jslove
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Patreon doesn't pay Apple's 30% App Store commission, and its CEO isn't sure why not
This is not complicated nor mysterious.
It's against the guidelines to advertise alternative payment methods in order to circumvent app store payments. You can refer to payment methods as long as they don't circumvent payments Apple would feel entitled to a part of, as part of the guidelines.
That plays out in the following very clear way: You can't buy e-books from Amazon using either that Amazon nor the Kindle app. You can buy physical goods. The app says you have to buy e-books using their web site, but does not provide a link. Providing a link would violate the guidelines.
This is really really old news to Apple developers. It's not magic; it's not mysterious; and it's all there in the terms and conditions we have to sign. That the Patreon CEO doesn't know or recall the details is not surprising; lots of other stuff for a CEO to worry about when it's not a primarily Apple-centric business.
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New York's updated Excelsior vaccine passport drops Apple Wallet support
patchythepirate said:charlesatlas said:
https://www.jhsph.edu/covid-19/articles/why-covid-19-vaccines-offer-better-protection-than-infection.htmlpatchythepirate said:How are people just blindly accepting these vaccine passports? How is it that so few even question something that is so obviously absurd? The fact that they don't accommodate for natural immunity, which is *superior* to the vaccine 'immunity,' should be a clear indication that we're being manipulated. Not to mention the fact that they make no sense, since people 'vaccinated' with these gene modifying agents can still catch and spread covid. It's shocking how many people are accepting these 'passports' as somehow justifiable.Wow, thank you for sharing that, but that is beyond absurd. I can't believe that's published on Johns Hopkins site. Extremely poorly written, lacks context, and even contradicts itself. You don't even need any outside information or knowledge to see how ridiculous this is, and conveniently, they don't reference any actual studies, just framing it as this one person's opinion.For example, they claim that natural immunity is worse, but don't say how they came to this conclusion (antibodies? B or T cell activation?). They say they don't know how it is better, it just is, then diminish their own point by noting that the vaccines only focus on one set of antigens, the spike proteins, unlike natural immunity that can address all of the antigens on the virus. They also don't mention that focusing on spike proteins also reduces the immune response to B and T cell activation, whereas natural immunity also involves natural killer cells, macrophages, etc. They also don't mention the context of a *much* higher rate of reinfection with those who have been vaccinated vs those who have natural immunity, which shows that this limited gene therapy vaccine immunity is clearly not superior to natural immunity (which is obvious and expected).It's disturbing that an article like the one you linked is being disseminated as 'reliable' information. People need to wake up and realize that science has been politicized.First, I wrote this (before using forum):
patchythepirate is an appropriate name for a troll. Here are two examples:"...they don't accommodate for natural immunity, which is *superior* to the vaccine 'immunity'"
We do not know how to detect superior natural immunity. Some of us may indeed be naturally immune, but we won't know about that for years. If patchytheprirate means innate immunity, the first line of defense, that is clearly not superior, or none of us would get sick. If the writer means acquired immunity from having had an infection, that's still not quite right. In infection provides some immunity, vaccination is better, and the combination of having had an infection and then been vaccinated appears to be the best. There are multiple sources for this, but I recommend the podcast, "This Week in Virology". Chances are there are many relevant links in the notes for some of the episodes. I'd rather listen to experts; they are available there. "Natural immunity" in this context is sleight-of-hand; meaningless as used."gene modifying agents".
The vaccines are different, but we know that the ones authorized (not yet licensed) in the USA do not modify the DNA of a vaccinated person. That is, they do not insert, delete, or change the DNA base pairs. We may someday discover that changes in gene expression occur, but those are still the genes the cell started with, given that mutations in cell reproduction do occur, some of which lead to cancer. How gene expression changes is another topic, but it's somewhat like changes in the state of a computer program, and expected and desirable in many contexts. Without it, there would not be different types of cells in our bodies.Not clear how valid the passports are or how long they should last, but manipulation via false statements is perfectly evident in their post here.
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But then we have their response, quoted above. It's sort of impressive in a "dropping technical terms suggests you know what you are talking about" kind of way. So to falsify a few of the claims:
The reinfection rate for vaccinated persons is lower than for unvaccinated persons. That's the case for vaccination. The reinfection rate for persons who had the disease versus the reinfection rate for vaccinated persons is less analyzed, but we know there are reinfections and "breakthrough" infections among the vaccinated. We know that the post-vaccine infections are milder and hospitalization and/or death is very unlikely; we have no such observation for post-infection reinfection. I regard the statement that post-vaccination infections are have a much higher rate than post-infection reinfection as misleading and probably false.
Post-vaccination reinfection is really a red herring; being vaccinated is not being infected, the writer refers to people vaccinated and infected twice, which is a very small group indeed, and unlikely to be able to produce a statistically significant high rate. These are people whose immune systems are not working well enough to protect them; they are not typical.
This is a serious disease. You don't want to have an infection at all. Having an infection followed by vaccination produces far more antibodies than either alone; this has been measured. We don't know whether antibodies or T-cells are more important, but both are stimulated by vaccination. An immunoassay can distinguish people infected from people merely vaccinated because only people previously infected have antibodies for the non-spike parts of the virus, which is useful, but may not be relevant to effective immune response.
Also, some symptoms of long covid have been reported to be reduced by post-infection vaccination, especially two shots. Those reports are anecdotes, not data, but interesting and will likely result in data collection later as part of understanding long covid better. It's too soon for that now, but better understanding could be good news for sufferers from other diseases with long post-infection sequelae.
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Apple Maps shows users the Gulf of Mexico when searching for 'Gulf of America'
The discussion of the politics of the change is being interesting, but I have a rather different comment.
When I searched just now for "gulf of america" in Apple Maps, on an iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.3, it says it can't find anything. I am located in Massachusetts. Though some may say New England is not part of the Divided States of America, I beg to differ.
So the article seems to be inaccurate. Maybe the change was reverted, or only appears on a Mac; I do not know. Does it matter that my WiFi Internet access is via FiOS? Or that my IPv6 is via Hurricane Electric (tunneled from NYC)? It shouldn't. -
Apple renews effort to induce authors to publish with Apple Books
There are those of us who, with reason, rejected the idea Apple was fixing the market. That charge was leveled at the publishers whom they said conspired to rig prices. Apple only had a clause in their contract required its publishers to agree not to undercut them. Bad requirement, but addressing Amazon, which was engaging in a different activity that should have had anti-trust attention. So a consent decree removing that clause would have fixed Apple. Amazon was selling books at a loss, dumping books to drive its competition out of the market entirely. Should have landed on them for that anti-competitive activity like a flipping megaton of bricks, but no, it was pro-consumer. Yes, e-books should be cheaper. The way Amazon went about that should have been considered illegal. That's what anti-trust law was *for*.Rayz2016 said:DAalseth said:I might have to look at this. This morning, fed up with How Amazon treats its customers, workers, the environment, and on and on I pulled all of my books off of Amazon. So I’m looking for a new platform. This might be the way to go, but it’s not the only one.
Interesting that if you want to join KDP Select, you can't publish your book on any other platform. And they said Apple was fixing the market.
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AccountEdge abandons Catalina compatibility, customers looking for alternatives
It's not just a matter of converting 32-bit code to 64-bit code by recompiling. In 30 years there have been plenty of other changes under the hood. Significant parts of the code must precede MacOS X in any form, so to get it just to MacOS X they Carbonized their app. You can't convert from Carbon to Cocoa by changing compiler switches; significant parts of the app must be rewritten. There is no 64-bit version of Carbon. Meanwhile, the developers who wrote their app's original code and understood it have moved to other jobs, retired, or died; it's been 30 years. Because the software company has been coasting along using Carbon for all this time, all their deferred maintenance is hitting them at once. Carbon APIs have been deprecated since 2012, and the warnings have been getting louder since. In 2017 Apple announced that there would be performance consequences; then the 32-bit apps started getting warnings on launch, and they were told the end was near, and in 2019, seven years after the first warning, they finally eliminated the deprecated libraries. I use other code based on Carbon, which has not really been maintained in years. Up until now, it still worked. For one, the code was developed by a one-person shop, then sold. New maintainers have produced further updates on Windows, but not on Mac. The old Mac code costs $200 per seat still; the new code (on Windows) costs $500 for a license. Code frequently benefits from being rewritten to take advantage of new technologies, but for apps that don't generate enough revenue for proper maintenance or where the owners are primarily rent seekers unwilling to invest, this is what happens. It's bad news for the licensed users, but it's not all on Apple.
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New 'Service' battery message in iOS pushes consumers toward official replacement
If you put in a non-genuine part, there's a reasonable chance that the battery-health indicator will be wrong. That is, calibrated incorrectly, and then relying on that incorrect information could cause you problems. This is more likely than avoiding liability for catching fire, but the lawyers would probably have more influence. If you get a third-party battery that has the same controller chip, it's at least more plausible that it would work as expected, but is there firmware? Is it close enough? Better to deny access to information they do not know to be valid, or put in a different screen where they report raw statistics (e.g., voltage) but decline to interpret them. The issue is when you (or your repair shop) buy a genuine part but because the installer is not Apple it still won't accept it. THAT is where right-to-repair laws could come into play and squash Apple's defense. With these caveats, I'm in favor of right-to-repair. A genuine or compliant part must be able to identify itself as such or come with instructions to conduct the repair properly. If genuine part installed improperly, report that. More corporate deafness because they feel entitled (in this case, to consider all their customers idiots and thieves, but consider that having Battery Health at all was an outcry about similar thinking).
