abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @lemmy.world

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This is new territory and it's changing every week.

Historically, the way it worked is Apple gives almost everything away for free except for a $99 per year fee developers have to pay. But developers who have certain business models (especially game developers) have to pay Apple a huge percentage of their income.

I've been an Apple developer since the 90's - if you go even further back in Apple's history... Apple didn't have a walled garden approach. They simply charged money for all their software and that was very successful. Not as successful as the walled garden but still healthy profits.

“Non-profit organizations” that sounds like the minority of developers

True but if you're a for-profit developer, you can probably afford 50 cents per customer. Facebook, for example, has a "free" app that earned $134 billion last year. I'm not defending Apple, I think the Core Technology Fee is anti-competitive and I hope the EU tells them it's illegal - but 50c is pocket change for nearly any for-profit app developer.

Small apps with less than a million users don't pay any fee either.

A million users is a big open source project and I think you'll find most of them already are non-profits. Or they're part of a larger non-profit that runs a bunch of projects such as the Apache Foundation, which provides funding and resources to almost 300 open source projects and could easily grow that number by a significant margin if there was much need for it. This potentially creates that need.

The main thing I have a problem with is the requirement to be an established "good standing" developer in order to deploy on the web. Apple's definition of "good standing" is clearly anti-competitive... I expect the EU told Apple they can deny distribution rights to developers who can't be trusted, but based on recent history (e.g. Epic) it's pretty clear that Apple and the EU don't agree on who can be trusted. They are surely going to have to change that rule.

I do think Apple can charge a fee to use their service. The EU is not banning fees and they never will. A government can't force a company to give things away for free. What I personally hope to see is the EU telling Apple that all fees must be optional. That way if Apple wants to make money, they need to offer something people are willing to pay for. If I was CEO of Apple, I would make the "Core Technology Fee" built into the price of an iPhone and make customers pay it.

That used to be Apple's business model by the way — and it worked. It wasn't as profitable as "give nearly everything away for free but force everyone to use this overpriced service", but Apple was still very profitable under the old model. And both customers and developers were happy with how it worked back then.

I disagree - it's definitely a win.

There's still more work to be done (you shouldn't need to first deploy an app with a million downloads on the Apple App Store in order to deploy outside of it for example...) but I expect the EU will force them to change that rule.

It will be interesting to see where they land on the Core Technology Fee. At face value it seems pretty clearly anti-competitive to make developers pay more if you don't use an Apple service. But at the same time, the government can't force Apple to give things away for free.

I expect a middle ground will be reached with much lower prices and hopefully a per-app price (e.g. pay once to have your app go through an anti-malware scanning service) rather than a per-user price. Or even better, in my opinion, is to make users pay a fee to have their device scanned for malware by Apple. A cost that could be built into the price of the hardware.

For example Apple uses HBM instead of DDR5. They also give the CPUs heaps of L1/L2/L3 cache to avoid memory access as much as possible. And some of the stuff they do with flash memory is just as expensive.

That's the real reason Apple Silicon Macs cost so much and I'm more than willing to pay that price. But it's also the reason those Macs are so fast.

How does Qualcomm compare? I have no idea.

Sure - but apple has been "working on" ARM since 1981. Microsoft is definitely on the back foot here.

Is it actually emulation? Macs don't do that.

They convert the x86 code into native ARM code, then execute it. Recompiling the software takes a moment, and some CPU instructions don't have a good equivalent, but for the most part it works very well.

I don't know what these chips are like, but x86 software runs perfectly on my ARM Mac. And not just small apps either, I'm running full x86 Linux servers in virtual machines.

There is a measurable performance penalty but it's not a noticeable one with any of the software I use... ultimately it just means the CPU sits on 0.2 load instead of 0.1 load and if it spikes to 100% then it's only for a split second.

just be prepared that the “default” YouTube recommendations are all clickbait

That's not what Google is doing. They're literally showing an empty page with a search box (and a sidebar of categories). Similar to going to google.com.

It's clearly being A/B tested though - I only see the empty page sometimes. Other times I get the usual Mr Beast recommendations (this is with no login, not with a login but watch history disabled).

I don't think the banks see much of that money. It mostly goes to infrastructure companies such as Visa (who guarantees a refund if your card is stolen) and Telstra (network infrastructure isn't free) and of course the actual card processing hardware itself isn't fee either.

I would be curious to see how much money Australians save by not paying a million people to handle cash (which they generally do poorly).

Sorry but there just isn't that much to figure out. Cars have had electric motors and batteries for as long as cars have had motors (literally - early cars didn't have a combustion engine).

You take an ordinary car, bolt a big ass motor and battery to it somewhere, and you're done. Nothing innovative needs to happen and there should be no repairability compromises. If anything they should be easier to repair.

Tesla's obsession with complex body parts is inexcusable. I used to work in the car crash insurance industry - we put Tesla in the same category as Bugatti/McLaren/etc. They're that expensive to repair... and unlike those supercars, nobody is going to be willing to spend the money get a Model 3 back to show room condition.

Get yourself in a minor fender bender like the one below and your insurance company is going to buy you a new car (the owner of this car was given a $45,000 repair quote):

With a conventional car, those panels would have likely been plastic (cheap to replace) or else metal but simple designs that can be bent back into shape by someone who knows how to use a panel beating hammer. What you don't see on the photo is all the weld joints that have been stressed and failed on the Tesla. It can potentially be months of work to get that car fixed and the insurance company doesn't want to provide a hire car for all that time - so they just pay out the value of the car and leave you to buy a new one.

As fast as the web is now, I'm no-longer a fan of pressuring browser developers on performance. What we really need is to improve browser interoperability.

Rendering engines are constantly adding support for awesome new features... but those features can't really be used until all the other browsers decide to implement the same feature - which tends to be years later. I'm a huge fan of the "Interop" project, which maintains a list of web technologies everyone agrees should be cross platform and pressures rendering engines to implement those features. The list of features changes every year.

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024?stable

Perhaps the only difficult part was creating a bootable OSX restore disk just in case I destroyed the OS… it’s almost like Mac really don’t want you to be doing this.

Um, yeah, they really don't want you to be doing that. Creating the recovery disk was probably a waste of time and I recommend erasing the disk and doing something more useful with it (give it to your kid as a backup disk or something).

Your Mac has "recovery mode" in the firmware, it will often boot into recovery automatically if there's something wrong with your boot disk, or you can manually trigger it by holding down certain keys at boot time.

Back on topic:

I recommend teaching your kid how to develop "inside a container" with Visual Studio Code and Docker: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers

It's a bit of a steep learning curve - you're going to have to learn it yourself and help him at first, but it will save your kid so much time in the long run and will allow more freedom to experiment and potentially mess things up. When you install software inside a container, and mess it up, you can restart from scratch (or even better, go back to how it was a few days ago) in a few seconds.

I also recommend buying your kid a ChatGPT 4 subscription - so he can ask questions like this and get answers a thousand times faster than with a Google search:

Finally - teach your kid how to use Git. https://git-scm.com/ See the list of companies using git at the bottom of that webpage? The list would literally be shorter if they made a list of companies that don't use git... I bet there isn't a single large company that you've heard of, anywhere in the world, that does not use Git.

Your kid needs to learn git too and the younger he learns it the better. My number one pet peeve about our current schooling system is almost no schools teach git - it should be taught in grade school. Right after "this is how you type".

Visual Studio Code has built in Git support as a client. It's usually combined with git running on a server but you don't need that yet - just teach him how to use Git on his own computer (and make sure you have backups of all his work). Git does two things:

Git is primarily a tool to help multiple people work together... and your kid doesn't need that right now. However the way Git achieves that goal is by making sure the work is nicely organised and split into small units of work (a bit like climbing up a mountain is split into thousands of individual steps... climbing the mountain is hard, each step is easy, climbing the mountain without taking small steps is impossible).

Writing good software, without using git or a tool like git* is impossible. Like trying to jump to the top of a mountain.

(*) Git belongs to a category of tools known as "Source Control Management", and there used to be many different tools with plenty of heated arguments over which one to use. But that's largely over now, git has all of the features anyone could need, it's free, and everyone else in the industry also uses it which it's main selling point.

Lots of great advice here on using VSCodium instead of VSCode... and while it's great that community / open alternatives like that exist, I think it's better if you stick to the app that is supported by Microsoft. It's going to be easier, those open source alternatives have a few rough edges which your kid could easily get stuck on.

By the same token, I personally would avoid using Linux Mint. Install VSCode on the Mac, install Docker on the Mac, and then run Linux inside Docker. You will still have a fully functional Linux install, but it will only be command line Linux, which is the Linux that 99.99% of developers actually use in the real world. 96% of the internet runs on Linux. 4% of desktops/laptops run Linux.

Everyone chooses Linux on the server because it's the best software for the job. Almost nobody chooses Linux on the desktop because it's not the best software for that job. Linux inside Docker on a Mac is using Linux the way almost everyone in the world uses it. You are going to have problems if you use Linux - for example that tutorial above showing how to use VS Code and Containers? It has instructions for Windows/Mac/Linux... but the Linux one includes a warning that it's not compatible with the standard method of installing Docker on the most popular version of Linux. You don't want to deal with that stuff.

MacOS is really popular for developers. So popular that all of the Visual Studio Code screenshots on their Containers tutorial are with a Mac... even though the team that crated the tutorial are Microsoft employees. When you're starting out, it's best to what everyone else is doing, so you can ask for help and find lots of people who know how to fix it.

No it really is a philosophy.

There's a vast difference in approach between software that uses documents and software that uses a database. A document based approach tends to result in work that lasts a long time. A database approach tends to have more features.

It's tempting to chase those features, but in my opinion it's a mistake.

What the corrupt US departments couldn’t - and refused to - do.

I heard an interesting podcast interview with someone from one of those departments.

It sounds like they just genuinely don’t have enough funding, as in enough staff, to do their job properly.

Nothing corrupt within the departments - they’re doing the best they can with what they’ve been given . Congress needs to raise taxes and fund the departments better and then there will be proper regulation in the USA.

If course, congress can’t do hardly anything at all so that’s never going to happen. At least not at a federal level.

At a state level though? Maybe that could work.

Harder than implementing RSS.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. RSS is a ridiculously complex standard and almost nobody gets it right. Good chance you'll be back over and over to fix bugs and then, when you have more data in your database, you'll be doing it all over again after refactoring things to improve performance and causing more bugs.

Certbot is supposed to automatically renew certificates. It doesn't do that reliably in my experience.

We use it on non-critical systems and every few months I need to go in and fix things... that never happens with traditional certificates - those are setup and forget.

As for the exact problems, I don't think we've ever had the same problem twice. It's always a once off thing but it's still an hour of wasted time each and every time. If it happened on a proper production system it'd be a lot more than an hour, since whatever change is made would need a full gamut of testing / reporting / etc.

How big is your TV? Smaller than 1200 inches I’m guessing? How portable is it? Good luck carrying a building sized TV in your backpack.

Vision Pro is too expensive for me but I totally get the attraction for TV alone. Some people spend a lot more on a worse viewing experience.

More compelling content and software use cases will follow. As good as a movie theatre is - it’s still not 3D. Even if you wear glasses the fact they send the same image no matter where you are in the room or where your head is turned makes it basically 2.5D.

Cheaper/better hardware will come too.

Sure but any car will have low maintenance if you don't drive it much.

Body Corporate will usually let you install a charger.

The bigger issue is if you live in the city, how much driving do you do? 50km each month? Someone who drives that far daily will benefit more from an EV

Certbot is so problematic we still pay for most of our certificates because it’s more reliable.

I’m not sure if Caddy/Traefik is the answer but it’s clear the work should be handed over to a team with a proper focus on reliability.