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> Not in Sweden and we have less accidents than Germany.

I don't think you got the memo where everyone seems to think getting blind drunk and then getting on an electric scooter is totally ok "in Sweden".

I've had a few near-misses myself with crazy drunk riders on pedestrian streets in central Stockholm; I once interviewed a job-candidate with a cut-up face who laughingly told us he'd crashed a scooter with two(!) friends on the back after a drink night; a friend of mine smashed their hip after a night drinking and then jumping on a scooter.

The rules may be there. The actual reality is different.

This gives a really distorted image of the real Sweden I know. 99% of kids in real Sweden are definitely not hanging out at these educational centers: in this massively conformist society (especially for teenagers), the kids are getting hold of beer as soon as they can, driving cars to the nearest petrol station or out-of-town car parks, and burning tire marks in the asphalt.

This sort of article is just window-dressing for what it’s really like to live in this mostly restricted and limited land, out in the boondocks.

Swedes living abroad probably actually believe this nostalgic fiction of their homeland.

> It's also stupid and insulting, because those discoveries have far more to do with the capability of Swedish chemists than they do with geography.

Yeah - that poster hasn't learned the combination of massively overblown pride combined with extreme 'little-brother' sensitivity that's typical of the Swedish character.

All those downvotes will show him!

> In Sweden we also have a local metrology bureu which produces much better forecasts than most others

Ironically Sweden’s best weather forecast comes from Norway [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31965812

Article: boring. Image of Philippe Petit wire walking between the Twin Towers: amazing.

I find that some days, when I'm tired at the end of the day or drained by work, I crave some simple entertainment and come to HN or my RSS reader looking for articles or blog-posts to read, but I'm definitely finding that the RSS-feed has thinned-out, and on HN there's more often repetition of posts I've seen before or lynchmob ranting about Apple which I find unnerving.

So I'm also reading more books - both digitally and on paper. I find the 'non-fiction could be a blog-post' attitude just baffling for the sort of books I've been reading lately - including a biography of Napolean, another book about his Russian campaign, and a really fascinating biography of Casanova that was linked from HN (the type of post that brings me back here, in spite of the tribal nonsense).

There's so much more a sense of 'mental nourishment' and intentionality from reading a book, than if I'm rather mindlessly clicking through a sequence of links.

btw the RSS reader really gives a sense of the 'abandonment' of blogs: hundreds of blogs on my list haven't published anything for years.

> this will result in the days the responsible C-level staff gets jailed. This would be simple and very effective.

I really recommend you transfer your hatred and sense of injustice to companies that are right at this moment poisoning environments - even in the US - and actively covering-up chemical leaks, or the pollution of people’s drink-water, or allowing workers to use carcinogens that executives deny are dangerous.

Some pathetic technical contravention of a trivial rule by Apple here is not worth your energy and passionate hatred.

> Finally people from high management need to land in jail on a regular basis for the missteps of big companies

Amazing number of people baying for prison time for this pretty trivial mis-step.

As I said in another comment, just finished reading a book where one of the chapters was about the Diamond Alkali works near Newark, where executives knowingly covered-up the intentional leaking of dioxin (the most lethal chemical known to man - the smallest dose will cause cancer) for decades.

But people on HN want to put Apple employees in prison for some trivial, minor EU law contravention.

> We should put CEOs in prison

So in an obscure settings toggle, in one version of iOS that was immediately fixed, some developer probably unknowingly set a toggle default to a setting that contravened an EU law… and you think Tim Cook should go to prison??

I just finished reading a book where one of the chapters was about factories in north New York where the executives covered-up systematic leaking of dioxin into the local environment for decades.

But sure - Tim Cook should go to prison to appease your Apple hatred.

> The fine should be equivalent to profit plus a hefty penalty on top of that.

So this was a toggle in an obscure preferences setting toggled incorrectly and therefore a minor infringement of EU law - but you want the court to fine Apple their entire profit? plus some random extra amount?

Wow. Aside from this being completely stupid to anyone who doesn’t share your irrational level of Apple hatred, how would you deal with a really serious offense?

> I'm kinda surprise how the goalpost is shifted from "hey it's easy" to "go install iTunes if you're on windows". I having a website too much to ask really ?

Dunno where you got the idea that I somehow ‘shifted the goalpost’ from “it’s easy…”?

The poster I was answering said that Apple made it “impossible” to cancel subscriptions by using “dark patterns” and this somehow got transformed into some vanishingly tiny, special HN-case of a person running Linux who doesn’t have another Apple device and ‘cannot’ install iTunes with a teenager who’s phone they can never access to check subscriptions…

Oh well - the anti-Apple fanatics here will downvote absolutely anything, I guess - including anyone responding to utter garbage like this.

> full of pedantic tripe like that.

Ah here was me thinking this was an uncontroversial and enjoyable discussion on HN.

Anyways. Once again, just to underline what I wrote before - my comment wasn’t supposed to suggest that there was a golden age of Elysian harmony in the pastoral landscape of Europe, somehow superior to the ‘terrible’ existence we have now, with our hospitals, antibiotics, electronic gadgets, space travel etc.

Over the last few years there’ve been quite a few studies linked on HN that have begun to give a nuanced image of life in the ‘Dark Ages’ - albeit one that was ravaged by conflict and disease.

I thought these interiors gave another dimension to this new perspective. That’s all my post was about.

> To note, the “easily accessible” part is for people with an Apple device with iCloud set as the target account. > You don’t have another Apple device to manage your kid’s subscriptions ? it’s simple ! Download iTunes on Windows! No windows or can’t/don’t want to install iTunes? Tough luck.

Wow I’m speechless.

Not having access to your kids’ device, and not having access to a linked Apple device, and not having access to a Windows device, and not being willing to download iTunes is considered a dark pattern??

Sometimes I really wonder about the little anti-Apple bubble some people live in…

I think you gravely misunderstood my comment, I’m certainly not harking back to some romantic ideal of pre-industrial Arcadia.

If you were an under-nourished worker, living in the rat-like polluted conditions of an Industrial Revolution town in Northern England (for instance), constantly breathing sulfurous fumes, suffering cholera epidemics, seeing the whole town and all the countryside around it blackened by the ash from the local factories, while still seeing children die prematurely from all the same diseases and accidents that were common in the Middle Ages, but with less access to fresh air and your own vegetables and (to some extent) your own livestock, then making the life of a peasant seem less attractive than it maybe was in reality, is not such a far-fetched possibility.

> watching too many of your children die before their 4th birthday

As for children dying - maybe the children of peasants would die in greater numbers than the aristocracy, but nothing stopped their children from dying of an infected scratch or a bacterial infection, any more than anyone else, before the invention of antibiotics.

I think your comment falls into the “it was unadulterated hell being a peasant”-trap that I was referring to, instead of evaluating whether the life was actually more nuanced (especially in relative terms to those richer than themselves at the time).

> that's impossible to cancel via some dark UX patterns

The scandalous $10 per week kid’s games definitely exist, but in fairness, you made this part up, as all subscriptions are easily accessible on your clearly labeled ‘Subscriptions’ page, and canceled by clicking the big red ‘Cancel subscription’ button.

Setting aside the problem (mentioned in the article) that these images were produced for an aristocratic class, and possibly don’t accurately describe the reality of a peasant’s home, then what’s most striking is how decorative the interiors are: patterned floors, painted walls, and neat carpentry.

I’ve read the theory that the life of peasants in the Middle Ages was demonized and made to sound dystopian to encourage the working class of the Industrial Revolution (including ‘forgetting’ all the traditional festivals and days free from labor), and this sort of article makes me wonder whether this is additional evidence. Or possibly just the sanitized version for the entertainment of the upper class?

PS: a sidenote - strange to see spelling mistakes like a “pain of glass” in an academic paper.

> I really wish Apple would stop doing, though: Molded plastic packaging

Last year needed a new laptop, iPad, iPhone, and a whole load of accessories (from work switch) - none of them had plastic packaging.

Where I'm working we're porting the native apps gradually to SwiftUI on iOS and on Android using Kotlin Compose - addressing a lot of the development speed issues mentioned in the article, and shifting to a 'reactive' model while retaining truly native performance and components.

Developing in SwiftUI is lightning-fast - there are a few bumps and bugs that have been extensively discussed, but it's really simple to still use UIKit components in the places that need them (which are becoming fewer all the time).

For me the tone of the article is very 'positive' but the amount of time and effort seem horrendous. And now they're stuck with React. Not sure how many times these articles need to be written and then... [0]

[0] https://www.twopicode.com/articles/this-is-why-we-stopped-us...

> I’m EU and it was enabled.

This is pretty certainly a violation of GDPR in that case.

https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...

> I'm in the EU, and currently content analysis is toggled off for me

I'm also in the EU and checked this (very well-hidden) option for the first time after reading the thread - and it is defaulted to off.

Yet more evidence for the usefulness of GDPR. At times like this I'm genuinely grateful for these EU regulations that protect the individual against the encroachment of corporations on their private lives and personal data.

> Only by the Apple fanboys

This is such a pathetic line.

The story is so full of inconsistencies and the poster is backtracking fast on the clear initial implication that the laptop was somehow switched for an inferior replacement - but you're downvoting people for being "Apple fanboys" when they call it out.

Wow - even compared to other crap articles about this subject the last few weeks, this one was amazingly weak.

The 'journalist' quotes the "founder of the Fear Group, international property developers and investors" and the "chief executive of the Partnership for New York City" on the supposed reasons why people will be forced back to the office, before doing some fence-sitting about how remote work is both more productive and more satisfying for employees, as well as potentially saving companies money.

Not sure how many more of these ChatGPT-written articles about this subject we need to see?

> Yes, I was with her when she picked it up.

Ok in that case your story must be 100% true and no at all made-up for cheap HN upvotes. Thanks for the clarification.

PS: get back to us when you’ve checked the “switched” laptop serial numbers against the “friend” invoice, box and other ways to verify the identity of the device.

Are you seriously saying that Apple wiped all your “friend’s” files - completely obliterated what could have been unique work or memories - without even telling her, or asking permission first. Then effectively said “seeya!”

This doesn’t even remotely match any experience I’ve had with Apple or Apple devices in almost 25 years of use.

I’d check back with your “friend” and make sure she was telling you the whole truth.

PS: the serial number of her laptop is printed on the bottom of the case - which should address this very, very strange story implying the Apple staff slipped her a dodgy beat-up old laptop. The number should match her invoice and the box (but I guess your friend doesn’t have an invoice or a box, or probably any other way of identifying her laptop other than ‘stickers’)

A lot of people asking why quality TVs, that don’t spy on you or force you to watch ads in their interface, aren’t available for those willing to pay more.

But these TVs are available [0] - I’ve recommended them many times on this site. I have one myself and been really happy with it for a few years.

The trouble is finding them for sale - they can no longer be bought anywhere directly here in Sweden, for instance.

That’s due to the biggest problem of all: finding buyers willing to pay more for a TV.

[0] https://www.loewe.tv/int

> Think bigger: just being an enemy of an unfriendly state, potentially in your own country 25 years hence, who knows?

I don’t understand the logic of the supposed threat you’re talking about: if you’re so worried about some future dystopian authority that throws its ‘enemies’ into prison without them committing any crime, why would they need a relative’s long-ago stored DNA to do it?

> She called her bank minutes after it happened, but they told her that they are not able to reverse the transaction

Which bank is this?

Why wouldn’t they be able to reverse the transaction?

What do the police say?

Obviously she has contacted the police? as (unlike crypto) the police can get involved.