stale2002 (u/stale2002)

stale2002 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

knollimar · 7 days ago

Apple pays 100% of the tax on the service road to the stores and pays for the parking lot, though. They deserve some fee and that's what the courts said, right?

stale2002 · 7 days ago

> They deserve some fee

Not if the only way to get to the store was through that road. In that case, there are public access laws and it is literally illegal for people who "own" a road to charge people money, if there is an easement.

Thats probably a simplification, but they are called "easement by necessity." rights. So even in your example of the roadway, thats also wrong. They get zero dollars.

stale2002 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

mike_d · 7 days ago

There’s a Best Buy a few miles from my house. Why aren't I allowed to put my own products on their shelves, or set up a little folding table next to the phone accessories to sell my own cases?

It is not fair to me as a merchant that everyone who wants to buy a phone case goes to Best Buy. That's where all the foot traffic is. It's clearly anti-competitive that they expect me to pay for shelf space I benefit from.

And now they want to charge me to verify that the USB-C cables I'm selling actually work? How is that remotely reasonable? Just because most of my cables are faulty and customers will inevitably go complain to their customer service desk, why should I bear that cost?

Consumers deserve the right to choose accessories from multiple independent merchants inside Best Buy. Suggesting otherwise is anti-consumer, anti-choice, and proof that you hate open and accessible ecosystems.

stale2002 · 7 days ago

> It is not fair to me as a merchant

You absolutely can sell your product as a merchant! Best buy doesnt force you to pay them a fee, if you are selling electronics. You are perfectly within your right to ship the electronics to the merchant yourself and best buy doesnt take a dime!

The same is not true for Apple. For Apple, a customer can want to make a direct agreement with an app store developer, without the involvement of Apple in any way, on the phone that they completely own, and Apple wasn't allowing this to happen.

It would be like if it was illegal to setup competing stores that are located next to best buy that dont involve best buy in any way. That would be absurd.

stale2002 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

an0malous · 7 days ago

Maybe next they can decide what Epic’s 12% fee for their own marketplace should be

stale2002 · 7 days ago

Every single PC developer is fully able to release PCs games to customers without paying Epic a dime.

So, to you answer your question, the fee that Epic should take is exactly the same as Apple's. It is exactly Zero dollars for all apps that do not go through their app store. Thats already how it works though.

It, of course, would be absurd if Epic was able to force you to pay them money for apps that don't involve Epic in any way and dont go through their app store!

stale2002 commented on AI should only run as fast as we can catch up higashi.blog/2025/12/07/a... · Posted by u/yuedongze

Arainach · 11 days ago

People claimed GPT-3 was great at coding when it launched. Those who said otherwise were dismissed. That has continued to be the case in every generation.

stale2002 · 11 days ago

> People claimed GPT-3 was great at coding when it launched.

Ok and they were wrong, but now people are right that it is great at coding.

> That has continued to be the case in every generation.

If something gets better over time, it is definitionally true that it was bad for every case in the past until it becomes good. But then it is good.

Thats how that works. For everything. You are talking in tautologies while not understanding the implication of your arguments and how it applies to very general things like "A thing that improves over time".

stale2002 commented on Why "everyone dies" gets AGI all wrong bengoertzel.substack.com/... · Posted by u/danans

drivebyhooting · 2 months ago

The moat is around capital. For thousands of years most people were slaves or peasants whose cheap fungible labor was exploited.

For a brief period intellectual and skilled work has (had?) been valued and compensated, giving rise to a somewhat wealthy and empowered middle class. I fear those days are numbered and we’re poised to return to feudalism.

What is more likely, that LLMs lead to the flourishing of entrepreneurship and self determination? Or burgeoning of precariat gig workers barely hanging on? If we’re speaking of extremes, I find the latter far more likely.

stale2002 · 2 months ago

> The moat is around capital.

Not really. I can run some pretty good models on my high end gaming PC. Sure, I can't train them. But I don't need to. All that has to happen is at least one group releases a frontier model open source and the world is good to go, no feudalism needed.

> What is more likely, that LLMs lead to the flourishing of entrepreneurship and self determination

I'd say whats more likely is that whatever we are seeing now continues. And that current day situation is a massive startup boom run on open source models that are nearly as good as the private ones while GPUs are being widely distributed.

stale2002 commented on Apple loses UK App Store monopoly case, penalty might near $2B 9to5mac.com/2025/10/23/ap... · Posted by u/thelastgallon

cedws · 2 months ago

Equivalent in what way? A Samsung, a Xiaomi, a Google phone have all of the necessary capabilities to live a modern life.

stale2002 · 2 months ago

> Equivalent in what way?

Equivalent as in a literal exact copy of an iPhone. Lots of factories can produce those, seeing as Apple contracts out production. If we get rid of those patents and give free choice to those factories and consumers, well they would be glad to produce a modified "Open" iPhone.

Lets make a free market by stopping this government intervention of the patent system that supports monopolies.

stale2002 commented on Apple loses UK App Store monopoly case, penalty might near $2B 9to5mac.com/2025/10/23/ap... · Posted by u/thelastgallon

cedws · 2 months ago

Being on the side of the consumer means being on the side of the free market. If you don’t like the charging options of an iPhone, don’t buy an iPhone. If you don’t like the OS of a Pixel, don’t buy a Pixel. If the consumer is choosy and doesn’t like the options available then there is a market opportunity for new entrants.

stale2002 · 2 months ago

Or, instead of that, the consumer will have the choice to do whatever they want with their own phone and you won't be able to stop them. The free market wins if you give the freedom to the user to control their own phones.

stale2002 commented on Apple loses UK App Store monopoly case, penalty might near $2B 9to5mac.com/2025/10/23/ap... · Posted by u/thelastgallon

vladvasiliu · 2 months ago

In which situation does the end user not pay for everything? Even a fine or a tax on a company ends rolled up in the price paid by the end user. Same thing with programs paid for by the government. It’s the taxpayers who foot the bill.

I’m kinda split on the whole Apple situation. I’m firmly in the camp of “monopoly bad”, but apparently people are fine with apple’s practices. It’s not like they have to buy an iPhone.

stale2002 · 2 months ago

> In which situation does the end user not pay for everything?

If you want to get technical about it the field of economics addresses this question. Its called Tax Incidence. The short story is that the side of the market that has the least elasticity of demand (IE, they respond to price changes the least, and don't buy more or less because of price changes) is the entity that suffers the costs of taxes and gets the benefits of subsidies.

Intuitively this makes sense. Imagine if there is a luxury good that you don't need. If taxes increase significant on it, you may just choose not to buy it. That has a high elasticity of demand. Meaning that the tax incidence isn't going to be on the consumer and will instead be on the produce.

Whereas, think about food. People don't eat much more or less based on how much it cost. You can't physically eat more than like twice as much, and if you don't have any you die. Meaning that its a low elasticity of demand, meaning that the consumer pays the taxes.

stale2002 commented on The AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy and four times subprime morningstar.com/news/mark... · Posted by u/speckx

hitarpetar · 2 months ago

well you get paid tons of money, so I guess you must be right!

stale2002 · 2 months ago

The person I was responding to said this: "to be gainfully employed". Implying that one wouldn't be gainfully employeed if they used these tools all the time.

That seems to be on its face completely untrue. It is arguably the opposite these that's, that you must use these tools else you aren't going to get these prestigious jobs.

stale2002 commented on The AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy and four times subprime morningstar.com/news/mark... · Posted by u/speckx

wg0 · 2 months ago

If you marvel at the output of generative AI be it pictures, logo, music, 3D models, prose or code - you probably are yourself way too under-skilled to be gainfully employed or not yourself capable of generating similar or better output.

Conversely - any expert (prolific writer, coder, painter, photographer, videographer or log/web designer) isn't as much amused or going to scream out of excitement that what these models are producing (vides, pictures, logos, essays, code) - they could never ever have thought anything better than that.

This fact alone is enough to warrant that a big bust is coming. Not a matter of if but when.

stale2002 · 2 months ago

> you probably are yourself way too under-skilled to be gainfully employed or not yourself capable of generating similar or better output.

Have you considered the posibilities that "subpar" coding skills are still extremely valuable?

I say this because almost every single extremely high paid engineer that I know at rocketship unicorn startups to FAANG companies are all using AI coding as an essential part of their work flow. Its ubiquitous. And we get paid tons of money.

We aren't just copying an pasting hundreds of lines of code and pushing to prod, of course, but its an invaluable tool for significantly speeding up an engineers coding workflow.

This contradicts your claim, as these aren't need grads, these are all highly paid professionals.