Politics and Education
- For reasons, I’ll touch on later, this is mostly about desktop browsers.
- In terms of privacy and security, I’m approaching this from a reality where 65% of people use Chrome. So in this context, vastly improving the privacy from that, is more interesting than saying someone is a gullible idiot if they don’t use a Tor browser. 😛 So while I’m not saying those things shouldn’t be part of the discussion at all, I’d like to talk more about user experience and features than hardening if you catch my drift. 1
How to use your market dominance
What do you do if you’re dominant in some markets, but wished you were more dominant in others?
If this isn’t one of the clearest examples of the problems with too much bundling and integration, I don’t know what is.
So, Apple (the phone maker) is artificially nerfing the competition of Apple (the music streaming service), unless they agree to build stronger integration with Apple (the smart speaker maker).
At imaginary HomePod meeting:
Some guy: “Our speaker would benefit from Spotify integration, but they would rather not build it for free. Should we pay them, like how we demand payment for integration with our stuff?”
Another guy: “No, I have a better Idea: What if we called Federighi, and threatened them instead? We could remove a useful feature that Apple Music (their main competitor) has, unless they agree to our demands.”
Some guy: “Oh, yeah – that’s way better!”
Now, I’m not saying it went down just like that. But it is awfully “convenient”, isn’t it?
So, to be clear, this is the situation:
As I’ve mentioned previously, I moved from Spotify to Tidal this year, due to artist payments. (Now, I’m not sure whether I got that right – but that’s another case.) And the main thing I’m missing from Spotify, is the excellent Spotify Connect. This is both a way of streaming music to different speakers and devices, and a way to control the Spotify playback from any device. For instance, let’s say I start the playback on my iPad, connected to a speaker via a mini-jack. If I then open Spotify on my phone, the playback controls are “live”, like if I streamed from my phone. I can also say “Nah, move the playback to my Sonos speaker instead”.
What Apple has done, is removing the ability to use the phone’s physical volume buttons to control the Spotify Connect volume. So if you listen to Spotify on your phone, with AirPods, clicking the buttons adjusts the volume. But if you then move it to your Sonos speakers, it suddenly doesn’t – it only adjusts the phone’s notification volume. I really don’t like this disconnect.1
Apple is saying that Spotify users can get the feature back if Spotify agrees to integrate with the HomePod – and that’s very problematic.
Imagine me, happy as a clam: I had bought a phone that I liked, and was using a streaming service I liked – party due to how well it worked with my smart speakers, which I also like. And now Apple is jumping in, and making the latter two worse, just because Spotify won’t support a speaker I don’t have.
Making Something Bad Easier to Do, Isn’t Good
Should Be Obvious…
Speaking of bad arguments… This, from The Verge and this from Dan More (good posts!) got me thinking of another terrible take I see way too often:
«People have always done Bad Thing (at great expense of some kind), so Company X making it super-accessible isn’t critique worthy at all, actually.»
Edit 27/8-24:
The Verge posted a good, and very linkable, article called Hello, you’re here because you said AI image editing was just like Photoshop. And the comment section is full of the argument above, and also its sibling:
«We’ve always has to contend with Bad Thing – so drastically increasing the amount of it, is of no consequence, actually.»
"It's a Company" Isn't an Excuse
You’ll often hear people say (as excuses to negative conduct) something like: “It’s a company, of course they’re only worried about profits." Or something like: “It’s publicly traded – they have an obligation to work towards growth."
And I simply don’t accept that. I don’t mind companies trying to be profitable – but how you do it matters. The consequences matters. And if a company is already immensely profitable (and already provides lots of value to its shareholders) it’s toxic, on so many levels, to squeeze at all cost.
Anyone Else Feel Like They Should Use Firefox
… but Still Struggle With It?
This post was originally (and still is) a forum post on the MPU forums. I have two concrete question blocks I’d love feedback on, which I will present during the post. I would love to hear from you, either over at MPU, as a comment to this post on Micro.blog, via Mastodon, or email. 🙂
I’d like to talk about browsers! And people are of course welcome to comment whatever they want — but some notes on what my intentions for this discussion are:
OK, let’s go!
Ethics are always difficult to discuss. Because while I think everyone should be mindful of the small things we should do to improve things, people have different priorities and possibilities. And where should we draw the line while consumers in a problematic system? Like, I should probably use a Fairphone over an iPhone even though it’s worse, right? How much worse should I accept? How hard should I pull away from things like Facebook or X?
Still, I’m at least trying to try — and as the browser is perhaps the most used app, the choice of it is among the things I’m thinking about.
And here’s why I feel like I should use Firefox:
🌱 AI Is Just Different
The discussion around the ethics and legality surrounding AI has been a constant the last year — and it’s culminating in some important trials that’s coming up.
I won’t go into the entire thing here — I just want to focus on a specific argument that I often hear when it comes to the way these large models are trained. It oftes goes something like: «But how is this different from how humans have always been learning and iterating on previous knowledge?» or «The information was available on the open web, so it can be used for anything!».
I think these are terrible arguments.
Humans are allowed into shopping malls.
However, that’s simply not an argument for that cars should be allowed there as well — whether they’re driven by a human or autonomous.
If Apple was a food company:
Government: «You gotta stop using plastic wrapping around one-time utensils.»
Apple: ∗wraps it in barbed wire instead∗
Apple: «See what the government made us do!» 👆🏻
Why I Think Apple’s Fine is Fine
Today, Apple got hit with a €1.84 billion fine — for anticompetitive behaviour in the music streaming market.
I’ve seen people saying this doesn’t make sense, as Spotify has a larger market share than Apple Music — but that’s not what the complaint is about. The thing is, that Apple has used their size, ecosystem and general market position to give Apple Music a larger market share than they would’ve gotten if they had to compete fairly. Apple is about 80 times the size of Spotify. To put that into perspective, that’s about the same ratio as a rhino compared to a golden retriever. 1
Here are some of the smaller things Apple are doing:
🌱 The Ethics and Principles Behind My Blog
The problem with teachers being tired of change
I’m going to try something that I know is impossible – talking about a profession as one entity. In Norway, there are 77,000 teachers, and of course, all of us are individuals. Still, there are some things I’m pretty sure many teachers agree on: We are tired of people with little expertise telling us how to do our jobs. The pendulum swings from one side to another, so what was in vogue 30 years ago is now considered the newest hotness. Be it politicians, parents, or others – many teachers want to be left alone, and be free to do a job they’ve many years of education and experience in.
But many have written about this before.
I would like to point at a problem this has led to. It has, in my view, created a sort of hardness in the profession that’s made us impervious to change.