E.g. A frequent story that hits the front page of HN is "I'm quitting social media..."
But the much more common scenario of "I'm still keeping my social media account active today just like I did yesterday" ... is not submitted -- and nor would it be upvoted to the front page.
Real-life high frequency of normality doesn't make for compelling news.
> It's just the nature of journalism and headlines.
It's incumbent on these organizations, which want to be seen as purveyors of truth, to make sure their readers end up with the proper understanding. If lots of people end up thinking men biting dogs is a bigger problem than dogs biting men, they've failed at that.
They really ought to put up some kind of corrective explanation (sort of like the NYT's disclosures of their lawsuit with OpenAI) in a prominent place of most articles that could leave a wrong impression on readers. That shouldn't be much of a problem for the NYT (which I'm most familiar), because its articles tend to be longer with much more background and context than those of its competitor the Wall Street Journal.
Former journalist here. I would argue that it's a shared-responsibility model. We, the public, are at least partly (and I would argue mostly) responsible for developing the media literacy that helps us end up with the right understanding, rather than requiring media outlets to publish general disclaimers and PSAs.
When I was in high school, I took a one-semester media literacy course where we examined topics like reputable sources, bias, sensationalism, moderating one's consumption, why watchdog reporting is so important but often goes unnoticed, etc. I would love to see more high schools offer this.
In this shared responsibility model, if the public is mostly responsible, then what can and should be done by the public to fix these issues? And how long will it take? And how would you propose getting the bipartisan support needed, or avoid it becoming a partisan political issue? Are more high school media literacy classes realistically going to fix this problem? Today it feels to me like agenda-driven manipulative reporting is fueling a decrease in media literacy, which appears to be precisely what some people want. What can the public realistically do to counteract this?
That's true, but I don't think the burden can reasonably fall completely on schools and individuals.
I think regular "general disclaimers and PSAs" and necessary to 1) reinforce and refresh the proper lessons and 2) give them to people who never had the proper lessons in the first place.
> It's incumbent on these organizations, which want to be seen as purveyors of truth, to make sure their readers end up with the proper understanding.
It's incumbent that readers/viewers actually want to properly understand the world: Fox News broadcasts the stuff that it does because people want to it, and their ratings / market share is evidence of it.
There are three ways to make a living:
1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.
Is there a name for what happens to people who get all their information about the world from these types of sources?
(A similar thing is people who learn about interpersonal relationships from dramatic fictional stories with crazy situations and characters, and get the impression this is what "people are like")
The main reason for the difference in media coverage is the absence or weakness of a story. How can you build a story around a heart attack? :) On the other side, terrorist attacks, murders, car crashes, and other events are like fermentation jars for stories.
The timing of this article and the submission seems to coincide (and possibly a reaction) to the other story on HN frontpage: Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015) (jsomers.net)
To clarify, some are misunderstanding James Somers to be advocating sloppy low quality work, as if he's recommending speed>quality. He's saying something else: remove latencies and delays to shorten feedback loops. Faster feedback cycles leads to more repetitions which leads to higher quality.
"slowness being a virtue" is not the opposite of Somer's recommendation about "working quickly".
Correct, it is the speed of iteration that is important. [0]
If AI can do the OODA loop faster without getting fatigued, even though it is worse quality, like the F-86, it will win 10 out of 10 times.
EDIT:
> Boyd knew both planes very well. He knew the MiG-15 was a better aircraft than the F-86. The MiG-15 could climb faster than the F-86. The MiG-15 could turn faster than the F-86. The MiG-15 had better distance visibility.
> The F-86 had two points in its favor. First, it had better side visibility. While the MiG-15 pilot could see further in front, the F-86 pilot could see slightly more on the sides. Second, the F-86 had a hydraulic flight control. The MiG-15 had a manual flight control.
> Boyd decided that the primary determinant to winning dogfights was not observing, orienting, planning, or acting better. The primary determinant to winning dogfights was observing, orienting, planning, and acting faster.
> Without hydraulics, it took slightly more physical energy to move the MiG-15 flight stick than it did the F-85 flight stick. Even though the MiG-15 would turn faster (or climb higher) once the stick was moved, the amount of energy it took to move the stick was greater for the MiG-15 pilot.
> With each iteration, the MiG-15 pilot grew a little more fatigued than the F-86 pilot. And as he gets more fatigued, it took just a little bit longer to complete his OOPA loop. The MiG-15 pilot didn’t lose because he got outfought. He lost because he got out-OOPAed.
Totally agree, how I see it, it's related to taking time to sharpen your axe.
Having a defined flow that gives you quick feedback quick and doesn't get in the way.
I you are writing, then you'd be using an app that you can quickly do what you want, e.g shortcuts for bold, vim/emacs motions, that "things-not-getting-in-the-way" state is what leads to flow state, in my opinion.
Muscle memory is action for free, then you can focus on thinking deeper.
Same happens with coding, although is more complex and can take time to land in a workflow with tools that allow you to move quick, I'm talking about, logs, debugger (if needed), hot reloading of the website, unit test that run fast, knowing who to ask or where to go for finding references, good documentation, good database client, having prepared shortcuts to everything ... and so on.
I think it would be could if people would share their flow-tools with different tech stacks, could benefit a lot of us that have some % of this done, but not 100% there yet.
The energy threshold for adding a new unit test to the suite and a new row to the docs are vital for it to be done.
If I need to install pandoc to test compile a doc change before i submit it for code review with 3 other maintainers, id rather keep my note or useful screenshot to myself.
If i need to create a c binding of my function so that pytest can run it through 50 rows of cryptic CMake, I'd rather do happy testing locally and submit it as a "trust me bro".
Good and fast international tooling matters massively for good software. And it all comes back to speed and iteration loop.
On top of that, slow meticulous work can then be done. 100% test coverage, detailed uml diagrams describing the system, and functional safety risk analysis matrix documents.
So speed and slowness supplement in different levels of analysis.
There is a very important concept in security engineering around feedback loops. Consider the following: A vulnerability is discovered 5 years after it was introduced. The issue is patched and life goes on for the engineering organization that discovered it. Some time passes and they discover an architectural flaw and that the issue was not isolated. They must now expend precious effort fixing this entire flaw and the 5 years of dependencies that accreted on it. Now, consider, the team that designed this system and the engineer that implemented it discover the vulnerability leading to the architectural issue within two weeks. They refactor the code and eliminated generational security debt. Not to mention the engineers that wrote the code are not around 5 years later further increasing the "interest" on the debt.
I would note you might see this as another bland "shift left" argument and you could definitely view if through this lens. But if you consider it from a systems thinking lens it actually incorporates dynamics that are not typically included in shift left. It helps you consider the system within your organization and how to shorten those feedback loops. It also, conveniently, makes engineering organizations stronger as a whole as these feedback loops are also intrinsically linked to the organizations software development process as a whole. It is pretty hard to have a tight security vulnerability discovery loop without a good software engineering practice around it. For security issues like this they are effectively a strict subset of software quality issues.
You can apply this feedback loop shortening to /so/ many things in life.
To add, add some "slowness" before starting work - fix the latencies and delays, and plan what you're going to make instead of figuring it out as you go.
Shortening feedback loops was what Kent Beck and TDD advocates were emphasizing. Now TDD has been ruined by "experts", people are realizing the importance of fast feedback loops from a different perspective.
I've started to come around to this point of view, where I break down something i want to learn into more modular loops that I can get the most iterations of the basic result I want to get and save the rehearsing the whole thing for the end when I feel confident with each part. Otherwise, you basically have to unfluently rehearse and rehash content you're likely good for at the peril of never getting around to as or more important stuff further along
>I think cooperative game theory[1] better models the dynamics of the real world.
If cooperative coalitions to resist undesirable abusive technology models the real world better, why is the world getting more ads? (E.g. One of the author's bullet points was, "Ads are not inevitable.")
Currently in the real world...
- Ads frequency goes up : more ad interruptions in tv shows, native ads embedded in podcasts, sponsors segments in Youtube vids, etc
- Ads spaces goes up : ads on refrigerator screens, gas pumps touch screens, car infotainment systems, smart TVs, Google Search results, ChatGPT UI, computer-generated virtual ads in sports broadcasts overlayed on courts and stadiums, etc
What is the cooperative coalition that makes "ads not inevitable"?
I'll try and tackle this one. I think the world is getting more ads because Silicon Valley and it's Anxiety Economy are putting a thumb on the scale.
For the entirety of the 2010's we had SaaS startups invading every space of software, for a healthy mix of better and worse, and all of them (and a number even today) are running the exact same playbook, boiled down to broad terms: burn investor money to build a massive network-effected platform, and then monetize via attention (some combo of ads, user data, audience reach/targeting). The problem is thus: despite all these firms collecting all this data (and tanking their public trust by both abusing it and leaking it constantly) for years and years, we really still only have ads. We have specifically targeted ads, down to downright abusive metrics if you're inclined and lack a soul or sense of ethics, but they are and remain ads. And each time we get a better targeted ad, the ones that are less targeted go down in value. And on and on it has gone.
Now, don't misunderstand, a bunch of these platforms are still perfectly fine business-wise because they simply show an inexpressible, unimaginable number of ads, and even if they earn shit on each one, if you earn a shit amount of money a trillion times, you'll have billions of dollars. However it has meant that the Internet has calcified into those monolith platforms that can operate that way (Facebook, Instagram, Google, the usuals) and everyone else either gets bought by them or they die. There's no middle-ground.
All of that to say: yes, on balance, we have more ads. However the advertising industry in itself has never been in worse shape. It's now dominated by those massive tech companies to an insane degree. Billboards and other such ads, which were once commonplace are now solely the domain of ambulance chasing lawyers and car dealerships. TV ads are no better, production value has tanked, they look cheaper and shittier than ever, and the products are solely geared to the boomers because they're the only ones still watching broadcast TV. Hell many are straight up shitty VHS replays of ads I saw in the fucking 90's, it's wild. We're now seeing AI video and audio dominate there too.
And going back to tech, the platforms stuff more ads into their products than ever and yet, they're less effective than ever. A lot of younger folks I know don't even bother with an ad-blocker, not because they like them, but simply because they've been scrolling past ads since they were shitting in diapers. It's just the background wallpaper of the Internet to them, and that sounds (and is) dystopian, but the problem is nobody notices the background wallpaper, which means despite the saturation, ads get less attention then ever before. And worse still, the folks who don't block cost those ad companies impressions and resources to serve those ads that are being ignored.
So, to bring this back around: the coalition that makes ads "inevitable" isn’t consumers or creators, it's investors and platforms locked into the same anxiety‑economy business model. Cooperative resistance exists (ad‑blockers, subscription models, cultural fatigue), but it’s dwarfed by the sheer scale of capital propping up attention‑monetization. That’s why we see more ads even as they get less effective.
> Billboards and other such ads, which were once commonplace are now solely the domain of ambulance chasing lawyers and car dealerships. TV ads are no better, production value has tanked, they look cheaper and shittier than ever, and the products are solely geared to the boomers because they're the only ones still watching broadcast TV.
This actually strikes me as a good thing. The more we can get big dumb ads out of meatspace and confine everything to devices, the better, in my opinion (though once they figure out targeted ads in public that could suck).
I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but I get a lot more value out of targeted social media ads than I ever did billboards or TV commercials. They actually...show me niche things that are relevant to my interests, that I didn't know about. It's much closer to the underlying real value of advertising than the Coca-Cola billboard model is.
> A lot of younger folks I know don't even bother with an ad-blocker, not because they like them, but simply because they've been scrolling past ads since they were shitting in diapers. It's just the background wallpaper of the Internet to them, and that sounds (and is) dystopian...
Also this. It's not dystopian. It's genuinely a better experience than sitting through a single commercial break of a TV show in the 90s (of which I'm sure we all sat through thousands). They blend in. They are easily skippable, they don't dominate near as much of your attention. It's no worse than most of the other stuff competing for your attention. It doesn't seem that difficult to me to navigate a world with background ad radiation. But maybe I'm just a sucker.
> This actually strikes me as a good thing. The more we can get big dumb ads out of meatspace and confine everything to devices, the better, in my opinion (though once they figure out targeted ads in public that could suck).
I mean the issue is the billboards aren't going away, they're just costing less and less which means you get ads for shittier products (see aforementioned lawyers, reverse mortgages and other financial scams, dick pills, etc.). If they were getting taken down I'd heartily agree with you.
> I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but I get a lot more value out of targeted social media ads than I ever did billboards or TV commercials. They actually...show me niche things that are relevant to my interests, that I didn't know about. It's much closer to the underlying real value of advertising than the Coca-Cola billboard model is.
Perhaps they work for you. I still largely get the experience that after I buy a toilet seat for example on Amazon, Amazon then regularly shows me ads for additional toilet seats, as though I've taken up throne collecting as a hobby or something.
> Also this. It's not dystopian. It's genuinely a better experience than sitting through a single commercial break of a TV show in the 90s (of which I'm sure we all sat through thousands). They blend in. They are easily skippable, they don't dominate near as much of your attention. It's no worse than most of the other stuff competing for your attention.
I mean, I personally loathe the way my attention is constantly being redirected, or attempted to be, by loud inane bullshit. I tolerate it, of course, what other option does one have, but I certainly wouldn't call it a good or healthy thing. I think our society would leap forward 20 years if we pushed the entirety of ad-tech into the ocean.
> If they were getting taken down I'd heartily agree with you.
At some point it won't be worth it to maintain them, hopefully.
> I still largely get the experience that after I buy a toilet seat for example on Amazon, Amazon then regularly shows me ads for additional toilet seats, as though I've taken up throne collecting as a hobby or something.
This is definitely a thing, I feel like it's getting better though and stuff like that drops off pretty quickly. But it still doesn't bother me nearly as much as watching the same 30 second TV commercial for the 100th time, I just swipe or scroll past, and overall it's still much better than seeing the lowest common denominator stuff.
> I mean, I personally loathe the way my attention is constantly being redirected, or attempted to be, by loud inane bullshit. I tolerate it, of course, what other option does one have, but I certainly wouldn't call it a good or healthy thing. I think our society would leap forward 20 years if we pushed the entirety of ad-tech into the ocean.
I hear you, the attention economy is a brave new world, and there will probably be some course corrections. I don't think ads are really the problem though, in some ways everything vying for your attention is an ad now. Through technology we democratized the means of information distribution, and I would rather have it this way than having four TV channels, but there are some growing pains for sure.
> This is definitely a thing, I feel like it's getting better though and stuff like that drops off pretty quickly. But it still doesn't bother me nearly as much as watching the same 30 second TV commercial for the 100th time, I just swipe or scroll past, and overall it's still much better than seeing the lowest common denominator stuff.
I'll second the absolute shit out of that. My only exposure to TV anymore is hotels and I cannot fathom why anyone would spend ANY money on it as a service, let alone what I know cable costs. The ads are so LOUD now and they repeat the same like 4 or 5 of them over and over. Last business trip I could lipsync a Wendy's ad like I'd done it my whole life.
> I hear you, the attention economy is a brave new world, and there will probably be some course corrections. I don't think ads are really the problem though, in some ways everything vying for your attention is an ad now.
See I don't like the term attention economy, I vastly prefer anxiety economy. An attention economy implies at least some kind of give and take, where a user's attention is rewarded rather than simply their lack of it is attempted to be punished. The constant fomenting of FOMO and blatant use of psychological torments does not an amicable relationship make. It makes it feel like a constant back and forth of blows, disabling notifications, muting hashtags, unsubscribing from emails because you simply can't stand the NOISE anymore.
> I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but I get a lot more value out of targeted social media ads than I ever did billboards or TV commercials. They actually...show me niche things that are relevant to my interests, that I didn't know about. It's much closer to the underlying real value of advertising than the Coca-Cola billboard model is.
You are describing two different advertising strategies that have differing goals. The billboard/tv commercial is a blanket type that serves to foster a default in viewers minds when they consider a particular want/need. Meanwhile, the targeted stuff tries to identify a need you might be likely to have and present something highly specific that could trigger or refine that interest.
Yes, I'm saying, as a consumer, I much prefer the latter, and I get more value from it. And it's only enabled by modern individualized data collection.
>Pretty sure farmers don't buy them tax free? [...], but they still foot the rest of the tax burden.
To clarify, this isn't about the farmer paying a "sales tax" or VAT as % of the price of buying the tractor.
The article is talking about something else: paying additional machine taxes to cover the loss of unemployed crop workers that would have been paying individual income taxes.
Oh I get it, but I do find it silly, because that only means that the company running the models pay more in taxes for providing you with a service, which is weird to me. Especially if they keep costs down on goods and services, allowing us to focus on quality of output more. At least that's what Claude Code has done for my side projects.
If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will learn to never buy/redeem Apple gift cards because of the real possibility of account bans.
- Don't give Apple gift cards to family and friends: You're potentially ruining the recipient's digital life if they redeem it.
- Don't buy Apple gift cards: You risk ruining your own digital life.
If you've been given an Apple gc for Christmas -- and you have paranoia of the risks -- don't buy anything online that's tied to your Apple ID. Instead, go to the physical Apple store to redeem it. And don't buy an iPhone with it because that will eventually get assigned to an Apple ID. Instead, get a non-AppleID item such as the $249 ISSEY MIYAKE knit sock.
I have thousands of credit-card reward points that could be traded in for Apple gift cards but I don't do it because Apple's over-aggressive fraud tracking means Apple's store currency is too dangerous to use.
The "gift card" in general is an anachronism whose time has passed. They have got to go. If companies are going to consider use of gift cards as red flags (as they often are, due to their being key components in money laundering and scams), then society should just abandon them. They are worse in every way than a prepaid credit cards, and in most cases where you want to give someone a gift card, you should probably just give them cash.
The only “use cases” I’ve seen are discount or niche. For example, Target and Bass Pro Shops/Cabelas in the US both offered some kind of 5 or 10 percent back/discount around Black Friday on gift cards. Niche would fall into, generally, some small enough business that these messes aren’t likely to happen, where the point of the gift is specifically later-consumption, like a local coffee place that you know someone loves, or say a specialty herbs and spices place for a cook (where you wouldn’t know exactly what they want from there, but that they WOULD be delighted to get something from the place).
Otherwise? Yeah. Gift / prepaid credit cards are a horrible scam, because they tend to have a percentage or, worse, flat fee to activate. $4 extra on a $50 card as a gift means you just paid 8 percent just to GET the card.
It is a way to extract money from the unlucky unbanked people, like the immigrants making your lunch or cleaning the streets. A part of systematic oppression of the outgroup.
I used to buy a gift card every ~week at a local sandwich place near where I worked and ate at every day. Their deal was a free meal (sandwich, chips, drink) with a $50 gift card purchase. Then I'd just pay with the card until it ran out.
If you buy them in bulk for employees they get progressively cheaper. It also matters how many customers you can serve vs how many you have and what you spend to get one customer into your store. If you spend 500 per day to get 100 customers into your brick and mortar store you can also give/spend 500 in discounts to get 100 more. If only 60% redeems the card the other 40% is profit. ETC
Un-redeemed GC aren’t profit. You can’t book the revenue, rather the balances count as a liability (because you owe all the random cardholders valuable goods/services) and, at least in my state, after a certain period of inactivity, you’re obligated to give that money to the State as unclaimed property. Google “escheatment”
my sweet summer child, neither rain nor sleet nor cash nor dark of night will stay your postal carrier from zer's appointed rounds, but winter is coming... do you want to still receive your mail?
Giving cash also only really makes sense for kids or other asymmetrical relationships where one gives more than the other. If you are just passing cash around then you may as well have everyone not gift anything. If you want to show someone that you appreciate them then spend some time making something yourself or just spend time with that person.
Gift cards are worse in every case though unless they come with a heavy discount - and even then it's a pretty shitty gift.
I'm the author of that Reddit post. I should probably update it to clarify that I didn’t just purchase the gift cards, but also redeemed them. I don’t think it was purchasing them that triggered the lock on my Apple account. I mean, after all, how would they know what my Apple account is until they’re redeemed?
>, how would they know what my Apple account is until they’re redeemed?
To add context, your reddit post also mentioned: >, I purchased eleven Apple Gift cards from [...], and apple.com, and added the amounts to my Apple account.
I'm not saying the following applies to you but one can buy Apple Gift Cards using their Apple ID. After adding gift cards to the ecommerce shopping bag on Apple.com, it offers the option : "Check out with your Apple Account"
So Apple would know the exact AppleID at the time-of-sale instead of waiting until redemption. If for some reason Apple's fraud detection system doesn't like the transaction (e.g. unusual ip address from Mexico instead of USA, or too many high-value cards in a certain time period, or other black-box opaque heuristic) ... then the buyer puts their Apple account at risk.
Fraud prevention heuristics are insanely aggresive these days...
Last week, I bought a Netflix subscription and 5 days later, Netflix cancelled the membership for no apparent reason. I got on a customer support chat with Netflix and the agent said it was cancelled because of the credit-card #. It didn't pass their fraud prevention system and to try using another card. At least Netflix automatically refunded the entire amount back to me -- whereas Apple keeps the gift card balance for itself after locking accounts.
In another incident, I used a Chase credit-card at a physical Apple store to buy 2 iPhones on 2 separate receipts. The first iPhone sale was a success. The 2nd iPhone transaction just 1 minute later was denied and Chase locked the entire account. I had to call Chase customer service and recite the make & model of a car I had 20 years ago to prove my identity for them to re-activate the credit card!
My recommendation is to completely drop the Apple ecosystem, however painful it is. I do use an iPhone but I treat it as just a phone. If Apple locks me out I dgaf.
Comments like this remind me of my distant relatives who proudly live out in the countryside and avoid traveling to big cities for any reason. They see a lot of Fox News headlines about bad things happening in big cities and they've concluded those bad things are happening all the time.
So they constantly congratulate themselves for not going to the nearest city, look down upon people who spend time in cities, warn us that we're at risk of the bad things happening, and never miss an opportunity to talk about how bad cities are in conversations.
Now replace big cities with big tech and that's exactly how a lot of these Hacker News comments read.
Currently having to migrate to Win11 and thinking I spent 3k on new hardware just to be able to run some absolute clusterfuck of an OS.
I regret not spending it on overpriced Apple hardware, at least it runs all my Adobe crap which I'm 100% dependent on. But then I read joyous stuff like this.
Oh but you say, ""just"" run it on a VM in Linux, like all us rural folk, because big tech evil. Yeah thanks pointdexter, like I didn't know that. And oh look it's running like a complete slideshow on my 4k color calibrated monitor because now you apparently need two fucking GPUs. One for the host and one for the guest just to have hardware acceleration and CUDA video encoding. And I only have room for one GPU so I sell my current CPU and buy a CPU with iGPU. And now apparently I have to run these 10 ducktaped together shell scripts and there's like three guides to achieving a clean passthrough and they're all 50 pages and each is completely different and omg I have other shit to do please kill me already.
Death by mutually incompatible walled gardens, welcome to our fully automated high tech utopia.
Huh you got me with this analogy. On the other hand, can't this be said about any bad thing? Few bad things are always bad. A few examples:
* My liberal relatives won't own guns because they keep hearing stories about how guns are deadly, even though I own guns and nobody's died yet
* My friend's kid won't pet puppies because he heard they bite sometimes
* My aunt in Moscow didn't want to vote for Putin because he's "authoritarian", but my life is going great
How do you distinguish between things that are actually bad vs overreactions? Maybe it's just based on individual risk tolerance? I don't see the need to put my digital life in the hands of some unresponsive corporation, but the risk is worth it to you and we just have to agree to disagree?
Bad isn't a binary judgment you can place on something.
Everything has a level of risk and reward associated with it. It's up to everyone to judge the risk versus reward.
The flaw I see a lot in the HN comments trying to get people to abandon Big Tech is that they're coming from people who overestimate the risks while underestimating the benefits to other people.
Abandoning a lot of convenience for fear of some rare outcome might be a perfectly good choice for someone who doesn't use those conveniences (e.g. Linux user who doesn't want cloud storage for photos because they enjoy setting up their own elaborate backup schemes) but it's not a good tradeoff for the average person who just wants their photos backed up and either doesn't want to or doesn't trust themselves to set up a good backup solution.
My model for this is to have one nerd per group of people, who runs digital infra for the community. I'm that nerd for my friends, and run a bunch of self-hosted services that people I personally know use. Some of them even pitch in to help pay for the hosting costs (though not my time).
You are going to have false positives in fraud detection. You are going to have to investigate those or pay in reputation. Fail to fight fraud may also cost rep.
When you run out of reputation people should take their business elsewhere.
> By using a service you also chose to support it.
> This is how one should make the choices.
Well yeah, but there're not the only choices. The full opportunity cost is finding and paying and learning alternatives when you have decades of vendor lock-in to overcome. Maybe "keeping people honest" is a bigger ask than you think while you're busy meeting all kinds of other requirements which take priority.
I’m not trying to be rude, but what is the point of buying and then redeeming gift cards yourself?
I just pay Apple with my credit card when I want to buy something. Is this some kind of weird credit card rewards churning thing? Are you unbanked? I don’t understand why you’d voluntarily add unnecessary extra steps.
A credit card offers far more protections to consumers than a gift card.
Given the amount of false positives, Apple should have an appeal process for innocent users to regain access to their accounts. It would be nice if this applied to all big tech companies, losing an email address can make other accounts difficult or impossible to access.
I always buy Apple gift cards when there's a deal on them. A few weeks ago you could buy an Apple gift card and get $10-15 of Amazon credit, so I bought the gift card and loaded it into my account.
I do this all the time and I've done it for years.
I once bought thousands of dollars of Apple gift cards, $500 at a time, by redeeming credit card reward points that could be spent like cash at a couple of select retail stores for 2X their points value.
It's a common practice. The edge cases are scary when you see them reported on Reddit, but they really are rare and generally get resolved after follow up (however inconvenient).
Some people go to extremes to do things like buy Apple gift cards at stores that give them a small discount on gas purchases or something. I'm not nearly extreme enough to do that entire process, though. Having the money loaded on to a Gift Card is inherently risky and I need some significant upside before I'll do it.
Lots of stores offer deals on gift cards, essentially giving g you a discount at the cards’ store. $100 Apple gift card for $80 means you can buy something at Apple for $20 off if it is less than $100.
I've bought and redeemed gift cards for only one single company ever. Can you guess what company? :) Exactly - Apple. Because these MFs generously banned whole countries from using their services, and not because of the justified sanctions or a law, but simply because they could. So when I lived in Ukraine and got my first Apple device, I had to buy and use gift cards to purchase any app or media in the Apple's closed system.
In Australia, we often have bonus offers on Apple Gift Cards, from the merchant/retailer.
This could include a "real" cash discount of ~8-10% (eg, buy a $100 card for $92), or loyalty points.
Our supermarkets often have a "20x" bonus points promotion, which is effectively 10% off a future shop - eg, buy a $100 Apple gift card, get $10 off a future shop in loyalty points. Buy $1000, get $100 off, etc.
Or, if you're a frequent flyer, earn Qantas points - buy a $2000 gift card, get 20,000 in QFF points - that on its own is some one way/return domestic flights, or halfway to Honolulu (one way), if you were going to spend $2000 on a new iPhone, Mac, iCloud etc anyway.
If you want to trade in an old phone without doing it at the time you purchase a new one, the only way to receive the trade in value is via an Apple gift card.
I was looking forward to getting $160 gift card for my old iPhone 11 but after reading all this I think I’ll just leave it in a drawer.
Not so. I just traded in/upgraded (on a Verizon contract, but AT the Apple Store; maybe that affects this… but still paying Apple directly) and they handed me the new phone and had FedEx send a trade-in mailer that I had a while to send back with my trade-in.
Ah but you told them at the time of purchase that you were going to do the trade-in. As I said. It’s different if you want to do the trade in later, which at that point looks more like “sell an old random phone back to Apple for some credits”
This is a problem with modern life in general. Computing and the internet have exploded the complexity of society. Regular people have so much on their plate as it is (school, work, family, mortgage, etc) that they simply cannot keep up with all of the privacy and security risks of a digital life. They also can't keep up with the complexity of politics and civic life, but that's another discussion entirely!
‘Member States shall ensure that, in the cases referred to in paragraph 4 …, after taking its decision, the credit institution immediately informs the consumer of the refusal and of the specific reason for that refusal, in writing and free of charge, unless such disclosure would be contrary to objectives of national security, public policy or Directive [2005/60]. […]’
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
I think tech people who read a lot of news headlines have a hard time grasping the scale of these services.
Commenters here talk about PayPal account closures as if everyone who uses the service will eventually lose their money. Now we're talking about gift cards as if everyone using gift cards will have their account locked.
These stories, while frustrating and sad, are rare occurrences. The majority of people who use these services will not have any experience like these stories you read.
To be honest, I think the average person is probably better at estimating their risk of using these services than a lot of these HN commenters.
> It's the "would you eat from a jar of M&M's where one is cyanide? well what if there are X x 1000 M&M's?" principle.
This captures the Hacker News style misjudgment of risk very well.
First, none of these issues are equivalent to eating cyanide in any way, shape, or form. The extreme melodrama of upgrading "someone's PayPal account was erroneously locked" to literally being poisoned to death is emblematic of the misjudgment of risk going on.
Second, eating M&Ms is a silly analogy because it's so easy to dismiss. Obviously nobody needs to eat a couple M&Ms, but someone who is running a business needs a way to collect money if they want to get paid. Using a mainstream service keeps your overall conversion rate higher and prevents losing customers who don't want to sign up for something new.
Third, the level of risk is not X in 1000. These cases you hear about in headlines are more like 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000. This is what I referred to by Hacker News frequently misjudging the scale of these services because they only see these negative stories posted.
Finally, this is the key point that everyone misses when they say "Just don't use any Apple products" and other dismissive comments:
> It's easier to just eat something else, and not from the jar, than take an unnecessary risk, even if that risk is unlikely.
It's very obviously not easier to build a life where you avoid anything that might have a small risk. Building your entire life around not taking very unlikely risks is irrational. I know it brings some people comfort to feel like they've avoided some risk they saw in headlines, but claiming that nothing is given up or that it's easier to choose an alternative is blatantly false.
> First, none of these issues are equivalent to eating cyanide in any way, shape, or form. The extreme melodrama of upgrading "someone's PayPal account was erroneously locked" to literally being poisoned to death is emblematic of the misjudgment of risk going on.
If you're a business, yes, PayPal locking your account and freezing your funds forever, which is what they do, is tantamount to legal grievous injury or death. This happens with enough regularity that I know multiple people that this has happened to, and the risk is enough for me to never rely on PayPal or its partners for my income.
You seem to understand this with the following:
> Obviously nobody needs to eat a couple M&Ms, but someone who is running a business needs a way to collect money if they want to get paid.
--
> Third, the level of risk is not X in 1000. These cases you hear about in headlines are more like 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000. This is what I referred to by Hacker News frequently misjudging the scale of these services because they only see these negative stories posted.
I used a variable X so you could make it sufficiently large enough that you don't have to rely on the multiplier to understand the analogy.
> It's very obviously not easier to build a life where you avoid anything that might have a small risk. Building your entire life around not taking very unlikely risks is irrational.
I've lived my entire life without relying on an Apple account, and the few instances that I used one, I hit that risk myself[1] and now have an expensive paper weight instead of a tablet, and a bunch of app purchases I can never use again.
This isn't some hypothetical, it's something that's literally happened to me and people I know. The lesson I learned is not to rely on Apple or PayPal, and believe it or not, that's really, really easy to do.
To my knowledge, PayPal does not hold funds “forever”. They penalise the account holder by locking it away for 180 days. At that point, they can withdraw the balance to a bank account. I have multiple friends and clients who had this happen to them, but in all cases, they were exposed to higher risk by accepting payments through donation forms, or a marketplace where they sell directly to customers. (Despite what feels like an anecdotal high failure rate, somehow I’ve never had an issue running my own marketplace for the past decade.)
> If you're a business, yes, PayPal locking your account and freezing your funds forever, which is what they do, is tantamount to legal grievous injury or death.
Losing business funds is not equivalent to death, no.
> I used a variable X so you could make it sufficiently large enough that you don't have to rely on the multiplier to understand the analogy.
I was commenting on the "in 1000" part, not the X part.
Sorry, I just can't engage with this level of hyperbole and exaggeration. This isn't a life or death thing.
Utterly perplexing you've backed off with a scathing 'Sorry, I can't engage' after literally contracting yourself plain as day a few comments up.
I think you can't understand his analogy no? Without taking it literally to the point of making it your entire life's purpose to counter the point?
How about this: You have a 1 in 100,000 chance of eating an M&M which literally drains your bank account and you have to eat hundreds or possibly thousands of M&M's per day.
(some of your dreaded hyperbole for transactions)
Would you dig in to that bowl? There's shouldn't be a miniscule percentage chance of your entire livelyhood being ripped away and locked forever without recourse simply by using a certain payment platform. Is that fair? Or are you still intent on stepping on the cosmic merrigoround of potential ruin without a care in the world?
I remember when Cory would let you download any of his books for free and even said you were allowed to email him and call him a sucker for doing this.
The most money I have ever had on my PayPal account was 100 bucks from a reversed transaction (like, double booking of a hotel room or wrong item sent), otherwise it's just a gateway. It would be annoying if my PayPal account was locked, because I use it a lot to order pizza online and a few small purchases. I could just use my credit card or something else but it's more clicks. And I know a lot of people who do it like this. The only thing lost is convenience. No past purchases, no digital identities.
Maybe you meant the merchants who really amass thousands but I suppose they are a small minority of active users.
There are a good number of freelancers of various sorts that get paid via PayPal and only occasionally pull that money to their bank accounts to avoid the fixed fee, or even prefer to spend much of it straight from PayPal to avoid the percent fee. People also use it to send money between family members in different countries because it's often cheaper than an international wire.
It's quite easy to build up a few hundred or thousand USD worth. It feels just enough like a bank account that you think you're safe. Then...well, the internet is full of PayPal horror stories, I won't bore you with my own.
Last time I had to deal with that was 8-ish years ago and there was definitely a fee. Can't check now because they blocked my account due to a failed Spotify payment and I don't care enough to deal with their phone support again to get it unblocked
That you don't keep a PayPal balance and i don't buy Apple gift cards is irrelevant to the people that do keep a PayPal balance and do use Apple gift cards
I would go even further and say for most PayPal users there never was anything to mitigate because they didn't keep a significant balance there in the first place. Which is a perfectly valid reply to someone not understanding why so many people would keep using PayPal.
For every purchase you make as a gateway there's a vendor account on the other end receiving that money and required to do accounting with it (like issuing refunds) which requires keeping a balance. These are the people having big problems when their account gets locked and their funds are no longer available. The blow back does potentially effect you if you return an item and then the vendor can't issue the refund because the account is locked.
I think it's a combination of money laundering and phone scams where people are told they owe money to the IRS or something and are tricked into buying a bunch of gift cards.
That said, if buying and redeeming gift cards are such an indicator of fraud that people are legitimately afraid of getting their accounts permanently locked, why doesn't Apple just stop selling them?
> If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will learn to never buy/redeem Apple gift cards because of the real possibility of account bans.
If you are trying to be a bad person you could weaponize that approach. You do not like person x, send them some Apple gift cards... :o
> You do not like person x, send them some Apple gift cards... :o
99.999% chance they happily redeem them and go about their lives.
These stories, while frustrating, are clearly edge cases. Yes I know you can find more if you search social media, but I don’t think a lot of these HN commenters realize the volume of gift cards Apple sells and redeems without problem every day.
Maybe that hypothetical, bad person needs to find out what is triggering the account locking, first. Many small sums per gift card? A sum over a certain threshold? The point is, in reality it will not be up to pure chance.
In this case buy the gift card from some shady retailer with a one-time-use virtual card, and give this shady code to your friend. Or buy a physical card from aliexpress, the cheapest one with bad reviews.
It seems you haven't learned the whole lesson. You're close, though. If you're going to be skittish, there's a better and easier set of rules. Don't use anything that involves an Apple ID.
The newer iPhones have such great cameras, I have have been considering an iPhone for my next phone. The only thing holding me back is the lack of built-in stylus.
Does the iPhone require an Apple ID? I don't even log into my Google account with my Android device. If the phone requires an Apple ID, then obviously I'm not buying one.
No, it doesn’t require one… but you won’t be downloading anything from their App Store without one, leaving your only option for getting software onto it “Xcode after you build it yourself” since there’s no side loading. Xcode’s ability to do that may require an Apple ID or developer account; I’m unsure.
In the EU, the requirement to support alternative app stores would probably mostly fix that, but those of you in the US are kinda…
I skimmed some of the comments from that giant Reddit thread. A lot of people responded that they’ve been buying even more Apple gift cards without problem.
One commonality among the stories in that thread from people who had problems was either switching their App Store country or using their App Store account primarily from a different country than the setting.
That includes the original poster!
"could have been because I purchased gift cards from the US (online) and added them to my account while I was in Mexico, or I was using a VPN while adding gift cards"
One of the other people was someone who
"purchased $2k in apple gift cards from target during Black Friday deals... There was a limit of 1 but if you went in store and were friendly to the cashier a lot of people (myself included) had luck getting them to ring them up as separate transactions".
Pretty sure if the latter person had given those out as separate cards to other people it would have been fine but going from "limit of 1" to "all redeemed by same account" is unsurprising when it triggers a fraud flag.
The big problem in this story as in the past one is the apparent lack of sensible escalation.
I've heard horror stories from Google devs that it's even worse - such a situation follows you for life even if you try to setup new accounts.
And in fact, a prohibition is never a solution, it is a reduction in solution options
And this advice takes into account exactly zero aspects of the particular problems a given person may have to solve, besides “problems with Apple”, in a world where most people have “problems with X” for each of the few large ecosystems.
Freedom of choice would mean for N choices, being able to make, well, N indepointed choices. N may be a very large number given how many things people do.
For an ideal world of compatible modular technologies, N choices is easy.
But our technology world is highly non-modular, centralized at many levels, and full of incompatibilities and dependencies of various kinds and costs. Including important dependencies involving the choices of other people we interact with, or very specific tools or resources.
So no, “Don’t buy Apple” is not better advice, it is just bad random generic advice, without knowing a lot more about any particular situation.
LOL it’s not some sisyphean task to not use big tech products, its slightly inconvenient and takes some time to adjust, don’t talk about it as though it were something that only the great men of the ancient times could do, take your iPhone and throw it as hard as you can against the concrete, you will be fine.
Great advice if you don’t need a smartphone. Many do, they are now an identity tool.
The alternative to Apple is…Google? How is that in any way better other than not being Apple? Sure, there are de-Googlefied versions of Android and today they work . But Google is actively working on ending the ability of those alternative operating systems to work.
In my country we have a large religious population that eschews smartphones. Thanks to this, all services - bank, government, etc - are available without requiring apps or even internet access.
The US has just proposed making the ESTA application process mobile-only.
As an example of one.
Banks requiring device attestation may be a pain in the ass, but it’s not a “requirement”; they (for now) still have websites and, usually, a physical branch.
Banks 2FA are not SMS anymore, so no banking, and because no 2FA no online card payments and no limit adjustment.
Some banks are even app-only.
IRL events where you have to open the app at the gate.
Probably no charging for your EV.
No bus tickets. No Uber. No scooters. No food delivery.
More tedious flying / immigration. No Tinder (requires live face verification on your phone)
Some modern cars you are going to have troubles.
Impossible to setup a lot of smart appliances (like home WiFi routers).
Many examples.
It’s like: can you live without a bank card ? Probably but not everywhere and you will not be able to go to all shops.
Essentially it’s great if you plan to stay at home. Becomes a great problem once you want to interact with anyone further than 1 meter from you.
None of those require smartphones if you live in a free country (1) (2).
(1) Unbanked population in Uganda or india don't have options. Funnily, it's become the same with everyone, banked or unbanked, in the USA. The USA a third world dictatorship now, so expect that and more. Please vote for the orange buffoon a third time! He will most surely try to get on a third term.
(2) No bank in the EU requires a smartphone; it's banned by law (you know, law that protects people, the type you lost). "Banks" that are app-only are not banks but financial casinos. No bus driver in the EU can refuse small coins. In some countries they cannot refuse that you get on the bus without paying. No shop in the EU can refuse cash. No EV charging requires any app; you can pay right at the charging station with a credit card. Uber is not a universal right but a trinket. Same with tinder/food delivery and all the impoverishing tech for the disowned.
Sounds like we don't live in the same EU.
Banks are required to use Strong Customer Authentication, and they consider apps to be safer alternative than SMS.
Revolut, N26 and co, are real banks, like any bank in the EU.
In many countries, you cannot pay with small coins the bus driver.
Shops can refuse cash.
https://fullfact.org/online/UK-not-only-europe-country-legal...
etc
In Northern Europe it's very common not to have cash at all or to have it rejected.
In Estonia, you can choose to login to services using... your mobile phone OR (if you are lucky and this is supported) a physical ID card reader, so realistically you want to have a mobile phone. Some services don't even have alternative.
It's more like a German / Swiss thing to have cash everywhere.
>Banks are required to use Strong Customer Authentication
Not impressed by the pseudotechnical bullshit. The law provides several ways to authenticate. I tell my bank that I don't have a smartphone and they have to send me (at 0 extra cost) a code card: a piece of plastic with numbers on it that no one is ever going to hack. I routinely transfer tens of thousands of Eur between my accounts at real banks within the EU without a problem with my plastic card. When I have used up all the numbers on it they send me another one. I don't know in which EU you live in either.
>Revolut, N26 and co, are real banks
They are collectively known as "neobanks" for a reason. The official name is "e-money institution". Those are financial casinos, not real banks, operating with non-full banking licenses, peddling all the tech-bro bullshit: trading on memecoins, pulling out of countries when the regulations that real banks have to follow irks them, with a horrible track record of IT security: customer data leaks in the millions, horrible track record of staff abuse, unpaid hours, null customer support: exclusively in-app, where your customer support is "other customers that answer to your in-app post"; the staff shows up once in every 200 messages to write a one-liner and go into hiding again. I do not do business with bullshit "lean" business that operate at cost. Look at their wikipedia pages sometime.
>In many countries, you cannot pay with small coins the bus driver
Simply not true, not gonna argue this one.
>Shops can refuse cash
No, they cannot. Many businesses don't want to handle cash and they will make it hard and send you an invoice with a surcharge but they must accept any form of legal tender, no way around it. There are exceptions like you cannot buy a car with a truckload of coins, or give a 5000 Euro note to a taxi cab but those fall under "unreasonable" and it's a very high bar. Also, there is a long tradition of countries delaying implementing EU directives for many years, and then getting it wrong several times. The EU is very lenient, but accepting cash everywhere is EU policy. The fact that some wise-ass members drag their feet for decades is not news and doesn't prove your point. If you push back at the dentist, for example, they will send you an invoice with a surcharge, and you can pay that invoice with cash at your bank.
>If you want to use the Tesla supercharger
Lol no I don't finance retarded imbeciles - incidentally, all the other charging networks allow you to pay right there without subscription, smartphone or app. It's called "drop-in" payment, and it is there because the law says it must be an option.
>In Northern Europe...
No, you confuse the EU policy of allowing cash in transactions with money-laundering directives. Those prevent you from buying a house in cash, but you can buy anything, say, under 10000 Eur or equivalent NOK/SEK
>No, they cannot. Many businesses don't want to handle cash and they will make it hard and send you an invoice with a surcharge but they must accept any form of legal tender, no way around it.
Not true in the UK. The House of Commons Treasury Select Committee has been considering this issue (Apr 25): BBC News - Shops could be forced to accept cash in future,
They may not require one, but good luck getting transactions done without one. My EU bank branches are now only open 3 hours a day, and to approve an online transaction without the app means phoning the bank during business hours…
you mean like I do all the time with my high-tech plastic code card? At any time of day or night, workday or weekend? I must be lucky because I have been doing it for decades.
Your mistake was telling them you agree to use their app in your insecure smartphone. You were not obligated to do so.
> Your mistake was telling them you agree to use their app in your insecure smartphone. You were not obligated to do so.
Must be nice to have such choice. In rural areas you generally only have one bank in the local area, and unless you want to drive an hour to the city to do your banking, them's the breaks
>In rural areas you generally only have one bank in the local area
I agree to that but I don't follow. Are you a resident of a EU country? If yes, any bank operating in that country is obligated to let you open an account with them. Notice I say "resident", wich is a lower bar than "national". Banks operating in the boondocks and banks operating in the most expensive high street of the capital city, all must give you an account if you ask, so I don't follow unless they make you do banking in person only at one office, which I don't think is the case.
But it is a solution. Apple being a poor stuard of their customers is indicative that people buying their hardware and software are not their priority. Apple support used to be stellar, they used to care about customers, they no longer do.
Apple's ToS should be readily indicative of anyone using any of their products that Apple's perspective is that you don't own anything and they can do whatever they want with anything you do with their products. As the author points out you clearly don't own free access to what you've purchased.
The last thing I'll say is that it is fantastic advice to not purchase Apple in 2025. You can only be certain that this won't happen if you avoid them. I actually own a MPB, with receipts from purchase, that I had to purchase a bypass for when the device was enrolled in MDM by a family member that Apple has MDM locked and refuses to remove from iCloud.
Avoid Apple, that's the best advice. If you can't avoid Apple, minimize your footprint and make sure you're a good boy or girl else Tim Cook will steal from you and hide behind some bullshit first line support tar pit and an army of lawyers if you do happen to decide to threaten them.
But, at least with Google you can use hardware without the binding software requirement. You can use an Android device with GrapheneOS and have the phone entirely de-Googled, yet still use Android apps.
If the implication was that there's no other option outside of Apple and Google then that is unfortunate.
Ok so now we’re not only boycotting Apple, we’re boycotting banks as well! Seriously, Apple can and should fix this issue without having to retort to misery for everyone.
Apple could release a statement reassuring people that no one will be locked out of their account for redeeming any gift card going forward. We have collectively forgotten that companies have stopped talking this way. That’s what we need to change.
I mean, yes, absolutely. I don't have a count limit on my boycott list. I won't be holding my breath for empty promises from corporate. We need to build systems that assert user sovereignty and prevent abuse, not wait around for evil people to do good things.
My bank does let me use such a device. In fact all big banks I use (and I use about a half dozen) work just fine on GrapheneOS.
> If I want to participate it modern life, where I live, I need an Android (Google blessed) or Apple device.
"Modern life..." - wow. The only thing I'm not doing that you are is tap to pay with your phone. I have cards that work just fine for this use case. Stone age, right? Not sure if anyone could survive in a modern society without it. o_O
Tbf banks are truly driving the coercion. My banks used to have functional apps on bare GrapheneOS, but nowadays they won't launch without Play Services (to wich I can deny network access, pretty neat of GrapheneOS).
Plus my main bank now requires the app even for web access. Nightmarish.
> But, at least with Google you can use hardware without the binding software requirement.
For now, but they are tightening things up.
And at least with Apple they provide convenient end-to-end cloud syncing. Google doesn't.
(And this back and forth can go on for a long time...)
You are just picking what is important to you and then ignoring other issues. That isn't how to craft advice that helps people you don't personally know, with needs you are completely unaware of, in a complex domain.
> And at least with Apple they provide convenient end-to-end cloud syncing. Google doesn't.
What?
In fact you have more (and better) options on an Android based device.
> That isn't how to craft advice that helps people you don't personally know, with needs you are completely unaware of, in a complex domain.
Cool story. But it's OK for you to craft advice on a topic you're not well versed in (cloud sync)? Seems like you're ignoring some issues and misunderstanding needs that you're completely unaware of in a pretty straightforward domain.
In phones you have a choice of iOS (Apple) or Android (Google). Sure, maybe some people can go back to flip phones, but I can’t without finding a new job.
This is the first I’ve heard of Apple locking someone out of their account for no reason. Google does it all the time. So, yeah, can’t leave Apple over this.
>> This is the first I’ve heard of Apple locking someone out of their account for no reason. Google does it all the time. So, yeah, can’t leave Apple over this.
The thing is, you don't need to avoid buying Apple completely, you just need to avoid giving Apple all of your life: your photos, documents, emails, backups, passwords, bills, ... basically you should avoid doing what the person in the OP did.
What I do is have my primary machine keep all of that stuff downloaded. I only use iCloud to sync. Anything happens, I can take the computer offline and even restore from a local backup if there’s a problem.
And this isn’t hypothetical, I’ve use backups regularly for reloading secondary machines for over a decade.
As soon as I heard the first one of these stories about a guy getting google broad-spectrum banned because a junkbot AI thought his completely normal youtube comment was a nazi rant or whatever else it hallucinated - I bailed on the whole shebang. Hosting your own stuff is, if you're a reader of this site, easy enough and cheap enough there's little reason not to.
People love to smugly suggest this useless advice like there aren’t literal public services from governments around the world that are being tied to these platforms, let alone the many private companies which gate access to their goods and services behind apps on proprietary devices.
To say nothing of the fact that well-adjusted humans need to communicate with friends and family, and many times that also practically requires being on these platforms as well.
Someone has to be the stick in the mud, right? I personally enjoy being that guy that doesn’t have a smartphone and causing problems in every government office / institution that assumes everyone has a smartphone, it’s like I’m a pioneer on the frontier :)
E-stim addicts will rationalize their slavery to a small rock in their pocket and sing grand songs about how it’s a curse but they need it. Like all addicts, they are not capable of rationally assessing the utility of the dependence object, and they’ll start carting out all sorts of silly things and gesturing vaguely “See this washing machine? Yep, it needs the rock, that’s why I keep my rock on me and charged at all times”
Reality is that you are the one paying the price, you will spend 45 minutes extra at the office when you could have spent it with your family or friends or playing soccer.
Time is the most precious thing in life, you’ll never be able to buy it back so you may want to reconsider long-term.
This also applies to protesting, activism, politics... It's not that you're wrong, it is in fact time that you could've spent playing soccer. But if everyone just turned their back and played soccer, the world would be a much darker place
Pretty sure I'm getting >10x returns on my time for the minor inconveniences I suffer, most people sacrifice a double digit percent of their time on Earth to the device in their pocket.
You don't have to obey, but not doing so I think definitely puts you into most people's "not well-adjusted" camp... whether you think that's a good thing or not is a different issue I suppose. Lots of people in history who ended up being right were treated similarly...
And I really meant to write "not seen as well-adjusted" above... wasn't trying to say that anyone actually is or not.
I know you think it's rude, my apologies and I wasn't trying to be... just pointing out that people are still going to think it's weird and "not normal" to go to such "extremes" that most people don't, no matter how right they are.
If it was be that simple. In that case I would have to go to the bank for every transaction/payment I want to initiate online. Banking app doesn't work for jailbroken devices. Using PC to access banks website works, but transactions still require 2FA and they don't support any other 2FA flow except the one in the app.
There's always a workaround. There are banks with far less annoying root checking and you can just switch. Many banks allow SMS or a physical authenticator for web banking or 3DS 2FA. There are also many was to bypass root detection. If your main problem is 3DS 2FA for online card payments, get a proxy card.
"you can just switch" and yet then you have to contact X people and change Y contracts that are related to your prior bank account. It is not that simple.
Plus nothing ensures the bank you switch to won't up their "defenses" in a week.
I never said it was trivial, I said it was possible. In many places, it's actually very easy. In others it takes some work, but we're talking about de-googling your life, having to put in some work is already implied.
At least around here, I can walk into a bank, sign a few papers, then that bank coordinates with my old bank to transfer all my direct debits, move all my money and notify all my periodic creditors (employer, social security, tax office...). Peer-to-peer payments (like splitting bills with friends) are usually done by alias (phone number or email) on our instant payment scheme, not by IBAN, and my new bank will take care of rerouting that too. And if for whatever reason someone has my old IBAN and tries to send me money in the future, they'll get a rejection and will just have to ask me for my new one, no big deal.
As for "in a week", come on, you're just being intentionally annoying. Obviously there's no guarantee. If they don't have root detection now, after everyone has had it for a decade, there's probably a reason and they won't implement it any time soon. And if you're just supremely unlucky and they actually do it right after you switch, oh well, you wasted and afternoon. Definitely less time wasted than trying all the million different root hiding techniques that probably don't work anymore.
You don't have to go to the bank for every transaction, you can just go there once to close out your account and open one somewhere that doesn't require that.
Depends though what you mean by "do not use Google". Having an Android phone with a Google account logged in will not affect you much. If they would block one account you just create another.
Having all your emails on Gmail and used for external services (bank, insurances, etc) is a different story though. I prefer to pay my email provider, at least they will care a bit more than they do for a free account...
I'm surprised, most banks I've come across force sms or phone-call 2fa only. A rare few allow generic TOTP authenticators, and maybe one or two has an app as an option. And I've only come across one bank that detects and warns for root access. Is there no "jailbreak hide" on ios?
In Poland it's SMS OTPs, bank app (heavily recommended and in some cases enforced by the bank) or additionally paid physical TOTP token devices. And almost all banks throw a hissy fit once you have some sort of vector of root detection left open.
I naturally wrote "it's not just X, it's Y" long before November 2022 ChatGPT.
Probably because I picked up on it from many people.
It's a common rhetorical template of a parallel form where the "X" is re-stating the obvious surface-level thing and then adding the "Y" that's not as obvious.
E.g. examples of regular people writing that rhetorical device on HN for 15+ years that wasn't in the context of advertising gadgets:
So AI-slop writes like that because a lot of us humans wrote like that and it copies the style. Today is the first time I've learned that the "It's not X, it's Y" really irritates many readers. Personally, I've always found it helpful when it reveals a "Y" that's non-obvious.
2) Most of those, while they had the two statements, the statements were not in succession.
There are maybe 4 unique examples in the search over the past 15 years, which is why it is very telling when there is an explosion of the pattern seen today, and that is most likely due to LLMs.
I was responding in particular to the "you write like a late night kitchen gizmo ad?" ... which would be a speech pattern people hear. In the audio case, it doesn't matter what punctuation symbol separates the "it isn't/it's" pattern because the comma or em dash would be invisible.
>There are maybe 4 unique examples in the search over the past 15 years,
No, (1) the Algolia search engine HN uses is not exhaustive and always returns incomplete results, and (2) I couldn't construct a regex to capture all occurrences. It didn't capture the dozens of times I used it before 2022.
More pre-2022 examples that match the "it isn't/it's" pattern that the blog author is complaining about :
The same gp mentioned that it's also common in "ad copy". That's also true with the famous Navy's "It's not just a job. It's an adventure.". E.g. 1981 tv commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc9g2tagYms
That's a slogan people heard rather than read with an em dash. LLM engines picked up on a common phrasing used for decades.
I understand that there are multiple people in this conversation, but you are attempting to pick and choose points to discuss at the expense of your own internal consistency. If you were responding to "which would be a speech pattern people hear," why did you only quote written examples from the HN search and not provide video or audio clips?
>why did you only quote written examples from the HN search and not provide video or audio clips?
At the risk of stating the obvious, highlighting the HN _texts_ demonstrates in a very literal way the "write like" fragment in gp's question, "You write like a late night kitchen gizmo ad?. The other fragment was the "late night kitchen gizmo ad" which is the audio comparison. The gp was making that comparison between the writing style and the speech style when asking the question. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46165248)
Providing audio links would not show the "writes like". The gp (and you) already know what the "It isn't/It's" audio pattern sounds like. It's the written text the gp was wondering about.
The point is people really did write text like that (no em dashes required) before ChatGPT existed.
EDIT reply to: >He just said that it is traditionally associated with late-night ads, and that the explosion in use of the phrase (especially with the em-dash)
Actually, the gp (0_____0) I was responding to didn't mention the em dash in either of the 2 comments. Gp used a comma instead of em dash. Gp only mentioned the comparison to ad copy. The em dash wasn't relevant in the subthread we're in. That's something extra you brought up that's not related to gp's specific question.
EDIT reply to: >Quick HN tip: It is usually better to reply to a post instead of editing the original post.
I agree but the "reply" option was not available. This is a "cool down" mechanism HN uses to discourage flame wars. I don't know if it's 30 minutes or what the value is before the reply link shows up. It was just easier to reply in my post rather than wait an indeterminate time.
>This statement is incorrect, as the original post mentioned, "'it's not just x — it's y' format is the hallmark
Yes but that's not the ggp (ceroxylon) I was responding to. Instead, I was responding t gp (0_____0)'s question and the 2 times the writing was compared to ad copy with no mention of em dashes. Sorry for not making that clear.
>Showing fewer than a dozen uses of the phrase
Again, there are thousands of examples but the Algolia search engine will not show all of them.
Quick HN tip: It is usually better to reply to a post instead of editing the original post.
>Actually, the GP (0_____0) I was responding to didn't mention the em dash in either of the two comments. GP used a comma instead of an em dash. GP only mentioned the comparison to ad copy. The em dash wasn't relevant in the subthread we're in. That's something you brought up.
This statement is incorrect, as the original post mentioned, "'it's not just x — it's y' format is the hallmark of mediocre articles being written/edited by AI." (note the quotes in the first post), and the next post said, "It's simply how literate people write."
All of this is beside the point, however, because your statement, "The point is people really did write text like that (no em dashes required) before ChatGPT existed," was never contended in this thread, and I do not think anyone has ever thought that ChatGPT created that phrase, so it just doesn't add to the discussion. Showing fewer than a dozen uses of the phrase (with or without the em dash) in a 15-year period just further proves that it was not a common written turn of phrase before ChatGPT.
>The point is people really did write text like that (no em dashes required) before ChatGPT existed.
OK, I think I can see your point, but at best it is irrelevant. At no point did the original poster imply that ChatGPT created the phrase, or that it wasn’t in spoken or written language before then. He just said that it is traditionally associated with late-night ads, and that the explosion in use of the phrase (especially with the em-dash) is most likely attributed to increased LLM use.
>Everyone likes a service when it’s subsidized by VC dollars.
Netflix went public in 2002. It was +8 years later that the streaming-only service was launched in 2010. The digital streaming wasn't "subsidized by VC".
Netflix had more content from everybody back then because the other studios licensed their content for cheap prices to Netflix. But those studios then realized that Netflix was growing rapidly on the backs of their content. Once those multi-year contracts expired, studios like Disney didn't renew with Netflix and instead, started their own platform (e.g. Disney+).
You're not wrong, but that doesn't mean they weren't still in "growth" phase.
Their pricing, and their doubling down on account sharing policies over the last few years have shown that they are no longer in a growth phase.
I cancelled my Netflix account a few months ago because I had gotten the "You're not accessing this from your typical location" blocker. Even though I was trying to watch from my permanent residence and I was the account owner / payee.
The reason that happened was that my wife and I own two properties. We are happily married, not separated, but we just like our space... especially with two adult daughters who still live at home with one of their significant others also living in the house.
We are a single family "unit" but have two locations. Furthermore, my wife has sleeping issues and was using Netflix at night in order to fall asleep. To have to get me to check my email for an access code, was a total deal breaker since I would be fast asleep. So that cut her off from her typical usage of Netflix.
And the reason Netflix thought that I was accessing the service from a different location was that I hardly ever watched it. Every time I'd pull it up, I would spend more time scrolling for something to watch than actually watching anything.. and typically I'd just give up and go watch a 30m YouTube video instead.
So I was paying more, receiving less ... mostly had the account purely for my wife and daughters who watched it the most ... and then the final deal breaker was logistical barriers preventing me from being able to use what I'm paying for.
Agree, but I think they moved away from growth to this not because they lost investor money / vc demands but because they started losing a lot of licensing deals and content, and had to shift from redistribution to making more and more originals with capital investment cost and etc.
Slightly different reasons for enshitiffication - if Spotify lost half of their catalogue suddenly they might move in the same way I guess.
These content library contracts are only for a couple of years, and each time one lapses, some terms get negotiated. Nobody in the streaming industry is successful because they have a long term lock on someone else’s content. It’s all about eyeballs and margins.
Sure, that was very early though. You could argue that was crucial for establishing their brand, but the industry has caught up and doesn't do that very much now.
>I'm not messaging all the other sellers and suggesting we all raise prices by 10%,
The way competitors legally message each other to suggest a price increase is via the prices themselves.
E.g. an airline wants to raise the price of a ticket from New York to Los Angeles from $500 to $530 -- and they secretly want the other airlines to follow them and raise their prices too.
1) The airline submits the price increase to the global travel reservation system that all airlines can see. All the other airlines have computers constantly monitoring all the other airlines' ticket prices and can instantly adjust prices in response.
2) The airline that wants the price increase waits to see how the other airlines respond. Either (1) the competitor airlines keeps their lower prices to "take market share" -- or -- (2) they also raise their prices to match which "maintains status quo of market share" but all competitors get to take advantage of charging the higher price
3) If the other airlines don't match the higher price, the airline that "proposed" the higher price then rolls it back to $500. All this can happen within a few hours.
That's the way competitors "collude" to raise prices out in the open. The publicly visible prices are the messaging system. The loophole here is that the changing prices must be visible because the potential passengers buying the tickets need to see them too.
The above scenario has been studied by various papers and the government. The prices simultaneously act as both a "cost to buy" and as a "message to cooperate".
Legal "collusion" via price signals is easier in concentrated industries with few competitors (e.g. airlines). It's harder for fragmented markets or markets with hundreds-to-thousands of competitors. E.g. a barbershop wanting to raise the price of haircuts by $5 isn't going to get the hundred other barbershops to also raise their prices by $5.
>The above scenario has been studied by various papers and the government. The prices simultaneously act as both a "cost to buy" and as a "message to cooperate".
Yea I mean. A simple watch of movie film "A bueaitful Mind" starring John Nash as math genius russel crowe. Crowe equilibrium or whatever it's called. That scene where the nerds were in the bar trying to get the girl. his friends said let the best man win and crowe said - no - only way to win is we collude. and then they won. Now imagine that -- but it's not russel crowe, it's united airlines.
I mean if you look at companies from that crowe equilibruim perspective and treat them as sophisticated and rational.. one would expect most everything to be rigged!
Windows NT started development in 1988 and the public beta was released in July 1992 which happened before Ken Thompson devised UTF-8 on a napkin in September 1992. Rob Pike gave a UTF-8 presentation at USENIX January 1993.
Windows NT general release was July 1993 so it's not realistic to replace all UCS-16 code with UTF-8 after January 1993 and have it ready in less than 6 months. Even Linux didn't have UTF-8 support in July 1993.
>I'll never really understand how they ruined the opportunity presented,
Money. It's easier to understand it if you realize each studio is trying to maximize its own revenue.
Consider the common advice given to content creators and startups : "You don't want to be a sharecropper on somebody else's platform."
Well, the other studios like Disney, HBO-WarnerBros, Paramount, etc are just taking that same advice by not being beholden to Netflix's platform.
E.g. Instead of Disney just simply licensing all of their catalog to Netflix and then just getting a partial fraction of Netflix's $17.99 subscription revenue, Disney would rather create their own platform and get 100% of their own $19.99 revenue. In addition, the Disney+ subscribers are Disney's customers instead of Netflix's.
Everybody avoiding the "sharecropping" model inevitably leads to fragmentation of content. Everybody pursuing their self-interested revenue maximization leads to not sharecropping on Netflix's platform because Netflix (i.e. the Netflix subscribers) won't pay the equivalent higher prices that Disney thinks they can get on their own.
To create a truly unified video streaming service with everything for one cheap monthly price means multiple studios have to willingly give up revenue. Most customers are not willing to pay Netflix a hypothetical $150+ per month such that all studios like Disney think it's a waste of money to maintain their own exclusive digital streaming service and would be happy with the fractional revenue share from Netflix.
The rightmost columns of media coverage (homicides, terrorism, plane crashes, etc) ... are "man bites dog" stories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_bites_dog
It's just the nature of journalism and headlines.
E.g. A frequent story that hits the front page of HN is "I'm quitting social media..."
But the much more common scenario of "I'm still keeping my social media account active today just like I did yesterday" ... is not submitted -- and nor would it be upvoted to the front page.
Real-life high frequency of normality doesn't make for compelling news.
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