Plenty of us non-billionaires are glad PG wrote this article, because a lot a success-striving people are pretty grossed out by the lie that the only way to be a self made billionaire is to do something 'bad'.
If I had a dollar for everytime someone told me they have an advanced physics degree and can unequivocally gaurantee me that it will never be physically feasible to cool GPU's in space.... How soon those people have disappeared!
This really sucks, I hope Apple sorts it out, I wonder what one can do to put pressure on Apple - I suspect you may need a lawyer to write them in order to get your issue escalated.
I don't like that people just shrug and say this is how all big tech is.
Apple charges a premium and built their brand name on customer service.
But they have stopped caring about the customer.
I was also a loyal Apple customer for 2 decades and used to recommend them to everyone.
Now I recommend them to no one.
I've switched my phone back to android a few years ago to avoid apple lock-in. I still use an ipad pro and several macs and peripherals, sets of airpods and apple tv and what not - then I wanted to buy the watch - and was told it cannot work with any of their tablets or computer and cannot be activated without an apple phone. OK apple.
One day my debit card expired while on long overseas travel, suddenly I was unable to install apps I already paid for on my mac and other devices, update any apps, or install free apps, I could not pay with a different card because those were in a different region and would have required a region switch locking me out of a lot of content and apps. So for several months I could not install many of my apps I bought on my other sevice or update or install free apps. OK Apple.
I also remember how the base config of Apple laptops were 8gb ram and 256gb SSD when all other decent ones were on 16 and 2tb - and remember apple is supposed to be a premium brand and they're supposed to not burn you with a default config. OK apple. Then they charge you 3 times more for the upgrade from 256gb ssd to 2tb than what 2tb costs retail. OK Apple.
I still love their tablets and laptops and even the mac mini. But I've already started to mentally prepare for a switch to Linux and maybe x86 or other hardware.
Apple cannot be trusted.
They are a fashion company and not a tech company any more. Jobs is dead.
Plan your exit, reduce your exposure, soon they will be so evil and dysfunctional that you will regret it.
Don't trust them with your most valuable data. Use other services. Use a diverse mix of providers, no apple exclusivity. If you tie your entire life to one cloud, especially Apple, you have set yourself up for future ruin.
Their software quality and reliability is also slowly slipping. Everything is being dumbed down. Their business processes are becoming a broken maze. Apple used to be a company that aimed to satisfy simultaneously the power user and the basic user, now they only care about optimising for the casual user mass market, power user is going to have an increasingly tough time with them. Remember it is now a fashion company, watch their keynotes and believe the vapid image they project.
If someone makes a linux laptop that is as good as the a bleeding edge apple macbook air, it is shut-up&take-my-money.
But it is hard to imagine a company spending the time to smooth a linux config on their hardware config and make sure it reaches the "just works" that apple has!
Boy would I love it! Please, someone do this! Getting tired of Apple's walled garden become ever more locked up and enshittification.
I also want it. I dislike this idea "make it illegal I don't want other people to have the freedom to do something I dislike". Of you don't like unupgradable products, then don't buy them. I like upgradability - apple makes some things like the SSD non-uogradeable without much benefit. But many other parts gain different benefits when you don't try to make everything infinitely upgradable. I really want this non-enshittified macbook alternative!!!! Shut up and take my money.
Can someone from the field provide examples of specific drugs or break through therapies that are approved for human use that we would not have had without breakthroughs in protein folding compute?
Same! I main macos, love the hardware, but I keep a very close eye on Linux (asahi, omarchy etc) in case Apple gets any more toxic, and I am forced to jump ship to something else, and that something else won't be windoze.
The last straw with MacOS was when my US bank cards expired, I could no longer update apps I already paid for, I could no longer install apps I already paid for. Everything was held hostage, could not install FREE apps via the appstore on macos or on ipad.
That day my eyes opened to what Apple has become.
You simply cannot trust Apple with your computing future. They're a fashion company now.
For some rich guys whole point of being rich is to be maximally independent.
Some billionaires are all kinds of weird flavor of Anarcho Capitalist (completely anti government), libertarian (small government), objectivist (suspicious of government and against overbearing regulations and mob control).
Not all, but many.
I think there is an important distinction between independent minded successful people and crapitalists, the ones who collude with the government and enforce their fortunes via regulatory capture.
Not every rich person is obsessed with controlling the world and other people.
Many just want to live their own lives, and want as little as possible interaction with the government.
Shareholders voted for it.
Don't understand how the will of Tesla Shareholders is a corporate governance failure... couldn't read the rest of the article behind paywall, but the premise seems so borked that I'm not going to bother.
Article reminds me of a Delaware judge who also ruled that shareholders were not properly informed about the implications of their vote ‐ then after a very high profile court case and ruling ‐ shareholders voted a 2nd time to retroactively approve the same pay package. Who was right, this activist judge or shareholders?
It's funny how judges and The Economist's writers tell shareholders how they aren't really able to make an informed decision by voting their shares.
You ought to vote in a way that activists agree with!
Elon is too rich, how dare you vote for something that will make him and shareholders a lot of money!
"We know better than shareholders what pay structure is appropriate!"
"for any reason other than to cure a fatal disease" ... what about non-fatal but debilitating ? Sounds like you have a pretty absolutist view here ? What other reasonable exceptions can we imagine outside your rigid criteria ? Why should we not have nuanced discussions of the entire spectrum of reasons ?
Also hard to miss your implication of "agree with me or you are on par with a nazi"
I don't see any food scarcity? A lot of innovation coming. Indoor 3D farming if needed. Bio-engineered algae bars if needed! Constant innovation at all levels. Why would food production methods collapse? Some currently productive agricultural land may become unproductive, and then areas too cold now will then become viable, so a shift, not just a one sided destruction. More CO2 means plants grow faster, more global greening. Disruption yes. Over 50+ year time span? Very manageable. Unimaginable advances in energy and robotics ahead.
I always thought the usability/ergonomics of the Flutter framework was slightly poor, but the Dart language itself is pretty darn awesome!
I also rolled my own reactivity interfaces, and made many shorthand functional wrappers for standard things I use frequently to debloat the GUI boilerplate.
My stuff isn't robust enough to consistently live seamlessly alongside regular flutter code or to release for anyone elses use.
I am super stoked to see that I'm not the only one to find the stock flutter framework something that can be improved, and that others more confident than me (and more experienced with other frameworks) are putting things like this out there.
Congratulations and thank you.
I even dream that someone would reimagine the entire flutter framework, maybe just reuse some of the low level rendering and eventing but rebuild everything else on top of that.
Apologies to anyone on the flutter team if I sound too critical, you've put something very useful and difficult out there, but a lot of design choices seem to be mutually inconsistent or just have so many counterintuitive aspects to them, usually justified in the name of performance.
I often find myself thinking I am just not smart enough to figure out the right way to do something with flutter. A lot of abstractions that are hard to get them to work how I want or run into weird corner cases. Many simple things I just ask AI to solve it, and after seeing the solution I can see it is right, still don't understand why my attempt was not.... so I welcome alternative interfaces and approaches.
For casual users there exist a huge chasm between "everything just works" and "everything works except x, y, z and those you must open seperately with Chrome"....
I think many people will rather just use the 1 thing that does everything perfectly well, rather than switch back and forth between two browsers because one is slightly better "most of the time" but also completely unusable some of the time.
For me, I am thrilled to be able to make Ladybird my main browser eventually, and consume my streaming in other apps and browsers.
I don't think civilization ends if temperatures rise dramatically. A lot of existing agricultural land gets destroyed, but some currently unusable/unproductive areas that are too cold become viable. So the regions will shift. Painful but not insurmountable if it happens over a 50 year time span. But even if there wasn't such a compensatory mechanism, modern problem solving abilities will find a way - yes really. Look at the problems already solved. Nuclear reactors, solar power, vertical farming, genetically enhanced crops, alternative food sources will be engineered if the need arises. We can really stop saying that we know for sure society will end. I don't know how poor people will be affected, and yes there woll be winnners and losers as always during massive disruptive change - but hardly the end of human civilization.
The most egregious offenders never allow reader comments or discussion underneath the story.
This would do a lot to restore trust.
The problem is, they want to restore trust and keep acting deceptively too!