And North Korea maintains a system of neighborhood surveillance, mandatory self-criticism sessions, and hereditary social classes which are perhaps closer to “1984” because they are so well established now.
When it collapsed, East Germany was still led by the same people who had created it. The Berlin Wall only existed for 28 years. North Korea is a multi-generational prison.
> When it collapsed, East Germany was still led by the same people who had created it. The Berlin Wall only existed for 28 years. North Korea is a multi-generational prison.
Excellent point. Something that refutes another of Asimov's critiques in his review, that tyrannies inevitably end through tyrants' deaths, or at least become milder in their oppression. Admittedly he wrote the review in 1980, back when a) the first Kim was still in power and b) no one in the West saw North Korea as anything other than an "ordinary" Communist state—no awareness of Juche, etc.—but still.
Besides that, multiple ways to read this. "Monarchies" could've been a reference to pre modern monarchies of which many made it through at least 3 successions. Or as a correction to the upper comment, saying that the Kim's are more monarchy than plain dictatorship.
Indeed, a Stanford study from a few years back showed that the image data sets used by essentially everybody contain CSAM.
Everybody else has teams building guardrails to mitigate this fundamental existential horror of these models. Musk fired all the safety people and decided to go all in on “adult” content.
Developers are a tricky market for this because they could realistically move to different platforms if stuff like this started to happen. Or at least work on remote machines.
If gaming on Macs ever became popular though this would be a real risk.
I'm not sure Claude Code is making enough for Apple to take notice & drastically alter their CLI like that? CC has 100-150k users across all platforms, paying $200-1200/yr each. Even if every developer is on the top tier Max plan, and on MacOS, that's $180mn in revenue at Anthropic. So even in the most optimistic scenario, that's only ~$50mn revenue for Apple at a 30% take.
That pales in comparison to the hardware & subscription revenues Apple brings in by being a dev-friendly OS.
Claude code reached $1B in six months in early Dec and given what I am seeing on ground, I wouldn't be surprised if just in last 2 months after that their revenue grew by double.
> Wouldn’t be surprised if macOS starts locking down CLI tools towards an App Store model too.
The day that happens is the day Apple sees a mass exodus of developers to Linux, I don't think they'd be that stupid. They enjoy enough goodwill right now as the platform of choice (vs. Windows for those that don't want to run desktop Linux), I can't imagine they'd casually just throw that away.
We're talking about the company that abandoned CUDA, OpenCL and Vulkan mere moments before they were killer technologies. If Apple wanted to phase-out Homebrew, I genuinely think most of the community would nod in unison and switch to developing in UTM. Mac owners are nothing if not flexible.
Yeah no, as a Mac and Linux user, I would seize buying Mac hardware and buy exclusively Linux if they took down Homebrew from being usable. At that point a Mac is no longer a Unix system.
The Mac is barely a UNIX system to begin with. It doesn't ship with UNIX compliance out-of-the-box, and nobody complains. You're likely the minority here.
If Apple locked Homebrew behind SIP or some other inconvenience, it would just result in more virtualization. The default Mac environment hasn't followed industry standards for more than a decade, most professionals are doing their work in a VM already. Truth be told, even Apple wants you to stop compiling software locally in the long-run: https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/
If Claude Code was in the Mac App Store, they would have signed an agreement to do so (offer an in-app purchase option and Apple gets a 30% cut of subscriptions for the first year, 15% after that).
They would also be sandboxed such that the app wouldn't have access to the level of system integration it needs.
I would expect also that there is a broader revenue sharing agreement for both being a system-integrated search engine and "world knowledge" chatbot (Google and OpenAI being the respective defaults)
For me personally, I have used this method to spend my Apple gift cards purchased on a discount. Effectively I got a Claude subscription at 15% off. (You could argue this only works because OpenAI/Anthropic charge the same price across web/mobile, and I agree.)
So, as much as I despise Apple's business model, in some sense I have directly benefitted from it (other than stock price).
We’re closer to “doom” than in 1962 because Kennedy wasn’t a narcissist with Alzheimer and Khrushchev wasn’t an old KGB agent on a vengeance.
The leaders around the world now are the worst we’ve had since the 1930s. And now they have a nuclear arsenal that can destroy the world at their whim.
Great mention of Alan Kay - however I enjoy hearing from them both. Both have an infectious enthusiasm for teaching and making things so dang simple. I enjoy coming back to their talks and learning something new
The EU has mostly done a good job of reining in private data collection. But unfortunately even tech-savvy people often don't see the big picture and just complain about cookie banners and other instances of malicious compliance by the companies who now can't collect and sell your data without significant financial risk.
Ellison’s Murdoch killer flexing its muscles for a mild warmup.
They got Paramount and CBS and TikTok, are allied with Twitter, and still have a chance of grabbing Warner.
I don’t think American billionaires ever particularly liked Murdoch, an Australian, controlling so much of the media environment in their country. Maybe they’ll make an offer for Fox News that the Murdoch heirs can’t refuse.
When it collapsed, East Germany was still led by the same people who had created it. The Berlin Wall only existed for 28 years. North Korea is a multi-generational prison.
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