If there are two producers each with ~50% market share, it's not profitable for one of them to improve their product such that they capture an additional 5% of the market but reduces the profit margin of their product by 10%. If there are 50 producers each with ~2% market share, one of them would happily capture 5% of the market (more than doubling the size of their business!) by sacrificing 10% of their profit margin.

In the Google-Apple duopoly it's much more profitable to engage in tacit collusion than it is to defect.

Second, even if you are a copyright maximalist the output of an LLM is either

a) not subject to copyright because it is not the creative work of a human or

b) a derivative work of the original training material to which the LLM's operator has no rights.

Since the LLM's operator forcefully asserts that it is not infringing, any wrong that arises from taking their word for it and distilling one model into another rests squarely with the operator of the former.

Unfortunately, the charitable interpretation of the EC's behavior is that they lack reading comprehension. Less charitably, maybe if the EC had fewer shady backroom meetings with industry lobbyists and more meetings with the constituents they are meant to serve, they would act differently.

Many transitions in Android are perfectly fine at 0x animation speed. The majority of transitions that suck without animation suck because the pre-/post-transition layout sucks and the transition between the two states doesn't make sense as a result.

It's the same with several of the transitions in TFA. For example, the address bar placeholder text[1] should just be left-aligned all the time. The save dialog[2] should leave all the basic controls in their original location[3] when switching from the basic mode to the advanced mode. That means the "Where:" label should also remain in the advanced mode, and the controls[4] that pop up to replace it should either be moved to the right or below. The search bar should also be moved down.

These are some really basic details and it is my understanding Apple used to not screw them up nearly as badly.

[1]https://tonsky.me/blog/every-frame-perfect/safari@2x.mp4?t=1...

[2]https://tonsky.me/blog/every-frame-perfect/save@1x.mp4?t=178...

[3]https://imgur.com/ZpHLCsv Artist's rendition. Please excuse the minor jank and criminal amount of empty space; I couldn't be arsed to fiddle with the screenshots to get pixel-perfect positioning and shrink the advanced dialog horizontally. Bikeshedding over where exactly the new controls belong is welcomed but irrelevant to the point I'm making.

[4]Is it just me, or are their icons uselessly, impenetrably, unhelpful?

That's the stated reason. The actual reason is that they are salivating at the sight of how much money the app store and play store are making. They just don't want to move too quickly for fear of customers revolting.

1) Push vs pull. As you identified, ls doesn't stop you from doing the thing you wanted to push the man page on you when you don't need/want it. ls just does the thing you ask. man also just does the thing you ask. The product tour is a sign that the developer doesn't understand consent and is trying to get the user to do what the developer wants, not what the user wants.

2) It's infantilizing. The product tour assumes the user doesn't know what they want, and doesn't know how to RTFM to learn how to do the thing they want to do. It treats the user as having no agency.

2.5) It's a tacit admission that TFM sucks and R-ing it isn't a productive use of your time.

Of course that doesn't work all that well for laptops where it would stick out and easily break when you put it in a bag, but for that one pair of headphones you like that is no longer being manufactured it's great!

If the proof of adulthood scheme is truly anonymous, one adult with some technical chops who thinks "kids should be allowed to watch porn if they want" would be able to, say, run an adult-o-matic-9000 TOR hidden service that anyone can use to pinky promise that they are an adult without fear of repercussions. If such a service comes with a meaningful risk of being identified and punished, it is by definition not anonymous.

I suppose I'm just not convinced giving up some basic liberties for a law that converts into sternly worded advice if just one adult chooses to break it is a great idea.

It is my understanding that this is not possible. I would be happy to be shown to be wrong, but to me it seems like you can either prevent people from lending out their credentials, or you can preserve the anonymity of the user, but not both.

You can use 0KP to prove you have a signed certificate issued by your government that says you are an adult, but then anyone with such a certificate can use it to masquerade as however many sock puppets they like and act as a proxy for people who aren't adults. You can have the issuing government in the loop signing one-time tokens to stop Adults-Georg from creating 10k 18+ attestations per day, but then the issuing government and the service providers have a timing side-channel they can use to correlate identities to service users. Is there some other scheme I'm missing that solves this dilemma?

It does if that's the law. Every jurisdiction routinely overrules contracts as unenforceable on the basis of some overriding law, so it wouldn't even really be that unusual. Whether it's a good idea or not is another question and one that depends almost entirely on second, third and higher order effects.

There probably is a world where all software is libre software and we still see similar rates of development, but it's not at all clear how you could get there. Especially not if you cared about the damage caused by upending the business models of a significant fraction of the world economy.