The trouble is people have gained employment from doing the things he's pushing to totally automate. This shift goes way beyond inventing the technology but also re-inventing economics and society and from a glance at his website's mission statements it seems that he think this isn't his problem.
Governments are bad: long before now there should have been rules about applying 100%-automation to previously people-driven industries, public debate about the ramifications and proposed means to keep the resulting economy working for masses of people.
That's the purpose of economies and societies, after all, to enable the livelihood of the masses. Not to fulfill the fever dream of entitled asshats at the expense of billions of livelihoods.
So if governments are as bad, and woefully delayed, at acting to support the social transformations of these utopian dreams, its the responsibility to the industrial forces pursuing them to proactively drag governments into doing so. Any firm doing one without equally the other, I just cannot support or take seriously.
A smart phone's primary function is to initiate and receive phone calls, or arguably 1/3 of it's primary function if the metric is the Jobs iPhone launch presentation, however since "smart phone" and "iPhone" have "phone" in their names I'm going to argue its their primary function.
People have come to expect that phones nearly always work, and rely on them for critical communication with loved ones, services like emergency services. When these aren't dependable you don't have a phone but instead a toy.
The case made two decades ago is that running arbitrary software on a phone incurs a risk that malware can compromise the device and alter its dependability. _General purpose computers don't have this historical burden._ Phone and mobile OS makers sell their products with their purposeful limitations made fairly clear. You want a mobile device with different capabilities then seek out am alternate device, it's kinda obvious.
There's always communities of people who attempt to repurpose the products they own for purposes the weren't originally intended, and I would like to see that laws that make that hobby more legitimate and legal. I would love to see 3rd parties able to support these hobbyists, that would be great. But Apple, Google with their hardware partners have no obligation to do so, and justifiable positions for making repurposing non-trivial to do.
The Xerox influence was real but limited - Apple's team iterated extensively as shown in these polaroids, adding crucial innovations like drag-and-drop, pull-down menus, and the desktop metaphor that weren't in the original Alto/Star interfaces.
The desktop metaphor absolutely was in the Xerox Star and that was copied by the Lisa team (and carried over to the Mac) after they viewed it when Star was first announce. That’s well documented. The Star also had limited pull down menus mostly a single menu item on the top right of every window that was hamburger-like in design that had items in it.
The Xerox Development Environment (TAJO/XDE) was more windows like where windows were processes and shrunk down to the bottom of the screen when closed. Star was developed using Tajo but are completely separate systems with very different user interfaces. For example Tajo used cut/copy/paste and any window could be set overlapping where as Star use a MOVE, COPY where use selected the object pressed the verb action button, and then selected the destination (use that was modal!). Also Star choose to have non-overlapping tiled windows (except for modal dialogues & style sheets.) The windowing was changed in later versions to allow any window to overlap.
What’s even more confusing is that Xerox had lots of systems including smalltalk, interlisp, star, Cedar & Tajo at the time Lisa was released. They also had lots or prototypes systems including Rooms and the Alto for that matter.
Apple absolutely also did their own research and design that was unique. And in cases the duplicated earlier research but came to a different conclusion (for example the number of buttons on a mouse.)
I think Apple did more with direct manipulation than others did taking it to more extremes — but you can still see that in other earlier systems.
In context those are just tweaks ... Xerox designed the entire WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) UI concept, including the bitmapped display it is based on, first commercial mouse, ethernet networking ...
Xerox's invention was visionary and pioneering. Apple's was just engineering iteration.
It's as if one company designed the automobile and you want to give outsized credit to someone else who added turn indicators.
The part so-often left out of this story (that Apple "stole IP from Xerox") is that the C-suite at Xerox got special considerations during AAPL's IPO, in exchange for access to their engineers in Palo Alto. From the POV of these former salesmen-turned-executives, it was fiscally worthwhile (they generally despised/misunderstood PARC engineers).
Xerox, of course, almost immediately liquidated their AAPL holdings (doh!).
Recalled from reading Dealers of Lightning at Xerox PARC (my favorite non-fiction book of the past few years).
Are these subsidies to end users, contributing towards retail or perhaps discount service fees? This shouldn't be how it works. Services should be given free to qualifying users (at some service tier) and providers should be paid directly to offset their cost of that service.
Providers should not be making market-standard profits, or revenue that subsidize ventures other than the services rendered to those users, like media creation or M&A.
"Recent leaks from Meta show that executives there worried that if they didn’t censor accurate information that the Biden administration didn’t like, the company could face severe consequences." dead giveaway about this article's author bias.
I live in Metropolitan Vancouver, somewhere with very low vaccination hesitancy, and still someone in my circle only got vaccinated because of restrictions. Restaurants were re-opening and she couldn't join in without getting the vaccine.
How knows how many avoided infection at all, severe symptoms, or even death because they were similarly convinced by restrictions and mandates. In this light, I really don't have much sympathy for some people who felt a little discriminated against. A public heath emergency doesn't care about your petty feelings.
It would be nice if this was a common OS feature. For some platforms however, system APIs implement the undo stack by way of pointers into runtime objects. A macOS application, for example, has model functions for each kind of document change, and these end with constructing an undo stack item. This contains pointers to the model object and inverse model function, plus captured parameters for that function to perform the undo. (Elegantly, when the inverse functions are called during an undo, the undo stack items they make effectively build a redo stack)
To save this undo stack on this and similar platforms would also require changing the undo mechanism entirely, from using pointers into using static references having meaning across instances of the document model. The inverse model function would have to be identified by an enumeration, the object to change would have to be identified by a kind of search path. The details about saving the data, and where to save it, would be the tiniest part of this problem.
But even on these platforms, if an individual app wishes to implement a custom undo stack which supported this feature, that would be very possible. If cross-platform frameworks implemented support for this that could be a definite advantage over native APIs.
"I will soon start a series of posts about the Apple IIgs, the most successful of the series." This https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/498 claims the 2e outsold the 2gs by more than 4 to 1. The former was in the market for far longer, was cheaper, and thus was the mainstay purchase for many mid/late-1980s schools.
Governments are bad: long before now there should have been rules about applying 100%-automation to previously people-driven industries, public debate about the ramifications and proposed means to keep the resulting economy working for masses of people.
That's the purpose of economies and societies, after all, to enable the livelihood of the masses. Not to fulfill the fever dream of entitled asshats at the expense of billions of livelihoods.
So if governments are as bad, and woefully delayed, at acting to support the social transformations of these utopian dreams, its the responsibility to the industrial forces pursuing them to proactively drag governments into doing so. Any firm doing one without equally the other, I just cannot support or take seriously.