Posts by Justthefacts

Re: And how would that work?

“I have feeds that don’t track me”

You mean like RSS? Ok….let me know how many people use RSS vs user base of Instagram. Would you say that it has a one-to-one map with people who browse tech websites, for example? Most normal people think your solution is just a terrible fit for their needs, and would rather wear a frumpy dress from Laura Ashley than even consider doing that.

Honestly, this has such a creepy vibe, it’s astonishing you don’t see it: a bunch of middle-aged male software engineers, want to tell 16-25 year women what to watch. And when they refuse to do so, on the mens terms, the men lobby the EU to make the womens thing illegal. It’s just….ick. Ick, Ick, Ick. No way round it, creepy as hell.

Re: And how would that work?

#1 Falls at the most basic function: how do you ever find accounts to follow in the first place. But also, people want to follow what’s fashionable. Insta, by definition, finds people who are “like” them, and suggests them fashions they want to follow. Your app only works for the consciously unfashionable. As you can appreciate, *by numeric definition*, your app loses to Insta in the free market.

#2 You are just outsourcing the discovery mechanism to “a trusted influencer”. We used to call these “TV channels”. You’ve just reinvented TV, or at best “curated content”. Also, how does “the trusted influencer” discover?

#3 “Asking you to suggest what you’d like”. I think you’ve just reinvented the search box….we used to call that Google. If you want Google, go to google.

Re: And how would that work?

“Subscribe….the accounts you choose to subscribe to”.

And, how would you ever have discovered these accounts to subscribe to?! Presumably you didn’t just stare into the ashes of the flames of your Viking longship, guess a username, and run a search to go to their page to see if you were interested in the content? What actually happens is that a certain % of the scroll slots always contain new-possible-accounts of potential interest. If you engage, you will starting seeing posts from that account; if you don’t you will stop seeing posts from that account.

Again, ads are treated *identically* to non-ads. If you are of the correct demographics to see eg an Insta ad from Hello Fresh, then it will get served to you a few times to gauge interest.. But if you show no interest, it won’t ever show any more ads to you from Hello Fresh. It has discovered that you are a waste-of-time poor match for that advertiser, and that’s the last you will see of them. Same as any music band that you might like, but actually don’t. *That’s targeting*.

All you are doing by “turning off targeting” is a) Ensuring that only a teeny-tiny fraction of the “discovery” items in your feed have any possibility of you being interested in them b) Ensuring that the fraction of “discovery” items in your feed has to approach 90%+ in order for there to be any chance whatsoever that anything ever piques your interest before you delete the app in disgust….and that applies to both normal and ads c) Ensuring that once you have viewed an ad from a company in which you have no interest, refusing to let Meta remember that you don’t want to see the ad again! So they must show it again….and again…..and again. Because remembering what you *didn’t* want to see is literally the definition of targeting.

Re: Gibberish

Of course it needs “troves of personal information”. How else do you think it works? “More of what you just looked at” = a hash-table of the last ten thousand items viewed, weighted by engagement, then a bunch of Principal Component analysis to put you in the correct box, then some K-nearest neighbours stuff.

If you want to pretend that you being in a K-nearest neighbour box with other people who post “Yaas Qween” at Katy Perry, and also have an interest in Jungkook BTS doesn’t make you a 16-22yr old female, who will be interested in other things that 16-22yr old females are interested in…..then go right ahead and be silly about it. But probably not a bad target for awareness ads for tampons. And a lousy target for Saga Holiday ads. But there is literally no “targeted ad-ness” in there. They fail to serve the above person Saga Holiday ads, through exactly the same lines of code that also don’t shove out “80-yr old Japanese great-grandmother bemoans why her grand children don’t visit the family Shinto shrine”, and for the same reason. Different box.

“It would be dropping stuff in your feed that you've looked weeks, months or years in the past where there is new and interesting related stuff”. The algorithm does exactly that. It really absolutely does. All day, every day, 24/7 to hundreds of millions of people. Perhaps if it isn’t doing that for you, you’ve got some ad-blocker blocking everything, and have been hoist by your own petard. Can’t say. But for everyone else, no it does exactly as you request. If you’ve watched a hundred “cat plays with otter” clips, then within minutes of your favourite creator dropping “cat plays with otter again” after six months off, it will be in your feed.

Gibberish

In feed-based apps like Insta and FB, the entire app is literally driven off tracking your personal data, and feeding you what you engaged with before. Never mind ads, *that is what a feed is*. Insisting on non-personal-data-driven posts, * whether ads or not*, is like legislating for “red courage”. “Red” is an adjective, certainly. But applying it to abstract nouns, that’s a category error. Your legislation is literal gibberish. The words don’t mean anything.

And how would that work?

So, Instagram. Forget about ads entirely for the moment, just look at the very concept of “an Instagram feed”. “Your Instagram feed” consists 100% of posts in Instagram database, which have a high match on an individualised basis to other posts which you have engaged with in some way. That’s literally what your feed *is*, it is nothing other than closed-loop completely personalised tracking. Again, forget about ads, what would “your Instagram feed” look like without tracking? It would be…..just the globally highest trending hashtags. Stuff you had no interest in, the Kardashians mixed in with equal measures of Trump rallies, Brazilian soap opera stars, Thai cuddle buddies, Teletubbies, K-Pop, and Cardinal Ratzinger. It would be the same feed for everyone, not individualised, so it would just be a global broadcast channel. This is just not a viable concept, it *makes no sense*.

Nobody is asking you to scroll Instagram. You don’t have to, if you don’t want to. But you do have to accept that for those people that scrolling appeals to, they need to be logged in for Insta to show them any meaningful feed. That is their choice. The whole concept is just gibberish otherwise.

Now consider how ads change this whole picture. An ad is simply a post where the poster has paid to have it displayed in among all the others. That is all it is. Apart from the payment, it goes into exactly the same algorithm mixing pot. So, please explain: *how* could Instagram show non-tracked ads into your feed, which is literally defined as “the place where Instagram puts the targeted stuff for you, based on tracking info”. It’s *gibberish* as a concept. It doesn’t parse semantically. You asking for ads to be “smodge-wollocked”, because that sounds bad and you don’t approve of ads, rather than considering whether “smodge-wollocking” is even a word.

It’s about the use case

“ £31 for a conservative 6000 pages”

So, I’m genuinely astonished that anyone actually prints 6000 pages any more. Or even *600* pages.

Not disputing that you do, but this is why I have such a big problem with people using a £/page metric. It’s just so far off the world I see around me.

I’m pretty old school myself. I suspect that 90% of things that I would print, nobody else does. Airline tickets, theatre tickets. I doubt that that I’ve printed 600 pages since the pandemic, total.

I mean just *how* do you print 6000 pages? In the whole 10 year lifetime of the printer, as a home user?

And, flipside, how do you end up with an inkjet solution for a business, however low end? Even you sell some soy candles at the weekly market and need to print leaflets, packaging etc, it’s got to be a laser printer or the cost per page is more than the cost of your product.

I just don’t understand the economics of inkjet for modern use, at all.

Re: HP claimed it went "to great lengths"…

So, at home we are on the “HP ink” subscription. You may have a political disagreement with such things, but it works for us and is indeed *super cost effective*. The deal is ultra-simple, it’s £1 a month, all-in. Whenever we run out of ink, they send us a new cartridge without us asking.

Clearly there must be some limit to that, I honestly have no idea what it is and we’ve never hit it. I reckon we probably print less than 5 single pages per month plus a couple times a year the odd 50 page doc.

Our needs are low, but very likely in the modern world extremely commonplace: we get the ability to print whenever, whatever, on the rare times we need to for modern life. For *£1 a month*. Ink used to cost us maybe £35 *twice a year*.

How cheap is the 3rd party model going to have to be, they can charge me less than one old cartridge every 3 years, make a profit, and still have it that the cartridge isn’t dried up and non-functional when I fire it up from cold having not printed a page for four months? HP Ink works when I do that. Because a new cartridge comes through the door whenever it needs to, to avoid the drying-out problem. Is it wasteful? F* if I care, I can print out the airplane tickets when I need to, and they look fine.

Honestly, HP have hit the market sweet spot for probably 90% of home printer owners. For £1 a month.

Fuel usage

I haven’t run the numbers on Starship specifically. But actually launcher waste far less fuel than people think. A Falcon9 uses a total of 150 tonnes of fuel and oxygen combined. For comparison, a 747 jet maximum fuel load is 200 tonnes. And that’s all fuel, therefore much more CO2 for the 747 (if that’s your concern). Plus, amongst launchers, Falcon9 Merlin engines run on (space-grade) kerosene, really rather similar to standard jet fuel. As opposed to, say, Ariane second stage, which is hydrazine - horribly toxic.

To give a real feel for this, a current satellite on its way, Eutelsat 36D, was recently flown to Florida from Toulouse aboard a purpose built Airbus Beluga, for launch on the Falcon9. The (return) flight of that transport aircraft will have burnt more fuel than the launch. And particularly if you add in the flights for all support personnel.

Re: Great Idea!

Targeted “based on the content of the show and typical demographic of the viewer.”

Exactly as targeted internet ads are. The difference is that many (really all) relevant modern web platforms have dynamic content, not static. Eg an Instagram feed, there’s simply no equivalent of a static channel with a given viewership. It’s all dynamically generated targeted based on assessment of the individualised preferences. Even the non-ads.

Instagram literally *is* targeted, some of the posts being ads. That’s how it is defined. Asking for ads to be non-targeted on Instagram doesn’t parse as a grammatical statement, it’s a type mismatch error.

That’s what Instagram is. Don’t like it, nobody is forcing you to use it. But legislating against their core product, that other people do want to use, is just nuts.

Re: Great Idea!

Well, like most on this forum, you are confusing targeted advertising (which is all advertising), with what is called in the industry *native* advertising, which is the ads shown on unrelated websites/blogs/forums etc. It’s *native* that everyone here hates, because it’s all they happen to come into contact with, but it only forms about 5% of online ad spend. It costs almost nothing to run native ads, because they are known to be remarkably ineffective. Precisely *because* the targeting is so poor (even *with* the tracking), the volume has to be vast.

None of this has anything to do with the vast bulk of ads, on Facebook, Google, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, MailMetro, Bing. Those targeted ads run *on their own platform and their own website*. If you don’t go to their website, you don’t see their ads. At all. Instagram running targeted ads is no different to ITV running ads on TV. If you don’t want to see ads served by ITV, don’t watch ITV.

And yet the EU Commission want to tell them what to do on their own website. That’s the problem.

Re: Great Idea!

Yeah, because white middle-aged males like you are being discriminated against. By not being allowed to view ads for “SKKN by Kim” makeup. It’s suddenly hit me: a weave is what you’ve always wanted, *normally* used by Afro-Caribbeans but who are we to say. And you just don’t know where in the local area to get one. They’re hiding it from you, it’s a global conspiracy to prevent you getting a weave and nail extensions.

Re: Great Idea!

TV advertising is *highly* targeted. I have no idea why you think otherwise.

Re: Great Idea!

“Except perhaps some very approximate geographical stuff as there's no point running ads for, say, an Australian product if the viewer is in Europe but happens to be looking at the Australian based website”

Indeed. And of course gender. Because there’s no point in serving ads for tampons to men. Plus, of course, age. Because it’s actually illegal to serve ads for gambling or alcohol to under-18s. And while you’re at it, not very sensible to target ads for holidays for a company literally called 18-30 to 65 year olds.

Paying 30p per click, how long do you think it is possibly to stay in business blanket-advertising tampons to 65year old men?

Re: Sorry to pour cold water on a plasma jet

“A few hours per day with sun on the solar panels might be enough”

I’m afraid the orbital mechanics for this don’t work. Firstly, the orbital period is about 90 minutes, that’s the length of your light cycle period. But if you only thrust on the half of the orbit when you are in the sun, you don’t maintain orbit altitude. Instead, you push the height of the orbit up, on the opposite side of the Earth where you are thrusting. Very quickly you get an elliptical orbit. And the bit of the orbit opposite the dark side just decreases in height without being held up at all, and hits the ground quite quickly.

Re: Sorry to pour cold water on a plasma jet

“ 70 to 90 kilometers”. At 80km, pressure is about 0.01mbar. No, I don’t think “airbreathing engine” is the correct perspective. It’s an ion thruster, backed by an air ram as a propellant source (instead of xenon tank, as per norm), and powered by solar panels.

“You have no idea what plasma systems eat or why”. Ad hominem, and not useful. It’s clear that we come from different industries, you are from the aero side; whereas I come from the space angle. Almost all the latest class of geo satellites are now electric thruster. The mass saving from reducing the chemical propellant tank is sufficient to compensate for the several months of orbit-raising via ion thruster. But if I take say a Eurostar E3000 EOR variant, it has 5kW thrusters fitted. The total bus power budget is up to 25kW, with 15-20kW payload power now routine. So, no, the electrical power draw of the thruster is not the be-all-and-end-all, it’s just one consideration in a large tradeoff matrix.

Re: Sorry to pour cold water on a plasma jet

I worked in the space industry for over twenty years, designed and led several payload equipments, and later overall Program Management responsible on two spacecraft.

Apparently, you can’t read. That was exactly what I said: there’s a hidden assumption on the solar panel config that needs it to be in sun-synchronous, but it can’t be.

Re: Sorry to pour cold water on a plasma jet

I agree with your conclusion (this isn’t practical), but not your reasoning. “If you rely on superhigh exhaust velocities, your thermodynamics become inefficient”. Yes, but you’re making the assumption that thermodynamic inefficiency is unacceptable. However, today spacecraft use ion engines routinely with exhaust velocities 30+km/s upwards, and the thermodynamics *are* inefficient. The atmosphere is sufficiently thin that the thrust required is low enough (milliNewtons), that the spacecraft tradeoff is in favour of over-provisioning power to save stored reaction-mass, up to a point.

The reason that *I* don’t think this will work is: one has to allocate a large fraction of the frontal area to the intake ram. Because even at 30kps exhaust velocity, drag is a fixed large fraction of thrust. The solar panels have a massive area, so they have to be aerodynamic, ie edge-on to direction of travel. But you can’t just fix the solar panels like this. The spacecraft is orbiting and constantly turning relative to the Sun. It *must* point them separately towards the Sun, otherwise for large fractions of the orbit you have no power, and no thrust.

Now, there’s a bodge, which the designers of this might be aware of but not understood properly. If you choose a sun-synchronous (polar) orbit, you can have the panels fixed and edge-on to direction of travel. But only a small range of orbits can be Sun-synchronous. That orbit relies on a coincidence due to the earths equatorial bulge, which needs an orbital altitude 250km+, otherwise it’s unstable. As low as they want it to be (within the upper atmosphere) the simple orbit equation naively seems to allow it, but you’d need to use an unthinkable amount of delta-v to keep the inclination stable at 96degrees over the year. I think what happened is that they’ve *seen* an existing operating example, but not understood it. GOCE satellite indeed does have low altitude, uses electric-propulsion, and has fixed aerodynamic solar panels. And that does work….because GOCE is in a Sun-synchronous orbit! But GOCE orbit altitude intrinsically isn’t low enough to gather sufficient propellant to maintain orbit, so it has onboard propellant. There’s just no overlap between the constraints “propellant collection rate”, “solar panel power / area / pointing” and “sun-synchronous orbit”.

I think a (military) spacecraft operating on Nuclear Thermal Battery, plus aero-ram, plus ion engine, could work though….

Re: Who are their lawyers?

It really doesn’t. If this is important to your business, you need to consult a lawyer specialising in EU law, ASAP. Just reading EU law yourself isn’t going to cut it: they’ve redefined the words they use.

Re: Who are their lawyers?

Wrong. People within the EU borders. Plus if the EU want to add the extra restriction “only EU citizens within our borders”, that’s up to them nobody else cares.

But it’s certainly not an OR, it may be an AND

Re: Who are their lawyers?

The law *doesn’t* apply to EU citizens, as indeed it can’t. Countries can’t make laws that apply outside their sovereign boundaries, citizenship is irrelevant. In just the same way that an Afghan citizen attempting to claim protection for marriage to a child by Sharia law within the borders of France will get short shrift.

By the way “EU citizenship”’ is a very slippery legal concept, and not in the end a useful one. First off, it’s not recognised at all outside the EU - as far as the USA or Switzerland or anyone else is concerned, you are a French or German citizen. If, for example, you were detained by in a 3rd country, you have a right to contact your national consulate, but not the EU consulate. Second, the citizenship criteria can diverge subtly but importantly from national citizenship. There are a dozen edge cases where people can be eg French citizens but not EU citizens, and people who are EU citizens who are not nationals of any member state. And in every single case, the legal rights follow the national citizenship(s), not the EU one. EU citizenship in itself can’t confer any rights in circumstances that national citizenship doesn’t cover, so it’s a redundant concept.

The only time you see the phrase used is as an inaccurate shorthand by people who don’t really understand it, and EU Commission. The courts themselves are always really careful in the rulings to use phrases like “violates rights laid down in EU law”. Occasionally you do see something like “violates the rights defined for EU citizens”, which if you think really carefully with your legal word telescope, does not mean the court is handing down the judgement *because* this particular person is an EU citizen. Merely that it applies to all EU citizens (of whom this person is a part of an overlapping set) and (who in this particular case is covered by national adoption of this EU law)

Re: Illegal under the DMA

“That’s what a sandbox is”. Is it really? Because *Apple customers* think that by far the most important bit of the sandbox is the review process of what is allowed onto the Apple App Store in the first place. It’s *you* who has too limited a technical understanding to understand what the sandbox is. Process wins over technical guardrail every time. And you know this perfectly well (or should do) as an IT professional. For employers that give their staff locked-in laptops, who have an IT policy as to what programs they can install…..how impressed do you think they would be, if a user decided to install a “sandbox” on their laptop? “But it’s a sandbox, it should be able to contain any malware”. That employee would get fired. Because it’s insecure.

“Oh, but I own this iPhone, I should have the right to install whatever I like, I’m not an employee”. Right. And I own *my* iPhone. *I* should have the right to install whatever *policies* I like to ensure my own security. And I’ve chosen to outsource hire Apple as my IT department, to vet the security for stuff I don’t want to waste my time with. What business is that of yours, to decide that I’m not allowed to do that?

Re: "We have received requests"

The latest couple of generations of iPhones work just fine after being dropped in the toilet. Mine has been at the bottom of a swimming pool overnight with no ill effects.

Re: Illegal under the DMA

Ah, the guy who thinks he knows how somebody *else’s* software should be architected. Based on the fact that another bit of software they’ve worked on had been done that way, and therefore everyone must do it that way.

Or, and it’s just a thought, why not let consumer choice take care of it? If it truly is a crappy architecture, in a way that affects the customer, then they won’t buy it. Simple.

The fact that IOS is, by some margin, the dominant software ecosystem in the world by profit (rather than turnover), shows that consumers actually rather like it. For reasons you don’t understand.

Re: "We have received requests"

No, for hardware they’ll just make one for the EU market and one for the rest of world. The Rest of World will meet IP68 maximum protection for liquid and solid ingress; EU they will just do same as a LandfillDroid: none at all.

Illegal under the DMA

Except that Apple’s *new* solution, they *can’t* let people pick their own browser. Select Firefox, get Apple WebKit if and only if PWA.

Because that’s technically required by IOS architecture. And that’s illegal under the DMA. As Apple told you the first time.

Not quite right

The RAM refresh is done in sections. The overall actual refresh interval for DDR4 is 64ms, from when a particular row is refreshed, to when it is done again. We can ask a separate question: if we hooked some separate refresh and power circuitry to the DDR4, such that when the CPU was powered down, the refresh still ran….well the RAM itself is taking maybe 3W when fully active, but the refresh is only maybe 0.5% duty cycle. I don’t have exact figures, but it might consume only 15mW in refresh-only. That’s still more than you can hold in a capacitor, but it’s easily in the range of a small on-module Li-ion battery for a week or more, if one chose to do it.

And that’s the thing: you don’t need any complex technology developments, just a bit of engineering on the PCB. The fact that nobody *does* choose to do it, says to me that “persistent memory” in and of itself is not really useful to anyone.

Re: No problem

Well, *my* worldview (and career experience) is that in a large corporate tech company, the kind of meeting where those decisions are taken, is an eyeball-stabbingly dull place. Typical discussion is about deadlines, existing commitments, staffing levels, technical risk, overcost, and our friends SAM and ARPU. The unspoken subjects are internal politics, whose fault it is, departmental responsibilities, compensation alignment. External politics? Taking revenge on a government? That sort of lack of self-control and poor judgement is going to get you taken aside after the meeting, asked if everything is Ok at home, and whatever it is they don’t GAF but either way leave it at home or be re-assigned to the Quality Department.

I await the evidence outcome with baited breath. Maybe some manager at Apple brought their politics to work. But I bet you 10:1 odds they didn’t.

Re: No problem

So, ironically, whether your solution works or not depends on whether you are correct about Apple doing this deliberately and maliciously.

If I am right, and this is just a necessary technical consequence (for Apple) of EU legislation…..then yes your solution will work. But if *you* are right, and this is intended to deliberately disable features within the EU to poke them in the eye…..then Apple will just add a GPS location check. So if you are correct, then you *are* screwed. But if your company survives, then your entire paranoid world-view is wrong. Quite a puzzle eh. Do the experiment, find out.

Re: I

I believe you are confusing two separate things here: Apple’s relationship with developers who release stuff for its platform, and Apple’s relationship with consumers who bought its devices.

“App developers cannot release a new version of their PWA which works because Apple has blocked all of them.” Sucks to be an EU-based developer then. But Apple have no contract with them. IPad purchasers, the people who do have a contract, are not affected by that aspect. Sorry, you just have to put that argument aside, it doesn’t affect anything.

“It is not simply that the sausage maker chose to go vegan only. It is that they have also entered the houses of everyone who bought their sausages and removed them, even though they had no need to do so.” Maybe….let’s deconstruct that: does Apple have the right to force-deprecate Apps? Well, they can’t (and don’t) force upgrade people’s IOS version. They can (and do) routinely upgrade IOS version at the users request, which has the effect of deprecating some of the Apps on their devices, those ones that don’t support the newer version. As long as Apple have informed you that upgrading the IOS will break a particular functionality, and you do it anyway, that’s your choice. So no, that argument doesn’t fly.

“They are doing that to try to punish the regulators for having made the change that they don't like. This is not supposition no matter how you intend to characterize it.” Yes it is supposition, and I don’t particularly believe it. And even if true, it doesn’t matter, because as long as the act is lawful, intent doesn’t matter.

“They could have allowed other browser engines, and those engines are capable of running PWAs inside themselves. Those engines probably would need to have code added to interact with some of the hardware, but that's the job of the people writing those engines, not Apple.” I 100% agree. 3rd party browser authors have spent years arguing that they shouldn’t be forced to use WebKit…and now they’ve been handed the keys to the kingdom we discover that they haven’t bothered to code any of the hard edge-cases, which they expected just to use WebKit anyway. Now that Apple is saying “well you’ve opted out of WebKit, so you can’t use it” they’ve been found out. Do we know that if/when any of the other browser manufacturers implement WebKit-like functionality, PWAs won’t work? I don’t know that at all. PWA’s now open in-browser. If Firefox make push notifications work in their browser, then….push notifications will work in their browser. Is that technically possible? I have no idea, and there’s no reason Apple should care, that’s Firefox responsibility.

“Existing PWAs could run in WebKit because that is what they're already set to run in” No they shouldn’t, Apple does *not* have that legal freedom. The EU made it a legal requirement that the user be allowed to opt out of using WebKit. This is what that looks like in practice. You absolutely cannot require a company to manage the situation where people “sign a legally binding opt out from WebKit”, the users selection doesn’t work, and Apple have to fall back to the working solution, with the risk of getting sued because they did something that the user has opted out of. This is the carbon copy of the GDPR problem. “Do you accept cookies that this website needs to do its job”….user clicks “no I don’t accept”….website says “well, I need them to do my job, so I’m going to ignore your non-acceptance and set them anyway”? Results in getting sued. Sorry, no. If you don’t accept cookies, the website may not have its full functionality, or indeed any functionality.

Re: Thanks Apple...

“Could they not use Safari for PWAs and allow other browsers for normal surfing”

That’s easy. No, the *EU law* does not allow it, and people could sue Apple if it did. The browser makers asked for, and got, the EU to legislate that consumers be given the choice to opt out of WebKit. If the consumer has chosen to use a browser that doesn’t contain WebKit, the law says that their choice must be respected. It can’t just automatically fall back to Safari on those use-cases where “Firefox doesn’t support it”, whatever the technical reason for that.