throwawayapples

> I wouldn't hold up GrapheneOS as a good example of more freedom compared to Apple or Google tbh.

I don't see why we can't have both, but this doesn't really a fair criticism of GP's comment. The specific word GP used was 'privacy', not 'freedom', and you are attacking GrapheneOS's stance on the latter, not the former.

GrapheneOS is more focused on privacy over freedom, as you said ("their stance on user privacy is so extreme that it gets in the way of user freedom"). They have chosen to prioritize one over the other.

> For freedom, I'd moreso point towards projects like LineageOS.

This might be true, but LineageOS doesn't have access to microcode either, and certainly GrapheneOS is more 'private' than Lineage, assuming that GrapheneOS hasn't been compromised either internally or at some point in the AOSS supply chain. Except for niche mfgs like PinePhone et al, Google is probably the most free of the major manufacturers (ironically, less private but more free).

I agree that we should aim for both freedom (as in free speech, not necessarily as in free beer although it'd be nice!) and privacy.

Both are critically important, and the efficacy of the latter depends in large part on the former.

We're commenting, not stating something as fact.

And if that's the closest we'll get to a fact, then what if it's not? .. it's actually worse than no fact at all.

no way even ChatGPT is this nuts.

Ok, well, maybe it is. but a magic 8-ball would have been better than this.

and the Apple (II etc) vs Mac teams warring with each other.

Kara Swisher gets in big public fights with CEOs and wears dark sunglasses in order to be cool.

In other words, she's definitely not immune to bias and might easily want to shape the story to her own ends or to favor her own friends.

We're not really talking about facts here.. it's really just speculation and hearsay, so who can say if she's just talking?

The Court of Chancery nearly always rules with the board (VCs) over shareholders (founders). VCs like that.

Oh, no, that's not true at all. An invention might not even be possible, let alone having a clear and (literally, provably) correct specification of inputs and outputs. Just seeing that it exists, to say nothing of getting the correct proportion of inputs and outputs, could shave a decade off your invention cycle.

Take, for example, the nuclear bomb. Just knowing that it could be done put you ten steps ahead. What if cold fusion or a warp drive were known to be possible because you could see it (even if from a great distance with little detail)? Airplane manufacturers leapt ahead (literally) after the Wright Brothers.

A tremendous amount of effort for worthy inventions is often involved simply in proving that it can be done. Once you know it can be done, you don't have to prove it anymore, and also large companies will throw buckets of money at a clone of something that's proven to work.

A patent (sometimes) prevents that -- at least, when everything is working as it should be. (In this case, clearly not!)

I'd settle for a source analysis and reproducible builds for just our myriad open source dependencies. All it takes is a single developer to be compromised in the thousands throughout a typical stack..

> If we look at university performance at the margin, we would really be expecting some of these people to have won a Fields Medal or a Nobel Prize-winning discovery.

At the highest-level universities, nearly every applicant is already exceptional before they're even accepted, and yet:

Even if you carefully selected 100 or so people out of nearly any university, it's statistically unlikely that a Fields medal winner, Nobel prize laureate, or unicorn founder would come to fruition out of any of them, even if we allow more than a decade.