@eliterrell yup! Ten years goes by fast.

End of an era. I literally started reading this site in middle school. RIP. https://www.anandtech.com/show/21542/end-of-the-road-an-anandtech-farewell

@cory_foy to be clear the people I blame here are his colleagues not the guy himself. He was clearly in distress and called them for help multiple times. They do an attempt and are thwarted and then finally call search and rescue. Just awful.

This story is so insane. I can sort of understand how someone could get mistakenly separated from a group (but also, you’re on a mountain. Count better!) but to wait like 8 hours before calling search and rescue (after abandoning your own search) is just really terrible. https://www.npr.org/2024/08/29/nx-s1-5093882/colorado-hiker-left-behind-office-retreat-mountain

@jamie_blumberg lol I sent that money they day she reported for prison! and yes RIP Rocket -- thank you for being a boostie!

@vwampage amazing!! thank you so much and it was so fantastic meeting you and talking to you at #xoxfest!

@Adora oh no!! please take care of yourself!!

I’m at #xoxofest so happy to be back

I did something. Coming soon to an #xoxofest near you

@njpozner thank you!

This is infuriating not just because I own the domain name scam.town but because I spent the better part of a decade doing a podcast segment called Scamtown that was this exact same concept and even openly toyed with making it its own show. My bad for not doing my own thing. I’ll own that. But I’m absolutely annoyed b/c this is a thing I did and a concept I had and it’s the same fucking name I created. https://mastodon.online/@9to5Mac/112989365745219118

Oh for fuck sake. I own scam.town as a domain name I’m pretty sure if they want to buy it https://mastodon.online/@9to5Mac/112989365745219118

@apyth @stroughtonsmith @atpfm @altstore @mjtsai I didn’t know that Patreon was used/linked in alt store until your post. Apple told Patreon that their terms were changing last year so I think this is probably a coincidence but it certainly doesn’t look good and makes Apple appear even more petty. Thanks for the share.

@MugsysRapSheet @mmasnick yeah unclear. They are using Flux under the hood which is very, very good at text but it is possible XAI passed along a wrong figure in the prompt. Might play with it more later.

@eduo fully agree!

@eduo yay! So happy! I bought iDOS 3 the other day!

@phi1997 ok well that’s a skill issue. The whole joke is using Elon's AI to make fun of him.

@MugsysRapSheet @mmasnick hilariously, that was in my prompt but the AI engine (Flux) got the number wrong and I didn’t want to rerun it since the output was still very funny

@Pepperbike @mmasnick so like this?

@phi1997 well yes that’s the whole joke

Thanks @mmasnick for the push to make this art

@keyboardg yes. They are doing a cocaine snowball even tho as brothers that is very inappropriate

@HomerNotSimpson yeah this is my prompt

Ngl, this is the greatest image I’ve ever seen created from an AI prompt.

Yes. Call them out, just like Netflix did when Apple threatened to remove the Netflix app over Netflix dropping IAP but still including a web link to manage your account. Patreon doesn’t have the market position of Netflix but they do have a loyal base of users (the app kinda sucks tho so also maybe consider this free publicity to promote your website or web app!)
https://mastodon.social/@daringfireball/112956773688361140

@Eggfreckles as someone (maybe it was @mjtsai?) smart said, “we are so lucky the web existed before the App Store.”

@justincox I think there are fair reasons to criticize Patreon. I don’t think Apple has any high ground in this case at all, however. Bad policy is bad policy.

So I just checked out of curiosity — and forgive me if this has already been litigated like 24 hours ago — but Patreon doesn’t even use Apple’s IAP as the payment processor. If you sign-up for a creator inside the app it defaults to whatever your existing payment method is. So for me, that’s PayPal. So that makes the 30% commission even less defensible. Like I’m genuinely laughing at this now.

@MurphysLawKY I think the “approve this” boxes Sequoia pops up are awful. A lot of the security theater stuff is. I think Stage Manager is an abomination. There are tons of usability deficiencies and regressions that have happened over the years that we become numb to the (imho) bad changes. Is macOS still better than the alternatives? Yes. Is it worse as an overall user experience than where it was a dozen years ago? For me, also yes.

@JoshHrach @pilky @craiggrannell to do a buyback on $3.3T, you’d need multiple Soverign Wealth Funds and even then, you’d be talking about taking on trillions of dollars in debt. The ZIRP-era that helped Michael Dell and Silver Lake flip Dell private (and then push it public again without the activist investors) is over. So a huge amount of the revenue would go to debt/interest payments. And to what end? your banks/investors would still want a return/dividend.

@JoshHrach @pilky @craiggrannell if had never gone public in 1980 and assuming everything else remained the same (which isn’t a fair assumption but let’s just go with it), I’d agree that today, there would be no liquidity reasons for a company with their cash position to go public, but I think it can be argued that to get to that position, you *need* to be a public company. Regardless, at this point getting the money to take Apple private would be almost impossible. See next post.

@fbartho @arstechnica sadly, not in a way that would offer decent or acceptable performance. Apple doesn’t allow emulators to use JIT compilation and that’s going to mean that the performance you have is not good enough to emulate or recompile from DX11 (or even DX9). This is why Dolphin won’t come to the App Store, even tho the ARM processors of the iPad or latest iPhones could run GameCube/Wii stuff perfectly.

Complaining to the press works! Congrats iDOS 3! Bought this yesterday!

From: @arstechnica
https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/112956721667940897

@narles @arstechnica bought it yesterday! Very happy that complaining worked!

@macosken @caseyliss if Patreon had tried to introduce this during the Apple v Epic lawsuit or post DMA, I’d agree. But they launched their app in 2014.

@macosken @caseyliss my pushback here is that they did this for a decade before Apple changed how they enforced the rules. A decade. Now, we can question whether they shouldn’t have tried to get more of an agreement with Apple earlier or even moved to shut down their iOS app once Apple made the announcement that they’d start charging 6 months ago, but having one arrangement for a decade and then having the rules change doesn’t strike me as shortsighted.

I think the only way Apple or any App Store should take a cut from these types of apps are if they are professing the payments and then you can charge your 5% or whatever. I feel the same way about Apple trying to take a cut of people who buy ads on Facebook in the Facebook app. But the real solution, I think, is for Patreon and Substack to just leave the App Store. Fuck it. Leaving is the only way to maybe win. Yes, that might make it worse for your users. Fuck it.
https://mastodon.social/@daringfireball/112956211367383557

People like me are too deep into the Apple ecosystem to ever reasonably leave. Until/unless they fully neuter macOS, I’m here for life. And I’ll realistically never use Android. But the next generation of users might use an iPhone, but they also rely on the web and services from other companies. They use Chromebooks. They don’t have a reason to “root” for Apple the same way I did as a kid. And that’s how platforms change and ecosystems fall off. https://mastodon.social/@film_girl/112955398796903001

The richest company in the world (congrats guys, you’re back on top) being fucking rent-seeking pieces of shit isn’t going to earn your precious services more $, it’s just going to convince a whole new generation of users to avoid the App Store for all payments and have a distaste towards your brand. https://mastodon.social/@caseyliss/112949682879529175

I agree with all of this. I was away for the last 2 days on a video shoot so I missed this dust-up until now but Jason is absolutely right. 17 years ago, Apple rightfully skewered Vista foe this same sort of behavior. I actually think the Sequoia stuff is worse. https://zeppelin.flights/@jsnell/112922329846385002

Meanwhile, while Apple enshittifes macOS and tries to force everyone to use the absolute ghetto that is the piece of shit Mac App Store, they also approve fake apps. So miss me with this “annoying and bad notifications are b/c Apple cares about user safety.” No. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot claim the only way to release safe and reliable apps is through a terrible App Store and also approve predatory fake apps through said App Store. https://appdot.net/@jgordon/112895103651131419

Bffr Apple, this is so anti-user for absolutely no reason. MacOS is still the best desktop operating system but Apple seems content on trying to change that every year as they make decisions that are bad and also diametrically opposed to anything a pro user would actually want. https://9to5mac.com/2024/08/06/macos-sequoia-screen-recording-privacy-prompt/

lol. Only the Humane AI Pin could make the Apple Vision Pro look like a hit https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/7/24211339/humane-ai-pin-more-daily-returns-than-sales

We haven’t had one of these in a while but today is “don’t look at your 401K day.” Just don’t look at it. Don’t look at your Coinbase/Robinhood either. Just don’t look!

Garden State hit theaters 20 years ago today

OK, I was already incensed by the CrowdStrike scenario but now I’m trying to fly to Atlanta for a family emergency and I can’t get on a flight to save my life that won’t take under 17 hours because Delta is completely screwed and every other airline is SOL.

When you ask me what is the greatest TV show of all-time, the easy response is to say, "The Wire." And I mostly agree with that. But I always add the caveat of "Homicide: Life on the Street" because to me, you don't get "The Wire" without Homicide. You just don't. Anyway, after many years of delays and music license stuff, Homicide is coming to Peacock next month and in HD and 4K! This is fantastic news for all of us who have wanted to show our friends top tier television https://deadline.com/2024/07/homicide-life-on-the-street-stream-peacock-1236016316/

I posted this to Twitter and it doesn’t really apply to Mastodon b/c Mastodon (also true of Threads) but the sentiment remains true:

The most reassuring thing about all of this for me is that finally FINALLY I’m seeing good memes on the timeline about the presumptive dem nominee! The Kamala memes have been getting good for a few weeks but are excellent today. I am serious when I say we need people to be inspired to shitpost if we want anyone to show up and vote.

Lmao. The Morning Show is already filming season 4. You know they are so mad to have missed this week.

My favorite part of CrowdStrike’s “statement” about the damage they’ve caused is that there is still a free trial signup thing at the bottom of the blog post. I’ve rarely seen a company so bad at reading the room. Never change, CrowdStrike, never change! https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/statement-on-falcon-content-update-for-windows-hosts/