energywut (u/energywut)

energywut commented on Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers proton.me/blog/apple-laws... · Posted by u/moose44

foobarian · 2 months ago

> I think you might be living in a bubble, if this is the "most evil" thing you have heard of a big tech company doing. Go read up on IBM's history, especially in the 30s and 40s. Or a more contemporary example, read up on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Or Amazon's mistreatment of workers in both corporate and warehouse settings. Or Meta scraping data off your devices without permission to train AI.

I wouldn't count the IBM thing because I don't see it as part of the vernacular "big tech" of today; however I do think it's the most evil so far in this thread.

The others? They are mostly aggressive competition, especially the MS stuff, and altogether I don't see them as more evil than Apple's exclusionary UX. What's at the bottom of it for me is that it harms users directly, e.g. what others said about kids getting shamed for having a non-Apple phone. The one thing not mentioned yet that would qualify for me would be Meta's product altogether with its impact on teenagers; and various gambling simulators like Roblox.

energywut · 2 months ago

Oh, Roblox by far and away is worse than Apple. But also, Facebook is pretty clearly implicated in a genocide in Myanmar. It's difficult for me to put any genocide in a bucket less important than some kids being put into out-groups.

energywut commented on Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers proton.me/blog/apple-laws... · Posted by u/moose44

energywut · 2 months ago

> Apple walling off iMessage, giving the impression that Apple phones were high technology, and interacting with peasant androids is what made group chats fragment and pictures and videos look like trash.

Which lawsuit PDF related specifically to iMessage interacting with Android was mentioned in this comment? I see a comment about RCS.

Now, maybe you are right, maybe I narrowly interpreted RCS in iMessage to mean chat bubbles, and there's a wider interpretation. Even still, there's no possible way that's the singular most evil thing tech has ever done. The OP is free to be anti-Apple, more power to them, but like, let's be real about levels of evil.

> Also, bringing up IBM, Microsoft or Facebook is "whataboutism".

It's absolutely not whataboutism. The claim the OP made was about Big Tech broadly. Bringing in examples of Big Tech doing evil things is a direct and appropriate rebuttable to the argument that Big Tech doesn't do evil things.

energywut commented on Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers proton.me/blog/apple-laws... · Posted by u/moose44

bitpush · 2 months ago

From the lawsuit

> For example, when a user purchases an iPhone, the user is steered to use Apple’s default email product, Apple Mail. It is only through a complex labyrinth of settings that a user can change her default email application away from the Apple “Mail” application towards an alternative like Gmail (Google) or Proton Mail.

> At least for mail a user can in theory modify the default setting. On the calendar front the situation is even worse. A user’s default calendar is Apple Calendar, and the default cannot be modified

That's pretty evil & predatory to me. The fact that it is by design (someone decided it needed to this awful) is why Apple is being evil here. And this is just one example.

There's more

> For example, Apple banned apps from its App Store that supported Google Voice because Apple sought to advantage its own services over Google’s

energywut · 2 months ago

> That's pretty evil & predatory to me.

That's not what the parent is asking. The OP said it was the most evil ever done.

Big Tech does predatory and evil stuff all the time. That's not what's being claimed. The OP is claiming that this specific thing is the worst, the singular event that is above and beyond all others.

energywut commented on Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers proton.me/blog/apple-laws... · Posted by u/moose44

Workaccount2 · 2 months ago

I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage, giving the impression that Apple phones were high technology, and interacting with peasant androids is what made group chats fragment and pictures and videos look like trash.

Few things are more enraging than people being left out of chats with friends and family because they didn't bend over for Apple. Even worse being a teenager and having to endure social shaming for it. It wasn't until the EU signaled it was going to bring down then axe that Apple capitulated to RCS.

- Yes, I know you are part of the domestic US long tail that use signal/telegram with all your friends.

- Yes, I know no one outside the US uses iMessage.

ETA: A note because people are pretty incredulous about "most evil". Tech companies do a lot of evil stuff, no doubt.

But there is something special about putting social connection behind an expensive hardware purchase and walled garden lock in. Every other messaging app I know of is open to anyone on most platforms for little or no cost. Apple on the other hand purposely leveraged social connections in your life to force you into their garden and keep you there. Lets not pretend that Apple couldn't open up iMessage or even charge a nominal fee for outsiders. Instead you get an iphone and just seemlessly slide into iMessage. So seemless that most users don't even know that it is a separate service than sms/mms/rcs. Apple muddies that too.

But they would never do that, because using people's closest social connections to force them into the ecosystem and lock them there is just too juicy. "Oh you don't want an iPhone anymore? Well looks like you have to leave your social circles main discussion hub to do so..."

It's just evil on another level.

energywut · 2 months ago

> I don't think any big tech company has ever done anything as evil and predatory as Apple walling off iMessage

I think you might be living in a bubble, if this is the "most evil" thing you have heard of a big tech company doing. Go read up on IBM's history, especially in the 30s and 40s. Or a more contemporary example, read up on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Or Amazon's mistreatment of workers in both corporate and warehouse settings. Or Meta scraping data off your devices without permission to train AI.

And, though I know some folks here disagree, plenty of people around the world believe what's happening in Gaza is a genocide, and Big Tech has materially contributed to making it happen. Or, if you want another example of human cost, talk about how resources for electronics are mined, or how electronics are manufactured.

Saying, "the most evil thing big tech has ever done is make some chat bubbles blue" puts a whole lot of human lives below the color of some chat bubbles.

You can think Apple did a really bad thing by doing that, that's fine. No complaints. But to call it the most evil thing ever done erases an incalculable amount of human suffering.

energywut commented on Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers proton.me/blog/apple-laws... · Posted by u/moose44

rTX5CMRXIfFG · 2 months ago

Apple and Proton are two companies that I personally like, but the claim that the internet descended into surveillance capitalism because of the walled garden approach of the App Store is an argument in bad faith. Even if Apple allowed other app stores or payment methods, that would not have stopped Facebook and Google from capitalizing on user data to sell ads and manipulate public opinion. They would give their product away for free and spy on their users anyway.

I never really understood the monopolistic argument against Apple. In the first place, there are very clear legal criteria that define what a monopoly is and what anti-competitive behaviors are, and it’s not even the case that majority of the world runs on iOS. It is actually Android that is the most popular OS globally by a wide margin, though the split is somewhat equal in the US.

But the core of my contention is that: if you make the platform that others run on and which creates entirely new economies and allows businesses to thrive, don’t you get to define the constraints that you want since it’s _your_ platform? What’s effectively happening here is that companies are using the courts to force the design of OSes in a certain way: That only open OSes can ever be made, not closed ones.

Note that the businesses who are lobbying against Apple are operating on the very same capitalist, profit-optimizing interests that drove Apple to choose a walled-garden approach. They are not doing this to make the world a better place, and the vast majority of smartphone users do not even care about this “issue”.

energywut · 2 months ago

> the claim that the internet descended into surveillance capitalism because of the walled garden approach of the App Store

I did not read this claim. I read the claim that Apple's approach unevenly benefits companies that engage in surveillance capitalism. No one's ad revenue, for instance, must pay a 30% cut of their revenue.

You are making an argument (and then arguing against it) that Proton did not make, as far as I can read.

> if you make the platform that others run on and which creates entirely new economies and allows businesses to thrive, don’t you get to define the constraints that you want since it’s _your_ platform?

I don't think you do. We constrain what companies are permitted to do all the time. Apple must abide by regulatory constraints first, and then they can add the additional constraints they like.

A simple test -- could Apple say, "Everyone is allowed to use Messages, except Hindus"? It's their platform, don't you get to define the constraints because it's your platform? No, we've collectively decided that kicking some people out based on certain characteristics is generally bad.

energywut commented on Proton joins suit against Apple for practices that harm developers and consumers proton.me/blog/apple-laws... · Posted by u/moose44

slashtab · 2 months ago

What is the logic behind everyone wanting Apple to be champion of democracy in authoritarian countries?

energywut · 2 months ago

Ideally we want all companies to be champions again authoritarianism, surely?

energywut commented on Why are lefties more creative? Turns out, they're not phys.org/news/2025-06-lef... · Posted by u/bikenaga

SnooSux · 2 months ago

Headline made me think this was about political affiliation

energywut · 2 months ago

This was my intuitive read too. I thought it was about to say something about the socialists, anarchists, and communists I know.

Nope, just the left handed people I know.

energywut commented on Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship angadh.com/space-data-cen... · Posted by u/angadh

notahacker · 2 months ago

It's super reliable, provided you've got the stored energy for the reliable periods of downtime (or a sun synchronous orbit). Energy storage is a solved problem, but you need rather a lot of it for a datacentre and that's all mass which is very expensive to launch and to replace at the end of its usable lifetime. Same goes for most of the other problems brought up

energywut · 2 months ago

Exactly this. It's not that it's a difficult problem, but it is a high mass-budget problem. Which makes it an expensive problem. Which makes it a difficult problem.

energywut commented on Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship angadh.com/space-data-cen... · Posted by u/angadh

kolbe · 2 months ago

Re: reliable energy. Even in low earth orbit, isn't sunlight plentiful? My layman's guess says it's in direct sun 80-95% of the time, with deterministic shade.

energywut · 2 months ago

Depends on your orbit, but you need to be prepared to rotate into Earth's shadow seamlessly.

energywut commented on Starcloud can’t put a data centre in space at $8.2M in one Starship angadh.com/space-data-cen... · Posted by u/angadh

energywut · 2 months ago

Putting a datacenter in space is one of the worst ideas I've heard in a while.

Reliable energy? Possible, but difficult -- need plenty of batteries

Cooling? Very difficult. Where does the heat transfer to?

Latency? Highly variable.

Equipment upgrades and maintenance? Impossible.

Radiation shielding? Not free.

Decommissioning? Potentially dangerous!

Orbital maintenance? Gotta install engines on your datacenter and keep them fueled.

There's no upside, it's only downsides as far as I can tell.