The article is somewhat old, but the quality of the Medium code continues to be terrible. What made me think about this is how the front-end of Substack, which has stolen Medium's thunder, also looks terrible these days. It wasn't always like this. But these platforms always seem to follow this standardisation pattern.
Generally speaking, unless there was a sort of constitutional right of people submitting apps to app stores, I find it somewhat complicated, because the multibillion dollar corporation could always argue, "Oh, we didn't remove it because the government asked us to gain some favor with the current administration, but rather because it violated our user policy." Like, you can very, very, very easily hide behind a private corporation deciding to exercise its power to decide such an app violated their internal user policy.
Hell, even if there were a public register of Trump asking them to remove an app, you could always argue, "Well, anyone, regardless of them being president of the United States or not, is free to ask for an app to be removed; anyone could theoretically demand and protest anything, and Trump, as any citizen, has this right" (not saying I agree with that thesis, to be clear).
But I do believe the whole point highlights a bigger problem: a negative relation between big corporations and the government. I'm not sure how anyone would solve it. Maybe by sidelining the whole issue by making it easier for people to install apps from whatever the fuck they want, without the app stores gatekeeping what software one installs on their device.
But if anything, we are moving far away from that, even on Android
"The Court finds that Plaintiffs have shown that their injuries are likely traceable to government-coerced enforcement for the following reasons. First, Facebook had previously reviewed the Chicagoland group, and Apple had previously reviewed Eyes Up. In both cases, Facebook and Apple had determined that the content met their requirements. Second, Facebook and Apple changed their positions and removed the content immediately after Defendants contacted them about it. And third, Defendants made public statements taking credit for the fact that Facebook and Apple had removed the content."
"Regarding the third element, and as alleged, Defendants’ actions can be reasonably understood to convey a threat of adverse government action against Facebook and Apple in order to suppress Plaintiffs’ speech" ...
"As the Seventh Circuit found in Backpage, although the defendant lacked “authority to take any official action” and did not “directly threaten the [third parties] with an investigation or prosecution,” the defendant still engaged in coercion where he “demand[ed]” rather than “request[ed],” and where he “intimat[ed]” that the third parties “may be criminal accomplices” if they failed to comply. Id. at 232, 236. Here, Bondi and Noem did exactly that. They reached out to Facebook and Apple and demanded, rather than requested, that Facebook and Apple censor Plaintiff’s speech."
>defendants made public statements taking credit for the fact that Facebook and Apple had removed the content
It feels if they were a slightly smarter and not had made an announcement that about such fact they would have gotten away with it hell, this probably happens all the time, but other administrations maybe were more discreet. Be that as it may, regardless of this decision, which can be appealed by the way, there is that saying: there is nothing more coward than money – and would argue power as well. A single discreet Trump meting with Tim Cook, and Trump saying "I would be really happy if you removed that app, and not tell anyone that I asked you for it", could have been enough.
It seems these sort decisions are fundamentally useless:
* It doesn't even force companies to reinstate such apps.
* It doesn't give any constitutional right for apps to be on the app stores.
* It doesn't force companies to allow people to install apps from whatever they want, which would be by far the best solution
The reason people are so shocked about the administration isn't the horrible things they do, but how they are so bad at it.
You can look at the financial blockade of Wikileaks as an example of how to get away with it.
It is impossible for the judge to change #2 as the 1st amendment freedom of association gives broad powers to Apple and Facebook to decide who to associate with. Also note there's no constitutional right to have phone service, so why should there be a constitutional right for an app to be in the app store?
I think article sounds click bait or at the very least not representing the facts fairly. Also, debloating is not only about performance, but about you not seeing random crap, when open the star menu for instance, other similar anti-user features, like the new context menu that doesn't offer you the same functionality as the old.
What I would agree or say, is that if you debloat and update Windows, the update will most likely undo whatever you did, and well, that's part of the game. I usually solve this by disabling updates and deciding when I will update the system, so I'm prepared and have reserved time to re-apply the patches on that day.
The point in the article is that 'debloating' does nothing for performance. And they're right. Uninstalling things you don't run does nothing for performance. Background tasks largely don't interfere with foreground processes thanks to the foreground process boost Windows uses.
It allows you to do text to full search on youtube videos. The project obviously didn't index ALL youtube videos subtitles, but it easily index millions of youtube subtitles.
It also probably won't work if the person actually wants your content and is checking if the thing they scraped actually makes sense or it just noise. Like, none of these are new things. Site owners send junk/fake data to webscrapers since web scraping was invented.
Totally random observation, but this site, Windows Central (I think it belongs to a company named Future PLC), is bloated as hell. So it was somewhat ironic seeing them publishing about how Microsoft should make Windows less shitty for its users
I heard Seedance is also full of restrictions now, although the model seems to be better at that sort of “cinematic” look, which might allow it to compete with Veo 3 and the like.
The issue is that Sora ended up getting the short end of the stick: by generating the footage, it became the primary target of complaints. Meanwhile, they were forced to remove the videos, but people simply took those videos and uploaded them to random social media platforms like Twitter, TikTok, or YouTube, which ended up hosting the content while being much less of a target, since the content wasn’t generated there.
Honestly, I think the only way forward will be to wait for local models to become good enough so that you can run something like Sora locally and generate whatever you want.
Seedance has a lot more restrictions now, but still arguably not as much, it's probably cheaper for ByteDance to run, and as you said, it at least looks good enough to be worth paying for.
Sora had all of the downsides, and attracted all of the scrutiny. Local-first is definitely the way.
i think it's clear cloud hosted is the actual future, which people have predicted for decades. it will never make financial sense to duplicate what you can get for cheap, because it's oversubscribed, with economies of scale and "if we let this run idle it's losing us money" pressure, for hardware found in a datacenter.
this has been the case for a long while now, and will increasingly be so as data centers buy up all the everything.
local first usually means extreme compromise so it can, practically, be run locally, because the cost of owning high end hardware is prohibitive. there are also companies providing locally deployed closed source models, that meet certain security requirements.
I'm reading this discussion, and allow me to give you my two cents. It's not a matter of being impossible, but rather how much the rest of society is willing to pay to maintain such infrastructure (either through higher taxes when dealing with the government, or through more expensive goods/services when dealing with corporations, since companies need to maintain old infrastructure that most people don't use).
For example, I read that Switzerland voted to guarantee the use of physical cash, even enshrining it in the constitution, which clearly points toward preserving older infrastructure. However, if you have cash but no one accepts it, it becomes useless. So it would probably require more—something like requiring businesses and the government to accept that form of payment.
As many things in life, not impossible: but is society willing to pay for that?
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