"X and Y were in the garden, Y noticed the ripe tomatoes as they went into the greenhouse". Is X in the greenhouse?
I'm way woker than the average person but I have to admit encountering a singular 'they' breaks my concentration in a distracting way - there's definitely possible ambiguity.
People really ought to read redacted documents to get an idea for how people write with clarity when gender and even number of parties is unknown.
But I'm confused by your sentence regardless of the gender terms. Did they notice the tomatoes in the Garden or in the greenhouse? This is just ambiguous wording in general.
- These are two different sentences, but they're separated with a comma. It should be a period, as it makes no grammatical sense with a comma unless you're trying to make it intentionally confusing.
- You would write "They both went into the greenhouse" if they both entered, or you would write "Y entered the greenhouse and noticed the ripe tomatoes."
- "Before entering the greenhouse, "Y"/"they both" noticed the ripe tomatoes in the Garden."
More likely they didn't care and nobody wrote an automated test for it because that would be hard, no human testers are employed (because who even does that now?), and only two users got all the way through the labyrinthine process to report it as an issue so managers triaged the bug as wontfix.
I think this is industry standard practice in 2025, right?
It's very surprising to me that this needs to be said - but maybe that's because I've mostly worked in, let's say, 'resource constrained' environments. You focus on the stuff that keeps the money coming, or people start losing their jobs.
Is that on the things that make money now or the speculative things you might make money on later?
Almost everyone is resource constrained in that the ambition of non-dev management is always 10x what they have the money to pay for. I take that back a bit - I haven't worked for FAANG so perhaps they do have more people than real work.
The author works at Github, so yes not so much a "resource constrained" environment. It matches my experience at a high growth company, Canva, where in places it was easy to see the connection to profit and in other places quite hard. There were people that didn't care about their connection to profit, and there were expensive employees doing "good work" done merely because it was good to do. Canva could do that because its margins are 80+% and it made almost $1B in revenue at the time.
Apple cares about profits, and only about users to the extent that it can profit from them. The touted security and privacy aspects of their service are useful for marketing, but they are not primarily why people buy Apple devices.
They already operate in China, allowing the Chinese government to access all "Chinese" user data. Non-Chinese Apple accounts also work perfectly well in China, which leads me to believe that the extent of data sharing is greater than has been disclosed (or dissidents could just use a foreign phone to avoid surveillance). I strongly suspect the CIA/FBI/DHS has similar access.
(Microsoft stuff also works fine in China, Google stuff does not. Draw your own conclusions.)
I think it's somewhat likely they'll just backdoor it and not tell the public, they can see this is just the way the world is headed.
If you want to message someone secretly, use an audited open source solution - don't rely on a megacorp to look out for your interests.
Chinese iCloud accounts operate on Chinese infrastructure running Apple’s software managed by a Chinese entity. The arrangements are well documented and public, no need to speculate wildly.
> Non-Chinese Apple accounts also work perfectly well in China, which leads me to believe that the extent of data sharing is greater than has been disclosed (or dissidents could just use a foreign phone to avoid surveillance).
The Chinese state could make foreign iphones unattractive to dissidents fairly easily without needing to compromise icloud.
Simply discover the foreign iphones by a process of elimination, and make it clear that having one attracts much more surveillance.
I totally agree and disagree. Yes it’s their culture but it’s not unfair at all.
Its the only big tech company that sells privacy to consumers. They could do that because unlike the competition they weren’t an ad company and thus didn’t need to spy. (This is changing and no longer true, but that’s a different story).
This competitive advantage goes away if nobody can sell privacy because it’s illegal. A publicly traded corporation does not exit a large market because one of their products is banned, much less because of principles. Apple will comply just as they’ve done before, and while maintaining the blast radius to only introducing the backdoor on UK residents.
I really hope so! I have no doubts they will fight hard, and that will be good for everyone. But going decentralized? No way. The motivation isn’t privacy for the sake of human rights, is what I’m saying. Heck, I’m happy as long as Apple thinks it still is valuable enough to keep selling in a world of omnipresent surveillance. But I’m not delusional about the ”values” of a public mega corporation.
The company culture is relatively malleable. Apple does probably care about security and privacy, but mainly because of profits. That does help in this case because they don't want leave themselves between two big portions of profits.
Both Apple and Microsoft do what the article suggests - they decentralize services in China and partner with a local company to operate in keeping with Chinese law. Google took the option of pulling out of China, because their incentives were different.
> Non-Chinese Apple accounts also work perfectly well in China, which leads me to believe that the extent of data sharing is greater than has been disclosed
Yes because people just use VPNs to access overseas e.g. US iCloud servers.
That has nothing to do with whether Apple is sharing data with Chinese authorities or not.
Any evidence the reproduction rate is higher among tech workers, or even among the wealthy in general? From what I've gathered in the past autistic people are more likely than average to not reproduce.
That is not how things work. Females are the main drive to reproduction and decide demographic trends in societies where they are not oppressed(also, diagnosed autism levels in minority grpups is higher compared to classical white populations - make from it what you want, but I will avoid comments for this here). And female autism works differently than male autism and a lot of that does not show up, because less females would be diagnosed for the very simple reason that diagnosis is not a disease but how well a person can function in society and females differ from males in that as they are doing better than males. We do not exaclty know variable for amount of females, that have "autistic" genes, but they seems to be main drive to spread autism and very successful at that, regardless how diagnosed male autists are multiplying less. Also, people seem to have wrong idea about how genes spread - it takes SINGLE successful case to spread dominant and successful genes over the next generations.
The main issue that people are thinking of autists, that they are somewhat different from other people - even on biological level and it does not help, that among autistic people there arte those that think in the levels of "autistic nation", because genetically we are even less different to other humans than a lab rat to other rats. And like I mentioned before, spread of succesful autistic genes is irrevelant of the number of direct descendants that person produces, and with genes you can't assume, that they are only present to those that have diagnosis.
If the US government is "chucking all their secret data" into OpenAI servers/models, frankly they deserve everything they get for that level of stupidity.
Probably more like specialized tools to help spy on and forecast civilian activities more than anything else. Definitely with hallucinations, but that's not really important. Facts don't matter much these days...
