The "Ministry of Truth" in this case is a bad analogy though, since in the story, its purpose was to redefine what is the truth according to state up to the point of forcing people ignore the proof that they see in front of their eyes through torture.
I'm now picturing a customer support that can send henchmen to convince you that, "no, we never advertised 500m of autonomy, and your range did not drop unexpectedly while you were driving, and anyway the car was fully self-driving itself into that tree - we have logs and data and signed ToC to prove ourselves, now please sit down on this chair so we can strap you and use this big red hammer to protect your free speech."
And it' supposed to sound ridiculous and Terry Gilliam-esque, but it's now eerily realistic...
Yeah, there's a video going around where a dealership is working with Tesla to repair a car battery, but Tesla says the car has structural damage and is therefore classified as salvage, so the repair will cost $12,000+.
The guy says "Salvage is different from having structural damage, I have proof here that it's not salvage". Tesla informs the man that "according to Tesla, it's salvage, and they can't provide any more details about anything, if you want more you have to go through Tesla Legal"
So when it comes to Tesla, it's salvage if they says so, despite any other records, and if you don't like it, you can sue.
Parent wasn’t using it as an analogy though, they were saying it is ironic we were afraid of the state doing that when subtler corporate means are what we ended up with.
I don’t know if it is ironic, though — maybe more of an Orwellian inoculation that pushed the problem elsewhere.
I think the idea would be to compete in different segments. Startups often focus on problems where hypergrowth is at least possible with massive investments. But the examples listed in the article advocate for ideas that might generate millions but not billions in revenue.
Some of the ideas the author is proposing are already happening in Germany. There are grants to develop games for instance which pay you a monthly salary for 1 year and a while back there was a similar one for open source projects.
There is a huge gap in the market, I'd say between capital investment of $50,000 and $5,000,000, where a ton of ideas which can make 20%+ ROI per year once mature live. But because they will never hyper scale they can't be financed by startups, and banks are too scared and stupid to invest.
I've done the math for a document segmentation pipeline that every RAG system needs and you'd be able to get one off the ground for around $2,000,000 USD and be rolling in cash instantly. Good speaker diarization is another family of models that will print money once solved, but again, there isn't the possibility for hyper scale.
Meanwhile at least a dozen companies I've spoken to have wasted on the order of $10,000,000 trying to solve these problems in house and failed.
I think it's more likely that while the punishment might be significant it will be more profitable to continue as long as possible violating the law or at least pushing the boundaries as much as possible instead of proactively being compliant.
After a court order they will know exactly where the limits are and tiptoe them as much as possible. If they proactively try to be "overcompliant" they might loose more money in the long run.
It's messed up to be honest. I would prefer harsher punishments, but on the other hand if companies are scared all the time it might have a chilling economic effect so there is a balance to strike as well.
> while the punishment might be significant it will be more profitable to continue as long as possible violating the law or at least pushing the boundaries as much as possible instead of proactively being compliant
This is it. The law is ambiguous, and until someone specifies the line it makes no sense for either side to concede. Both Epic and Apple are multi-billion dollar companies taking maximalist positions.
There is also the shadow component of it being an open question—given the present state of European politics—as to which will outlast the other, Cupertino or Brussels.
I can't speak for the original poster but one thing that I noticed is that from time to time it happens to me that despite not having a tight deadline I tend to not go all the way in avoiding tech debt.
One example would be that I had a problem in one of the microservices with a version of a docker image that wouldn't run on an M1 mac. I fixed it in that repo but didn't do the same changes to other services with the same issue. Changing the other services would have taken me less than half an hour. This is the kind of laziness that the article and qup are referring to I believe.
The standards mentioned in the article seem to be required to deploy rust code as part of safety critical systems in cars and other industrial applications. This might be a big deal to get rust code into cars but I’m just guessing
From personal experience I can tell you that using a modern framework can be really worth the added complexity even in simple applications.
For one of my clients projects it started out in what seemed like a simple crud app and so I did the few reactive changes in pure java script. The thing is: requirements changed and now after a while I couldn't get around adding VueJS simply because the reactive changes kept piling up.
Even though the HN sentiment seems to be that all "modern" frameworks are just huge piles of code that you add to your project without understanding how any of this works, my personal opinion is that using something like nextjs with server side rendering is not all that different from using a server side php framework like laravel. You still generate the same html unless you need reactive changes and when you do, you are happy to have chosen that. And to play a bit the devil's advocate: Unless you write your own webserver and template rendering engine you are already using a bunch of code you don't really understand.
It is like questioning about backend using a spring boot in every single service even when it is only for a simple store and fetch json from mongoDB. If you have the know-how, why not? Jumping between Vanilla and React projects can be counterproductive. If things get more complex you are prepared, if not, nobody will mind.
It is not fair to compare SPA or big frontend frameworks with "pure JavaScript" or messy jQuery as some imply.
By putting 20% the effort we put nowadays with these big frameworks into well organized "sprinkles" it is a very viable alternatives. Tools such as Stimulus, unpoly, htmx,etc make this very approachable and maintainable.
To me, SPAs only make sense in two scenarios: 1) You have the requirement for the app to work offline, or on really bad network connections (subway, etc) or 2) You already have a team which only wants to do SPAs and everything else is uncool to them.
I feel like D has a lower barrier of entry than rust. It has the familiar patterns most developers a familiar with like garbage collection and inheritance while also giving you the tools to manually take care of the garbage in a safe manner.
As much as I love rust, I can see how as a language, D would be easier to teach devs who come from languages like java, javascript or php.
That would be a grammar checker though. And there are many solutions available today to do that. Even open source solutions. Grammarly would be one example, language tool another.
The ones I looked at work by encoding common spelling mistakes into a grammar (as in Chomsky grammar) and then running that over the text.
No, that's not grammar checking, but spelling mistakes that turn out to be real words!
If you misspelled "college" as "collage", or you misspelled "three" as "tree" the word you typed incorrectly happens to be an actual word itself!
Correcting these types of errors is called "real word spelling correction".
Real-word spelling errors are words in a text that, although correctly spelled words in
the dictionary, are not the words that the writer intended
It's so weird that spellchecking isn't context sensitive: both locality and use.
Locality: The pair "buy Apple" must be vastly preferred, like millions of times more.
Use: I'm writing this and my swipe keyboard offers "spellcasting" when I want "spellchecking". The page I'm on is about spellchecking and the other word isn't one I've ever used until now. You can split these down in to prior-use and use-context, I guess: the former is most annoying, always having to correct in the same manner.
