Most existing iOS apps are likely to use a suite of Apple platform frameworks beyond simply pure Swift and SwiftUI.
For those cases, Skip's approach seems to be a range of Skip* frameworks that are minimal implementations of the Apple or Android versions. This will likely grow over time, but for most apps it would likely be very limiting at this stage.
For instance in my iOS app I use StoreKit, WebKit, SafariServices, UserNotifications and CryptoKit amongst others that have no current implementation when using Skip.
This is indeed our primary focus, now that Skip 1.0 is released. We already have a bunch of open-source frameworks that bridge common libraries like WebKit, Firebase, Lottie, SQLite, and more. We expect this ecosystem to grow quickly and organically along with the Skip community. If there are any other frameworks that you commonly use, please let us know (either here, or via any of our support channels) – we will definitely add them to the roadmap.
They stopped the study because of the incredible efficacy and lack of side effects. This was a phase 3 clinical trial so they have already cleared substantial hurdles in safety requirements (clinical trials are about both efficacy and side effects).
But for argument’s sake, there are even more sides than efficacy and safety: there are substantially different risk profiles for different potential patients, and a long acting treatment with no daily pill is more valuable for some people.
One of the reasons that long acting injectables could have a big impact on transmission in Africa is because there’s stigma around PrEP usage, especially for women. Obviously, there is now a big conversation about the cost and who pays, but the potential here is indisputable.
> They stopped the study because of the incredible efficacy and lack of side effects.
Are you aware that historically when this has happened, it almost always turns out to have negative side effects and marginal efficacy?
Don't you think an easy con is to flip a coin 3 times, and if you get heads all 3 times, tell everyone it always comes up heads, and there's no need to continue to measure it, but just to trust them?
Usually when a study is halted early it’s because of obvious harm to the experimental group from the treatment which means there would be no possible benefit and it would make continuation unethical.
A meta analysis of early stopping in randomized clinical trials has found no evidence that early stopping hides side effects or inflates benefit—and I challenge you to produce any examples of a phase 3 trial of an infectious disease treatment that was stopped early which later showed unduly harmful side effects for marginal benefit.
This trial showed 100% efficacy.
A major consideration of RCTs is also the benefit denied to the public by withholding a viable treatment. HIV remains a global epidemic with no existing good solutions for poor countries.
Your account is new and has no profile and for all we know could be a bot.
However, in adhering to the HN guidelines [0] I must "assume good faith".
And indeed, you provided an excellent, intelligent reference! Very interesting paper and debate.
In the paper the authors review the debate on early stopping, and then created a model/simulation to examine what one might expect.
I should note that the paper came out in 2016, which was before the December 2020 early stopping of the COVID vaccine trials, a real world example of an early stopping debacle, where trials were stopped and then efficacy turned out to be vastly less than originally reported (even worse than the "29%
exaggeration of effect" Bassler et al originally reported).
I think your argument has convinced me that my position is not correct. However, it has not convinced me that early stopping is correct either. I think the obviously dumb thing is having these rigid trials, and a far better idea is to have real-time adjustable ongoing data collection and experimentation that never stops.
I don’t think anything is going to be as devastating as 60%+ of Eswatini’s women between the ages of 25-39 being HIV+. Anything that can put a dent in that is going to far outweigh any potential risks and side effects. That whole country is going to be dead in 5-10 years unless they all get a daily dose of ART for the rest of their lives.
On a side note, that number is absolutely unbelievable considering that heterosexual intercourse has a 0.08% chance of infection. Do they all have 100s of sexual partners and tens of thousands of sexual interactions before they’re 30?
Last week, as part of the US Department of Justice investigation, documents were released that showed Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to retain the search partnership.
This is almost 20% of Apple’s total operating profit for the year.
It’s never a good idea for a company to be so reliant on a single partnership or client.
It distorts incentives, is high risk and sometimes, as in Apple’s case leaves a company blind to other opportunities it could be pursuing.
On top of it all, Apple’s search partnership with Google trades their customer’s privacy for search $ kickbacks.
Based upon all this, it should be time for Apple to end this partnership and pursue their own search solution.
Search is a hard problem, and if they haven't decided to cut the $20 billion, it's because they believe Google is the best.
I do think Google has been decreasing in quality over the years, but when I use any of the privacy focused alternatives like DuckDuckGo, Brave or Kagi, I end up using a !g bang every 2/3 searches.
The others just aren't there yet, and they know that.
So was Maps, but Apple committed the time, resources and focus to make it happen. In 2024, I would say the Maps initiative has been an overwhelming success.
As per the article, Apple already has a search solution in Spotlight, which though it hasn't been battle tested as a general web search solution, seems to be a great basis to improve and make better.
My concern is that due to their addiction to the Google partnership money, Apple don't even seem to be contemplating their own Search approach.
This is how we end up with monopolies in product areas as the big tech players, in effect, collude to not compete in core areas of business due to partnership agreements.
Radically different experience here. When I used DDG by default for a couple years, I'd resort to !g maybe 10-20% of the time. For the last few months with Kagi, it's literally 0 times I've even been tempted. Paying $5/mo to be a customer and not the product, having my privacy respected, and enjoying consistent access to excellent search results is IME equivalent to switching from browsing without an adblocker to using ublock plus or trying reader mode for the first time. It's transformative.
It's just a bit ironic that Apple keeps the lights on by paying with their user's privacy. If I was a Google executive reading this I'd be in stitches, this is exactly how you keep the ad economy going. Something tells me Apple doesn't even care anymore either, since they know there's only so many profitable options once their service revenue is regulated down to a trickle.
I also tried switching to DuckDuckGo for a bit, and then Kagi after reading rave reviews here on HN. I churned after about a week with Kagi as my default search engine in iOS Safari. It was too weak at contextually aware / local search in particular. It might do better for me on desktop which tends to be a bit more knowledge research focused.
Google is pretty much unusable today if you don't look for specific websites. If you are using it to look up information, learn or discover new things in the web it is just SEO LLM spam. Features like shopping and LLM-powered Q&A are quite misleading and potentially dangerous for a trusting user.
Google didn't give Apple 20% of their revenue for the year, they were responsible for 20% of their profit. AAPL is $2.8T and their P/E is 28. They earn about $100B a year. And if I'm recalling their profit/revenue ratio correctly, that's $100B on about 400B in revenue. Making Google's money 5%, not 20%.
The post says "almost 20% of Apple's profit", and you note the profit was $100B and the payment was $20B, making it 20% - is something going over my head?
Yes - all $20B isn't pure profit. It must take 25% of an engineers time to maintain the search box in safari. So lets say it is only $19,999,899,999 in profits.
Ideally you could use a device like the Apple Vision Pro with a machine learning model to blank out all advertising you see both in the real and virtual world. Would be interesting for it to recognise billboards, for example, and simply show a blank space instead. It could also work with AirPods to simultaneously silence any audio advertising.
Unfortunately this is not possible at the moment due to the restrictions that are placed on the pass-through video feed by Apple in visionOS. If these OS restrictions were removed it could be technically feasible.
> Ideally you could use a device like the Apple Vision Pro with a machine learning model to blank out all advertising you see both in the real and virtual world. Would be interesting for it to recognise billboards, for example, and simply show a blank space instead. It could also work with AirPods to simultaneously silence any audio advertising.
I need to go to bed, but... I used to run an AR startup (pre-pokemon go/AR craze) and I played with an idea like this. What works better: polarised sunglasses and shitty LCD screen ads*!
* you might wanna tilt your head by 90deg from time to time
As per your link, many of those other categories listed such as Video and Social media also contain as much as, if not more, advertisement load than perhaps even pure 'web traffic'.
The article was using the % of advertising resources in web pages – which came to 24% – as a proxy for the overall advertising resources across all internet traffic (which is difficult to accurately ascertain).
So, yes, this is a rough approximation... and the actual % of advertising resources on all internet traffic may be more or less.
However it is stating all digital advertising may be the cause 2% of global carbon emissions, not just due to the advertising on web pages.
That's a bad way to estimate that, unless one's goal is to come up with an absurdly high number which doesn't pass the sniff test. In which case they succeeded. It doesn't.
Couple of months back I wrote how a Bing partnership would be a good initial step for Apple on the way to completely ending their Google search partnership:
Hush is a great tool to manage annoyance blocking and is also free and open source which is nice.
I've developed a full Safari ad blocking app which includes similar features (amongst others), though if you only want simple annoyance blocking to supplement Safari's in-built tracking protection instead of a full ad blocker, Hush is a good option.
It was rumoured a few weeks back that Apple TV+'s "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" upcoming tv show has been filmed using this camera for Apple Vision Pro.
This is the series based upon the Godzilla / Monsterverse movies.
So, no-one should be saying that all Apple TV+ content has been filmed in this format. But, yes there will likely be at least one show that has been.
For those cases, Skip's approach seems to be a range of Skip* frameworks that are minimal implementations of the Apple or Android versions. This will likely grow over time, but for most apps it would likely be very limiting at this stage.
For instance in my iOS app I use StoreKit, WebKit, SafariServices, UserNotifications and CryptoKit amongst others that have no current implementation when using Skip.