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Are you saying those are additional possible meanings of Pennsyltucky, or that you've heard people use it to mean all of those?

I have only ever heard it used to mean the rural areas between the two cities, in keeping with the saying "Pittsburgh on one side, Philly on the other, and Kentucky in between", which has of course confused people not familiar with the stereotypes or geography.

The other famous use of Pennsyltucky is the character in Orange is the New Black, which I've always taken to mean "she acts like she's from Pennsyltucky".

I guess we need to wait for the term to be used enough to get into a dictionary to get it well defined


They're not even serving the file. That cost is born by the external provider.

The four dollars is for providing the platform that the user used to navigate to the link and download the zip file.

That's a fun bit of argument from the owners of Chrome.


I’m not sure what you’re referring to here. Google are the file distributor for content from their store.

These rules aren’t for linking out from the store to a third party site, but rather for installing an app from the store and then linking out to a third party payment.


Yep, I misunderstood that key point here but can't edit anymore.

> The four dollars is for providing the platform that the user used to navigate to the link and download the zip file.

And does not include showing up first in search results for your app's name. That's a separate fee you'll need to pay.


The apparent information gathering and brutal review process is unbelievable here. If I'm understanding this correctly, the requirement is that eg Epic Game Store must register and upload every single APK for every app they offer, and cannot offer it in their store until Google approves it, which may take a week or more - including every time the app updates.

Meanwhile they get full competitive insight into which apps are being added to Epics store, their download rates apparently, and they even get the APKs to boot, potentially making it easier for those app devs to onboard if they like, and can pressure them to do so by dragging their feet on that review process.

> Provide direct, publicly accessible customer support to end users through readily accessible communication channels.

This is an interesting requirement. I want to see someone provide the same level of support that Google does to see if it draws a ban.


Google and accessible customer support should not be put in the same sentence. Their history of automated neglect is beyond reproach.

their Play store review practices are such a joke. Apps review is a completely obscure process, no clear way to see that the app is in review state, if they reject - amount of information why it was rejected is minimal and you have to second-guess; appealing is not trivial; most of the reviews are done by AI which gets triggered in totally random places from time to time (e.g., in my case, some pictures which looked fine for kids for years and went through many previous reviewed, suddenly seem too violent).

I have healthcare apps. The review process for me consists of some reviewer deciding what set of healthcare features I should have picked from their list and rejecting on that basis. But subsequent reviewers have different opinions. In one app version release I got rejected 5 times for picking the wrong set of healthcare features as either the reviewer changed their mind or I got different reviewers. The app has been on Google play for 13 years.

I wish there were laws against their practice.

I'm not subscribed to too many Youtubers. But it's insane that I still need 2 digits to count how many of those creators tried to work for over a week to address some urgent issue brought upon by one of Google's automation tools. Then simply resorted to Twitter to get their fanbase to rile up YouTube for them.

If it wasn't a hack, Google moves like molasses.


This page only applies to apps distributed by Google Play. Not apps installed by third party stores. It's still outrageous, of course.

Ahh that's a really good call out, thank you. Basically negates most of what I wrote.

Hmm, does this mean that large swaths of people publishing apps are going to flock to distribution platforms like f-droid?

(Yikes)


This is probably why they killed installs that dont have attribution, specifically to undercut f-droid.

F-Droid only accepts open source apps.

absolutely, i get this. i assume it's going to be a relatively small subset that go open in order to jump to an open platform. i'm not super familiar with the f-droid publishing ecosystem (or mobile publishing at all, admittedly).

i do wonder if there's regardless going to be some kind of (perhaps overwhelming) inundation.


I want to see what the EU anti-trust organization will make of this.

Isn't this limited to the US?

Yes, but you can bet that if they succeed with this in the US they will try something similar in the EU. They're constantly testing the waters.

Probably for the same reasons

This has been Apple's stance for years and has been routinely brought down in courts across the globe. Why are you guys surprised.

At this point I'm going to assume that anyone pushing datacenters in space wants to host child pornography. That's the only realistic workload that ticks all the boxes for orbital datacenters.

I don't think it would "solve" little any of the legal issues with Child Pornography (not if the owner lived on earth, at least), but it would make a great and politically convenient target for space to earth weaponry.

Oh, fully agreed. Orbital datacenters don't solve many to any engineering problems either, so I figure its adherents are as much into legal problem solving as they are engineering problem solving.

Authz overhead for graphql is definitely a problem. At GitHub we're adding github app support to the enterprise account APIs, meaning introducing granular permissions for each graphql resource type.

Because of the graph aspect, queries don't work til all of the underlying resources have been updated to support github apps. From a juice vs squeeze perspective it's terrible - lots of teams have to do work to update their resources (which given turnover and age they may not even be aware of) before basic queries start working, until you finally hit a critical mass at some high percentage of coverage.

Add to all that the prevailing enterprise customer sentiment of "please anything but graphql" and it's a really hard sell - it's practically easier and better to ask teams to rebuild their APIs in REST than update the graphql.


I mean, the use of GraphQL for third party APIs has always been questionable wisdom. I’m about a big a GraphQL fan as it gets, but I’ve always come down on the side of being very skeptical that it’s suitable for anything beyond its primary use case — serving the needs of 1st-party UI clients.

Strongly agreed.

GitHub search is among the worst out there, is this why?

Yes, it's the standard Visual Studio Enterprise credit that you get with the license - 150/month

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/member-offers/cred...


Which means that you need a Visual Studio Enterprise license that costs $500 a month, unless you can get it though partnership programs. I take it OP doesn't have an Enterprise license.

Every Microsoft employee is given a license as part of working there, at least if you're in the eng orgs.

I've had mine for over a decade.


The author chose a library that didn't support TLS, written by a company that isn't Microsoft. Terrible devex indeed but hard to see why that's the fault of the platform that required TLS.

What made you feel like a criminal? Buying a home is fairly straightforward and has almost no state verification of any piece of it, at least in the US.

Was it something the state enforced, or something being done by the agents of the transaction (ie the mortgage company)?


> Buying a home is fairly straightforward and has almost no state verification of any piece of it, at least in the US.

you mean the purchase deed isn't registered anyplace?

or you mean that the mortgage company didn't do a credit/background check on the buyer before granting the mortgage? Which includes some level of providing a state-backed identity card?

Or do you mean it's easy to buy a house for cash without hassle in the US? Just a suitcase of $100 bills? I'm assuming you've tried this recently?? (and the house cost more than 150K?


Only one of those things is a state enforced requirement (the deed) and everything else are system requirements that do not get solved with bitcoin. What mortgage company is going to loan you a million dollars ("in btc" whatever) without figuring out if you're a good risk? That's not the currency of choice making you get cross examined, it's the nature of the thing you are trying to do.

Maybe the suitcase of anonymous cash bit is easier but only because you're doing that to dodge taxes... In which case feeling like a criminal might be a bit on point.


That is because you’re working in the same financial system.

Now try buying some property in South America. Or Eastern Europe. Or Asia.

Be prepared for a similar experience OP documents.


It's incredibly common in Argentina to buy a property with a suitcase of cash. In fact I think it's about the only way it's done. Argentina has a tax on bank transfers, plus by various measures the tax on profit of business can be above 100% so no one actually uses the traditional finance system for more than a minority fraction of their use.


Just owning this much money feels criminal. Suddenly a lot of institutions start asking questions about where they came from.


This was largely the reason I rejected "real name verification" ideas at GitHub after the xz attack. (Especially if they are state sponsored) it's not that hard for a dedicated actor (which xz certainly was) to get a quality stolen identity.

The inevitable evolution of such a feature is a button on your repo saying" block all contributors from China, Russia, and N other countries". I personally think that's the antithesis of OSS and therefore couldn't find the value in such a thing.


That would be easily defeated by a VPN. The inevitable evolution would be some kind of in-person attestation of identity backed up with some kind of insurance on the contributor's work, and, well you're converging on the employer-employee relationship then.


Yep, I saw the cat and mouse ending at ever increasingly invasive verifications involving more parties, that could ultimately still be worked around by a state actor. We already get asked for "block access from these country ip ranges please" as a security measure despite it being trivially bypassed, so it is easy to predict a useless but strong demand for blocking users based on their verified country.


This feels so true, all this surveillence/controlling seems like it will be a non issue for the dedicated hacker or criminal eventually and just a lost right for the regular person


"defeated", yes

"easily", not so much...

As in, services can still detect if you're connecting through a VPN, and if you ever connect directly (because you forgot to enable the VPN), your real location might be detected. And the consequences there might not be "having to refresh the page with the VPN enabled", but instead: "find the whole organisation/project blocked, because of the connection of one contributor"

This is why Comaps is using codeberg, after its predecessor (before the fork) project got locked by GitHub

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43525395

https://mastodon.social/@organicmaps/114155428924741370

Moreover, this kind of stuff is also the reason I stopped accessing Imgur:

- if I try without VPN, imgur stops me, because of the UK's Online Safety Act

- if I try with my personal VPN, I get a 403 error every single time

I'm sure I could get around it by using a different service (e.g. Mullvad), but imgur is just not important enough for me to bother, so I just stopped accessing it altogether


So... GPG?


For better or worse, Accelerando comes to mind _a lot_ when trying to figure out how agent platforms should work. Hopefully for better.


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