masterspace @ masterspace @lemmy.ca

Posts

4

Comments

2,048

Joined

2 yr. ago

Please do us all a favour and go and read the Wikipedia article on anti-competitive behaviour and anti-competition laws before commenting.

And just in case you lack the mental faculties to actually parse that Wikipedia article, the key lesson we're looking for you to learn is that you do not need a a monopoly to behave anti-competitively, you just need market power, and to abuse it in a way that avoids fairly competing on the merits of your product.

Apple forcing people to use their payment system for no reason other than it lets them make more money, is anti-competitive behaviour. They are not competing on the merits of the best payment system, they are using their dominant market share in phones to force people to use their payment system where they can charge whatever they want.

Quite frankly, there are a huge number of examples in society of companies behaving anti-competitively. It's largely what happens when you let business people run things, since they can organize your company structure and reporting to be efficient, and then they run out of ideas for legitimate ways to improve the company's products.

Anti-competitive tying is a long standing, textbook, example of anti-competitive behaviour, it's just often not prevented in the US because US law basically requires you to have a full monopoly before anyone will do anything which is dumb as tits. It'd be like in hockey if the refs were only able to give you a penalty after all your opponents were too injured to play anymore.

It also ignores other ways of gaining and abusing market power. Walmart is the textbook example of a monopsony, where there market power comes not from being the only store, but the only customer, they are famous for using their size to crush and control their suppliers in ways that are flat out illegal in most of the western world.

At the end of the day, our economic system is based on the idea that people should compete to produce the best product or service, and then consumers will reward the best one with proportionally more resources based on which one is their preference (best, cheapest, etc.). That falls apart when you start using software to artificially tie every product to every other product. Suddenly AI can't fairly compete to produce the speaker without also producing a phone, and watch, and laptop, and have everyone have a network of friends and family all also using those. It literally undermines the entirety of capitalism.

Apple wouldn't have to if they didn't artificially prevent competitor app stores from being installed on iPhones. An app store is just software that tells the OS to install another piece of software. They are not complicated or hard to code, Apple just installs one with your phone and prevents any apps from being installed except through it, and then they refuse to host other app stores.

This is them using their market share in phones, to avoid competing fairly with third party software app stores like Steam.

They claim they have to install every thing through their app store for security reasons and there's no possible other way to build it (horseshit), so rightfully then, to prevent them from illegally tieing two unrelated products together, they have to host Fortnite on the App Store since it has to be the neutral competition hosting level of abstraction. It wouldn't if Apple would allow competitor app stores like they do on MacOS but they won't this is the bed they made.

And let me be frank. Your assertion that Epic is not a good company and Apple is not a good company, in the same breadth, is false equivalency horseshit.

Apple charges mafia 30% of all software REVENUE fees in addition to their other anti-competitive bullshit. They use their dominant platform position to be an absolute drag on the economy at large. Epic bought some game exclusives for a couple years. They are not comparable.

💯

It's not a popular opinion but you're entirely right.

AI isn't copying in the way that most people think it is. It truly is transformative in all the tradition copyright ways.

Is it copyright infringements if my company pays an employee to study the internet and that makes them capable of animating a frame from the Simpsons? No, it's copyright infringement when that company publishes that copyright infringing work.

The reality is that copyright has always been a nonsense system and 'fair use' concepts were also nonsense and arbitrary. AI algorithms just let us expose how nonsense they are at scale.

This is a little naiive imho. I get what you're saying, but the reality that has been proven time and time again is that if you're willing to stoop low enough and cause enough suffering, it is possible to break most animals' spirits.

I really wish Vercel would put more effort into the static site generation side of Nextjs, but they won't because that inherently makes them no money.

If they pay to power it with sustainable energy then it doesn't. Simple as that. Energy use is really not a problem.

AI's biggest problem is that it accelerates the effects of capitalism and wealth concentration, and our societies are not set up to handle that, or even to adapt particularly quickly.

I worked at a major tech company and their attitude was 'if this becomes popular enough, and copyright is an issue, we'll just pay artists to produce training data en masse'.

We use copilot literally every day and it's extremely helpful, literally not a single developer at our company disagreed on the most recent adoption survey.

Maybe you're trying to use it to do too much, or in the wrong way?

Oh I'm glad you're the be all know all arbiter of all software developers, and not just some grump on the internet.

Its not about writing easy entry programs, it's about writing code robustly.

Writing out test code where tests are isolated from each other, cover every edge case, and test every line of code, is tedious but pays dividends. AI makes it far less tedious to write out that test code and practice proper test driven development.

A well run dev team with enough senior people that manages the change properly should increase in velocity if they're already writing robust code, and increase in code quality if they're not.

Pointing this out in company wide meetings is a fun past time.

It does save a lot of time and effort, and does lead to better code in the hands of a skilled developer. Writing out thorough test code and actually doing proper test driven development suddenly becomes a lot less onerous.

Their graph also has no numbers and is just there to help visualize the difference they're referring to.

Read the article before commenting.

The literal entire thesis is that AI should maintain developer headcounts and just let them be more productive, not reduce headcount in favour of AI.

The irony is that you're putting in less effort and critical thought into your comment than an AI would.

I told my work that I will not be travelling to the US under any circumstances until there's no risk of me being detained in an ICE prison.

Realistically I will not be travelling there for any reason for years to decades at this point. America as a country needs to go fuck itself for a while so it can really learn the lesson of how productive that is.

The fact that AutoCAD needs tutorials like this is a bit of a UX smell for AutoCAD itself...

But regardless, to echo someone else, I would suggest aiming at corporations. On a personal level, I would just use YouTube videos for free, and quite frankly would invest my time in learning something open source like Blender rather than something closed like AutoCAD or Fusion.

Sweeney is not lionized as a false saviour.

Newell is.

100%.

Gamers act like Gabe Newell is a god, when he's just a billionaire that charged them more than he needed to, like all the others.

Epis using Fortnite money to break up Apple and Google's app store monopplies an objectively good ded

Honestly, the author of this article, Arwa Mahdawi, is hands down the worst columnist at the Guardian.

She's an internet reporter who thinks she's reporting news when she's just regurgitating the most surface level takes from bluesky and reddit.