Indie iOS app developer with a passion for SwiftUI

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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I feel you’re brushing over the privacy implications regarding how apps are used.

    Sure, you could say: “Oh, but it’s inefficient to compile the entire application, and what if there are features that barely anyone uses.”

    But you can also say: “Compiling the entire application ensures we don’t need to collect usage data and it ensures everyone gets the best experience, even the people that use features that are otherwise hardly used.”

    Now, of course, to go with the second option, you need to care about user privacy and not gain any benefits from usage data beyond the benefits for compiling it.


  • lazyvar@programming.devtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    10 months ago

    You’re right that a lot of Terms of Service documents and similar agreement documents have language that reserves the right to modify those terms.

    At the same time just because something is in the terms doesn’t mean it can stand the test of adjudication and terms as well as changes are often challenged in court with success.

    Unity is in a particular tricky situation because the clause that governed modifications in their last ToS explicitly gives the user the option to pass on modifications that adversely affects them and stick with the old terms:

    Unity may update these Unity Software Additional Terms at any time for any reason and without notice (the “Updated Terms”) and those Updated Terms will apply to the most recent current-year version of the Unity Software, provided that, if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long Term Supported (LTS) versions for that current-year release) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms (the “Prior Terms”). The Updated Terms will then not apply to your use of those current-year versions unless and until you update to a subsequent year version of the Unity Software (e.g. from 2019.4 to 2020.1). If material modifications are made to these Terms, Unity will endeavor to notify you of the modification. If a modification is required to comply with applicable law, the modification will apply notwithstanding this section. Except as explicitly set forth in this paragraph, your use of any new version or release of the Unity Software will be subject to the Updated Terms applicable to that release or version. You understand that it is your responsibility to maintain complete records establishing your entitlement to Prior Terms.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20201111183311/https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/TermsOfService/blob/master/Unity Software Additional Terms.md



  • Cue the nuclear shills that will handwave away any legitimate concern with wishful thinking and frame the discussion as solely pro/anti fossil, conveniently pretending that renewables don’t exist.

    ETA:

    Let’s look at some great examples of handwaving and other nonsense to further the nuclear agenda.

    Here @danielbln@lemmy.world brings up a legitimate concern about companies not adhering to regulation and regulators being corrupt/bought *cough… Three Mile Island cough*, and how to deal with that:

    So uh, turns out the energy companies are not exactly the most moral and rule abiding entities, and they love to pay off politicians and cut corners. How does one prevent that, as in the case of fission it has rather dire consequences?

    So of course the answer to that by @Carighan@lemmy.world is a slippery slope argument and equating a hypothetical disaster with thousands if not millions of victims and areas being uninhabitable for years to come, with the death of a family member due to faulty wiring in your home:

    Since you can apply that logic to everything, how can you ever build anything? Because all consequences are dire on a myopic scale, that is, if your partner dies because a single electrician cheaped out with the wiring in your building and got someone to sign off, “It’s not as bad as a nuclear disaster” isn’t exactly going to console them much.

    At some point, you need to accept that making something illegal and trying to prosecute people has to be enough. For most situations. It’s not perfect. Sure. But nothing ever is. And no solution to energy is ever going to be perfect, either.

    Then there’s the matter of misleading statistics and graphs.
    Never mind the fact that the amount of victims of nuclear disasters is underreported, under-attributed and research is hampered if not outright blocked to further a nuclear agenda, also never mind that the risks are consistently underreported, lets leave those contentious points behind and look at what’s at hand.

    Here @JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works shows a graph from Our World in Data that is often thrown around and claims to show “Death rates by unit of electricity production”:

    Seems shocking enough and I’m sure in rough lines, the proportions respective to one another make sense to some degree or another.
    The problem however is that the source data is thrown together in such a way that it completely undermines the message the graph is trying to portray.

    According to Our World in Data this is the source of the data used in the graph:

    Death rates from energy production is measured as the number of deaths by energy source per terawatt-hour (TWh) of electricity production.

    Data on death rates from fossil fuels is sourced from Markandya, A., & Wilkinson, P. (2007).

    Data on death rates from solar and wind is sourced from Sovacool et al. (2016) based on a database of accidents from these sources.

    We estimate deaths rates for nuclear energy based on the latest death toll figures from Chernobyl and Fukushima as described in our article here: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima

    We estimate death rates from hydropower based on an updated list of historical hydropower accidents, dating back to 1965, sourced primarily from the underlying database included in Sovacool et al. (2016). For more information, see our article: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

    Fossil fuel numbers are based on this paper which starts out by described a pro-nuclear stance, but more importantly, does a lot of educated guesstimating on the air-pollution related death numbers that is straight up copied into the graph.

    Sovacool is used for solar and wind, but doesn’t have those estimates and is mainly limited to direct victims.

    Nuclear based deaths is based on Our World in Data’s own nuclear propaganda piece that mainly focuses on direct deaths and severely underplays non-direct deaths.

    And hydropower bases deaths is based on accidents.

    So they mix and match all kinds of different forms of data to make this graph, which is a no-no. Either you stick to only accidents, only direct deaths or do all possible deaths that is possibly caused by an energy source, like they do for fossil fuels.

    Not doing so makes the graph seem like some kind of joke.





  • There are plenty of instances that are open, but it depends on your definition of “censored” if they are what you seek.

    Completely “uncensored” instances are rare if not non-existent because most instances will at least try to adhere to the laws of their jurisdiction and in addition will have some rules in place to keep things running smoothly and pleasant for everyone.

    Most big instances are run from the EU so they’ll often have rules regarding hate speech.

    Depending on your definition your only options might either be Japanese instances due to less strict laws around certain content or right wing instances, but both will be almost uniformly blocked on other instances.






  • The proposal is bad enough as it is, but it’s the duplicitous gaslighting BS that really pisses people off.

    If they came out and said “We came up with this thing to prevent loss of revenue on ads and prevent LLMs from capturing data” then people would still be against it, but at least it would feel like an honest discussion.

    Instead it’s just another page out of Google’s playbook we’ve seen many times already.

    1. Make up some thinly veiled use cases that supposedly highlight how this would benefit users, while significantly stretching the definition of “users”
    2. Gaslight every one by pretending that people simply misunderstand what you’re proposing and what you’re trying to achieve
    3. Pretend that nobody provides reasonable feedback because everyone is telling you not to commit murder in the first place instead of giving you tips on how to hide the body
    4. Latch onto the few, inevitable, cases of people going too far to paint everyone opposing it in a negative light
    5. Use that premise to explain why you had to unilaterally shut down any and all avenues for people to provide comment
    6. Make the announcement that you hear people and that you’re working on it and that all will be well
    7. Just do what you want anyways with minimal concessions if any and rinse repeat

    For what it’s worth I blame W3C as well.
    Their relatively young “Anti-Fraud Community Group” has essentially green lit this thing during meetings as can be seen here:

    https://github.com/antifraudcg/meetings/blob/main/2023/05-26.md

    https://github.com/antifraudcg/meetings/blob/main/2023/07-07-wei-side-meeting.md




  • The presumption of innocence doesn’t preclude the fact that criminal courts don’t find someone innocent, rather they find someone not guilty.

    This is for the simple fact that it’s neigh impossible to establish someone’s innocence, whereas it’s easier to establish that there isn’t enough evidence to consider someone guilty.

    This case is, and sexual assault cases in general are, a great example why we can’t expect criminal courts to establish innocence.

    These are often cases with little evidence available either which way, because often there are no other witnesses. Even if there would be physical evidence of a sexual act, it’s still challenging to prove under what circumstances those acts have occurred, specifically on the matter of consent.

    To expect a court to be able to say with certainty that something hasn’t occurred is unreasonable.

    That is not to say that it isn’t good that we have these high standards before we impose punishment onto someone, but it is important to recognize what it means when a court comes to a decision.

    Additionally the presumption of innocence is just that, a presumption to establish who has the onus to prove something, there is no additional meaning attributed to it in the legal principle beyond establishing who has the onus to prove the facts at hand.

    In that regard it’s rather unfortunately named, as it would’ve been more apt to name it “the presumption of not guilty” but I suppose that doesn’t roll as nicely off the tongue

    To add to that, that the presumption is specifically a principle that only has meaning in criminal court, because the burden of proof is generally higher than in civil court.

    People can be, and have been, found liable in civil court for the very thing a criminal court has found them “not guilty” on, on the very basis that criminal court can’t establish innocence and that the bar that needs to be met in civil court is generally lower than in criminal court.

    As such to bring up the presumption of innocence in a vacuum is kind of like bringing up the generally recognized human right of freedom of speech when a social media company bans someone and removes their post.

    Yes, the concept exists, but it’s irrelevant because it doesn’t apply to the topic at hand, because the concept aims to govern a very specific circumstance that isn’t applicable here and withholding the important context surrounding it (i.e. the role it plays in criminal court for the presumption and the fact that it only limits governments for the freedom of speech) masks the limitations of said concept.

    None of the above aims to reflect my opinion on Spacey’s innocence (or lack thereof), rather it aims to provide the necessary details to put things into context.




  • Most of these services are US-centric because a lot of the necessary records to provide the information isn’t public in many countries outside of the US.

    Birth records, death records, marriage records, divorce records, voting records, criminal records, etc. is considered public information in much of the US. Even address information can be found publicly and immigration records become available to the public after a certain time.

    In a lot of countries, especially in many European countries, these are hard to access for people that aren’t the subject of these records, if accessible at all.

    For example while court records are public in much of Europe, often times the names of private persons are censored because it’s not deemed necessary to know who the parties are to be able to check if the courts make fair decisions.
    This automatically excludes criminal and divorce information from disseminating into the public.

    Some countries will make some records public once the subject of those records have passed for X amount of years, but that’s still pretty rare.

    As such services like these have limited use outside the United States.


  • @mrmanager@lemmy.today was talking about European companies doing fine despite strong unions in Europe and there being a lack of companies toppling over due to the strong unions.

    They actually undersold it, because in many Western-European countries everyone benefits from union negotiations, even people that aren’t members of a union because the collective bargaining agreements unions manage to negotiate will affect everyone working in the relevant industry by virtue of laws deferring to those collective bargaining agreements.

    You in turn decided to reframe the discussion at hand from companies doing well to unemployment numbers and not just general unemployment numbers, but youth unemployment numbers because you felt it would serve your argument best.

    But if you look at the trends for unemployment then the story isn’t as bleak as you’d make it out to be. For starters general unemployment averages under 6% with only two countries being above 10% (and below 15%).
    Average youth unemployment sits at 13.9% with a hand full over 20%.

    However, both general and youth unemployment are on a steady downwards trend since 2013.
    One exception to this trend for general unemployment is during the pandemic, where it shows a bump and for youth unemployment there’s an additional minor bump in 2022, which suggests a correlation with the influx of refugees from Ukraine. This is the European source on these statistics.

    There will always be a higher unemployment rate in the EU compared to the US, especially when it comes to youth unemployment.

    This lies mainly in the fact that most European countries have a civil registry system that automatically keeps track of certain data, unemployment being one of them, whereas in the US this data is collected by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics by conducting a survey of roughly 60,000 households.
    Another factor is a difference in definitions. A good example is the one from the website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

    Garrett is 16 years old, and he has no job from which he receives any pay or profit. However, Garrett does help with the regular chores around his parents’ farm and spends about 20 hours each week doing so.

    Lisa spends most of her time taking care of her home and children, but she helps in her husband’s computer software business all day Friday and Saturday.

    Both Garrett and Lisa are considered employed.

    Neither of them would be considered employed in most European countries. There are other such discrepancies, for example the US doesn’t include people under 16, whereas Europe looks at 15-24 for youth unemployment.

    And then there’s the cultural difference between the two markets about when people are expected to start working and subsequently the jobs that will be available.

    Which makes sense. Companies still need people, but if it’s more expensive to get low-end workers you just won’t hire entry level workers unless they’ve proven themselves beyond a shadow of a doubt.

    Your hypothesis is quite lacking.
    As stated, the trends have been going down for a decade now, if your hypothesis was true we’d see an upwards trend.
    Additionally, these labor protections, including protections against being laid off, have been around for decades, your hypothesis doesn’t offer an explanation why, despite these protections, unemployment is going down.
    Also, minimum wage, as is often paid for these kinds of jobs, is lower in most EU countries than in many US states, making it comparably cheaper to hire those kind of jobs in Europe than it is in the US, your hypothesis doesn’t explain why, despite this, the unemployment rate is higher in Europe than it is in the US.

    In short, your hypothesis nor the unemployment rate is relevant to what @mrmanager@lemmy.today was positing, so lets refocus to the topic at hand: the lack of companies toppling over like domino bricks despite the copious amounts of employee protection facilitated by strong unions.

    Perhaps afterwards, we can talk about the lack of landlords, corporate or otherwise, going bankrupt despite the strong tenant protections as well as the lack of companies selling merchandise to consumers pulling out of the market despite the strong consumer protections, and so and so forth.

    And then, maybe, just maybe, we can afterwards all come to the conclusion that these QoL improvements are attainable without some kind of economic doom scenario.