I don't know... ads in maps is very, very different from ads in the OS.
Users buy the OS with the computer, and Apple doesn't incur any extra cost from users using it (maybe cloud-based AI will change this though?), and it doesn't require additional payments. Meanwhile, services like iCloud+ do require payment.
Maps is a service, like iCloud, but users have been trained to expect it for free, with basically every other maps provider using ads to fund it. I suspect that most users think that ads are a better user experience than not using it at all because they won't pay $9.99/month for maps.
Maps is also a search engine, and ads are the primary way to fund search engines. I guarantee that if Apple every launches iSearch they will eventually fund it with ads.
> basically every other maps provider using ads to fund it.
> iSearch they will eventually fund it with ads.
See, I disagree with your entire premise here. Apple, unlike Google, has a very very profitable hardware business which provides so much to the bottom line that they don't have to operate Apple Maps or Apple Search or Calculator as a self-sustaining business with its own P&L. It's stupid to operate as though they must.
The correct thinking (in my not so humble opinion) for a long-term-minded company is to recognize:
1. That massive firehose of money allows them to make Maps markedly better than what Google can afford to do. Since Apple gave up on UI/UX design excellence, this ability to not rely on ads is arguably their only remaining differentiated advantage.
2. Part of what allows Apple to command such monster-sized margins is that (usually... so far... outside of the App Stores at least) their product is not packed full of sleazy ads that significantly detract from the experience. You don't just get to fully enshittify the product and still command the same high prices as you did when you were offering a premium product. A Porsche covered in wraps advertising porn sites and penis pills, which plays loud AI-generated ads on every screen all day long would not sell at the price a normal one does.
I've never flagged a submission before, but I just have to with this one.
There's no evidence, no blurred-out screen shot even, no one here has seen this behavior in the comments, and I can't find any corroborating reports on the web.
Anyone remember the news story about Metallica copyrighting G and F chords? It’s sort of like that, true or not it’s so on brand that people just accept it, it doesn’t tell you something you did already know about how google (or Metallica) behave.
I just flagged yours because I don't think it makes any sense to flag the post much less posting about flagging it - especially when you said you are an ex-googler.
Life continues, move on, defending Google enshitfication online after being laid off is extra work for no payment, you can rest.
What makes you think it hasn't long been using a large language model for it though? Maybe not Large Language Model, the term seems to have come with ChatGPT et al., but Google's been doing machine learning for a long long time; the transformer architecture paper (kind of the groundwork for the current wave) was published by a Google team in 2017.
A lot of new Google features are branded 'AI', because it's so hyped it has broad consumer awareness, but a lot of Google features for a long time have used AI and just been brandless or at least 'AI'-less features.
It started about a month ago for me. I am subscribed to emails from an IT as a Gig platform called Field Nation. Thought I might pickup a bit of side work but never did.
Recently it started adding them to my calendar and there is no way to turn off this feature without also turning off useful features such as package out for delivery notifications.
I see obviously AI-powered tab-completion suggestions, and the Alt-H prompt suggestion when first writing an email, but I've never had it actually insert text unprompted.
The much more easy thing is that they reimburse you only for what you charge to the company card. This is much more feasible now than it was even 10 years ago.
Indeed, my employer provides everyone who needs to travel or expense a company card that only works when you are actively traveling and knows your spending policies, what places you're expected to be, etc.
I have had to occasionally expense something on a personal card and I had to get multiple levels of manager approval afterwards (not difficult, just explained the circumstance to them.)
How much does it cost a business to manage say 10K company cards, maybe even globally? Sounds like a huge hassle, compared to "Send us a photo of your lunch receipt each day then at the end of the month we reimburse you".
My expense card has an app that uses AI to OCR your receipts, automatically fills out 95-100% of the expense form, and for most transactions auto-approves it via per diem policy rules.
My employer contracts with a vendor that manages them. It's not expensive or difficult anymore. Even individual consumers can mint "virtual cards" with different time-based or merchant-based spending policies and limits for free, since like five years ago now. (https://www.capitalone.com/learn-grow/money-management/what-...)
You can add them to Google Wallet/Apple Pay. Useful for giving a family member a limited expense card, e.g. you can set up a "let my kid buy up to $X of food on weekends" card they can add to your phone.
I basically got out before this was a requirement but, yeah, to the degree that routine employee fraud becomes a material issue, locking things down becomes a grumble, grumble thing but it's just what companies will do.
You have this flipped. Expense management systems with embedded company cards are an order of magnitude easier to managed and reconcile than dealing with thousands of employees' personal expenses and payouts
Many companies are penny-pinchers and can't stand the thought of some people getting more than they actually spent. I don't know either, and couldn't stand working in such companies, but I've definitely contracted for companies like that and it seems miserable.
Costs differ by location. Formal per diems, even with some attempt to adjust, end up screwing employees who are in higher cost locations (and/or have higher standards). Which may be fine--or not.
But, to the degree that fraud becomes a real issue, it may be the simplest thing to do.
Perhaps. But I also have standards for both accommodations and meals that I never pushed too hard on but may be different from those you have. If work travel is consistently costing me a lot of money, I'm going to have an issue.
JS tends to be slower to load, parse and run than CSS.
Additionally, animations are often tightly linked to your page styles which are set in CSS. It’s easier to reason about them if they’re all in the same file and language instead of split across CSS and JS.
Another argument, this time for performance: JavaScript is single-threaded, so while you wait for your hyper-detailed spring animation to play out, the JS engine does literally nothing else.
The majority of gun owners use them for hunting animals that they eat. They also use them for putting holes in paper targets. Only a tiny minority use them for killing humans.
> Only a tiny minority use them for killing humans
Ephedrine, anhydrous ammonia, syringes, drones/UAVs, fireworks, high powered laser pointers are just a few things that are misused by a small minority but are restricted because the bad actors create outsized harm
The question wasn't about "corporate cost-benefit analysis", it was simply (and vaguely) will society accepts deaths caused by robots, and the answer simply admitted the reality that no technology is perfect.
We already accept 40,000 vehicle deaths a year, 7,500 pedestrian deaths a year, 1,100 by police, 260 by train, and almost 50,000 deaths from falls.
Nothing is completely safe, and it's just factually correct to say that there will be a fatal crash at some point that's the fault of an autonomous car (there actually have been already), but that Waymo's at least are already far safer than human drivers, and if that remains true, then society will "accept" it.
Also, the question was literally "Will society accept a death potentially caused by a robot?" which is not great, IMO. What does it mean for "society" to "accept" a death? There will be lawsuits, regulations, etc. Is the question whether self-driving cars will be banned everywhere after one fatality?
A big difference is that you can't put a robot in jail. Even though the person driving the car is usually not harmed by hitting somebody on foot, it's still a life-or-death level situation, they might be looking at multiple years in prison, a large portion of their life gone.
The same even stakes are not there with robots killing humans. For one side it's a life-or-death situation, while for the other side it's profit margins and numbers. Companies are usually very happy to increase yearly profit for something as minor as a decimal percentage rise in human deaths spread across society, that's not even controversial.
Heck, not only can you not put a robot in jail, you can't even stop it from driving the next day as if nothing happened because it's duplicate running the exact same software and hardware is all over society.
I still think robot cars is a good thing though, because they will have a lot less accidents than us humans who love to drink and drive, or speed for no good reason. Still, it will raise some big important questions.
At least in most parts of the US, hitting and killing a pedestrian does not usually result in jail time for the driver - unless the driver was driving under the influence or was driving recklessly. Most times their license isn't even taken away.
We have put CEOs in prison in the past. We could do so again. If a company really operates with blatant disregard for safety we should. Waymo's CEO makes it clear that she thinks their cars are better than normal humans, so long as that is really the case and she isn't ignoring issues she shouldn't go to prison for deaths their cars cost, but it is (or should be) an option if the company isn't careful.
The point of failure is probably not the CEO, though. They are rarely technical people directly supervising the taxis. If it can be proven that management skimped on quality, then, by all means, jail them. Otherwise, it becomes the fault of the people monitoring the systems.
A friend of mine works in a bank. He said, "Did you know, the optimal amount of fraud is actually not zero? Because first of all, you can't get zero, and second, if you try, you screw up the whole bank."
The optimal amount of fraud is close to zero, but it's not zero. (He didn't say if they knew the actual number, but they probably do.)
I think the same logic applies to a lot of other things as well. You want to get as close to 0 as you can, without breaking everything else.
In real life tradeoffs always have to be made, and some of them are tough for the public to know about.
The classic case is road construction. Road design A will cost $120M and 3 people per decade will die. Design B costs $180M and kills 2 people per decade. Which one do you build?
> but that Waymo's at least are already far safer than human drivers
Is that really true? the only data I can find is published by Waymo or others who are obviously not independent of Waymo. Is there any independent data or investigators in this? Until then I need to be cautious. The big question is are they really safer, or are they just safer if you include a few outliers (alcohol) that among humans are significantly worse.
I'm not doubting the claim, and I've always though it is a matter of time before autonomous cars are statistically safer.
From what I can find, those 7500 are 7500 pedestrians killed by vehicle a year, so we might as well round it up de 50k vehicular death a year and be done with it.
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Users buy the OS with the computer, and Apple doesn't incur any extra cost from users using it (maybe cloud-based AI will change this though?), and it doesn't require additional payments. Meanwhile, services like iCloud+ do require payment.
Maps is a service, like iCloud, but users have been trained to expect it for free, with basically every other maps provider using ads to fund it. I suspect that most users think that ads are a better user experience than not using it at all because they won't pay $9.99/month for maps.
Maps is also a search engine, and ads are the primary way to fund search engines. I guarantee that if Apple every launches iSearch they will eventually fund it with ads.
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