I wonder what the alternative for Europe might be? A new project to launch, or is there an existing solution? Siren? Argon? In any case, it could be a great opportunity for Europe to create new jobs whilst increasing its sovereignty.
Palantir's technology, as its own name suggests, is inherently dangerous, regardless of who controls it. The right alternative is to simply not build capabilities similar to Palantir in the EU - ideally, to legally forbid building them at all. This type of aggregated data flow simply gives too much control to whoever has access to it, and thus greatly harms democracy.
Such a sad worldview. Unfortunately thinking like that is self-fulfilling. By building weapons you encourage everyone else to build weapons, and everyone is poorer in the end.
Some silly aspect of human nature I guess. I notice it's worse in men on average.
What's your suggested alternative? This is exactly kind of shallow virtue signalling I was pointing at. While you make dismissive remarks like this, your government or USA does the dirty work required to keep stability.
That's a false choice. By investing in weapons instead of diplomacy, we've created this world of tit-for-tat violence. We can dismantle it too, it's not necessary to continue escalating until we exterminate our species.
Maybe we should leverage all of this supposedly world-changing AI to move on from primitive wars instead of using it to build more weapons. At a certain point, our species will be faced with a choice between maintaining the status quo (climate destruction, mass casualties through violent conflicts, food/water shortages, extinction-level events, etc) or working together to forge a sustainable path forward for the benefit of the species. An argument that this current world order is just how things are and there's nothing to be done but escalate is just a vote for the former.
I definitely don't think that the current world order is just how things are. That does not mean you should act now in terms of how the world order _would be in the future_.
No that's not true, some try to do it by the book ( ai act, gdpr, and follow German law etc) but they won't have any chance on the market, because those who ignore any law will provide more information / control etc for police, state etc etc
And on the same topic again, it's not "LinkedIn" but some managers most likely in marketing and tech who allowed this amount of bloatware. And I won't believe this RAM usage is really needed just for displaying static content or chat. It's like always trackers and ads.
Some people are exceptional at solving difficult but hard to explain problems while other are great solving direct business problems. No need to feel ashamed for both it’s just different work
It's not just "PC Gamer" but people making decisions behind as always. Three first people from their "Meet the Team" page [0]: Tim Clark — Brand Director (@timothydclark), Evan Lahti - Strategic Director (@elahti), Phil Savage — Global Editor-in-Chief (@Octaeder). Hopefully they can see this HN thread and people complains and do "something" about that.
I have professionally dealt with these types of people in my career (not these exact 3) in similar settings and I can tell you - they don't care. They care only about revenue numbers. You can walk up to them, show them this article and even this HN thread and their first question will be "how does it affect our revenue?"
They don't see it as money made through ripping off users without their consent - they think they are entitled to that money. Anything that leads to less money in the name of usability, transparency and honesty is just met with a shrug.
To them, the author of the article and the rest of us are just rambling developers who don't understand how businesses work. And they are the gold standard (they think so) for business ethics. So tell me again, do you really think they will do "something" about that?
Simple, you can serve a reasonable amount of unobtrusive ads and I and others might turn off adblock to support the publication or you can do what you're doing, I'll keep it on and see no ads at all.
Exactly we don't, and what's worse is that the "content" is getting to the point where we need _content_ blockers.
I recently got hit by an "article" that promised to tell me which three AAA games would be released with PS Plus soon. A three point bullet list was all I wanted. Instead I got pages after pages of word-manure about nothing at all for reasons I don't even understand. At the end of it I still couldn't tell you which three games the article was supposed to tell me about.
I foresee a bleak feature where we will deploy AI as "content blockers" to extract the useful content from the word-manure that is becoming the preferred way of working among internet "authors".
The PS Plus One is a gaming console or something to that effect. “But Henriette,” my grandmother asked, “which AAA titles will be released for Xbox”?
My grandmother is a gamer. But a bit senile. She had her formative gaming years on the XBox, you see. What she actually meant to ask was: which titles for the PS Plus One?
My dad too has been asking me that question. Or he did until he tragically died in a car accident last week.
So which AAA games will be released for PS Plus One soon or soon-ish?
I really had to ponder that question while driving my Tesla Cybertruck to the gas station. Indeed, which games are that? It’s on everyone’s lips or mouth.
Which brings us to this article. You have been wondering the same thing, haven’t you? If so you are in good company, like that of my beloved grandmother and dear departed father.
Sony says that they will reveal which three AAA titles will be released for PS Plus One in the fourth quarter of 2027.
I think we'll be soon at the point where articles are written by asking AI to extend a three point bullet list to 30 pages, and read by asking AI to summarize articles into a three point bullet list.
This drives me nuts. It's been going on for years that a simple "if this, do that" deal is encoded in an overly elaborate 10 minute long YouTube video where at least 9 minutes of it is filler. You know, when you start skimming the comments to see if anyone bothered with summarizing it.
AI amplifies the problem by making it easier to produce filler, but the problem is whatever metrics are behind the monetization. You need users to "engage" with your content for at least x amount of time to earn y amount of money, while instead the earnings should be relative to and directly derived from how useful the content is to how many users.
Exactly how did you "get hit" by an article? Did somebody hack your computer and pointed your browser to it? Or did somebody ambush you on your walk to work and show a magazine with the article into your face?
If you seek out content from low quality sources, you get the low quality treatment. The only way for consumers to fight this is by paying for good quality content, which is often possible.
Burger King isn't going to improve the quality of their burgers or service by customers complaining. They'll do something when they see customers going somewhere else.
A notification on my phone. I don't know what produced it exactly, but it was probably connected to my google account (sigh!) somehow.
It's something that happens rarely enough for me to not having developed an automatic "aw hell nah, no f-ing way" filter towards it anyway, and I (naively) did click the notification and "got hit" by the article.
Yup, I keep mine enabled at all times. Anytime I've tried selectively disabling them, I get burnt with increasingly intrusive ads. I might be convinced to enable some kind of "ethical ads" filter that only permits ads are known to be unobtrusive and not track, but then you need to trust that whoever maintains that list wont succumb to incentives.
I do. I have turned off UBlock Origin at the learnopengl site as well others where the ads are unobtrusive enough to not block the view completely or require several actions on my part to view the contents. It also helps that the content is not "SEO optimised" bullcrap.
Mostly true, but I personally have it turned of for duckduckgo and it shows me some ads with [ad] label. Actually if you wanted to disable ads there, you wouldn't even need an ad blocker, there's toggle in the settings
While I agree with you in general, I am one of the very few people who do it for the small amount of sites I support. This is not a smart decision from the technical point of view but it's been fine so far.
I guess the ship sailed a long time ago, but while no one is going to turn off their ad blocker, they could make people not use one in the first place.
I think this is extremely uncharitable and while there may be people this is true for, it is not at all the general case for people with job titles like "brand director" or "editor in chief". In fact I think it's obnoxious to tar specific named people with such a false generalization.
How would you like PC Gamer to pay their staff? Pop the whole thing behind a paywall?
Yes it’s poorly designed and annoying, I don’t ses where you get ‘ripping off’ from. It makes you sound like a rambling developer who doesn’t understand how businesses wor
I know for sure good businesses don't make their users download half a GB worth of data without the user's consent/knowledge (which is what the article states) in the name of "paying their staff". Ironically, they are not even a gaming company and the users aren't exactly downloading a gaming application that justifies the size of the data.
As I say, it’s very sloppy and could be improved. It probably hurts their readership metrics. ‘Don’t unnecessarily annoy your customers’ is a good maxim. But no-one is being ‘ripped off’.
> trust me, they are going to be livid about this.
Just as soon as...what? How are two of the top three people named on the "Meet the team" page simultaneously oblivious to the half gig of ad downloads and on the verge of caring?
The people writing the article, the people designing the site and the people slapping ads on it all work for PC gamer. You aren't saying anything that everybody doesn't already know, the point is that they are all prisoners unable to act with their free will.
Theres a huge difference between naming a company and naming individuals.
That said, I’ve had to work on projects that I’m not 100% proud of. I’ve had the companies I work for get complained about and in a few cases I had to work on the thing that was being complained about.
Both Apple and Microsoft had interface guidelines documentation for years and while Cupertino was able to kept their software pretty much unified visually through the years, Redmond was and still is less consistent in applying such rules [1].
In period between Vista and 7 there was a really dedicated community (Aero and later Windows Taskforce) who tried to give Microsoft hints where polish the Windows environment only to see their efforts being largely disposed with Metro introduction.
Apple had to pursue the literal new shiny thing because their AI endeavors backfired - it's all a distraction which also didn't work as they expected. In the all of critical comments I liked one that replied to me here on HN, where user compared Liquid Glass to pouring a corn syrup over the interface.
Operating systems for mainstream users are mostly complete so companies have to focus on visual aspects of their products much more. This is obviously nothing new but watching that WWDC25 I was really amused how these people were disconnected from real world, how marketing side has dominated usability of Apple products. For me that was the actual reality distortion field in use.
Bulky, rounded interface become popular shortly after flat style become dominant in our digital life. Liquid Glass is really close to Gnome's Adwaita, Microsoft also tends to follow similar style. I can't bring the source but it was pointed out that rounded interface and graphics overall are giving some level of comfort, a sense of "safety" unlike than anything sharp and "spiky". This seems to be related to the bouba-kiki [2] effect.
It's a giant "fuck you" to accessibility in general. It reminds me of the first designer I ever worked with, who designed for pretty screenshots and put zero thought into the actual interaction.
E.g. the pervasive use of transparency means that you have text overlayed on text all over the place, so just literally can't read things.
It's not just the transparency (and distracting highlights and slow animations and inexpressive icons), but also the floating controls and other elements that make it harder to discern what is content and what is UI chrome/controls, not to mention the associated layout bugs.
I like the look and esthetics but there are some places where the design doesn't fit well. For instance, I've had to change my phone's background to accommodate for the theme and that should definitely be the other way around. Some screens also were just buggy in general, even screens as simple as the voicemail screen.
Turning off transparency helps a lot for accessibility but if that's necessary then it should've been the default. Whatever they're doing with uniform app icons is working out worse than Google's implementation in my opinion, though.
The rollout of Liquid Glass has been rather unfortunate, full of missed or ignored flaws that seem obvious, full of bugs and design flaws, and for a design that seems most at home in their failed VR headset rather than 2d phones, laptops, and desktops. At least their controls are still somewhat usable and it hasn't turned into a full Windows 8 moment for them.
I think it's a great example of how Apple has become just as terrible and uncaring as the massive companies, which can only lead to more resentment from the Apple purists who joined the brand back in their underdog days.
The default clear setting on the iPhone was pretty stupid. It made my icons monochrome. I have GMail, Apple Mail, and Proton Mail installed on my phone, all of which use an envelope as their logo. Previously this had never confused me because they're different colors, and I have one of those new-fangled "Color Screens" on my iPhone that the kids use.
Then they made all the icons a weird hipster monochrome thing, and I kept opening the wrong mail client by accident, because I couldn't quickly differentiate the three different envelops.
I don't know who the hell told the Apple designers that people don't like having color in their icons, but I think that person might need a reality check.
I was sitting by someone on the bus a while back, and they had all their apps arranged by predominant icon color. Black on one screen, blue on another, green on a other, red, orange, etc... I can't imagine what sort of havock this led to in their life!
That sounds like a pretty good way of organizing honestly. As long as you can remember where things are more-or-less within the individual screens, if you have a lot of apps installed and you have some that are only occasionally used, scrolling until you get to the color is a pretty easy way to narrow down where your target. I have some apps installed that I rarely use that I'd be more likely to remember what the icon looks like than the name of the app to search for it by text.
I heard that The Simpsons were made yellow because it stands out the most when quickly flipping through channels.
Hold on your home screen to start editing, then edit in top left and then customize. Not sure why it would’ve defaulted to the tinted option though. Don’t think I had that happen.
On the iPhone, the performance is much worse and my battery life is easily a less than 2/3 of what it was before Liquid Glass. This is on top of Apple forcing the OS updates in ways they haven't before.
It does not feel good that you can pay $2000 for a device and then see Apple unilaterally make it worse shortly later.
They won’t see value unless they try. And by lowering price (maybe for a year or two?) you will compete strongly with figma and other design tools. Then you can increase price and see who sees value and who doesn’t.
Recently I stayed in the Korean hotel where the toilet and the bathroom had the door but made out of semi transparent glass. And the worst, the toilet was next to the glass and walls while on the opposite side was bed. Perfect view and the smell my friend
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