benoau
That said renting storage from Google for iCloud reportedly carries an ~80% profit margin, there's no reason they can't also put a 5x markup on what Google charges them for PCC and Siri since they can still prevent rivals from providing the same service in most markets.
Whereas for software, we're down to just a few supermarkets and they have made no effort to stay on top of curation - in fact Google and Apple straight up monetized bad curation with advertising, which inherently favors the "unhealthy" food able to recuperate that money through addiction.
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/valve-has-a-signifi...
Apple actually ran a comparison of both of these companies recently in their court filings - they determined companies with a lot of payments could do it cheaper themselves.
> Stripe and Paddle are leading full-service, turnkey payment processing, and merchant-of-record providers handling all the services necessary for link-out, including payment processing, tax compliance, fraud detection, and customer service. Id. ¶ 82. Across the top apps, the mean implied processing and merchant-of-record fee based on Stripe’s and Paddle’s rack rates (which few, if any, large developers actually pay because they negotiate discounts or provision in-house) is 8.1% using Stripe rates, or 7.8% using Paddle rates
> Large developers often negotiate processing fees below published rates or perform processing more cheaply in-house.
> Epic’s Head of Payments, testified at trial in this case that Epic’s “average cost of using . . . payment service providers … [i]n [the] U.S., [is] around 3.5%” and “Epic [has] the opportunity to negotiate these costs with its payment service providers.
https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2026/08/Epic_...
But AI could certainly make some poor choices and cause havoc - if AI messed up Walmart's refrigerator configuration that would be 15x greater effect than France earlier this month, there would certainly be localized food shortages:
> On 11 October 2026, an unknown party hacked into the refrigeration controllers at up to 700 French supermarkets[2] and set them to defrost mode overnight, causing their refrigerators to overheat.
There must be many situations like this entrenched in industries that could be brought to their knees maliciously or accidentally - even where there should be security like eMudhra the certificate authority:
> The affected refrigeration controllers each ran a web server reachable over the public internet, many of them[2] accessible using login credentials 'admin' as the username and the current date as the password.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_French_supermarket_refrig...
About ten years ago I deliberately started doubling-down on JavaScript instead, it's good-enough for practically any use case and I've been able to leverage it for web, mobile, desktop, server and games. There are things other languages can do better, but I love not having to install them and manage their different versions and dependencies, and stay familiar with their idiomatic approaches, and keep up-to-date with their evolution.
There are outcomes where a monoculture can be bad, but structurally I think JavaScript is in a good place - open standard, open governance, open to proposals, massive open source culture.
https://github.com/tc39/ecma262/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#ne...
And what they're actually doing is refusing to submit copies of their passport and license, they have not been ordered to surrender their passport as the article headline implies.
- it did top the Mac subreddit (700 upvotes) but ranks as the 12th-most popular post in the last month
- it didn't top HN (491 upvotes)
- it didn't top Reddit's main Apple subreddit (1000-1200 upvotes)
I might be remembering wrong but I think this kind of news usually gets thousands of upvotes.
The odds of > 128GB are very good, AMD have already bumped the Strix Halo to 192GB of RAM and both AMD and Nvidia should have successors to their offerings in 2028 that will compete with the M7 Pro and Max. Both AMD and Nvidia will be using TSMC N2 too so the competition will be ramping up.
Now it's a "how will you still need an iPad" problem, that they have solved perfectly because it's a usability problem.
And still have what looks like a very healthy number of long-time users, although I didn't dig deeper than the top 10.
I can still remember when they hired dang and he's still around, I see people posting I recognize from 18 years ago when I first started reading this site...
https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
The youngest "top ten" account is from 2020, most of them are from 15-20 years ago. Two of the top ten have not posted for months, seven have posted today.
UnFoUnDeD!
> Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.
> Much of the fraud came from marketers acting suspiciously enough to be flagged by Meta's internal warning systems. But the company only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, the documents show. If the company is less certain – but still believes the advertiser is a likely scammer – Meta charges higher ad rates as a penalty, according to the documents. The idea is to dissuade suspect advertisers from placing ads.
> The documents further note that users who click on scam ads are likely to see more of them because of Meta's ad-personalization system, which tries to deliver ads based on a user's interests.
> At the same time, the documents indicate that Meta's own research suggests its products have become a pillar of the global fraud economy. A May 2025 presentation by its safety staff estimated that the company's platforms were involved in a third of all successful scams in the US Meta also acknowledged in other internal documents that some of its main competitors were doing a better job at weeding out fraud on their platforms.
https://www.tbsnews.net/world/meta-earning-fortune-deluge-fr...
And the fact that he did this years after Cambridge Analytica, just wow.
I wonder if it can even be stopped at this stage - Brazil can only arrest him or execs if they are in Brazil, even international warrants are tricky to enforce against people who can travel by private jet and mega-yacht.
Won't be much left to read next year, similar thing just happened to Liliputing traffic hit the floor and the founder accepted a job.
https://liliputing.com/whats-up-with-liliputing-fall-2026-ed...
Really just highlighting how screwed up copyright law is, that's a 65-year old song, of someone who died 49 years ago.
You can't even trust the biggest tech companies to reliably ship software updates anymore and they've got more money than god, and the entire industry seems intent on reducing headcount as deeply as possible, killing products and projects however they see fit, ending support in the most abrasive manners possible.
Somewhere amongst this was a great opportunity for reducing consumption of electricity from dirty sources, mass-optimizing millions of thermostats, car and electric bikes/etc charging, refrigerators, computer power settings etc to reduce emissions... but now it sounds like it should be illegal.
Conspicuously absent from the "sensitive categories" is political leanings...
It's becoming very unnecessary for me, either DuckDuckGo's search assist will extract the answer for me or even more likel, I'll be asking for code directly in Duck.ai and then I'm extremely unlikely to need to click through for anything programming-related.
But also it's a function of what I'm working on, there is stuff I just skate through without needing to look anything up.
3 days of October
9 days of September
16 days of August
17 days of July
18 days of June
10 days of May
However I think there will be a price to pay building software without the "trough of sorrow" phase stressing over the product and market fit and limping away with lessons learned - the way you build software and the problems you solve are basically confined to a safe space, a bubble of yourself + your AI agents and a brief moment of suspense submitting to reddit or whatever, and you risk learning nothing at all to improve your next projects and higher-volume won't help that.