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Great, but how does it compare to Pyright on the utility / performance curve? Pyright is mature and already very fast.

https://github.com/microsoft/pyright


I don't get why so many people go to bat for pyright, my experience with it has been pretty miserable. Open enough instances of it and you're in OOM city. It works, but often gets confused... and of course the absolute audacity of MSFT to say "let's go over to pyright, and by the way we're going to carve up some stuff and put it into pylance instead", meaning that it's totally not within the actual spirit of open source.

I would like to just not use it, but the existence of pyright as a _barely_ functional alternative really sucks the air out of other attempts' continued existence. Real "extend/extinguish" behavior from MSFT.


I tried all the type checkers available as of ~1 year ago, and Pyright worked the best for me. It's not perfect, but it's better than any of the pure Python checkers. Memory is cheap (unless you're buying it from Apple I guess...). Would I take a faster type checker with better memory footprint? Heck yes, assuming equal or superior functionality.


Memory ain’t that cheap on laptops in general! The bigger issue is less “pyright” and more “every tool out there being as heavy as pyright” + docker etc… but things are getting better IMO


If you haven’t checked it out already, basedpyright is pyright with all the arbitrarily carved out functionality put back in – plus some extra features that you may or may not find useful depending on how strict you like your typing.

Can’t recommend it enough


To be honest I can't respect a project that names itself like that. I am a working professional.


I tested it side-by-side on my ~100Kloc codebase.

Ty: 2.5 seconds, 1599 diagnostics, almost all of which are false positives

Pyright: 13.6 seconds, 10 errors, all of which are actually real errors

There's plenty of potential here, but Ty's type inference is just not as sophisticated as Pyright's at this time. That's not surprising given it hasn't even been released yet.

Whether Ty will still perform so much faster once all of Pyright's type inference abilities have been matched or implemented - well, that remains to be seen.

Pyright runs on Node, so I would expect it to be a little slower than Ty, but perhaps not by very much, since modern JS engines are already quite fast and perform within a factor of ~2-3x of Rust. That said, I'm rooting for Ty here, since even a 2-3x performance boost would be useful.


Compilation / type checking depends on a lot of trees of typed data, and operating on those tree nodes. That's something where a statically typed language with custom data structures that allows for optimised representations makes a big difference, and where a lot of the fancy optimisations in v8 don't work so well.

There is a reason Typescript moved to a typed language.


Let's hope you're right and that translates to even higher performance for Ty compared to Pyright. There are of course many variables and gotchas with these sorts of things.


Pyright is only for type-checking and it lacks many features you'd expected from a modern LSP (I forgot which). Hence, it was forked and someone created basedpyright to fix it: https://github.com/DetachHead/basedpyright


To extend on this:

In python it's pretty common to have LSP separate from type checking separate from linting (e.g. ruff+mypy+ide_specific_lsp).

Which to be fair sucks (as it limits what the LSP can do, can lead to confusing mismatches in error/no-error and on one recent project I had issues with the default LSP run by vscode starting to fall apart and failing to propose auto imports for some trivial things for part of the project....)

But it's the stack where pyright fits in.


The pylance team has started exploring this, namely whether it makes sense to have an API for type checkers that is not the LSP, as language servers have a somewhat different goal in which type checking/inference is an enabling technology. This could allow multiple different language servers to be built on top of different type checkers (and the type checkers can run out-of-proc, so implementation languages can be different). https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release/discussions/718...


Pyright is good, but it's quite a memory hog. (Yes, I have plenty of RAM on my machine. No, it has other uses during development, too.)


Pyright is incredibly slow in my experience, I've seen it take over a minute on complex codebases


in my experience pyright is unable to infer many inherited object types (compared to PyCharm's type inference)


PyCharm definitely excels on more ‘dynamic’ code but the number of times I’ve pulled in code written by colleagues using PyCharm only to get a rainbow of type errors from Pyright is too damn high.

The PyCharm checker seems to miss really, really obvious things, e.g. allowing a call site to expect a string while the function returns bytes or none.

Maybe my colleagues just have it configured wrong but there’s several of them and the config isn’t shared.


About time. I'm tired of apologizing to customers who purchase subscriptions in my app only to discover they could have purchased the exact the same thing from my website for 15% less. "Why didn't you tell me?"

Excerpt from the filing:

"In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option. To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate."


About time for what? Another company to get charged with something that they don't get punished for?

The fines are always less than the companies' net gains from the practice. Gains are often indirect, risk-related, and/or part of a larger strategy, so they cannot be calculated.

Everything short of prison is a waste of time, waste of tax dollars, and spits in the face of decent citizens.


The judge referred the case for review of contempt of court, which makes individuals responsible for their criminal actions, and carries possible prison sentences. The judge has clear evidence of lying under oath and withholding evidence, and people have gone to prison for less. Alex Roman appears primarily culpable, but given the evidence reported, Tim Cook may also be complicit, and others. There is a real chance they are arrested at some point.


For me (IANAL), reading the judgment was initially shocking primarily for its facts and tone, rather than having any understanding of the legal consequences. I initially skipped over the phrase 'contempt of court' because the phrase seems so familiar from TV. But on reflection, it's the most consequential part of the document because, as you say, it has actual consequences for the people involved.


>There is a real chance they are arrested at some point.

Let's put money on it. I'll put $10k on it.


Lying under oath would catch a perjury charge as well.

In the United States, the general perjury statute under federal law classifies perjury as a felony and provides for a prison sentence of up to five years.


I like the idea of civil judgements that require responsible individuals to remove themselves from the company. And void any forward looking renumeration in their contracts.

Personal fines too, such as returning past remunerations during the problematic time in question. Salaries. Stock grants.

There is no such thing as an incentive, that doesn't incentivize someone. Relatively small fines relative to revenues and profits don't incentivize anything.

Alternatively, if fines really were big enough to turn large companies around (i.e. not just the enforced, but other companies seeing the enforcement), heads would roll, but would they be the right ones given those in charge are unlikely to fire themselves? And shareholders are the ones really paying the fines, are they really the culprits?

The incentives to act in good faith, should be placed very directly on the individuals whose choices dictate the good/bad faith. Starting and staying largely with the CEO, and the direct line of reports from the CEO down to the relevent decisions.

You don't want anyone who mattered to have cover. You want CEO's policing their own, and their reports pushing back upward against poor directives.

The only cover for relevent actors would be a record of pushing back against those who pushed through poor behavior.

TLDR: Limited liability should protect non-managing shareholders, but not bad actors within a company. Decisions makers should always be held directly responsible for their decisions. Any other system is perverse.


I think both things are needed. Despite what you're saying, shareholders have the ultimate responsibility and control over the company: they own it, they name the executives, and all the profits are ultimately returned to them. So it's absolutely necessary for the shareholders to be penalized, massively, if they profitted massively off of illegal business practices. Even if the executives were hiding this illegality from them, they are still responsible for having set up the company in a way that allowed that.

If you only punish the executives for illegal business practices, but leave the company alone, then you create an incentive to hire patsies as executives, continue letting them do illegal stuff, go to jail, and pay them handsomely after they get out.

Ultimately it has to be the company that's losing money when the company made money from illegal business, otherwise the company can just find other people willing to continue and provide for everyone who gets caught.


> Ultimately it has to be the company that's losing money when the company made money from illegal business, otherwise the company can just find other people willing to continue and provide for everyone who gets caught.

You are so right. The board & shareholders are in the path of responsibility and not recognizing that would be a call for both to use and abuse executives as scapegoats.

So be it!


> I like the idea of civil judgements that require responsible individuals to remove themselves from the company.

As long as their job isn't to P.L.E.A.S.E.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfWVV533RHE&t=85s


> There is no such thing as an incentive, that doesn't incentivize someone.

It's wild how the public discourse on incentives is so split. On one hand, the poor are guilty until proven innocent of six dimensional chess to eek "unearned" pennies from social programs, yet the very idea that mega billionaires might pull easy, obvious levers for unethical mega million payouts is one that must beg and scrape for consideration.


100%. This doesn't deserve a fine. This deserves Apple to be given an ultimatum about their mob boss behavior with mobile.

Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax. You can't even deploy your own apps at your own cadence, without strict review, using your own technology. You have to jump through unplanned upgrade cycles, you're forced to use their payment rails and signup flows (and don't get to know your customer or get them to use your website). You pay the taxes on everything. And even then, they let your competitors advertise against your name or trademark.

This is rotten to the core.

Neither Google nor Apple should have an app store. Apps should be web installs. The only reason things work the way they do is so that Apple and Google can tax and exert control. A permissions system, signature scans, and heuristics are all that are needed to keep web installs safe - and all of those pieces are already in place. There's no technical or safety limitation, Apple and Google just want to dominate.

These two companies were innovative 20 years ago, but their lead then doesn't entitle them to keep owning the majority of most people's computing surface area for the rest of time. They have to give up the reigns. There are still billions of dollars for them to make on mobile, even if regulators tell them to stop treating developers as serfs and locking them in cages.

No. More. App. Stores.

Regulate big tech's hold over mobile, web, search, and advertising.


I understand people like this ruling and want Apple and Google to open up. But this is just silly rewriting of history:

> Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax.

Long before Apple and Google made phones, a huge mobile device ecosystem already existed, including app stores, and it was way more locked down and expensive than what we have now.

The iPhone did not even launch with an app store, its launch concept was 100% web apps. They only added the native SDK and app store after developers and customers demanded it.

Again: I know the world is different now. But the idea that this was all some swift inexorable coup by Apple and Google is totally inaccurate. Plenty of other companies had a chance to do things differently, many with huge head starts.


Sure, but parallel to the mobile device (featurephone) ecosystem, there was also the old smartphone ecosystem which grew out of the PDA market where you could install your own program without paying the middleman. I would argue that modern day smartphone is more similar to the old smartphones than the featurephones.


And somehow despite that ecosystem existing before, new entrants Apple and Google emerged victorious. Maybe it had something to do with their different approach.


I doubt it was because people wanted The App Store. If the PocketPC/Windows Mobile had an App Store it would not have won.

Featurephones had App Stores like Verizon’s “Get It Now” and it was obvious that they were money grabs like Apple’s.

Apple and Google won the game because the phones were powerful enough to make web browsing feasible, and had great text input.

If nobody had thought of app stores, it would have been trivial to distribute .ipa’s and .apk’s on the Web just like Windows and Mac software still predominantly is.


> Long before Apple and Google made phones, a huge mobile device ecosystem already existed, including app stores, and it was way more locked down and expensive than what we have now.

That’s a poor comparison IMO, because the scale of this was multiple orders of magnitude less. App stores were a niche occurrence that almost no nontechnical person had heard about. Seldom anyone „needed“ an app for their company to be successful. Now they control billions of eyes.


In addition there are some exceptions when it comes to new stuff which app stores were at the time. When you come up with something new e.g. you can choose who to make business with. Different to what you can do running a dominant platform.


The iPhone did not even launch with an app store, its launch concept was 100% web apps.

In 2007 web apps were severely limited in performance and functionality, so this wasn't remotely feasible for most apps. I still believe Apple's original plan was a console model where hand-picked partners would get the secret native API. Then they realized the demand for native apps was much greater than they had anticipated, and decided to take a 30% cut from millions of developers rather than large licensing fees from a few.


It's worth noting that other fields take a radically different perspective on this. You can see Brandon Sanderson talking about how software developers get such great deals from publishers, with Apple, Google, and Steam taking puny 30% commissions, and he wishes authors could get something similar.


The 30% number was taken very positively when the Apple app store launched. It was much lower than what software companies typically budgeted at that time for marketing and distributing a new product.

Of course it didn’t take long before the App Store was so full that anyone who wanted scale had to do additional paid marketing anyway.


> They only added the native SDK and app store after developers and customers demanded it.

People demanded native SDK because web apps were garbage, unlike the native first party apps. Some people wanted an app store. No one ever wanted or demanded an exclusive app store. Putting demand for native SDK and demand for app store in one sentence smells like gaslighting.


Sure, 100% web apps will never work. It should be 95% web apps.


These days that’s obviously true. Back then web technologies lacked a lot but today I seriously question why say, a retailer, needs to waste the massive cost of building an app and putting it on both of the App Stores and updating it for every OS change. Especially considering it’s just going to be using React Native and likely isn’t any faster or more responsive than the Web.

And as a user it just feels idiotic to have to download a dedicated program to say, pay for parking or order a sandwich, in a city I’m just visiting for the day. As though taking a credit card on the Web is a foreign concept.


It's also insane how what was considered dystopia for desktop computing silently happened for mobile devices: a corporation controlling the software stack and using cryptography against the users to control precisely what software they are allowed to run on their "own" devices. Yes, in principle Android phones can be rooted, but in practice this breaks Play Integrity and you are now locked out from a huge range of apps.

Google and Apple have silently achieved Microsoft's wet dream from the "trusted platform" era of effectively making it impossible for free and open source operating systems to compete with their own.


You don't need to root an android to install apps from outside the play store


What I meant is if I want to run an open source OS like LineageOS. In principle this is possible, but Play Integrity will refuse to work when you have a custom ROM.


Some apps go far beyond that and actively check your installed apps against a whitelist and refuse to work if anything unknown is found.


I'm fine with Google and Apple having App stores, so long as I'm not forced to use them. They should compete like everyone else. The walls of the walled garden have to be torn down. They still get to have a garden, they just can't lock unwitting people inside of it.


Walls to keep apps out should be fine, but they should have to have gates to let the consumers out - i.e. a method to install other apps (not through the app store) that have every bit the same level of access as the device manufacturer's apps.

There should be two levers used to achieve this. One is anti-trust style legislation. The other is patent misuse legislation. If you try and prevent consumers from running software on hardware they bought from you to make a profit, you shouldn't be allowed to prevent consumers from buying the same hardware from someone else - that's what patents do - they create government enforced monopolies on the hardware. You should be required to invalidate (donate to the public domain) every patent on the hardware if you want to sell hardware where you get to profit off your monopoly on letting developers write software for the hardware.

These Epic rulings are better than nothing, but I can't help but feel that their solution of "make Apple distribute software they don't like in their app store" is the wrong one.


A company can lock the hardware but not the software, or lock the software but not the hardware? I’ve not heard this idea before, it sounds like an extremely logical idea. It would easily be achieved by splitting apple in two. I wonder if there are any downsides to that? The “walled garden” of hardware and software does have some benefits, but the cost to society is too high.


Is anyone proposing making Apple distribute software? If so, though, pretty sure just allowing sideloading instead would satisfy all of Apple’s critics including the government. It’s Apple who insists that all roads onto the iPhone must go through them (and give them 30% of your gross revenue)


> Is anyone proposing making Apple distribute software?

That's what the plain language of this injunction does.

Admittedly if Apple had come to the court (or even potentially came to the court now) and agreed to the alternate solution of allowing sideloading the court might have issued a different injunction (or modify this injunction).


If it's good enough for Mac, it's good enough for iPhone.


I think the realistic possible end-states are either effectively Facebook controls the app store that matters or Apple/Google do.


That's not the end-state that was achieved on macs, why would it be on the one achieved on iPads or iPhones?


It does deserve a fine and/or criminal forfeiture of the revenue they made from the app store monopoly. If Apple had to repay let's say the difference between what they charged and what a reasonable fee would be (let's say 10%), for the entire time they've been doing it, that would put "a bit" of a dent into their pocketbook and serve as an effective deterrent.


> Apps should be web installs.

That would not work with iPhone security model, as iPhone assumes the user is inexperienced.


Its not possible for them to make "billions of dollars" any other way - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_economy


Then maybe they shouldn't be making billions of dollars


And really we don't need them making billions of dollars. It is not conducive to healthy human society or progress. Such money could be spent way better than lining the pockets of management levels, people, who enable this by not having a conscience, and corrupt politicians.


If it's possible to prove that they could only make their billions thanks to this illegal practice, that would be awesome - the government could claw back the billions.


> To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath

Well that sounds rather damning.


Happens more than you’d think. Happened to me in the past as well in some business conflict. It was baffling how people can just lie in court under oath and get away with it.


The asterisk is that the government has to be able to prove knowledge and intent to lie, and prove that beyond a reasonable doubt. It makes it really hard to successfully charge anybody with perjury.


What happened to the people who lied under oath? Were they found out?


No, it was their CFO who denied knowing about <something> when he absolutely did. We ended up winning the lawsuit on all accounts, but they were never specifically called out about lying about this.


Surely he should receive a prison sentence for that alone?


With the referral to the US attorney’s office, he actually might.

Consider how painful that is going to be for Apple, and Roman, with how the current administration is abusing the DOJ.

The repercussions of this could be huge.


Well in this case it wouldn’t be abuse. I hope they do convict him if he’s guilty of perjury. It will set an example for the other weasels. “Percentage of executives of Fortune 500 companies who do time for real crimes they committed” should be a big KPI for the DOJ in my book.


I really hope you're right, but I think we're more likely to see the case swept under the rug in exchange for totally voluntary donations from Apple to various organisations with 'Trump' in their name.


So what is the punishment for outright lying under oath?


Generally none, the DA must choose to pursue perjury charges, which basically never happens. In reality, nearly everyone commits perjury. Thomas More would not approve. Both versions (1966 and 1988) of A Man For All Seasons are highly worth watching several times and practically memorizing. "Would you benefit England by populating her with liars?" [edit] in retrospect, there is one inescapable consequence of lying under oath: your word now means nothing to honest people.


I bet if a poor person struggling to hold down three jobs to survive were found to be lying under oath, the DA would throw the book at them.


> if a poor person struggling to hold down three jobs to survive were found to be lying under oath, the DA would throw the book at them

Have you been to a traffic court?


Yeah. I was pulled over and told I had an "invalid" license. "My license isn't suspended!" "No, it's not, it's just invalid." Not expired. Not counterfeit. Just invalid. "What does that mean?" "You'll have ask the DOL. And here's a ticket. And you can't drive from here."

Go home, go to the DOL's website. Green text, "VALID". Weird. "Pay any monies owing on your license." Let's try that. "There are no monies owed."

Huh.

Print these out, take them to the DOL. It was a technicality where a process had suspended my license over a fine, but then unsuspended it the same day because they'd received a check.

She waives the $25 fee that should have been attached. And stamps the screenshots of this I'd taken, and prints out the status changes on my account.

Take it to court to challenge the ticket. Prosecutor doesn't want to dismiss. "They'd have generated and sent you a letter when they did that, so you had to have known."

Eventually dismissed, but only after three or four back-and-forths.


That’s hilarious. But also irrelevant. The point is people in traffic court are constantly lying. Like, zero-effort four-IQ lies.


Federal prosecutors have insanely high "winning" percentages but the closer you get to the local level, the more that drops. I suspect that local prosecutors, in addition to often having a poor understanding of the law, often try to up their win percentage by pushing cases like yours because they know most people will find it easier to just pay whatever token amount it takes to make it go away.


To be honest companies practically incentivize having no moral compass and lying to succeed. Every major company's executives incorporate lying judiciously to their employees and their users alike and encourage their reports to lie to theirs and so on. Adhering to complete honesty is a one way ticket to HR.

Sit on any all-hands call for a major company and it is practically guaranteed large chunks of the presentation will be executive gaslighting of its own employees with info that is objectively false or a misrepresentation. You will also never get a real answer to actual hard questions (especially if it is on the topic of something that may negatively affect workers) which is essentially lying by omission.

It doesn't help that we have now proven that you can lie all the way to the seat of being president of the united states.

That said - whether we like it or not, we are now a culture built on lying.


This matches my own personal experience of corporate America, and is one of the primary reasons I left.

And it’s not just the lying that’s the problem - it’s the lack of critical thinking, the gullibility, the willingness to suspend disbelief and give benefit of the doubt and credit where it’s not due, amongst those being lied to, be they employees, or voters.

The way out is to see through it, to question it, and to stop acquiescing to it. If we all do that, the liars will never ascend to the positions of power we have allowed them to have over us today.


> we are now a culture built on lying.

Are now? I mentioned Thomas More to show that this exact same thing happened 500 years ago. The whole point of the movie A Man For All Seasons is to show that this is always how it has been throughout human history, and that only a few people stand out as putting the truth higher than their own interests, such as Thomas More and Joan of Arc, which deeply impress even non-religious people like Robert Bolt and Mark Twain.


Maybe 'are now' was the wrong choice of words because this is correct. It has always been this way.

Truth for thee but not for me are the rich and powerful's greatest desire.


Sure, but doing it in a court of law is illegal.


Illegal but practically never actually consequential.


I've not seen the one from 1988; I'll have to check that out. I've long enjoyed the one from '66.

I also heartily recommend both seasons of Wolf Hall. About Cromwell rather than More, but still fascinating.


The 1988 one stars Charlton Heston as Thomas More and was a made for TV movie based on the original 1965 play by Robert Bolt. Very, very good. Different from the 1966 movie. But both good in different ways. Neither is better.


Oh no, my word means nothing to honest people.

Boards private jet to Monaco


Yet these superrich people crave respect so much that they endlessly poast on social networks, or buy a social network.


>these superrich people crave respect so much

Don't we all? This is one of the very basic human needs. Since they don't need to worry about food and shelter, they focus on social status and entertainment.


I think you're supposed to learn to respect yourself so your self worth isn't based on how other people view you.


This is mostly true - but it will be used against you in future civil proceedings as well.

IE this person is now useless as a witness pretty much forever.


There are so few honest Americans that it hardly matters to serve such a small demographic.


Clearly nothing, since we've decided to be a nation that doesn't enforce laws.


[flagged]


I mean, that contribution to his inauguration fund is what probably got them that tariff exemption.


Criminal contempt would the charge against the company or the people named above? How does it work in this case?


"Accordingly ... the Court refers the issue to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California ... for investigation against Apple and Alex Roman, Apple’s Vice President of Finance specifically."


Read Taibbi's book, The Divide. No prison time is the most likely outcome unless the justice system has changed between then and now.


> Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise.

Here's the fun question though. Do Roman, Maestri et al not have any specific damages to this? (I know the answer, but it's a good question to ask....)


And what happens now to those who lied under oath? Can we get those people properly punished and send some signals? Or are they above the law somehow?


The USA is an oligarchy


> About time.

Oh c'mon, 16 years into a product line ain't too bad, is it?

If you had a kid when the App Store first came out, that kid would now be nearing high school graduation and you still can't do as you describe. The great recession, the pandemic, the iPad, proliferation of AI, legalization of Gay marriage in the states and weed in some places, annexation of crimea and the war in Ukraine, the foxconn suicide issue, 4G, LTE, 5G, fiber to the home, brexit, Golang, Rust, TypeScript, Swift, APFS, Arm and the downfall of Intel, the rise of NVIDIA, Netflix, TikTok, drones, electric cars, scooters, bikes, end-to-end design and construction of their mothership headquarters, and federal acknowledgement that climate change is an issue, have all basically happened in that time; but nope, it's for security reasons. Hell, even their lead industrial designer retired long before they'd let up.

Edit: Not that any of those have anything to do with the App Store, but still.


We didn't start the fire, it was always burning since the world's been turning...


In the inevitable case where this lands Apple serious monetary penalties affecting the quarterly earnings, how many employees will be laid off? Will Alex Roman be one of them?

I'd bet no.


If you're publishing on the app store you are part of the problem. Your customers are right to feel aggrieved.


Will Walmart let you have a label on your product saying you could get it cheaper from Amazon?


Will walmart open your packaging, review all text in the manual, and tell you that you need to reprint your manual because it has a link to your homepage "company.com" and on that page you can find a pricing page with lower prices?

Will walmart prevent you from selling, say, a fishing pole that allows you to buy fishing hooks from another store?

Apple's app-store review would reject any app that linked the company pricing page, and would reject any app that let you use an alternative payment method like paypal or a credit card on a non-apple site.

Also, in your analogy the customer has to be unable to buy your app from anywhere else (since the customer has an iPhone and there are no other stores or operating systems for iPhone)..

It really doesn't work as a good comparison imo.


The parent poster just said that customers can pay on his website so I’m assuming it’s a service surfaced by his app.


Yes! Why do people keep on asking this? Yes, practically every single tech product that you buy from Walmart will include links to their online stores in the packaging. Including Apple products! And this has been the case for ages.

I remember buying DVDs from Walmart and opening them up and the first thing you would see is a slip of paper telling you in giant letters to use some reward program or streaming service rather than buying the DVDs physically.

If you buy an iPhone from Walmart, there will be a link to the apple store in the packaging. If you buy a Switch, there will be promotions for digital downloads that directly compete with Walmart in your packaging. It's not just digital links either, when I bought a Roomba it came with instructions about how to order future purchases, filters, and parts directly from the manufacturer.

Apple bans developers from including links to alternative stores in bundled manuals and help pages. I can not think of a single physical store that does the same, and I can't think of a single tech company including Apple that doesn't link to competing storefronts in their manuals and packaging inserts.

Apple is worse than Walmart on this issue.


And that’s after you buy it. Are you willing to sell your software up front instead of a subscription? Walmart doesn’t distribute products for free that then you can pay for it after you take it home.


Apple's policy was also the same for apps that you bought upfront. There are paid apps on the app store, they also were not allowed to link to payment methods in-app for things like DLCs, add-ons, etc...

Which noteably, Walmart doesn't restrict.

----

Also not for nothing, but this was an impressively fast pivot you made from "well, Walmart wouldn't let you do this" to "Walmart is nothing like the app store" ;)

Like.. you asked the question. Would Walmart let you link to a competing store? Yes, and everybody does it. You are the one here who compared Apple to Walmart, I'm sorry if that comparison didn't go the way you wanted it to. If perhaps you want to suggest that Walmart is not like the app store.. well.. congratulations, you and the judge are in agreement on that.


> Thus the Court found:

> In retail brick-and-mortar stores, consumers do not lack knowledge of options. Technology platforms differ.

Yeah, but keep going on about how this is the same as Walmart


Yet everyday, people seem to know that to use Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, etc on their phone, they have to sign up on the website since you can’t pay for either via in app purchases.


Courts understand that making things annoying but possible is not actually a counterargument.


Full context:

"In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option. To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate."


About time. I'm tired of apologizing to customers who purchase subscriptions in my app only to discover they could have purchased the exact the same thing for 15% less from my website. "Why didn't you tell me?"


Apart from, of course, the incentive of being undercut on price by the competition at (likely soon) a similar level of performance.



I have used Github Copilot extensively within VS Code for several months. The autocomplete - fast and often surprisingly accurate - is very useful. My only complaint is when writing comments, I find the completions distracting to my thought process.

I tried Gemini Code Assist and it was so bad by comparison that I turned it off within literally minutes. Too slow and inaccurate.

I also tried Codestral via the Continue extension and found it also to be slower and less useful than Copilot.

So I still haven't found anything better for completion than Copilot. I find long completions, e.g. writing complete functions, less useful in general, and get the most benefit from short, fast, accurate completions that save me typing, without trying to go too far in terms of predicting what I'm going to write next. Fast is the key - I'm a 185 wpm on Monkeytype, so the completion had better be super low latency otherwise I'll already have typed what I want by the time the suggestion appears. Copilot wins on the speed front by far.

I've also tried pretty much everything out there for writing algorithms and doing larger code refactorings, and answering questions, and find myself using Continue with Claude Sonnet, or just Sonnet or o1-preview via their native web interfaces, most of the time.


I see, perhaps with Gemini because the model is larger it takes longer to generate the completions. I would expect with a larger model it would perform better on larger codebases. It sounds like for you, it's faster to work on a smaller model with shorter more accurate completions rather than letting the model guess what you're trying to write.


Have you tried Gitlab Duo and if so, what are your thoughts on that?


Not yet, hadn't heard of it. Thanks for the suggestion.


For me it starts with a small patch of my visual field going blind - not white or black, just not able to see anything or make out detail in that area. Typically it's a spot in the center of my vision such that I can't read. After 5-10 minutes, flashing, swirling colored patterns will appear in that same spot. The affected area then enlarges progressively over the course of anywhere between 30 minutes and several hours, covering a polygonally shaped area with the flashing swirling patterns. Sometimes it will stop after 2-3 hours and gradually disappear. Other times the area of blindness and flashing colors will continue to expand for 6 or more hours until it covers an entire half of my visual field.

After the visual aura disappears, usually (but not always) an intense headache will start that lasts the rest of the day.

Triggers for me are unknown but in the past have included air pollution (e.g. smoke from wildfires) and very bright light (watching a video with a white background for too long on a high brightness TV).

I have also noticed greatly reduced frequency of these migraines after I started taking magnesium glycinate daily.


Atlassian IPO'd in 2015... so you would have worked there 2006-2009. Congrats on the success, but that was more than a decade and a half ago... I'm not sure it counts as a recent example.


I'm in this category, except became an invisible solopreneur after deciding startups are a raw deal instead of going back to FAANG. Between the unfavorable tax treatment, long time to IPO, the inherently high risk of options, it's just not worth it. Perhaps a good deal for the VCs, maybe for the founders, but not for even the earliest employees. See you in the next life.


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