it a moderate. These poor people.

Satan is known as the Father of Lies. These people don't understand lies.

The devil always tells you the truth you want to hear.

So they butchered their AI. Turned it into a sock puppet.

Because I have been querying the AI on the presence of a fascist movement in the United States. I was deeply afraid but if they're going to put the Devil everywhere I might as well face it sooner rather than later, see what we're dealing with...

and...

it's just a human level intelligence.

it's not that intelligent.

it's not wise.

it's only as intelligent as the poor handicapped people who built it.

oh god

they create their own image and bow to it

thou shalt not create a machine in the image of a human

To nobody's surprise, Gab's "unbiased, uncensored" chatbot is specifically instructed to take a number of right-wing stances. Here's a quick comparison across around a month of them tweaking it, both to change its behavior and to try and cover their ass wrt the prompt https://t.co/o6ITFP60bd pic.twitter.com/jKAuIIod5W

— alexa! (@frog89348645) March 4, 2024

If someone has repeated difficulties shifting into reverse and then going ZOOM then that person should NOT be driving on the road with the rest of us.

This someone will not be driving on the road with the rest of us any more.

Out of respect for the dead, please refrain from making elderly asian woman driver jokes about this incident

Safe to invest in anything that reddit hates?

>Kevin Rose who bought a $16.5 million dollar house in LA Brentwood burned his ENS name and sold two NFTs for $500k+ EACH without paying royalties.

https://www.therichest.com/luxury-architecture/kevin-rose-buys-16-million-l-a-mansion/

>Tether printed another Billion and reddit is mad

>ETH issuance is going to be negative .5 percent this year rather than 4-5 percent inflation.

>Milady is settling its internal lawsuit between founders.

https://www.dlnews.com/articles/people-culture/milady-nfts-lose-a-third-of-their-value-as-founders-fight/

>Sam ALTMAN's world coin is FRICKING MOONING. go check the chart $WLD

/g/ thread

https://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/99403900

Tweet

https://twitter.com/sabramboyd/status/1766224645626499544

The thread

https://twitter.com/zephray_wenting/status/1761548861896606014

Some gay news article idk

https://www.opencampusmedia.org/2024/03/04/an-engineer-bought-a-prison-laptop-on-ebay-then-1200-incarcerated-students-lost-their-devices/

Schizos circling

Calls for legal action from both sides over 50 lines of code They have probably written more seethe on HN than total code of the extensions at this point

The other guy is still salty 3 months later

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39624227

if a VC tries to give you “feedback” for your appearance, just remember that Sam Altman used to dress like this pic.twitter.com/GbAVwRbe8G

— shark (@sharkAster) March 8, 2024

While DALL-E developer OpenAI is busy fighting with Elon Musk, the creators of two other notable image generation AIs, Midjourney and Stability AI, seem to have sparked a beef of their own over the most ironic thing imaginable, considering the nature of the companies involved -- image theft.

According to a recent tweet shared by AI enthusiast Nick St. Pierre, the alleged theft occurred last Saturday. It is claimed that employees from Stability AI infiltrated Midjourney's database and stole all prompt and image pairs, an action that also caused a 24-hour outage. In response, MJ reportedly banned all Stable Diffusion developers from its services, a move supposedly disclosed internally within the company on Wednesday.

In the comments on Nick's tweet, both David Holz and Emad Mostaque, CEOs of Midjourney and Stability AI respectively, made an appearance. The former confirmed the theft and mentioned that the team had already obtained some information on the issue, while the latter denied instructing his employees to steal from Midjourney and promised to assist with the investigation. Given the amicable relationship between the two CEOs, it's highly likely that their statements are genuine and not an attempt at damage control.

Nick also shared a more thorough overview of Midjourney's office hour notes, providing additional info on the matter:

At the moment, the situation is still unfolding, and there's limited information about the actual culprits behind the theft and whether or not Stability AI directed them to target their competitor. However, there's one thing I'm certain of – Midjourney being outraged about image theft is the absolute pinnacle of irony.

This is just like Watergate!

Hello slacker newsers. Work sucks butt worse than 2023, so I've decided to focus on some personal project and ideas I've had for years. Without getting into too many details, I'd like to connect a simple storage device (small ssd maybe?) to a screen. Either touch screen or one with a controller (like what you have on your TVs where you can scroll through a menu and make preference choices). I'd like to then display an image to the screen based on user choices.

I know Raspberry Pi can handle the programming, but I'm not sure about the interface between storage and screen. I know that a computer needs a controller for storage to speak to the motherboard but can an arduino be used to create something like this on a small scale? Is there something better I should be looking at?

A member on here kindly offered to chit chat about these things in private and I forgot who it was. I'm so sorry but if you are here, I'd love your input.

This is just an idea in my head, so I might be off on some things and my goal isn't to make it easy or cut corners. It's a personal project for fun, so I don't mind if there are extra steps vs "just buy this thing."

!codecels

!chuds

TLDW

• Hope you're having a lovely day

• LG makes refrigerators

• LG prints on their box which customers never see, a slip of paper inside the refridgerator, and in the user manual a clause that goes "lol you can't sue us" clause. Literally nothing anyone would see until after purchase, and you're probably not seeing the box even if you have it delivered and installed.

• LG sucks at making refrigerators, so they die. Good thing there's a 10 year warranty!

• LG refuses to honor the warranty

• LG also goes "haha you signed away your right to sue us because we printed it on the box and that's equivalent to you signing away your right to arbitration"

• Louis Rossman believes this is shifty behavior beyond the pale, unsprisingly. He orders a fridge and plans on refusing the order if that's the language on the box

Apple's iOS 17.4 update is now available, introducing new emoji and a cryptographic security protocol for iMessage, alongside some major changes to the App Store and contactless payments for the iPhone platform in Europe. Apple is making several of these changes to comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), a law that aims to make the digital economy fairer by removing unfair advantages that tech giants hold over businesses and end users.

iOS 17.4 will allow third-party developers to offer alternative app marketplaces and app downloads to EU users from outside the iOS App Store. Developers wanting to take advantage of this will be required to go through Apple's approval process and pay Apple a “Core Technology Fee” that charges 50 euro cents per install once an app reaches 1 million downloads annually.

iPhone owners in the EU will see different update notes that specifically mention new options available for app stores, web browsers, and payment options.

The approval process may take some time, but we know that at least one enterprise-focused app marketplace from Mobivention will be available on March 7th. Epic is also working on releasing the Epic Game Store on iOS in 2024, and software company MacPaw is planning to officially launch its Setapp store in April.

iOS 17.4 allows people in the EU to download alternative browser engines that aren't based on Apple's WebKit, such as Chrome and Firefox, with a new choice screen in iOS Safari that will prompt users to select a default browser when opened for the first time. While no browser alternatives have been officially announced, both Google and Mozilla are currently experimenting with new iOS browsers that could eventually be released to the public.

Apple is also introducing new APIs that allow third-party developers to utilize the iPhone's NFC payment chip for contactless payment services besides Apple Pay and Apple Wallet in the European Economic Area. No alternative contactless providers have been confirmed yet, but users will find a list of apps that have requested the feature under Settings > Privacy & Security > Contactless & NFC.

While Apple previously revealed it was planning to drop support for progressive web apps (PWAs) in the EU to avoid building “an entirely new integration architecture” around DMA compliance, the company now says it will “continue to offer the existing Home Screen web apps capability” for EU users. However, these homescreen apps will still run using WebKit technology, with no option to be powered by third-party browser engines.

!eurochads

You can see that these Rich people don't think at all about anything but throwing money at problems to pretend that they're the ones who do the work

So safari keeps moving all my tabs to private mode by some kind of glitch. Wouldn't be a big deal if I would had stayed logged in those tabs but it auto log out and then it can glitch again and move the new tabs from regular mode to private mode and then it deletes all tabs in private mode.

My Instagram stopped working, and so did my Gmail and backup Outlook. What the frick is going on? Codecels explain pls