NaraVara's recent activity

  1. Comment on Marvel Rivals | Official announcement trailer in ~games

    NaraVara
    Link
    It’s pre-alpha so obviously a lot of work to go, but currently this gameplay looks extremely generic. The movement seems floaty and slow and the handling of each of the characters doesn’t seem all...

    It’s pre-alpha so obviously a lot of work to go, but currently this gameplay looks extremely generic. The movement seems floaty and slow and the handling of each of the characters doesn’t seem all that differentiated aside from their special abilities. It just doesn’t strike me as being that fun.

    Like, the Spider-Man character seems to mostly just be walking and running. He’s Spider-Man! Who wants to play a version of Spider-Man that walks everywhere?

    3 votes
  2. Comment on Apple has kept an illegal monopoly over smartphones in US, Justice Department says in antitrust suit in ~tech

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    Yeah it’s kind of a shame. I definitely wouldn’t want to live in a world where Apple is the only manufacturer or even one where the majority of computers are made by companies that operate like...

    Yeah it’s kind of a shame. I definitely wouldn’t want to live in a world where Apple is the only manufacturer or even one where the majority of computers are made by companies that operate like Apple. BUT the world would be a whole lot poorer without a company like Apple making design trade offs that zig where everyone else zags.

    1 vote
  3. Comment on Apple has kept an illegal monopoly over smartphones in US, Justice Department says in antitrust suit in ~tech

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    That’s fundamentally counter to the Apple design philosophy. This is THE differentiator between Apple and all the other OEM producers and Microsoft’s of the world. The integration is the whole...

    I do have to wonder what the smartphone market would look like if Apple the hardware manufacturer and Apple the software company were two separate companies.

    That’s fundamentally counter to the Apple design philosophy. This is THE differentiator between Apple and all the other OEM producers and Microsoft’s of the world. The integration is the whole deal. Take that away and you don’t have Apple.

    6 votes
  4. Comment on Apple has kept an illegal monopoly over smartphones in US, Justice Department says in antitrust suit in ~tech

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    I don’t think any amount of money will create a review process that satisfies even most people as long as they have as much of an open door policy for developers. And no, $20Bn total isn’t crazy...

    I don’t think any amount of money will create a review process that satisfies even most people as long as they have as much of an open door policy for developers.

    And no, $20Bn total isn’t crazy much for the scale of the App Store. There are 5 million apps in there. That would be about $4,000 per app, including all the infrastructure and associated API development, partnerships, bugs, etc. That’s a tidy profit, but unless the individual problems are really scalable that won’t be a ton, because I think you’d ideally need to have a bunch of engineering liaisons (expensive) with small portfolios (lots of people) to support each developer.

    1 vote
  5. Comment on Apple has kept an illegal monopoly over smartphones in US, Justice Department says in antitrust suit in ~tech

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    That’s not how corporate accounting works. Business units have to justify their existence individually, not just say “well the company as a whole has cash reserves so it’s fine to be a major cost...

    That’s not how corporate accounting works. Business units have to justify their existence individually, not just say “well the company as a whole has cash reserves so it’s fine to be a major cost center.”

    The company’s total cash on hand doesn’t mean they can just fund individual business lines to operate at a loss forever. Unless it’s a capital investment to fund future growth (which more moderation wouldn’t be, it’s a cost center and a bottomless pit at that) it doesn’t make business sense to do that.

    And it’s not like you just throw money at a problem and it’s magically solved. That’s also how engineering works. If it was, Apple would be rolling cars off the assembly line today.

    4 votes
  6. Comment on Apple has kept an illegal monopoly over smartphones in US, Justice Department says in antitrust suit in ~tech

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    A high quality review process would probably require more than a 30% cut to actually execute. Nothing about the DOJ’s suit is geared towards making them improve their curation, it’s geared towards...

    They’ve had a thirty percent cut of all app sales to fund a high-quality review process for over a decade.

    A high quality review process would probably require more than a 30% cut to actually execute.

    Nothing about the DOJ’s suit is geared towards making them improve their curation, it’s geared towards making them curate less and instigating a race-to-the-bottom effect against curating at all.

    If we wanted to improve curation we’d flatly just ban casino games and leave it at that. It’s too tempting for Apple to continue permitting that dirty money to slosh around in their store and it trying to police abuses around it drains resources away from doing anything else.

    1 vote
  7. Comment on Apple has kept an illegal monopoly over smartphones in US, Justice Department says in antitrust suit in ~tech

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    You can kind of see in Apple’s rules around it exactly the sorts of sneaky ways around their restrictions that companies have done in the past. They require a special set of API calls that have to...

    You can kind of see in Apple’s rules around it exactly the sorts of sneaky ways around their restrictions that companies have done in the past. They require a special set of API calls that have to be authorized, they initially didn’t want to permit you to run a store that only sells your company’s apps, etc. This all seems to be designed to prevent stuff like the facebook Onavo scam or companies setting up 3rd party stores solely to distribute their own spyware.

  8. Comment on Apple has kept an illegal monopoly over smartphones in US, Justice Department says in antitrust suit in ~tech

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    They would have had to pay to set up their own store to get your extra $20, and it probably would have cost them nearly that $20 to do it. It doesn’t pay to run your own store until you get into...

    The developer could have potentially made an extra 20 bucks from me had I purchased it from an app store they owned, but they don't do that.

    They would have had to pay to set up their own store to get your extra $20, and it probably would have cost them nearly that $20 to do it. It doesn’t pay to run your own store until you get into very very large install bases.

  9. Comment on Apple has kept an illegal monopoly over smartphones in US, Justice Department says in antitrust suit in ~tech

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    If you had included the sentence that you omitted in your quote, it would have been pretty clear that I was talking about smaller, indie developers: And you’ll notice when you say AAA games,...

    If you had included the sentence that you omitted in your quote, it would have been pretty clear that I was talking about smaller, indie developers:

    It’s not even close from an indie developer perspective among “normies” because the level of trust is on the floor.

    And you’ll notice when you say AAA games, figma/Adobe, Ableton, etc. that these are all expensive applications from very large companies, many of which are purchased through business licenses. It’s simply not the same market. None of this stuff is even on the radar for the typical non-techie grandparent.

    1 vote
  10. Comment on Apple has kept an illegal monopoly over smartphones in US, Justice Department says in antitrust suit in ~tech

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    The scale of indie software adoption by normies on the Mac is simply nowhere near what the App Store has enabled on the phone. It’s really not even close. The Mac basically coasts off the...

    I don’t know how much experience you have with the Mac, but it has a thriving developer scene despite the Mac App Store, not because of it.

    The scale of indie software adoption by normies on the Mac is simply nowhere near what the App Store has enabled on the phone. It’s really not even close. The Mac basically coasts off the historical legacy of desktop computing, where everything was basically trusted by default and, when you go far back enough, you had to compile the code yourself to run anything.

    I listen to ATP, I think Marco is letting his frustration with App Store review processes cloud his judgement honestly. Developers, in general, start to lose the view from the user’s perspective after a while and forget that the relationship between end-user and app developer can often be as antagonistic as it is cooperative. Yeah the application adds value, but for the developer your primary concern is my experience of using your application, but not my experience of using my phone and all the other effects the application has on that. Guys like Marco assume everyone is going to approach it like him, but I’ve looked at investment pitches from skeezy, fly-by-night game and application developers before and it’s pretty.

    I would say, if anything, there should be a whole lot fewer apps on the App Store and the code review policies should be quite a bit stricter. In an ideal world Apple would make devs go through some sort of certification program and only permit passing developers on, but in the real world companies like Google and Meta probably shouldn’t pass but would need to be allowed in anyway.

    2 votes
  11. Comment on Apple has kept an illegal monopoly over smartphones in US, Justice Department says in antitrust suit in ~tech

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    This is an argument that Apple should be doing more and better, not less.

    This is an argument that Apple should be doing more and better, not less.

    3 votes
  12. Comment on Apple has kept an illegal monopoly over smartphones in US, Justice Department says in antitrust suit in ~tech

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    I mentioned it in another comment, but the EU pretty clearly sees the platforms owning their own app stores as inherently problematic and are trying to untangle them in clumsy ways. It takes too...

    I mentioned it in another comment, but the EU pretty clearly sees the platforms owning their own app stores as inherently problematic and are trying to untangle them in clumsy ways. It takes too much work to sideload on Android now for broader adoption, but the EC clearly views those hurdles as anti-competitive and is going to continually try to knock them down. Google is already under investigation for this and it’s probably not gonna go well.

    Right now it’s not worth it for most of the third parties to run their own App Store because iOS doesn’t permit it and they’re not gonna run a separate stores that omits the majority of the addressable market of people who pay for software. If the gates are open on iOS the math makes a lot more sense to set up the infrastructure to run a separate storefront.

  13. Comment on Apple has kept an illegal monopoly over smartphones in US, Justice Department says in antitrust suit in ~tech

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    The EU is about to launch an investigation into Google privileging the Play store as part of its anti-steering efforts. They pretty clearly don’t want the platform owners to own their own...

    The EU is about to launch an investigation into Google privileging the Play store as part of its anti-steering efforts. They pretty clearly don’t want the platform owners to own their own application store at all.

    Today it requires a decent amount of extra work to do the sideloading, the lower the barriers to doing it are, the more companies will start to cajole (or induce with freebies) users into doing it.

  14. Comment on Apple has kept an illegal monopoly over smartphones in US, Justice Department says in antitrust suit in ~tech

    NaraVara
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    This is simply not how the real world works. Because my bank or my insurance company or some smart home device I need or the social network all my friends are on will require me to side load their...

    If governments force Apple to allow sideloading, you can still choose to only install software from the Apple App Store.

    This is simply not how the real world works. Because my bank or my insurance company or some smart home device I need or the social network all my friends are on will require me to side load their app to use it. Once the door is open it’s all the way open.

    Having a large corporate maintaining that boundary on my behalf is the only way it works. They simply have more negotiating leverage than any individual consumer does.

    Like this isn’t theoretical. The market for software on PCs is a fraction of what it is on mobile. It’s not even close from an indie developer perspective among “normies” because the level of trust is on the floor. The web is even more of a hellscape, with people being phished and scammed in droves. The problem of how to get people to pay for software has been a tough nut to crack for years.

    Apple cracked the code on creating a business model where indie developers can make real money, and not just by being data sources to funnel information to ad networks.

    4 votes
  15. Comment on Apple has kept an illegal monopoly over smartphones in US, Justice Department says in antitrust suit in ~tech

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    If the “move” ends up being “make your ecosystem and product offerings shittier so cheap commodity vendors can compete with you” I am 100% against that. A lot of people have hate boners for Apple...

    I'm not against the DoJ making some moves against Apple.

    If the “move” ends up being “make your ecosystem and product offerings shittier so cheap commodity vendors can compete with you” I am 100% against that.

    A lot of people have hate boners for Apple for what are functionally just tech-hipsterism reasons.

    5 votes
  16. Comment on Apple has kept an illegal monopoly over smartphones in US, Justice Department says in antitrust suit in ~tech

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    Let’s say I want to buy a phone where the manufacturer has made me an implicit promise that any software I install on it will never fuck my battery, install secret rootkits, or do other weird shit...

    Let’s say I want to buy a smartphone that pays developers a better percentage than 70% (this is slowly changing, but let’s assume not for the sake of argument). Well, touch luck.

    Let’s say I want to buy a phone where the manufacturer has made me an implicit promise that any software I install on it will never fuck my battery, install secret rootkits, or do other weird shit that’s not advertised. You would wish to make that business model illegal.

    4 votes
  17. Comment on India electrified 45% of its railway network in just five years in ~transport

    NaraVara
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    They also drew Kashmir to include the Pakistan occupied part, but excluding the Chinese occupied part, which is a choice I have never seen before. Usually they’re either maximalists for the Indian...

    They also drew Kashmir to include the Pakistan occupied part, but excluding the Chinese occupied part, which is a choice I have never seen before. Usually they’re either maximalists for the Indian claim or minimalists but rarely selective. And if they are selective they typically exclude PoK but retain Aksai Chin.

    What’s even weirder is even though Kashmir doesn’t include the Chinese occupied region, they do include the disputed region of Arunachal Pradesh as Indian.

    4 votes
  18. Comment on Tesla's gear-shifting problems known long before Angela Chao's death in ~transport

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    No they were called that because if the back door opened even a tiny bit while the car was moving the air resistance would cause it to swing all the way open, and you can’t close it without...

    No they were called that because if the back door opened even a tiny bit while the car was moving the air resistance would cause it to swing all the way open, and you can’t close it without needing to reach out. Back then cars didn’t even always have seatbelts and the seats were basically vinyl benches so people could roll out when that happened. The name is a bit of gallows humor, like calling your motorcycle license an “organ donor card.”

    What you described is the safety feature they added in so that failure mode doesn’t happen.

    8 votes
  19. Comment on Tesla's gear-shifting problems known long before Angela Chao's death in ~transport

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    Minivan doors are great and any car, whose form-factor permits, should have them. Suicide doors too honestly. We have enough smart sensing frippery in our cars now that the risk of it opening...

    Minivan doors are great and any car, whose form-factor permits, should have them.

    Suicide doors too honestly. We have enough smart sensing frippery in our cars now that the risk of it opening while driving are nil.

    11 votes
  20. Comment on An influential economics forum has a troubling surplus of trolls in ~finance

    NaraVara
    Link Parent
    There’s also lots of guys like Tyler Cowen, who are academic economists who do get taken seriously, but also get outsized say in the discipline by virtue of working in a Koch funded economics...

    There’s also lots of guys like Tyler Cowen, who are academic economists who do get taken seriously, but also get outsized say in the discipline by virtue of working in a Koch funded economics department.

    5 votes