I suppose this is in the same realm as what some people are trying to do with WASM, creating a common execution environment? This is built on RISC-V instead though. I wish I knew more about the limitations/capabilities of each approach, but in any case a future where applications are built for a common VM seems like something we've been building to for a while, the modern web being the closest we've come.
Readit Newsidle_zealot commented on Show HN: Tiny VM sandbox in C with apps in Rust, C and Zig github.com/ringtailsoftwa... · Posted by u/trj
idle_zealot commented on Japan law opening phone app stores to go into effect www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/e... · Posted by u/shlip
how does this interact with Google's push to sign all apps?
It doesn't. The law explicitly allows platform owners to require a verification/vetting process for applications, though it does limit the grounds on which Google is allowed to refuse to sign apps.
idle_zealot commented on Japan law opening phone app stores to go into effect www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/e... · Posted by u/shlip
JFTC's full 'Mobile Software Competition Act Guidelines' are available here : https://www.jftc.go.jp/file/MSCA_Guidelines_tentative_transl...
Curious to see how Apple and Google are going to circumvent this.
My admittedly amateur reading of this is that while it does promote competition, it also explicitly allows what Apple is pulling in the EU with its signing/review requirements for non-App Store applications. So no need to circumvent, they still retain control over what code is allowed to run on iPhones, albeit subject to restrictions on what reasoning they're allowed to use to refuse to sign an app.
> He’s promoted disproven treatments for COVID-19 and claimed, without evidence, that athletes are “dropping dead on the field” after getting the COVID-19 vaccination.
It’s interesting how prevalent lies and claims without evidence have become. And one lie gives another one the space to be accepted. At risk of making a claim without evidence myself, I feel like there is some link between claiming Haitians are eating dogs and claiming that athletes are dying after vaccination.
Another aspect is some lies have a small truth. Like maybe the claim that an athlete died after vaccination has one example. But that doesn’t mean it is true in general or that the athlete didn’t have some special situation. I see a lot of generalizations casually tossed around these days, especially in American politics.
What's happening is that politicians are slowly realizing that they no longer get punished for lying. At some point people got so worn down by more sophisticated half-truths that a large portion of the voter base just don't care about how true rhetoric is anymore. That plus the veil of civility that seems to prevent effective counter messaging mean lying blatantly is actually an effective strategy.
And who gets to decide which platforms count as 'social media'?
This is a problem with Australia's attempt to ban kids from it, where there's some surprising exemptions from the restrictions.
> And who gets to decide which platforms count as 'social media'?
The voting public via their elected representatives, as with literally all laws.
Really? There are plenty of things that are considered harmful to minors but okay for adults. Should all those be banned too?
The contention is that the thing in question is harmful for minors and adults, albeit perhaps to different degrees. Also, to be clear, any ban should be enforced on the offering side, not the consumption side.
Interesting to see these kinds of comments more in this thread compared to the one from yesterday.
The one from yesterday was discussing how australia is banning social media for anyone under 16. Most comments were supportive because they hate social media.
A few comments were discussing how it is just a way to propagate more KYC.
It's way easier to justify banning social media entirely than banning it for under-sixteens. Paradoxically it infringes on freedom less, as it bans a type of business model for being too harmful rather than restricting people's rights to view and share information.
idle_zealot commented on How the Creator Economy Destroyed the Internet theverge.com/cs/features/... · Posted by u/ecliptik
IMO this really misses the changes that the democratization of access to attention and media caused. Anyone being able to directly reach anyone is a massive change from the gate-kept pre-internet media landscape.
> Anyone being able to directly reach anyone is a massive change from the gate-kept pre-internet media landscape.
Sure, but how are we supposed to disentangle this change from the concurrent growth of algorithmic feeds driving what people see? I have no doubt that democratization of communication would have social effects on its own, but we don't really know what those would be sans the simultaneous centralizing effect that dominant social media companies impose.
idle_zealot commented on GrapheneOS is the only Android OS providing full security patches grapheneos.social/@Graphe... · Posted by u/akyuu
Why was it that in the early PC days, IBM was unable to keep a lid on 'IBM compatible', allowing for the PC interoperability explosion, yet today, almost every phone has closed drivers, closed and locked bootloaders, and almost complete corporate control over our devices? Why are there not yet a plethora of phones on the market that allow anyone to install their OS of choice?
> Why are there not yet a plethora of phones on the market that allow anyone to install their OS of choice?
There are technical reasons, but as ever the real underlying causes are incentives. Companies realized that the OS is a profit center, something they can use to influence user behavior to their benefit. Before the goal was to be a hardware company and offer the best hardware possible for cost. Now the goal is to own as large a slice of your life as possible. It's more of a social shift than a technological one. So why would a company, in this new environment, invest resources in making their hardware compatible with competing software environments? They'd be undercutting themselves.
That's not to say that attempts to build interoperability don't exist, just that they happen due to what are essentially activist efforts, the human factor, acting in spite of and against market forces. That doesn't tend to win out, except (rarely) in the political realm.
i.e. if you want interoperable mobile hardware you need a law, the market's not going to save you one this one.
I’ve started to have a positive association with reading only in the last few years, I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives.
The problem is that if you don't force them, they never actually become literate enough to discover that reading is fun later in life.