elishah

Even if you don't care at all about file sizes (which is definitely A Take), there is the whole other side of improving image quality.

Everything about computer imagery is pretty sadly limited when compared to the capabilities of human eyes and brains. And for quite some time now the ends of the pipeline (camera sensors and computer displays) have been improving, but are bottlenecked by the middle of the pipeline (image formats).

Yes, the unfortunate thing is that Google is not interested in a higher quality Web so much as they are in a Web that is cheaper to index and serve.

So it's unsurprising that they have pushed the format optimized for "as few bits as we can get away with before things like too terrible" rather than actually improving quality and extending capabilities.

I think an important driver in this is a persistent desire for (and faith in) novelty.

Every engineer has had unpleasant experiences with some giant convoluted messes. And there's a strong tendency to blame for that at the feet of the tools/stack/language of those messes, and believe that if we just choose something different, this time it will be clean and perfect.

Of course, some or all of that blame is undeserved. "Giant convoluted mess" is the state toward which every project will tend over time. But that rarely diminishes the totemic belief that new tools will produce different results, so an impetus toward novelty-for-novelty's-sake remains persistent.

> Trust us.

While you should never trust any corporation in the sense that you might trust a person, you can trust that they will do the things that they believe will make them the most money.

What financial incentive do you believe that apple has to steal your fingerprints?

I think apple noticed a long time ago that the world is not exactly lacking in quantity of phone apps. If anything, the sheer number of them has become a hindrance to anyone wading through thousands of nearly identical apps to try to find the actually good one.

So if they implement policies that increase the average quality of apps and decrease the total quantity, that's an improvement for users twice over.

I was quite disappointed that the Photoshop generative fill stuff insists on running on Adobe's servers rather than locally. So however good it is, there are many of us who will never use it.

With SD you have a lot of control over not just basics like image size and prompt complexity, but also things like how many iterations of which different sampler(s) get used.

So speed can vary wildly depending on how you're choosing to use it. And that's without even getting into the wide variance of hardware.

But generally speaking, it will usually be significantly faster than one image per minute.

> If Google forced it through but Apple refused, it would never be practical to enforce it. The numbers may not be as high, but they're plenty high enough that you couldn't cut all iDevices out.

Yes. Up until now, the amount of Google bullshit that Safari has saved us all from is _staggering._ It is unfortunate that this won't be another catastrophe deflected.

This is also why I'm concerned about legislation requiring Apple to open up sideloading onto their devices. As much as I love the idea of people having control over their own systems, in practice I'm afraid that it's just going to be the final nail that solidifies Google's complete control over the web all the way out to the client.

Whereas I feel that Desmond Tutu covered this pretty well already: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."

> And do you think an 80 IQ founder == 120 IQ founder all else being equal?

Musk and Bezos seem to have come to roughly similar outcomes, so evidence suggests yes.

> The two scenarios are precisely symmetrical. The only difference is that the cause on one side is one that you agree with, and on the other side is one that you disagree with.

Yep! That's pretty much what agreeing or disagreeing with something means.

But the reasoning you seem to be proposing is "here is something you agree with and something you disagree with, therefore those two things are interchangeable and you should not favor one over the other."

> Now what do you do? Both sides can say their cause is “advancing rights”.

I exercise human discretion and decide which of those rights is better, more valuable, more important.

In this case, that's not a tough call. Marriage provides a bunch of very concrete mechanical effects, from inheritance to medical decision making to finances to immigration. Whereas some people feeling happy about the fact that some other people can't access those rights is, at best, abstract and intangible.

And you'll also note that some of my previous references were to the uniformity of rights. Generally speaking, making rights more uniformly accessible to all people is better than having rights be selectively, arbitrarily limited to some people.

Nope! But that's because extending civil rights more uniformly to more people is a good thing, and selectively denying civil rights is a bad thing.

Any reductive moral framework that abstracts every possible political position into interchangeable spherical cows in a vacuum does a disservice to its users.

That CSAM detection method was something that apple published a whitepaper about to get feedback. The feedback was strongly negative, so they never implemented it.

I would hope that the grandparent was not referring to this thing that never existed as "the client side scanning ability that is built into the OS."

I disagree. Vehemently.

It seems disingenuous to sweep "actively working to deny people civil rights" under the rug of "having an unpopular political opinion."

Partially because this wasn't just a matter of having an opinion; this was an extremely concrete _action._ Even if you want to take the (dubious) stance that people should not be held responsible for their beliefs, surely we should still hold people responsible for their actions?