Excellent take. Had Apple made a dummy proof "Pass" portal for clubs, venues, etc to use to visually design and manage passes (and maybe even distribute?) when they launched this, I think it would have exploded, and the ecosystem lock in would have just been all that much deeper. But Apple doesn't really think or operate like that.
Be really interesting to see how their approach evolves over the next couple years with sea changes happening all around them in this moment.
You are correct on both accounts, as of tahoe 26.3 you can't nest a macOS guest under a macOS guest. However you can nest 2 layers deep with any combo of layer 1 guest so long as the machine is running Sequoia and is M3/M4/M5.
I live about 3 miles out of town, fortunately directly on a rail trail. I ride my e-bike in to town to get groceries weekly. I have saddlebags on the bike and I pull a kids trailer with the seat folded down and have never run out of room, or had issues with weight. Sometimes I'll even get a few bags of water softener salt. I have a fat tire ebike (aventon), it's pretty sturdy. I've got about 2k miles on the bike, I'd guess half those are from grocery runs.
I’m not a turn spotlight off guy but it is a bit of a pig in terms of apple’s approaches to system crawling and indexing and how it leaves its metadata detritus all over the disk. I can see the desire to disable it for some.
Challenge with trying to use Raycast more broadly in lieu of Spotlight for systemwide search is Raycast appears to be built on top of the spotlight indexes (mds mdworker)
I am with you in that this rhetoric is getting exhausting.
In this particular case though I don't think "evil” is a moral claim, more shorthand for cost externalizing behavior. Hammering expensive dynamic endpoints with millions of unique requests isn’t neutral automation, it's degrading a shared public resource. Call it evil, antisocial, or extractive, the outcome is the same.
This is the “answer” in plain sight and I agree. The iPhone is the beating heart of the modern Apple empire. Tim Cook has been a vocal proponent of AR since the summer of Pokemon Go. That combined with Meta getting traction with their Rayban line is almost certainly at the center of an overarching internal strategy at Apple to ensure they are positioned to maintain or even grow position as end user mobile computing form factors shift beyond the traditional smartphone. Getting the ux and app ecosystem ready visually is what ‘caused’ Liquid Glass.
Whether or not this specific author’s blog was de-indexed or de-prioritized, the issue this surfaces is real and genuine.
The real issue at hand here is that it’s difficult to impossible to discover why, or raise an effective appeal, when one runs afoul of Google, or suspects they have.
I shudder to use this word as I do think in some contexts it’s being overused, I think it’s the best word to use here though: the issue is really that Google is a Gatekeeper.
As the search engine with the largest global market share, whether or not Google has a commercial relationship with a site is irrelevant. Google has decided to let their product become a Utility. As a Utility, Google has a responsibility to provide effective tools and effective support for situations like this. Yes it will absolutely add cost for Google. It’s a cost of doing business as a Gatekeeper, as a Utility.
My second shudder in this comment - regulation is not always the answer. Maybe even it’s rarely the answer. But I do think when it comes to enterprises that have products that intentionally or unintentionally become Gatekeepers and/or Utilities, there should be a regulated mandate that they provide an acceptable level of support and access to the marketplaces they serve. The absence of that is what enables and causes this to perpetuate, and it will continue to do so until an entity with leverage over them can put them in check.
The situation reads more like a monopoly issue rather than a gatekeeper issue. Because google owns the indexer and the search tool most used, they're really only gate keeping their own sandbox.
It's entirely possible to have utility-importance non-monopoly gatekeepers, which is part of the legal issue.
The US regulates monopolies.
The US regulates utilities, defined by ~1910 industries.
It doesn't generally regulate non-monopoly companies that are gatekeepers.
Hence, Apple/Google/Facebook et al. have been able to avoid regulation by avoiding being classed as monopolies.
Imho, the EU is taking the right approach: also classify sub-monopoly entities with large market shares, and apply regulatory requirements on them.
I'd expect the US to use a lighter touch, and I'm fine with that, but regulations need to more than 'no touch'. It'd also be nice if they were bucketed and scaled (e.g. minimal requirements for 10-20%, more for 21-50%, max for 50%+).
Sure, we agree there though I'd add that while the US regulates monopolies we don't always enforce that, we also allow state-sponsored monopolies for many regional utilities.
With Google and SEO I see it more in the monopoly camp though. The existence of other big tech companies doesn't break the monopoly Google has by owning search, ads, analytics, et al under the same umbrella.
No argument there either, I do agree sometimes market monopolies need to be felt with though the bar is high in my opinion. If it were me I'd want to see proof of collusion, its easy for a market with only a few actors to independently make similar choices based on similar market incentives and data.
In this case though, it still seems like a more simple monopoly only with google. You don't need to consider other companies when the issue is related to the black box of search rankings.
I wouldn't personally want companies to be punished without evidence of collusion. A company isn't doing anything wrong by earning market share, and companies aren't doing anything wrong if they happen to move in a similar direction based on market incentives.
If we think free markets are generally going to move in the right direction, we should just want companies to want to fill market gap and outcompete. I don't agree we should make companies do anything though, at most governments should be tweaking incentives to attempt to push companies down a path without directly making them go there (even them I'm not sold that approach is worth it).
So there's no collusion or misbehavior, and the market ends up as a duopoly: one participant has 70% and another has 25%.
You don't think that alone distorts the market enough to merit intervention to encourage more competitors?
If you tie intervention to proven malfeasance, you allow abusers to skirt the rules for decades, entrench their positions with obscene profits, and then maybe eventually face consequences if they lose a legal case.
Instead of labeling some things illegal after the fact, monopoly and market law should be based around identifying some high market sharr situations as potentially dangerous and requiring compliance with additional regulations that make it harder for that dominant company to prevent competitors from starting and growing.
Otherwise, it invariably slides into state-aligned and -supported chaebols, because the government has incentive to ask large companies for help and they have incentive to cooperate with the government.
Yes, when crimes are committed it is often hard to prove and you won't catch them all. That's by design and a fundamental part of how our legal system was designed in the first place.
Having a duopoly as you described isn't in itself a crime, nor should it be. If they are skirting the rules such that they are breaking the rules, enforcement should step in as there is actually something to enforce. If the only "crime" is winning market share, what's the problem?
I’m really hoping the pendulum swings back to sanity in the US rather than becoming a Russia-like mafia business state.
It’s possible the only hope is a painful one: a major market crash caused by greed and excessive consolidation, the kind of crash that would trigger a 21st century new deal.
I wouldn't personally put much hope in a new deal approach.
The consolidation of power in the US government is the root of many of our problems, I don't expect that same government to solve it by grabbing even more power a la the new deal.
If they considered having some ethical responsibility they would at least tame the bidding war that turned a well paid ads for an existing, unrelated business show before the legitimate link, or limit it so that the search result to show the legitimate link on the first page.
For certain popular sites, it doesn't. Those businesses got to pay the shelf tax if they want their published piece to ever be - not just seen, but reasonably - found when looking specifically for it.
crime finds a way. any means of semi anonymous and/or non recourse value storage and exchange will suit. iTunes/play store/steam prepaid cards and accounts, money orders, western union, etc.
Agree with you it would be different, crypto is global, most of the accessible alternative methods are localized to varying degrees.
having been to VNP watching Kilauea burp lava, as well as to Iceland and watching one of the fissures burp lava near Grindavik - each experience had a lot of similarity, but also each uniquely different.
You could be dropped in either island near the active eruption areas on some roads and if you didn’t have anything other than landscape clues you’d be hard pressed to tell which one you were on. The fresh-ish lava fields (less than 100 years old) look the same, big black rocky expanses of volcanic rock with little or no vegetation. Iceland’s mosses and grass would be a tell, whereas in Hawaii when life starts to take hold it has a much more jungle look to it. But otherwise, the sulfur smells, steam vents in the active areas, etc are very similar.
I have to say the big island of Hawaii and Iceland are two of my most favorite places on the planet, alongside Alaska. All very rural, not over developed, and an immersion in a raw version of the natural world that is largely abstracted away from us where most of us live.
Be really interesting to see how their approach evolves over the next couple years with sea changes happening all around them in this moment.
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