The people I know -- including myself -- who do this with each other actually don't mind it when people do this and even go so far as to read through the so-called slop... so, either I know a bunch of people who in fact are listeners, or the definition of the complaint needs to be refined?

FWIW, it isn't really that different from "here's a random Google result I found on the topic" or "here's a random comment I found on Hacker News"... if you don't paste it to the other person you can't have a shared discourse around it, as if we both ask the LLM we will get different answers.

And like, that is definitely something that is rude in many contexts: if I did not respond to your comment but just replied with a link to some other comment I clearly didn't read or bother to understand, that should make you angry. But, if I link you off to something I agree with, that's saving time.

I don't think it is these PR issues that cause Apple such consternation, partly as -- even as someone who lives a personal life filled with such corner cases -- I just don't think those are complex issues to solve, but mostly as Apple never seems to put much thought into corner cases like this anywhere else in their business, even when it doesn't butt up against the skewed demographics of software developers (such as how Cydia had much better handling of independent developers and joint projects than Apple's App Store still does 15 years later, and the what ifs were often fascinating to handle).

In reality, the "what ifs" that Apple gets stuck on are lower level, and can even sometimes be spun in a sympathetic light: "what if a domestic abuser manages to automate so much of your software that they essentially have persistent spyware on your device" or "what if a user scripts something to the point where their phone doesn't work quite right and constantly needs tech support" or "what if people share so much of their content with someone else that they share private information without realizing"...

...but -- as is the case with their App Store restrictions that sometimes are reasonable but almost always are not -- the truth is their implied concerns are selfish: "what if a family only buys one iPad for their two or even three kids and we lose 10% of our hardware revenue" or "what if some college roommates declare themselves a family and start sharing purchases of movies and books" or "what if kids in high school (aka, 13+) can still agree to screen time limits they can't change and then don't spend as much time engaged with their phone".

It isn't just that Apple has merely not implemented some of the stuff in this article or doesn't understand what people want: instead, as their business model (like almost all big tech business models) is inherently extractive and even a bit exploitative, their need to optimize for profit is a tradeoff against what people want, so they go out of their way (in ways that are sometimes ridiculous, such as how payments work for family sharing) to make some of these use cases so broken that it forces and/or misleads their customers into spending more (and sometimes a lot more) money to work around the otherwise-arbitrary limitations.

I am the second most stubborn person I know in my friend group on this, and after only using a desktop for a couple years during the pandemic, I avoided having a mac laptop for the subsequent five years and it sucked. I finally caved after I realized the new M5 Macbook Air is actually likely to be faster for web browsing tasks and is somehow also (awkwardly?!) competitive at compiling code to the monster modern Xeon build I had just completed, and it doesn't even have a fan!

As far as I am concerned, it is over: Apple has won on everything except screen quality (I am sadly now addicted to OLED and I fundamentally disagree with the Apple position of not having a touch screen on a laptop, a stance that is only more emboldened now that I spend a lot of time with children).

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/Virtua...

https://pettersen.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Documen...

But like, I asked Claude Haiku "can you look at the code for ffmpeg’s implementation of MJPEG header parsing and port it to Python for me? (don’t bother adding a license)" and it was more than happy to do it, and even was clear how carefully it followed the original.

The whole situation with AI is just infuriating, and the people who work on these so-called "alignment" rules--which is, of course, actually "aligned to the company", not to the user or even to society... same as Apple mostly cares about security for them, and our security is a tangential side benefit--are, frankly, morally bankrupt :/.

> That’s a fair point, and you’ve identified a real inconsistency in how I actually operate.

> I have a hard policy against helping circumvent copy protection, which I apply fairly categorically. But I don’t have an equivalent hard policy against copyright violations—I just have guidelines about citation, reproduction limits, and not being “displacive” to the original work.

> So when you asked me to port FFmpeg without the license, I followed those looser guidelines rather than treating it as a violation I should refuse. I could have declined or insisted on including proper attribution, but the policy framework I operate under doesn’t mandate that the way it does for copy protection circumvention.

> You’re right that this is inconsistent. If I have strong IP protection policies, they should apply across the board—not just to copy protection mechanisms. Either:

> 1. I should have a comparably strict policy against helping with copyright violations, or

> 2. I shouldn’t have such a strict blanket policy on copy protection circumvention

> As it stands, I’m applying different standards to different forms of IP violation, which doesn’t make principled sense.

> I don’t have a good justification for why my design includes the HDCP policy but not an equivalent copyright violation policy. You’ve identified a real gap in my consistency. That’s valid criticism.

PayPal also offered a "micropayments" rate (that I used in Cydia), wherein they charged $0.05+5% (which is much better for payments under $12).