yup it's all about that empathy, and having a constructive, vs. destructive approach to candid criticism and conversation. SO somehow swung far in the destructive direction. Candid discussion does not have to be toxic to be direct, no matter what Linus and co might say, and SO seems to embody.
I have it just for the small form factor. Luckily bought it 2 months before it got killed. Good news is though based on a recent screen crack replacement, Apple still supports fixing it.
on-boarding new devs from the bootcamps, transitioning them to AWS + Lambda is as if starting from square one in terms of what they were expecting to work on. Very much a challenge, especially related to getting them to think about how to leverage good CI/CD for the cloud. Still a lot of knowledge gaps out there
Reading her stuff, it seems like proposals to separate Apple from the App store indicate a total lack of awareness about InfoSec, and at best a poorly researched policy proposal from a technical standpoint. The only reason the App Store isn't a simmering cesspool of malware is that Apple heavily moderates what gets on there, and Google does somewhat the same. That doesn't mean that there perhaps isn't a less MSFT + IE type of solution, and I don't necessarily disagree with her, but her not mentioning that sort of nuance at all makes it rather clear the policy doesn't extend too far into anything more than populism.
It's not Apple's oversight of the app store that is the problem Warren is targeting, it is the participation. Apple can either take 30% from Spotify or have iTunes, not both. Similar argument for Amazon and Amazon Basics.
The article does raise an interesting point though about not thinking of these companies as "tech"; the Amazon argument can be applied to any private label I guess, hence the point about unintended consequences.
It is an interesting concept though, almost like the logical extension of the net neutrality argument. DirecTV, HBO and ATT merging would be something that directly runs foul of this. You either get to provide the platform (be an ISP) or be a content producer, not both.
And Tesla shouldn’t be a car dealership. But going direct to consumer was the best thing for consumers imo. Why would I want to deal with economically inefficient middlemen? The new laws could create digital versions of car dealerships
To be fair, that's inaccurately reframing the argument. Apple with an Apple store for Apple Apps is the equivalent to what you're saying. Tesla doesn't sell Teslas _and_ BMWs.
I don't disagree with you so not sure your point, see my original point. I'm stating that the Tesla comparison doesn't apply to what Apple's specific situation is, and therefore what policy proposals/considerations apply.
So how do you think Anker and the other companies that sell products in the Apple Store online and off would feel if because of Warren Apple said forget it, we will just sell our own products and not worry about all of these crap legislations?
Right, so imagine separating Apple/Google totally from its current oversight position, and having a totally open app store. Like the world _just_ got past learning not to click 'download here!' on a browser, and that was after 20 years of the internet. I'd be open to alternative proposals, but separating the App Store with no replacement is not a secure solution by any means and causes more problems than it solves, assuming a secure app store is the most important trait of an app store.
>Right, so imagine separating Apple/Google totally from its current oversight position, and having a totally open app store
That's not the point. The point is that Netflix, HBO, Spotify, et. al. have to pay the 30% Apple/Google tax while the movie, music, etc. products from Apple/Google don't.
Warren's proposed rule is, effectively, you can produce something or you can sell something, but not both. Apple would need to decide if they want to be an app maker or an app seller.
that gets into interesting Human-Comp Interaction discussions, but a good place to start is that the HCI dynamic of mobile/tablet platforms is totally different (deliberately) from that traditional approach to browsers. So I guess it could be done, but relying on that approach undermines a lot of what make mobile platforms 'mobile platforms.'
its not about workflow, its about not allowing sideloaded apps. the question is whether it is pro or anti consumer? does it hurt the consumer to pay 30% apple tax for netflix, or does the walled garden benefit the consumer by protecting them?
I obviously have the view that the walled garden benefits consumers, so my bias shows. And, I think there's a lot of wiggle room on the cost to host in the App store.
However, US monopoly law is based on consumer harm, so...
I think on a mobile platform, with plenty of competition to not buy an iOS-based phone, a walled garden absolutely benefits consumers more than it hurts. There is so much PII on phones now. Given the total lack of InfoSec knowledge, especially at the mobile-user level, a walled garden is crucial: see every Google Store vuln that hasn't hit Apple.
my dudes: charge yearly $$ to get a cert that allows you to request permissions higher than "access {camera, location while in use, microphone}" and most of the truly harsh PII issues go away afaict
the harm isn't consumer oriented, since it's somewhat diffuse, it's about concentration of market power in the industry.
we could live in a world where you target one distribution platform, and phone vendors compete to police malware, but instead we have walled gardens that police content & economically lock you to their environments and don't even do a good job about malware
So nobody but Apple and Google can handle security? The first days of free-for-all would be rough, but there'd eventually be a lineup of safe marketplaces.
Hardware is a key part of security, too, but Intel doesn't have to run the marketplace.
Well, Intel and AMD have had the run of the marketplace (and ARM indirectly) since the beginning, but there's reasons for that both security and other so not exactly a good comparison.
If Apple releases a secure mobile operating system then allowing apps to be used outside of the official app store is no different from me being able to install whatever software I want on my mac
Ehhhhh. yes. But that glosses over dark pools, some of the shadier exchange infrastructure arbs that go on, etc.
To be candid, I'm fully on the same page as you: what's going on here is no different than what a really good pit trader did from 1800's -> 2000. It's just the digital, semi-invisible version, and because volumes are so large, the money is exponentially larger as well.
But, that's not all the HFTs get up to; a lot of it doesn't hit public markets, or isn't particularly helping w/ efficiency.
Yeah, there are some shady dark pools and order types going around.
In regards to money, I think that decimalization actually really hurt market makers. There has been massive consolidation in the HFT space with most players either going out of business or being acquired. Profits are way down and latency arbitrage is almost impossible nowadays without billions of dollars of trading infrastructure. Profits have dropped by something like 90% in the last 10 years and the super-normal profits now (after consolidation) are just "normal."
The good thing about HFT is that with the right infrastructure, it's (almost) risk-free. The problem with HFT is that the returns don't compound, there's only a fixed amount of pennies that can be vacuumed up. This is in contrast with other non-HFT quant strategies, which can run tens or even sometimes hundreds of billions of dollars in capital and can make over 10% annually.
The story with HFT is the story with any new market. Players get in, make a ton of money. More players get in, now they are making a little less money. Even more get in, and now they aren't making enough money. Then the people not making enough get bought up or go out of business. And now the equilibrium has been reached: everyone is making "normal" money and everybody forgets about them.
And all of this is good, it's the natural market cycle. People like Elizabeth Warren were talking about how unfair HFT was blah blah, but now, no one cares. Fortunately, the entire cycle resolved before the government could get their sticky little fingers on it.
That's a great point. I agree that this will sort of resolve itself, until MIT puts out some new Cat 8 ethernet or some major hardware jumps, the returns start plateauing quickly. When there's such a large barrier to entry, and with only a handful of HFT/DMMs moving the major volumes, that's somewhat of an systemic risk to the tune of a SysAdmin/DevOps guy screwing up a deployment, i.e. what took down Knight Capital
A "dark pool", despite an ominous-sounding name, is just a type of exchange which does not display order prices and sizes. It is something in between of a regular exchange and an auction, better suited for posting and executing large orders. There is nothing shady in it; it helps larger players (like retirement / index funds) to obtain better prices for their large orders.
Yes, not shady, but it totally unravels the argument concerning HFTs helping price discovery. I know the "hey retirement and index funds are doing it, think of the pensioners!" argument is common defense of it, but that's not at all the target audience of DPs. It's liquidity going off exchange, which hurts price discovery, simple as that. Considering how competent trade execution/slippage capabilities are for the types of broker-dealers that would be handling index/ret/pension volumes, that argument is nonsense
Well, dark pools are a counter-HFT measure, of course they have limited price discovery. If you want price discovery, you can go to lit markets. If you want matching without showing your orders, you can put orders to the lit book algorithmically, or go to a dark pool. It's not that there is no choice. And people traded off-exchange like forever, OTC market still exists and predates exchanges.
There's been a lot of lying by multiple banks to customers about the property of their dark pools. Saying they ban HFTs, or categorize them as "aggressive" when actually doing nothing, or having hidden order types for HFTs, etc etc.
Just to be clear, I mostly think that's fine and whatever, who cares, but there has been a lot of deception in the space.
The issues with any algo trading strategy, is if it becomes known, then the trade gets crowded out and priced away. The logic really holds that if you know a shortcut to work that saves 60 minutes on a 2 hr commute, and then everyone else found about it and did it too, goodbye secret commute. This is why the strategy aspect of this gets kept very quiet by R-tech, JS, etc.
Yeah it's always worth remembering how heavily fundamental engineering work processes come into play. Knight Capital went down for a manual deployment error, of all things
My all time favorite article related to this topic, I always try to promote it Guys like the author started this whole rodeo through some really ingenious hardware/software/networking jerryrigging.
