As a general rule, the sharing occurs only as compelled by lawful court order. Goog/FB don't really have a choice in complying if they want to continue to exist and do business in the USA.
> As a general rule, the sharing occurs only as compelled by lawful court order.
"Lawful", sure, in the sense that the secret FISA court approved it, and while that's blatantly unconstitutional the supreme court decided that no-one has standing to bring that case unless they can prove that they were themselves being secretly surveilled. I bet everything that TikTok does is lawfully compelled as well.
> Goog/FB don't really have a choice in complying if they want to continue to exist and do business in the USA.
Sure, but again, how's that any different from TikTok's situation?
Unit tests are a relatively recent concept (last 15-10 years?).
I know plenty of old developers who crank out pretty awesome software without versioning and without any kind of automated testing.
For most applications (especially UIs or 2d / 3d rendered), I think there is a benefit in having a few well chosen tests but overall I think TDD does more harm than good.
I understand the mantra started in the web world, where your services needs to maintain the promised compatibility or someone else may get an error. A lot of other software can afford to be more flexible and the ability to break the API without having to fix hundreds of tests is invaluable.
Even in web services, I think the TDD religion guilt trips developers into writing more useless tests than they should.
> Unit tests are a relatively recent concept (last 15-10 years?).
I was writing unit tests 20 years ago. I generally see SUnit considered as the birth of unit testing frameworks, and that's 30 year old art to solve something that was being done before anyway.
I guess one can say that Extreme Programming made it more popular in the mid 2000s, which is when relatively new languages started including built-in/standard unit testing libraries/frameworks/semantics (Python, Ruby, D...)
I was seeing Extreme programming being a thing and using DUnit for Delphi in the late 90's (possibly early 2000, but I left the Job I was using this for by mid 2000.)
Can confirm! Palm devices were generally tested for things like memory leaks by just running them for a really long time.
1 phone call, 1 email per minute… for a week.
I wrote some core dump readers that would look for memory patterns in crashed devices for Palm back in the day, but our QA was largely manual testers. 5-6 QA folks for every dev.
Listing the messaging App here is like comparing apples to oranges, gRPC and FIDL are for different purposes from technical perspective, people must have evaluated leveraging existing tech vs. creating a new one before the investment.
I've been only for 2-3 years ato google, butit felt like (Ads-team perspective) that protobuf is the building block in google. Some databases can hold as data as protobufs, and then convert these row oriented beasts into multi-million column databases with each protobuf leaf being separate column (!) such that analysts/linguists/statisticians and other scientists can lookup their data quickly (given some latency of minutes to hours).
What if someone don't use Messenger? Venmo/Paypal are still the most popular options in my circles, largely because they are not tied to any specific platform.
Since they're all owned by a company with an extremely polarizing public opinion, I imagine the reasons someone might not use one of them would likely double as reasons not to use the others, either.
There is a JavaScript API that abstracts this, so Google Meet/whatever asked can only read the "final" video stream of what you selected and not everything that's going on, which stays in your local browser.
It’s looks like free but it isn’t, RH makes money by selling trading requests to high frequency trading firms like Citadel, which buy/sell before the actual order in a better position so they can earn a penny from selling to or buying from you. The more transactions, the more they earn.
That would be front-running and it's illegal. The article you linked explains what PFOF is, but in general there's nothing wrong with market makers fulfilling brokerage orders. It means traders get a better price on their order and the market makers earn a profit.
The concern is that when market makers share that profit with brokerages they encourage brokerages to select the market maker that gives them the biggest cut rather than the one who gives the best price for the trader. Still, the trader will never get a worse price than what's available on the exchange. (That's also illegal.)
No, you don’t understand how that works. Citadel wants the retail order flow because it’s a huge pool filled with uninformed investors. They can actually offer you better spreads because on average you have no edge.
It’s similar to a casino offering free hotel rooms to people who play blackjack but who do not know how to card count. They even offer 3/2 on blackjack instead of 6/5.
>It’s looks like free but it isn’t, RH makes money by selling trading requests to high frequency trading firms like Citadel, which buy/sell before the actual order in a better position so they can earn a penny from selling to or buying from you.
That's literally not payment for order flow works, and it's illegal under regulation NMS.
As others in this thread have noted, what you described would be illegal. But suppose for the sake of argument that Robinhood's order flow is actually really bad and users are getting a measurably worse price through RH vs other brokers. RH targets small-time investors who are trading in small amounts - perhaps investing a bit of their paycheck every week. It seems unlikely that the order flow would be so bad that RH users are losing anywhere close to $5 per trade because of it.
So even if "it's not really free" it's still a significant discount compared to the pricing that was standard before RH came along. Opening up investing to more people by making smaller & more frequent trades feasible seems generally good to me.
I will admit that other aspects of Robinhood's business such as the degree of gamification are still concerning, though.
RH offered free trading in a small selection of issues with a poor ui and worse execution while others were offering great platforms for 50 cents to 7.95 a trade. They built a user base through marketing to the initiated, not through a better product.
Any investor can get 0 now with good brokerages or use something like IB for cheap trades on otc or foreign stocks in small amounts.
The existing retail brokers were also, with very few exceptions, selling trading requests on top of the fees they charged. (Also, in general this actually results in better-than-market prices because the trading firms know that retail traders aren't likely to have information they don't and aren't likely to be making large market-shifting trades, so they can relatively safely make money by market making between people who want to buy and people who want to sell at slightly different times.)
robinhood isnt the only one selling their requests, they basically all do it.
I'm not a robinhood fan - I moved all the investments I had out of their years ago. But, to think they are the only one selling order flow is disingenuous
First, you can play YouTube without any problem on Firestick, they made the change 2 years ago. Second, you should give the new Chromecast device a try, it's far much better than Roku. Third, Google is asking Roku to support VP9, which is a much superior video coding format, I don't see any issue with this ask.
No thanks. I'll stick with a computer running a web browser connected to the TV and a wireless keyboard because I'm sick of having to give a shit which devices are supported by which services.
- Google and consumers, who can enjoy better compression and lower bandwidth
- Consumers, who can enjoy a much more mainstream video encoding format in not just YT but pretty much every app.
Google doesn't want to write off 45% of the set-top market right away, but at the same time it's 100% in the right to demand Roku support modern royalty-free codecs going forward.
Roku fights pretty much everybody nowadays and as someone who's been dealing with full-screen ads and missing apps on my $1000 TV, I have no sympathy for Roku whining about needing to support a modern codec.
A goat farmer in rural Afghanistan browsing YouTube on his 2003 XP box has a legitimate excuse - Roku does not, especially going forward.
There is a balance between keeping the burden of backwards compatibility forever and making efforts to keep things accessible to those without new hardware.
Google has invested a decent amount of money in developing its Roku app. Roku is now trying to hold users hostage so that Google continues to pour resources into supporting inferior technologies.
We will see how this ends - I think if Google blocked YT/YT TV on Roku, it would annihilate Roku and barely scratch Google.
You can see this kind of comment in every YouTube related posts, please, there's no free lunch, either pay for the subscription or use tools to block the ads.
I was paying for the subscription but then they cancelled Google Music. Ad-free youtube was just a nice perk of that.
The replacement in YouTube Music premium* does not come with the bonus of no ads on youtube videos, which I think is some straight crap. I had forgot they existed, damn near.
*Unless there is another tier of subscription I haven't noticed.
I have no problem with some ads. I have a problem with midroll ads every 5 minutes and ads >> 2 minutes long when I've stepped away from my device and can't skip.
YouTube premium is available in tons of countries and they have family plans. I’ve been using it for years with my wife and it’s best money ever spent.
Just pay for the content. You aren’t forced to watch those ads.
Because despite the common request to "let me pay a monthly fee to not see ads", the vast majority of people are too cheap to pay up. This is why ads are as prolific as they are.
For me it's a bit of a Catch-22. I don't watch much YouTube content anyways, but I've reduced my consumption over the years because of the ads. From what I can tell, there's nothing I want to watch anymore because I no longer know what's there (and of value to me). So the prospect of paying is absurd for me as I'd be buying something with no real value except to remove an annoyance on the few occasions each month I bother to watch something on YouTube. If I had a clearer reason to increase my YouTube consumption, I'd entertain paying.
Other video services have clearer value to me in the content they provide so I pay for them. I suspect I'm not alone in this.
There is no free lunch for youtube either. Customers being less satisfied and whining about it on the internet is the cost of increasing the number of advertisements. If it wasn't, google would just put infinite adverts.
It may not be as clear cut as this – if an Android user cares about privacy, then they're probably using the OS in spite of its relatively poor privacy. Maybe this will be the one thing that for a small minority of those users makes them switch to iOS, but I'd expect that number to be closer to a rounding error. From that perspective, the upside for Google integrating a similar feature into Android seems comparatively small.
Is there any reason to think users care about it enough to switch based solely on this feature? Apple has been posturing itself as the privacy-first platform and so far it doesn’t seem like Android/Google is stepping up to challenge that (afaik, would love to see evidence that they are).
Android updated its permission system after iOS. You had to agree to all the permissions an app needed before installing it but they changed it to be progressive like iOS and I think it's more flexible than iOS now. For example, my phone has the ability to disable network permission for single apps like wifi, vpn, data, etc from settings.
> Is there any reason to think users care about it enough to switch based solely on this feature?
People buying flagship android phones definitely. They cost as much as iphones. Others, I am not sure.
Users have less freedom and cannot do many things by definition. Granted, this may not be important for everyone, but neither is freedom of speech.
In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products and services, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs. Lock-in costs that create barriers to market entry may result in antitrust action against a monopoly.
It’s of marginal importance to me, but the ability to install virtually anything on the App Store reasonably confident it’s not going to break my primary communication device or exfiltrate my data (without my permission) etc etc is of far more importance.
I rely on my phone very heavily and the fact that it reliably Just Fucking Works is much much more important than being able to — for example — run Firefox on it
Walled garden is just an anti-marketing term. I tried android for half a year in 2020. I hoped for caller id lookup/block, better text management (input box ops), ubo-like ads blocking, to name a few, and the freedom and “endless features” in general. Instead I got my AB available to various third-parties who didn’t even return what they promised. It is the same walled garden, but instead of walls there are endless traps and pits. Happily switched back to ios, and can say I’m too sick of that experiment to ever try to go back.
That's your experience, but my experience is very different. I rooted my phone, installed DroidWall (now AFWall) and have iptable rules to block apps from accessing the internet.
I can stop programs from running on startup and can force them to be killed instantly when they are closed so they aren't running in the background.
I can also write and run my own programs without having to own Apple hardware and can distribute them without paying $99.
For me, it really is a question of privacy vs walled garden and I choose to give up some privacy.
These “features” are irrelevant to me and to most people. I don’t want rooting, hacking, adding iptables rules, etc. My hopes were that android has caller id blocking via internet databases, sms forwarding, out of box adblock, browser that is superior to safari, etc. I don’t want to stop programs or write them, to have “files” for every app to access them, to dig into the kernel things, etc. It is not a selling point at all, you just fight with your phone’s bad habits. I don’t, I needed simple things and expected at least part of the world that android users promised me everywhere, and it’s just was not there. It is not a privacy concern, these “solutions”, even paid ones, just do not work after you give up privacy.
Which is fine if you don't care about those things, I do. You said:
> Walled garden is just an anti-marketing term
Which is what I was arguing with. For me, it's a big anti feature, big enough to always choose Android over iOS. I won an iPhone at a company xmas raffle and gave it to my mother rather than keeping it. She also doesn't care about those things, so it's much better fit for her.
> you just fight with your phone’s bad habits.
No, I make my phone do what I want it to do. You accept that your phone does what Apple wants it to do. I don't like being forced to change my habits based on some 3rd parties whim.
My issue isn't that you prefer not dealing with these things, it's that you entirely dimiss the notion that someone does and that a "walled garden is just an anti-marketing term".
I think it is more the other way around: feature parity to aid switching to rather than to reduce loss of shre due to people switching from.
Those of us using Android who care that much about the privacy aspect have ways to implement it (a little more Heath Robinson like, but still...) using a VPN and alternative browsers. Many in the Andoid camp are likely to see this are preferable to switching platforms and paying more for their devices (unless they run with expansive flagship android units in which case cost is less of an issue in the switch). Those that don't care that much, don't care enough to make a difference.
On the other hand Apple providing extra privacy protection is a significant extra bit of friction that would stop people moving away from iDevices onto Android ones, even amongst people who don't care enough to make any effort beyond not switching and/or don't really understand the issue much if at all.
I have zero faith that a significant proportion of consumers will switch to iOS solely for privacy reasons. We've seen time and again that mainstream consumers would gladly surrender all their private info if it saves them $100.
Most people do care about privacy, but generally they are not even aware of how their privacy is being violated - Google and Facebook are very good at hiding the reality of these things.
But you're right, the cost is the ultimate factor for most people, especially in developing countries. I guess Apple doesn't care about complete market share, but if they did, they could just release an "iPhone Lite" for 150$ and good bye to Android market share. Imagine having 90%+ mobile phone market share - Apple could destroy the Google ad business.
