Making a competitive alternative to iMessage is a game of whack-a-mole that you will always lose, too. Apple would never give a third-party the same level of control they have to integrate with iOS.
So, Beeper's approach here at least makes sense to me. They aren't representing the "hacker spirit" like Torvalds or Stallman, but they are highlighting how arbitrary some software limitations can be. Their efforts here, wasted or not, will be cited when iMessage finds itself in court next time. And to Beeper, a company founded on the idea of unifying all messaging clients, that may be a worthwhile business investment.
It's probably my favorite part of HN, at this point. The reaction from people the other day when Google/Apple admit to cooperating with FIVE-EYES was priceless.
Well, you can't pass legislation to shut down the school shootings factory or invade climate change's homeland. However, Europe has shown us that tying your economy's profitability to a basis of digital standards can easily compel more open behavior.
Given that Apple is quite literally the Largest Company, they're somewhere on that list. Maybe not next to abortions and climate change, but Apple antitrust is an inevitability unless they get smaller or the economy gets bigger.
How is it fascinating? Apple exerts pressure on customers to buy their products, and then further pressures to keep them integrated with Apple's ecosystem. Here, a customer gave in to the first pressure and is disappointed by the artificial friction Apple uses to upsell their customers.
So... are we shocked that iPhone customers don't de-facto agree with everything Apple does? Or the fact that OP would be willing to criticize something they paid for and supposedly identify with?
It's really not fascinating at all. It reads like a perfectly level-headed and candid criticism of an ecosystem by someone who isn't invested in the success of one particular company. It's almost too lucid for HN.
I will say that to their market cap. Such an insane capitalization on digital sales can only be achieved by extinguishing the alternatives your platform can host. It's a regressive featureset that can (apparently) only be reversed through legislative demands a-la Digital Market Act.
Many, many companies have had huge market caps while funding anti-humanist or exploitative processes. Given Apple's scale you almost have to assume that they're abusing something lucrative.
I have multiple flakes and a lotta CUDA drivers. In fairness though, this is after a few months of no manual GC. I think nix-collect-garbage could bring it down to ~120-150gb.
It's totally worth the stability, but maybe not the best choice for the storage-constrained.
EDIT: According to nix-tree my current generation is only 45gb right now.
I remember getting it to work reasonably well with some heavy-handed tinkering, but it was definitely never at a fully playable state on Linux. The remake utterly flies though, so I have hopes that they'll continue development!
SS13 will always have a special place in my juvenile heart, and while I probably wouldn't play it today, I'm glad it's being remade. Supposedly the game performs very poorly under Wine, so having a good native version seems imperative for keeping cross-platform play alive.
If you've never played SS13, by the way, you are the ideal candidate to pick it up and play a few rounds. It's mechanics are highly complex and intertwined: some players are wrapped up in a social sim, while others engage in sabotage. Many players are charged with keeping the peace, others are told to sow discomfort among crew members. The whole thing comes together in a beautifully elaborate machine where all sorts of crazy social situations crop up. Everyone is out for themselves, and that relentlessly petty style of gameplay is what got me hooked when I had nothing more than a Pentium and DSL.
This is my least popular opinion, but NFTs should have been applied here. We desperately need a legally binding, decentralized and distributed way for us to attest ownership of digital products. Sure, sure, "blockchain bad" and "don't apply crypto to everything", but this genuinely seems to me like the most mutually beneficial way to proceed.
> The computer disappearing is one of the most pure expressions of form following function.
I actually agree wholeheartedly. Apple's devices are the apex of form following function, which is why their form advances so rarely: the functionality of the iPhone changes so little from year-to-year, that Apple doesn't really need to re-engineer much. Hell, the iPhone 12 is just a redux of the iPhone 5 footprint, an anachronism that's yet another great example of form meandering while function stagnates. The deficiencies in our current devices are clear: they're centralized, non-extensible, and exceptionally difficult to fix when they break. Apple profits off all three of those markets, so I have little faith that they intend to change anything there soon.
> Contrast that to a competing product like the ASUS ROG Phone
Don't make me (or Tim Cook, for that matter) laugh. The iPhone doesn't compete with the ROG Phone: they're ostentatiously different products. One is a gaming phone, the other is an iPhone. You're comparing a dune-buggy to a Ford Fiesta, which you're welcome to do, but will sway very few of their respective audiences.
Apple's love for Dieter Rams has gotten them very far, but their recent pivot towards 'making the computer disappear' is at stark contrast with the design elements that he employed. Personally, I think we've gone as far as we can with those design cues: our tablets have been reduced to black slabs, and our computers arranged into thin silver clamshells. Apple's (re)introduction of color in the recent iMacs is a step in the right direction, but there's still so much of the 'domestic computer' design space that hasn't been explored yet. I think of Teenage Engineering and their colorful (albeit expensive) synthesizers, game consoles, and the various Homepod/Echo/Nest/Etc. smart assistants that now litter our home: these are all experiments in making the computer disappear, yet nobody seems to be paying much attention the field.
I think the other comment has a point though: these frameworks are definitely powerful, but they have no right to be as large as they actually are. Nowadays, we're blowing people's minds by showing 10x or 100x speedups in code by rewriting portions in lower-level languages; and we're still not even close to how optimized things used to be.
I think the more amicable solution here is to just have higher standards. I might not have given up on Windows (and UWP) if it didn't have such a big overhead. My Windows PC would idle using 3 or 4 gigs of memory: my Linux box struggles to break 1.
So, Beeper's approach here at least makes sense to me. They aren't representing the "hacker spirit" like Torvalds or Stallman, but they are highlighting how arbitrary some software limitations can be. Their efforts here, wasted or not, will be cited when iMessage finds itself in court next time. And to Beeper, a company founded on the idea of unifying all messaging clients, that may be a worthwhile business investment.