>but I can’t shake the feeling it was written by AI.
After I read this article, I thought this whole incident is fabricated and created as a way to go viral on tech sites. One immediate red flag was: why would someone go to these lengths to hack a freelancer who's clearly not rich and doesn't have millions in his cryptowallet. And how did they know he used Windows? Many devs don't.
Ah, you might say, maybe he is just one of the 100 victims. Maybe but we'd hear from them by now. There's no one else on X claiming to have been contacted by them.
Anyway, I'm highly skeptical of this whole incident. I could be wrong though :)
I'm convinced that Tim Cook's biggest mistake was not creating an EV. Just look at how Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi and BYD have moved into the EV space and have created amazing experiences for their customers. CarPlay paired with American cars is simply few generations behind from what the Chinese companies have done. Yet Apple was early enough and had an EV team but Cook killed it. Even if the 1st gen was crap and didn't live up to the Apple's standards, they should have kept iterating. Now they have nothing new and are just iterating current product lines. Which is fine but it doesn't create new growth. You need new markets to do that.
Automaking is a capital intensive, operationally complex, and fiercely competitive (read: low profit) industry. Apple's gross margin is nearly 3x higher than Tesla's, and Tesla will face increased margin pressure as more of the industry electrifies. Even if Apple were to match Porsche as the leader in volume+profit luxury automotive, it wouldn't be nearly as lucrative as their current businesses. There are other areas in which Apple could expand to more profitably leverage its core competencies.
Aside from all the difficulties that come with self driving, I suspect Apple cancelled its car effort because they couldn't figure out how differentiate its offering at a price low enough to drive volume and a cost low enough to drive comparable profit to its other businesses.
Apple's overall market strategy is "premium product, premium price". If you look to the 7x price ratio between AVP and Meta Quest 3 as your guide, they'd make a supercar that would cost something like USD 175k.
Sure, an Apple Car would likely have a lot of interesting and unusual but well understood design points, both positive (like liquid crystal electric tinting windows) and negative (imagine something as weird as charging a car like an Apple Magic Mouse), but hardly anyone would be able to afford them unless they were working in Big Tech.
I think Tim Cook has bad product and design taste [1], and see no reason to think that there are enough good design people at Apple to make a good car. I think they likely got stuck looking at making a car version of the gold Apple Watch Edition [2] and rightly shut the project down.
Cook's mistake is that they didn't make an Apple Internet, a version of the Internet that exists entirely within the walls of Apple's walled garden. Think of the 30% tax that could be collected from online shopping!
I would have loved to see an Apple iCar, just to see the soulless, sterile and inoffensive result, and the resulting magical marketing circus. Do you take it to an Apple Store to refill the windshield wiper fluid? Does it use another bullshit proprietary charging port, and will it refuse to charge if I'm not using the supplied Apple cable? Is the bonnet glued shut? Do I need to hold the keyfob just so to unlock the doors? Does the car brick itself if you install 3rd party tyres? Does the horn require an in-app purchase? So many questions.
What's a fair price for a TB of HDD? SSD? Which high-capacity SSDs are worth buying?
I'm not sure if there are any sites tracking this. Anyway, I need to buy 30TB of storage this year so I can upgrade my NAS and make it last few years. Thanks for any replies from anyone who has an opinion!
Most new drives are sold into consumer/end user retail around $20/TB and only seem to dip a little during sales (with most sellers also quantity limiting any sales, also). Getting to $10/TB is possible but typically involves buying manufacturer recertified, and may involve going smaller (14-16TB drives) than you might prefer.
I managed to find 64x Seagate Exos 20TB for $13/TB new about 2 years ago, on NewEgg of all places, but I’ve never seen that deal repeat. :(
All the new 30TB+ HDDs using HAMR technology from Seagate and WD still feel like expensive unobtainium.
I'm convinvinced that CEO-employee wage gap is due to this not-so-well known legal case from 1919: Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. [1]
Basically, in 1919, Henry Ford sought to reinvest the Ford Motor Company’s profits into raising employee wages and expanding hiring, arguing that sharing success with workers would strengthen the economy and the company’s long-term prospects. However, minority shareholders John and Horace Dodge (who also ran their own competing auto company) sued Ford, claiming that his actions violated the fiduciary duty to maximize profits for shareholders.
The Michigan Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Dodges, declaring that a corporation’s primary obligation was to serve the financial interests of its shareholders and not broader social goals or even the well-being of its employees. This decision established a legal precedent that continues to shape corporate law even today and reinforcing the doctrine of "shareholder primacy" and limiting the ability of companies to prioritize stakeholders (like workers or communities) over investor returns.
> Twenty-five years ago, Bill Clinton campaigned on an idea for limiting excessive pay for American CEOs: Cap the tax deductibility of top executives' compensation at $1 million, and companies, not wanting bigger tax bills, might reel in their pay. In his 1993 budget, advisers suggested a compromise: Companies couldn't deduct CEO pay over $1 million unless it was "performance-based."
> But many believe the loophole had the opposite effect, driving companies instead to pay more in stock options and certain performance-based bonuses, which actually supercharged the growth in CEO pay. In 1989, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, the median value of annual CEO compensation was $2.7 million. By 1995 it was $6.6 million, and it reached $13 million in 2016.
Bill Clinton made irreparable damage to the American workforce. He sold out America to move all manufacturing to China by giving massive incentives to companies to do so. The market boomed and all that money went to investors instead of workers.
While partially true in hindsight, letting China into the WTO, removing tariffs and giving them MFN status was a bipartisan effort beginning in the 80s and 90s. The premise was that China's market would open for US goods and services as well.
>Basically, in 1919, Henry Ford sought to reinvest the Ford Motor Company’s profits into raising employee wages
I don't actually see any reference in the wikipedia article that Ford was saying he wanted to use the dividend money to raise wages:
>...Henry Ford, sought to end special dividends for shareholders in favor of massive investments in new plants that would enable Ford to dramatically increase production, and the number of people employed at his plants, while continuing to cut the costs and prices of his cars.
And as usual in these cases, there are other unstated reasons that might actually be more important to the decision maker:
>...Ford was also motivated by a desire to squeeze out his minority shareholders, especially the Dodge brothers, whom he suspected (correctly) of using their Ford dividends to build a rival car company. By cutting off their dividends, Ford hoped to starve the Dodges of capital to fuel their growth
People always talk about shareholder value like it's some outrageous weird thing. Really, shareholders are just.. owners. And managers are their agents.
Let's say you hire a general contractor to remodel your house. How would you feel about him doing what's good for society without consulting you - e.g. buying sustainable material that is more expensive, or locally sourced material that is less durable or less safe? Or hiring more workers like they do on NYC construction projects cause it's good for labor? Especially if it's something you disagree with, like he's maga and refuses to hire cheaper immigrants, giving preference to disgraced former cops. When the bill comes with all the extra costs, hed just say he's not working for the owner value but for the good of society as he sees it :)
I'm sympathetic but the problem with this is that you are asking a discrete entity to optimize for the commons. There are more sophisticated solutions.
He wasn't exactly doing it out the goodness of his heart. From the same article:
"Ford was also motivated by a desire to squeeze out his minority shareholders, especially the Dodge brothers, whom he suspected (correctly) of using their Ford dividends to build a rival car company. By cutting off their dividends, Ford hoped to starve the Dodges of capital to fuel their growth."
> The Michigan Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Dodges, declaring that a corporation’s primary obligation was to serve the financial interests of its shareholders and not broader social goals or even the well-being of its employees.
i am not a legal expert but my laypersons' reaction to this is, how can a court just declare such a thing ... it seems even from the cited criticisms others agree... fta:
> Dodge is often misread or mistaught as setting a legal rule of shareholder wealth maximization. This was not and is not the law. Shareholder wealth maximization is a standard of conduct for officers and directors, not a legal mandate.
That's an example of trying to clean up Ford's image.
Ford didn't want to share with the employees. He was very strongly anti-union (granted, not a factor until post-WWII). He was a Nazi supporter and not just because he was a notorious antisemite, Nazis opposed organized labor, too. He is sometimes mistakenly acclaimed for being for civil rights because he hired so many black men (who were not unionized, in an attempt to defeat the unions).
The lawsuit wasn't about shareholders vs broader social goals. It was about shareholders vs the CEO. The article is not about shareholder vs CEO pay. This lawsuit is unrelated.
And before someone claims Ford paid his workers enough to be customers (the reason he still wanted to pay them more in 1918), consider that in the early days after he'd implemented an assembly line the work became incredibly monotonous and workers were leaving for other automakers, so Ford was forced to pay them better to stay with him.
I switched to Prezto [0] because I found OMZ too slow. Prezto is much faster out of the box and doesn’t have a lot of things enabled by default. Definitely give it a try if you find OMZ too slow on your machine.
Are there any WMs that are implemented in JS and CSS? Or at least allow you to use JS/CSS? I’d love to be able to use web technologies to manage and decorate windows.
Thank you for your kind words. To respond: 1. I'm not a "he", I would prefer "they". 2. As I mentioned in another comment, I have not received word back yet on any reward.
I think their "Hall of Fame" (or at least whatever people colloquially refer to as that) is their credits for people who found bugs in their web servers, so I don't think that counts here. I did get credited, so I'm happy about that. Now I just have to wait and see if they determine it's worth a reward (and, if so, how much).
It is absolutely worthy of a reward, and it should be worth a few months of your time. This is a nasty security issue, and you showed a ton of restraint not losing patience with Apple.
Honestly, it's bullshit that you don't already know whether or not you're going to get a bounty.
I will definitely admit, it can be a bit of a pain point that Apple sometimes takes a lot of time to determine a bounty. I'm just waiting patiently now to see what they say. I appreciate your kind words and encouragement.
I'm going to plug my own LLM CLI project here: I use it on a daily basis now for coding tasks like this one:
llm -m o4-mini -f github:simonw/llm-hacker-news -s 'write a new plugin called llm_video_frames.py which takes video:path-to-video.mp4 and creates a temporary directory which it then populates with one frame per second of that video using ffmpeg - then it returns a list of [llm.Attachment(path="path-to-frame1.jpg"), ...] - it should also support passing video:video.mp4?fps=2 to increase to two frames per second, and if you pass ?timestamps=1 or ×tamps=1 then it should add a text timestamp to the bottom right conner of each image with the mm:ss timestamp of that frame (or hh:mm:ss if more than one hour in) and the filename of the video without the path as well.' -o reasoning_effort high
Any time I use it like that the prompt and response are logged to a local SQLite database.
I was developing an open-source library for interfacing with LLMs agnostically (https://github.com/minimaxir/simpleaichat) and although it still works, I haven't had the time to maintain it unfortunately.
Nowadays for writing code to interface with LLMs, I don't use client SDKs unless required, instead just hitting HTTP endpoints with libraries such as requests and httpx. It's also easier to upgrade to async if needed.
I built an open source CLI coding agent for this purpose[1]. It combines Claude/Gemini/OpenAI models in a single agent, using the best/most cost effective model for different steps in the workflow and different context sizes. You might find it interesting.
It uses OpenRouter for the API layer to simplify use of APIs from multiple providers, though I'm also working on direct integration of model provider API keys—should release it this week.
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