Mastodawn

Thom, exceedingly pure Jun 22, 2024

The EU enacted a new law a while ago that all bottle caps should remain attached to the bottle, to combat plastic trash.

All the bottle and packaging makers, from massive multinationals like Coca Cola and fucking Nestlé to small local producers invested in the development of new caps, changing their production lines, and shipping the new caps. Today, a month before the law goes into effect, it's basically impossible to find a bottle without an attached cap.

I don't know, I thought this story was weirdly relevant right now with Apple being a whiny bitch. Imagine being worse than Coca Cola and motherfucking Nestlé.

Miłosz Jun 22, 2024

@thomholwerda still, Apple can sell their castrated products in full price to EU citizens without doing any work to stick to the EU law.

mxk Jun 22, 2024

@milosz @thomholwerda "castrated" would imply, that something of value is being lost.

RealWaaagh Jun 22, 2024

@mxk @milosz @thomholwerda there's going to be a lot of value missing

Andreas K Jun 23, 2024

@realwaaagh @mxk @milosz @thomholwerda
Not really.

As some developers have correctly observed, the iOS 18 Beta is missing all the new exciting features, which is highly atypical, but there are good reasons:

- Apple finds it a bit hard to tune the AI features to Apple quality expectations. Guss what, seems like Apple has not solved the LLM/world model problem, so they will take a long time to fine tune that AI beast.

- building the private AI cloud will take ~2 years.

RealWaaagh Jun 23, 2024

@yacc143 @mxk @milosz @thomholwerda still, EU for years is cut off from many services. Ofc, Germany, France is quite well served (UK of course too), but I would love EU to put pressure on many companies for an equal treatment of all EU market.
I find the current Apple position to be only a start from cutting off EU from even more Apple solutions. And if they will go over with it, others will only follow, that will end up with EU having worse experience across the board. From Apple, through Google till the Chineese solutions.

Andreas K Jun 23, 2024

@realwaaagh @mxk @milosz @thomholwerda
Sorry, when it comes to the whole AI (=LLM) hype thing, which IMHO, is a technology without really useful use cases, that cannot be made GDPR-compliant for what people try to use it (and the GDPR is a law that flows directly from the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights in the Treaties, basically it's our Freedom of Speech fetish), I'm highly happy that the EU keeps the snake oil outside.

Andreas K Jun 23, 2024

@realwaaagh @mxk @milosz @thomholwerda

And I'm saying that as someone who sees clearly the useful things that "AI" can produce. (But LLM are toys/snake oil/research, not really "products")

Actually to keep myself mentally agile I'm taking currently an AI study course despite my age. When the huge GPT hype hit, we (my student buddies) took the time to feed it quite some of our maths homework, it was hilarious what p(next|context) produced as very convincing and usually very false answers.

RealWaaagh Jun 23, 2024

@yacc143 @mxk @milosz @thomholwerda I'm not sure why are you seeing only the LLM/AI thing as the part of discussion here.

Andreas K Jun 23, 2024

@realwaaagh @mxk @milosz @thomholwerda
a) you didn't list much explicitely, AI comes to mind as the current thing Apple is holding back. (I mentioned that Apple is holding it back not only in the EU, but worldwide, but they announce it for the EU, funny that. No implementation of AI in the iOS 18 beta)

b) you mentioned Apple Care -> I explained I think that this not necessary the cool thing you think. (Yeah you cannot get it.)

Andreas K Jun 23, 2024

@realwaaagh @mxk @milosz @thomholwerda

c) and last but not least, forcing companies to treat all MS the same:

Problematic.

We do not do that even inside a country. You wouldn't force a restaurant in Kraków to deliver one Pizza and two portions of Pierogi to Gdańsk, and make sure they are fresh.

Generally speaking, e.g. in Austria, a contracting mandate usually exists only stuff like utility. Electricity, mail, car insurance.

@yacc143 @mxk @milosz @thomholwerda somehow EU is able to manage mandate on straws, bottle caps and roaming. In my eyes lack of unified market regulations are just lazyness or, worse, someone has interest in that. As an example, outrageous differences in car prices across Europe. Without reason (as it's far more than tax differences)

Andreas K Jun 23, 2024

@realwaaagh @mxk @milosz @thomholwerda
That one's is very strong lobbying,
AND it's a tradeoff, the manufacturers are explicitly not allowed to do anything to hinder EU re-imports. For the right to set up territorial distribution by MS.

So basically, in the cases there the net prices are clearly different, for better informed EU citizens in low car tax countries it's not really a problem to buy a cheap car. (E.g. when I lived in Germany, I drove a grey imported VW, I think from NL)

Andreas K Jun 23, 2024

@realwaaagh @mxk @milosz @thomholwerda
But as the grey importing was done by a non-VW trader on my behalf, including the financing via the VW-Bank, I'm not really sure exactly where they got the car from, it just was over €10k cheaper than the same car in Germany. 🤷

Andreas K Jun 23, 2024

@realwaaagh @mxk @milosz @thomholwerda

Straws, bottle caps, etc that's regulating how goods have to look to be legal to circulate in the market.
Classic EU work.

Now regulating that a company is forced to enter a contract with customers in 27 MS, is problematic.

As the 27 MS have different rules for many things. E.g. different costs for labour, different rules & costs for garbage, ...

Andreas K Jun 23, 2024

@realwaaagh @mxk @milosz @thomholwerda
Not for example, the EU mandates that companies must provide replacement parts for 7 years.

What the EU did not try is to regulate the details, e.g. what are manufacturers allowed to charge for the parts?

Oh, we just run out of replacement displays for our 3-year-old mobile X? No problem, let's raise the price for the X display to 10 times the price of our current mobile Z.

Problem solved. Statistically, the sales numbers of X displays will go to 0.