ninth_ant (u/ninth_ant)

ninth_ant commented on Epic celebrates "the end of the Apple Tax" after court win in iOS payments case arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/nobody9999

Bad_Initialism · 6 days ago

Tim Cook has been absolutely fantastic for Apple shareholders and absolutely awful for anyone else, particularly the customers.

The walled garden has to end. There is no excuse for making people pay a premium price for an iPad Pro that can't run a third party web browser or do software development in any meaningful way.

Outside of a very narrow use case, the iPad product range is useless, despite the endless rantings of the brainwashed fanboys. Source: used to be one. Left the ecosystem when they started treating the RFCs like toilet paper.

ninth_ant · 6 days ago

> Outside of a very narrow use case, the iPad product range is useless, despite the endless rantings of the brainwashed fanboys

The use case is rich iPhone users who want an easy experience to watch videos, read, or consume social media on a larger screen than their phones. It’s especially popular for the children or elderly parents of these rich people. You can argue this use case is narrow, but it’s decently profitable.

Just because this use case doesn’t apply to your experience doesn’t mean anyone who disagrees is a brainwashed fanboy.

I will agree that the iPad Pro range seems overly niche to me — but also it could be I just don’t understand the use case. If someone else finds it productive and pleasant to use, what difference does this make to me or you?

ninth_ant commented on Valve: HDMI Forum Continues to Block HDMI 2.1 for Linux heise.de/en/news/Valve-HD... · Posted by u/OsrsNeedsf2P

aydyn · 8 days ago

Does it really matter that much? Get a $20 roku or google tv stick or whatever you're comfortable with and don't connect the TV OS.

ninth_ant · 8 days ago

My recent-model Samsung TV repeatedly opens a pop-up info window about their AI features while my AppleTV is playing movies and shows.

So I didn’t connect the TV OS and it’s still thrown in my face. It’s not the end of the world to have to find the tv remote and dismiss a popup every few days, but I sure would welcome competition who doesn’t try this sort of nonsense.

ninth_ant commented on Wayland Nvidia kextcache.com/wayland-nvi... · Posted by u/breve

cedws · 10 days ago

It doesn't matter, your options are either X11 or a Wayland-based compositor, both of them come with their respective headaches that a regular user has NO IDEA how to fix.

ninth_ant · 9 days ago

This is only accurate for people who choose enthusiast-centric DIY distributions such as Arch.

“Regular” users have plenty of distribution choices where there are zero of these types of headaches.

ninth_ant commented on The state of Schleswig-Holstein is consistently relying on open source heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-... · Posted by u/doener

9dev · 11 days ago

That's a double-edged sword, though. Those tax dollars don't just pay for the license, but for ongoing development, responsibility for security issues, support contracts, emergency personnel, and so on. With a purely Open Source strategy, you'll have to pay multiple external consultants to take care of part of this, and/or cover these roles in-house. And suddenly, you've taken up a lot of tasks completely foreign to your business domain, such as new infrastructure and its maintenance, documentation requirements, software development, and so on. And we haven't even talked about the massive effort of educating your entire workforce on new tools and workflows.

Assuming you just replace a proprietary software ecosystem with an Open Source one and immediately get the same thing for free is a very naive view that will get you in trouble.

Having said that, as a German, I am very happy this switch happens and seems to have some backing in the local administration at least. But it's still a high-risk wager and I'm afraid it'll turn out like the LiMux project in Munich, which was eventually (and cleverly so) framed as the origin of all problems in the municipal digital infrastructure. In the end, it got swapped out for a new Microsoft contract in a wonderful example of lobbyism and bribery, and Open Source and Linux have been discredited, to the point no winning mayor candidate can ever bring it up again as a viable alternative.

ninth_ant · 10 days ago

> With a purely Open Source strategy, you'll have to pay multiple external consultants to take care of part of this, and/or cover these roles in-house. And suddenly, you've taken up a lot of tasks completely foreign to your business domain, such as new infrastructure and its maintenance, documentation requirements, software development, and so on.

Yes, this is what I’m talking about. Hiring people and developing expertise instead of paying expensive consultants is a preferred use of my tax dollars.

> But it's still a high-risk wager and I'm afraid it'll turn out like the LiMux project in Munich, which was eventually (and cleverly so) framed as the origin of all problems in the municipal digital infrastructure.

While this may be true, there are also quite prominent cases where the massively expensive foreign consultant solutions have also lead to disastrous project overruns.

ninth_ant commented on The state of Schleswig-Holstein is consistently relying on open source heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-... · Posted by u/doener

input_sh · 11 days ago

I hate when switches like these get advertised first and foremost as some huge cost-cutting measure, further solidifying open source ecosystem as some cheap knock-offs of their commercial alternatives.

How about instead you donate the same amount of money you would've paid to Microsoft anyways to fund open source projects you rely on? At least for one year, then drop it down to some arbitrary chosen percentage of that cost. That way you can still advertise it as a cost-cutting measure, and everyone would benefit.

ninth_ant · 11 days ago

You hate that, but what I hate that so many of my tax dollars are funnelled into bloated software run by awful foreign companies with massive lock-in scams, when better free software is available. I hate that lobbyists and consultants get these systems into place and can’t be unseated despite its utter unreasonableness.

It’s a tremendous mis-allocation of public resources. Hiring local people to tailor the free software which already exists and contributing those changes back to the world would spend fewer of those dollars and spend them locally, and be pro-social at the same time.

So I don’t hate this story. I love it and see it as a massive win.

ninth_ant commented on Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros about.netflix.com/en/news... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

Bhilai · 13 days ago

I am paying for both the services right now. I dont mind consolidating that payment and hopefully pay a slightly lower price.

ninth_ant · 13 days ago

That is not how the world works, be it the past present or future.

ninth_ant commented on Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm theverge.com/report/82065... · Posted by u/evolve2k

charcircuit · 15 days ago

Because the title mislead me. It turned out that 0 windows games are receiving funding to add ARM compatibility.

ninth_ant · 15 days ago

Your errant interpretation of the title would imply that Valve was funding individual game developers to support valve? This would be a fool’s errand, compared to the much more obvious interpretation that valve is funding a compatibility layer that would enable broad support for ARM.

ninth_ant commented on Same-day upstream Linux support for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 qualcomm.com/developer/bl... · Posted by u/mfilion

h14h · 20 days ago

I hope this is motivated by shrewd decision-making in response to market pressure, as opposed to being strictly a perception thing.

While it would be great for Qualcomm to "do the right thing" in supporting FOSS, I feel much more confident in that support being sustained long-term when it aligns with some profit motive.

IMO the best case is that Qualcomm sees dollar signs when they imagine their Oryon CPUs and Adreno GPUs dominating the consumer linux landscape. There is definitely room to shake up x86 (especially when it comes to perf/W and idle battery drain), and only a finite window for ARM to do so with RISC-V on the horizon.

And to whatever extent Qualcomm et al now view Linux as a relevant personal computing platform, I think a massive amount of credit goes to Valve. I seriously doubt Linux support even enters the conversation at these companies without the Steam Deck's success.

ninth_ant · 20 days ago

> When you get new hardware and new features, you don’t want them sitting idle while you wait for patches to get upstreamed. Whether you develop for IoT, automotive, audio or mobile, when you get new features in a system-on-chip (SoC), you want to take advantage of them right now.

Sure doesn’t sound like mainstream consumer pc desktop is the target at all. Yes, they do provide instructions for how to run this on desktop but it’s far from accessible for the overwhelming majority of pc users.

I mean it’s still a good thing for Linux desktop to have this as an option, I’m not complaining. But to be realistic those benefits feel tangential to what Qualcomm is aiming at here.

ninth_ant commented on What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality nytimes.com/2025/11/23/te... · Posted by u/nonprofiteer

BrenBarn · 22 days ago

> When you’re experiencing hypergrowth the whole team is working extremely hard to keep serving your user base.

Also known as "working hard to keep making money".

> In this mindset it’s challenging to take a pause and consider that the thing you’re building may have harmful aspects.

Gosh, that must be so tough! Forgive me if I don't have a lot of sympathy for that position.

> You can justify it by thinking that if your team wins you can address the problem, but if another company wins the space you don’t get any say in the matter.

If that were the case for a given company, they could publicly commit to doing the right thing, publicly denounce other companies for doing the wrong thing, and publicly advocate for regulations that force all companies to do the right thing.

> When you’re trying so hard to challenge the near-impossible odds and make your company a success, you just don’t want to consider that what you help make might end up causing real societal harm.

I will say this as simply as possible: too bad. "Making your company a success" is simply of infinitesimal and entirely negligible importance compared to doing societal harm. If you "don't want to consider it", you are already going down the wrong path.

ninth_ant · 21 days ago

I’m not suggesting sympathy.

I’m disambiguating between your projected image of a cartoonish villain desperate to do anything for a buck, vs humans having a massive blind spot due to the inherent biases involved with trying to make a team project succeed.

Your original comment suggests a simplistic outlook which doesn’t reflect the reality of the experience. I was trying to help you understand, not garnish sympathy.

ninth_ant commented on What OpenAI did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality nytimes.com/2025/11/23/te... · Posted by u/nonprofiteer

BrenBarn · 23 days ago

I went into this assuming the answer would be "Whatever they think will make them the most money," and sure enough.

ninth_ant · 23 days ago

That’s overly reductive, based on my experience working for one of the tech behemoths back in its hypergrowth phase.

When you’re experiencing hypergrowth the whole team is working extremely hard to keep serving your user base. The growth is exciting and its in the news and people you know and those you don’t are constantly talking about it.

In this mindset it’s challenging to take a pause and consider that the thing you’re building may have harmful aspects. Uninformed opinions abound, and this can make it easy to dismiss or minimize legitimate concerns. You can justify it by thinking that if your team wins you can address the problem, but if another company wins the space you don’t get any say in the matter.

Obviously the money is a factor — it’s just not the only factor. When you’re trying so hard to challenge the near-impossible odds and make your company a success, you just don’t want to consider that what you help make might end up causing real societal harm.