Among tech companies, RTO has primarily been about one thing: maintaining real estate investments. This was likely the primary reason Apple began RTO much earlier than most of its peers (Aug 2022). Apple has enormous RE investments in Apple Park, in San Diego, Austin, and a bunch of other locations, and RTO was a way to ensure their values stay up, and they can remain qualified for tax credits by bringing commerce to those areas.

The fact that RTO also causes the most expensive people to leave was a fortuitous bonus. In 2023, interest rates went high, and money (and thus revenue) became tight, so companies like Amazon enacted RTO to force their most expensive employees to leave.

Make no mistake: Apple, too, used RTO as an attrition tool. They fully expected some single-digit percentages of their engineering workforce to quit due to RTO.

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I’ll flip the question around: what are you trying to achieve with zero anonymity, and how could it be abused? Is the tradeoff worth it?

If real identity is required to participate, but is not publicly displayed, who would you entrust with this information, and how could it be abused?

Protip: Do not connect your TV to the Internet.

PSA: This “study” is crap.

Link to actual study

They base their findings on incidents per driver, not per mile driven. Maybe the “safest” drivers here just…don’t drive their vehicles all that much?

The open secret of Open Source is that successful projects are largely the playground of capitalists. Who has the time to develop and maintain a whole mobile OS with all of the services people have come to expect, for no compensation? Surely the money flows in from interested parties who can then use the software to their advantage.

Much of the fundamental pieces of iOS and macOS is open source too. Darwin/XNU are open-source, but no one is under the impression that any of this effort is to benefit anyone other than Apple. Sure, Darwin-based alternative OSes exist, but let’s not kid ourselves that they are anything but curiosities, waiting to be derailed by Apple when they get too large.

The article is incorrect in equating Apple’s stance to Google’s. As far as I can tell Google does not require a warrant, only a subpoena (which doesn’t require a judge’s review), while Apple’s change does require a court order or a warrant, both of which require a judge to sign off.

The armaments held by private citizens are laughable in the face of the weapons in the Military.

Any “civil war” in the US would likely be in the form of constant terrorism, not all-out gunfights.

This is why pharma research should be publicly funded, and the results go directly into public domain. We will save so much money and lives in the long run that way.

I don’t think Ridley Scott knows how AI works.

Yeah, it’s all about incentives. Google’s behavior is what the law incentivizes.

Cadillac and Mercedes have had thermal cameras on their cars since the early 2000s. There is probably enough data from their vehicles to see if this technology actually helps reduce collisions at night.

DMCA is such a shitty law. But companies like Google choose the safe route and believe every DMCA claim without first using humans to investigate them (because that will cost more money), and this is the result.

I pity the independent creators and makers who get fake DMCA takedowns all the time while Google does nothing to protect them.

If Google really wants to save themselves from this kind of trouble, maybe spend some lobbying money to get DMCA repealed.

Yeah, I do. I got bills to pay, mouths to feed, a job to go to, joints that hurt…yep. I event grunt when I get up.

I guess I was never under the impression that any adult actually knew what they were doing, even when I was younger, so I wasn’t surprised that I am still constantly improvising. This is the natural state of living. You’re either learning and improving, or you’re becoming obsolete and decaying. This is true whether or not you’re an adult.

One week of bug fixing ought to fix it.

That’s not what “soft skills” means, Satya.

Morals are subjective anyway.

They may be subjective, but they exist as a concept and can be discussed. Morals describe the value system from which you make decisions and build consensus. Pretending they don’t matter is nihilistic and self-serving.

Let me frame this issue a different way: when Google doesn’t make money from showing you ads, or getting money from your subscriptions, they don’t pay the creators for your views. Are you arguing this is also OK? Will you promise to support each creator directly instead? Or are you only interested in getting entertainment for free?

While the RIAA does continue to exploit artists, it’s now possible to support many artists directly by buying their albums online, buying merchandise, and attending their concerts. Do you do any of that, or are you simply pirating music for your consumption?

If you feel strongly that Google is a data-gathering evil so great that they deserve not a sliver of your money or attention, then stop using YouTube.

Sorry, but you can’t make a moral argument for your position. What you want is to benefit from Google’s services without paying them. That’s it. That’s the whole argument. It doesn’t really matter if you like them or not, really. You’re arguing that you deserve free service.

That is not a morally sustainable argument.

Here’s an interesting idea: pay for what you consume. We can argue whether ads or a YouTube Premium are a fair price, but I don’t think you’d have a moral or legal leg to stand on if your argument is that Google must provide you with hosting and streaming for free.

You are consuming resources on Google’s computers. I think they have a right to ask for payment.

To me, the ad tracking industry is completely out of control, and I’m not going to disable my ad blocker. So I signed up for YouTube Premium.

I think Apple still cares more for user privacy than just about any other consumer electronic company out there today. Google’s Play Services mines way more user data than iOS does. However, Apple’s foray into Services will no doubt start them well down the slippery slope of monitoring and monetization, so I think erosion is inevitable to fuel Services revenue.