I was just thinking about the A thing the other day.

A1 Plumbing, Acme Brick, AAA Home Servicing all the companies named over the years to try and be the first in the phone book.

But phone books have been dead for a long time. And search results aren’t alphabetical. It would be interesting for someone to graph or somehow otherwise show how names have changed in response.

I have seen those occasional pictures of businesses named “(thing) near me” in an attempt to win at Google searches.

There are a few called My Location or Current Location too. They come up when you want Google Maps to navigate starting from where you are...

I can’t help but think that’s because they don’t know any better and maybe because they’re getting better informed by the reporting than what they’re actually getting from management.

Which would be terrible if true.

The rumor I saw when all this started implied it was.

I think it said that Mullenweg always came back from burning man with lots of ideas.

The implication to me was the ideas were terrible and the board was afraid of having to deal with it yet again. But that’s a total guess.

I have worked at Automattic for ~7 years. I don't see the history of bad ideas coming from Burning man.

Matt is always looking for inspiration, as we all should be. Whether it comes from Burning man or elsewhere seems irrelevant.

Are there ideas coming from Burning Man?

Spending time at Burning Man can completely detach you from reality

I feel like the only way this makes sense is if "ideas" is a euphamism for drugs.

I had no idea they published this to the general public.

A huge ecosystem of third party accessories, cases, skins, etc.

The openness is easily worth it.

I always imagined shops in China got out the calipers and made measurements from scratch every time a new iPhone was released. Never knew Apple made it this easy to manufacture Minion iPhone cases

They probably still do, if they have the device, because you definitely want to make sure before creating the not-cheap-even-in-China tooling.

As others have mentioned, these are more useful for when they don't, i.e. before the actual release.

The big manufactureres pay or just simple acquire the leaks.

Commoditize your complements. Wide choice and availability of accessories benefits hardware sales.

That’s obviously the people who are really using it, but I assumed you had to pay Apple to get it.

So either you made your own measurements or if you were doing Made For iPhone and they would give it to you as part of that program which surely you must have to pay for.

I assume there's NDAs in place with some vendors pre-release, since my understanding is some accessory vendors get the needed info before new models are released, so they can spin up their lines and have accessories ready to go when the new model hits the market.

(but I could be wrong; NDAs w/China? no idea what the time between announced/released/shipped is typically; I last bought Apple product in 2009...)

I've heard that they are busy bribing people in Apple's manufacturers for dimensions before products are released.

Commoditize Your Complement - Apple wants accessories to be cheap.

You might want to pay for the Made For iPhone certification for some things, but I doubt most cases have it.

For accessory manufacturers?

Yes. These drawings are a companion to Apple's accessory design guidelines, which include a lot of other interesting design considerations:

https://developer.apple.com/accessories/Accessory-Design-Gui...

It's nice but lots of companies do this if their equipment is meant to be used with other equipment from third parties. Frankly I'm surprised they only provide it in 2D PDFs.

It's so we can make cases.

Wouldn’t surprise me if EU forced them to.

This kind of thing was available (although more difficult to find) well before the EU started on their Apple quest - e.g. I had the dimensional drawings for whatever phone I had in late 2015 (6 or 6S, I forget) because I was making graphical inserts for my clear case using my Cricut with dimensions from the Apple PDF.

No, this is to attract accessory manufacturers, and then corner them into buying an MFi/connector license: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MFi_Program

How about I rephrase it.

More than can be reviewed for the time and money they’re willing to spend.

Even before AI, they absolutely could’ve done it.

this argument still adds nothing to discussion because companies clearly want to spend zero but earn everything, the only amount they are willing to spend is on lawyers working on shielding companies from any responsibility including obvious cases of negligence

Yes, and I've also seen the absolute shitflood of horrible ads. Every time I see somebody else's system that isn't running ublock origin or similar... They clearly are prioritizing the ad revenue over any actual "don't take a steaming dump on the Internet" ethical priorities.

You don’t think there’s a difference between “hackers try to attack everything“ and “Tesla decided that I personally need to be tested as one of their systems due to a lazy misconfiguration“ are different?

Are you asking if I think Elon had this person's website on an 80" screen in a conference room whilst they collude how to send traffic to their site?

No, I do not.

I get thousands of these "security scanner" requests on a low-traffic site weekly, if not daily. Not a day goes by where someone doesn't try to kick in my door. Are you prepared to waste valuable time in your life to separate the white hat from the black hat requests?

I would have added the IP addresses to my firewall's IP blacklist and forgotten about it the next day. It's really all you can do.

> Are you asking if I think Elon had this person's website on an 80" screen in a conference room whilst they collude how to send traffic to their site?

i cannot fathom how you could possibly arrive at this reading of the gp's comment, what are you talking about

Liability when it happens?

Don't all water companies do it?

And while it may point at what we could do with Google and the likes, the risk profile is still a bit different (make many people ill or die vs "unknowingly" stealing some money).

My comment was meant to be sarcasm. I see that didn’t come through.

It did partially, which is why I have the second part — even if we applied the same rule, it's not really apples-to-apples.

It isn’t. But it should be.

I find online advertising crooked as hell. Google charges by the impression and knowingly allows huge percentages of fake impressions. How is that anything other than fraud?

It’s not because it’s online advertising. And that sucks.

I am not disagreeing it's outright fraud. I am disagreeing it's the same thing as water company not testing the water they distribute on purpose (or hiding the negative results).

Does contiguousness matter these days? Especially since all disk locations are lies anyway as SSD firmware has its own layer of indirection too?

Is there no way to criticize the government of Israel without it being taken as a request to get rid of the entire state and Jewish people’s right to exist?

The objection here is to the particular faction in power. Not the existence of the state.

People can pretend whatever they want, but this affects technology heavily too.

Everything you buy has to be shipped. That needs gas. Everything with plastic has oil in it.

Economic downturns/depressions/panics affect investment and the amount of money available for companies to keep running. Plus consumer/business demand. Especially hard on startups who aren’t profitable or don’t even have a product out yet.

Even if you ignore the extremely obvious political stuff, this will directly affect the entire audience here.