The Supreme Court denied both sides’ appeals of the Epic v. Apple antitrust case. The court battle to open iOS to competing stores and payments is lost in the United States. A sad outcome for all developers. Now the District Court’s injunction against Apple’s anti-steering rule is in effect, and developers can include in their apps “buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to IAP”.

People in this #BlockTheBlue pressure campaign are losers and goons. They're the cool kids from junior high who worked to exclude we nerds from cool kid events, plus the losers who joined in to gain cred. The elite-only verification system sucked, been criticizing it since 2018.

https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1231290805211496448

An online community like this should be a meritocracy, where everyone has an equal chance, and merit is earned rather than anointed by a corporation. Old school Twitter had found a great expression of merit with following & retweeting. The best rose to the top.

A very interesting development in the AI art saga: litigation against several commercialized generative AI art sites whose machine learning models were trained on art scraped from the internet without the permission of the artists who made it.

https://twitter.com/JonLamArt/status/1614395442376376320

The plaintiffs take the position that machine learning trained on art produces a model that’s comparable to a lossy compression of the original work, rather than generalized learnings comparable to those of a human artist. It’s an untested area of copyright law.

Almost all of the changes in Windows 11 make it worse. Lots more nag screens, can't dock task bar horizontally (which is bad on 16:9 monitors and totally insane on widescreen), can't save files in c:\, now the task bar clock disappeared, more hard to hide crapware. At least it's sort of acknowledged that One Drive failed since it's easy to uninstall now. But now we see a minefield of antipatterns to trick users into thinking they must create a Microsoft account to use windows, though it's bypassable. Unnecessary login to use widgets, etc.

This article leads with an outright falsehood. Journalists should beware of Google PR representatives giving talking points like this - it’s no longer “spin” as it was in the earlier days of the tech industry - it’s simply lies now. And they’ve done it to us before. I am still very bitter about the time Epic sent a confidential email to Google senior executives and general counsel, documenting our plans for Fortnite, and they took it to a naive journalist to leak it with Google talking points, not citing Google as the source.

This tax bill would likely end founder control of lots of independent companies - perhaps including Epic Games.

washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021… When the press says I’m a billionaire, they don’t mean I have billions of dollars in the bank. Never had, likely never will. In my case it just means I started a company 30 years ago and my ownership stake in it is now very valuable.

Apple lied. Apple spent a year telling the world, the court, and the press they’d "welcome Epic’s return to the App Store if they agree to play by the same rules as everyone else". Epic agreed, and now Apple has reneged in another abuse of its monopoly power over a billion users. Just last week, Epic agreed with Apple that we would play by the same rules as everyone else.

More insight on Apple lobbying! This practice of simultaneously engaging deeply partisan political lobbying groups on both ends of the political spectrum is really strange in the tech industry.

https://twitter.com/TTP_updates/status/1435359650619265026

On one hand, they have the Chamber of Progress (progresschamber.org, "a new tech industry coalition devoted to a progressive society"). On the other extreme, they have ALEC (described in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_…), both involved in wildly unrelated social and political causes.

https://twitter.com/leah_nylen/status/1428721396042059782

https://twitter.com/wsbtv/status/1349379467177766916

No surprise. Apple has long made personal privacy part of its very DNA. Engineers chose to join Apple for less pay and a tougher work environment because they believe in product excellence and chose to serve on the front lines of privacy as a human right.

https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1425986762132713473

The US constitution protects against arbitrary government search of one’s home and personal effects. Data one stores privately and doesn’t share is a personal effect. Apple backdooring iOS to examine personal iCloud data is a suspicionless search of personal effects.

So how should powerful tech companies reason about matters that balance individual freedom and collective safety? We should start with the underlying legal standards, especially when a policy may involve government reporting or policing. An individual has strong legal protections of privacy in their personal effects and in personal communication through the post. There are very different standards in publishing material, engaging in commerce, communicating with groups of unknown third parties, and so on.

I've tried hard to see this from Apple's point of view. But inescapably, this is government spyware installed by Apple based on a presumption of guilt. Though Apple wrote the code, its function is to scan personal data and report it to government.
eff.org/deeplinks/2021… This is entirely different from a content moderation system on a public forum or social medium. Before the operator choses to host the data publicly, they can scan it for whatever they don't want to host. But this is peoples' private data.

An axiom is an assumption that something is true. A theorem is a claim that something is true. A proof is a series of steps that show exactly how a theorem follows from axioms. These notions were clearly laid out in Euclid's Elements around 300 BC. In programming, a native is a function or type provided by a compiler. A type is a claim that value of that type exist. A type-checked expression establishes that a value belongs to a type. These notions came about in the 1950's as compilers were developed.

The topic of functional logic programming is extraordinarily rich and is largely unexplored, due to limits of the original reasoning model (closed world SLD resolution) which hindered a view of the bigger picture. David McAllester wrote all down in 1989 with Ontic, but it wasn’t recognized as being implementable nor was it even clearly understood what an implementation would comprise, nor were its connections to functional logic recognized.

Presumably they're just posturing for the court, but if Apple truly believes the fight over the App Store's distribution and payment monopoly is a "basic disagreement over money," then they've lost all sight of the tech industry's founding principles.

engadget.com/apple-epic-gam… Foremost among those principles: the device you own is yours. You're free to use it as you wish. Configure it as you like, install software you choose, create your own apps, share them with friends. Your device isn't lorded over by some all-powerful corporation.

Let’s try searching for Netflix on the App Store. Whoops, Netflix isn’t the top result, because Apple sold top result to TikTok. At least all the text is super readable - except the low contrast white-on-blue-white “Ad” label. Ok, we scroll down and install Netflix. Now let’s sign up. Whoops! You can’t sign up in-app, and Apple won’t even allow Netflix to tell users how to sign up out-of-app!

At the most basic level, we’re fighting for the freedom of people who bought smartphones to install apps from sources of their choosing, the freedom for creators of apps to distribute them as they choose, and the freedom of both groups to do business directly. The primary opposing argument is: "Smartphone markers can do whatever they want". This as an awful notion.

We all have rights, and we need to fight to defend our rights against whoever would deny them. Even if that means fighting a beloved company like Apple.

Here’s my first computer, the Apple ][+. It booted into a BASIC programming prompt so you could write code. Then you could save it on a floppy disk or a tape and share it with others. Where is the company that invented the personal computer now? The good news is that they have a billion devices in circulation. The bad news: to get permission to program, you have to submit a form and a $100 fee. To release it, you submit another form and wait for Apple to decide whether they will allow you to do that. Often they don’t.

Ultimately, ownership of digital items should be a universal notion, independent of stores and platforms. So much of the digital world today is frustrated by powerful intermediaries whose toll booths obstruct open commerce to keep customers and their purchases locked in. Epic’s committed to working with all willing ecosystems to connect our stores and recognize universal ownership. Early bits include purchase integration with Humble and others, and library visibility to GOG. A lot more will be coming over time.

George Washington referred to America as a great experiment, and today we might call this thing a mashup. We start the 4th of July with hamburgers and churros and kielbasa and end it with red, white, and blue fireworks launched to the tune of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture. Our flag made from the colors of Britain, which we overthrew, with stars representing American states. Our system of law is an Enlightenment reformulation of British law, which was built on Roman law, plus 244 years of our own patches addressing inequities ancient and modern.

@odean14 @logokas @ModernArtery This kind of new PC hardware is monstrously impressive. The specific case you’d want to benchmark for games is transfers of textures and geometry from SSD into renderable video memory resources. In this case I opine that PS5 would outperform due to GPU driver overhead. @odean14 @logokas @ModernArtery There are articles talking about the possibility of Microsoft bringing DirectStorage to PC, with the potential to eliminate the GPU driver overhead in the future. And there’s also Intel’s Optane effort to put non-volatile memory directly on the DRAM with cache granularity.