And how do you know if you have been breached if you (negligently, in my opinion) have no audit logging, multiple principals sharing the same account, and no anomaly tracking? Does a breach only happen if the attacker brags openly about it?
The difference with accounting is that, relatively speaking and certainly within this context, few businesses are cash businesses. Your bank is keeping at least a basic audit log of money coming in and out of the corporate bank account. Your payment processor is keeping at least a basic audit log of who paid you and how much. You won't make your auditors happy if they're the only documents you have, but they're at least something to be handed over in an audit that pretty much every software business will have. Cybersecurity? By default, nothing is collected.
forensic accounting and audits also require a paper trail.
So if you have no logging and such, you will have already failed regulatory reporting standards - just like you would fail an accounting audit if you have no paper trail of where your money went!
I've never heard anybody say anything like that when criticizing prop 13. It usually has more to do with housing prices and the fact that 2 people with the same home value should pay the same in property taxes. If you wanted to create a hereditary landed gentry, it would be hard to come up with a better policy to achieve that than prop 13.
Have you ever met anyone who genuinely believed himself to be doing bad things? I don't mean in some cynical sense but literally. Even when we portray overly simplified villains in comic books there's still consistently some justification behind their actions.
Yes. There are arguments to be made here about belief, judgement and justification, but overwhelming evidence points to people who knowingly do things that even they themselves consider "bad" as being simply indifferent.
Good idea. Write a python script, and then code the minimal c interpreter possible to make that specific script work, utilizing the script itself as string reference (and any other way one can manage to utilize it in the interpreter itself).
Companies that ignore everything besides their legacy cash cow tend to go downhill. I'm sure there are at least a few people at Apple who's main concern is marketing the Mac mini, and those people are highly definitely trying to cook up new marketing strategies all the time
I'm sure there are people dedicated to marketing the Mac Mini, but seeing as Apple has had trouble keeping it in stock from demand, I doubt they spend too much on it. And considering Apple is supply constrained, there is no benefit to trying to increase demand above supply levels.
I think the Mac Mini is legit popular and is actually being used for local AI use cases, especially Open Claw.
Beyond that, Apple is at capacity for SoCs and ram, and the Mac Mini is going to have a ceiling of how much of Apple's allotment they are willing to give it.
Sure. But thinking that means every article is a complicated psyop is classic correlation / causation.
If you’ve hot any occam’s razor left in you, consider:
1. Apple is a masterful media manipulator, carefully planting stories like this by gradually seeding fringe media first, then more mainstream, with a clever and subtle goal of making themselves look dumb in order to trick people into, uh, ok, I’m lost here, but something. Maybe drum up demand for products they can’t keep in stock anyway?
2. Media outlets chase clicks, and when fringe media finds a hit, mainstream media follows because you can always write a story about the fact that other people are writing stories. Low cost, proven clicks, nobody yells at you for missing a trend.
Which is more likely? I’ll cheerfully stipulate Apple is pure evil, serves cooked babies in their cafeterias, whatever it takes to discuss based on reason rather than big-evil-corpos.
To be fair, the very reasonable take is that if there was guerilla marketing campaigns, they are most likely being handled by external agencies and not Apple directly.
And, this isn't making them look particularly dumb. It is making them look dumb the way that most people make themselves look "bad" when they list their biggest weakness in a job interview. Silly Apple, not seeing how fantastically great their product is and how much people are dying to have it.
The most serious point in favor of this being organic nonsense is just the sheer lack of any actual evidence that it isn't, but the case is being wildly overstated, in part because we're using the non-standard term "psyop" to describe what I'd consider to be mundane marketing practices.
At this point I feel like there is no reasonable way to draw a conclusion. However, viral marketing like this is common and in fact, incredibly easy. This is done through PR services (and even shadier sources) all the time... I'm a bit surprised people on HN are unfamiliar with how utterly common the practice is, it wasn't new when I first came into contact with the industry over a decade ago. The hallmark of this is very similar articles appearing suddenly through the Internet and in the news. It's often not just random plagiarism. This is why the news is constantly running stories about how suits are back in vogue and other vain crap like that.
do people on here not know that things like forbes 30 under 30 are a pay to play game? do they not know that 90% of car influencer reviews are carefully curated by mrketing agencies? and yes apple is notoriously controlling about it too which is the reason to why it is unlikely to be apple driving this.
Complicated psyop? It's called "Personas" and a few of my coworkers wrote a few of them just this morning.
You simply promote or finance marketing materials (blog posts, podcasts, youtube videos) with a clear idea of the kind of people you want to reach, and if your "Persona" (that is, ideal customer or evangelist) model is accurate enough, they will talk endlessly about your product for free without having to directly connect with them.
That's very different from faking a bunch of excited chatter and making up happy customers, which is what the original comment was about:
> Nobody cared about or was using Mac Mini's for OpenClaw, but there were all of these very suspicious posts from accounts that were clearly Apple [...]
There's nothing masterful or careful about it. If it were, no one would notice it. This is as obvious and sloppy as it gets. No different to startup founders paying social media marketing companies $10-20k to promote their slop products all over X and Reddit with their army of AI generated blogs and news sites and social media accounts. This happens on the daily, and it is not a secret - every founder knows it, and most founders use it at some point. So to think this doesn't happen at larger scales with bigger companies is pure naivety.
It has nothing to do with "big-evil-corpo", it happens at all levels. For some reason you're trying to claim that "big-evil-corpo" are the rare exception, which is ridiculous.
Tbh, I won't be surprised that 1 is true; it does not look that far fetched. Organizing scarcity is already a well-established strategy in the marketing playbook; there are examples of other big organization playing a way longer game to conquer a market (see for instance how Japan became a coffee nation https://www.thetakeout.com/how-nestle-brought-coffee-to-japa...)
Because caring about factual accuracy isn’t “defending a corporation.” A claim doesn’t become true (or false!) just because it concerns a "billion dollar corporation".
Besides, Apple isn't a "billion dollar corporation", it's a multi-trillion dollar corporation.
> People don’t like nitpickers. “He literally did the WELL AKTUALLY!” If you say Joe Criminal committed ten murders and five rapes, and I object that it was actually only six murders and two rapes, then why am I “defending” Joe Criminal?
> Because if it’s worth your time to lie, it’s worth my time to correct it.
> If one side lies to make all of their arguments sound 5% stronger, then over long enough it adds up. Unless they want to be left behind, the other side has to make all of their arguments 5% stronger too. Then there’s a new baseline - why not 10%? Why not 20%? This mechanism might sound theoretical when I describe it this way, but go to any space where corrections are discouraged, and you will see exactly this.
I have no proof, only personal experience interacting with commenters on HN. No other tech company gets as much positive support when exerting its soft power under the guise of (bullshit) technicalities, e.g. all the issues with EU digital markets, API restrictions, 30% tax. Specifically, people were defending Apple vehemently when they feature gated remote phone control for EU citing concerns about EUs privacy laws (???).
I never stated that I know for a fact that Apple deploys bots, but I would not be surprised. I don’t even need to know if anyone is paid or not - if I cannot distinguish paid posts from fanatic apologism, then I need not care. The resulting posts are worrying all the same.
Similarly, I do not know if Apple was caught off guard by the demand - I wouldn’t trust this article. But Apple does plan production well ahead of time and forecast demand rather precisely. They could’ve been wrong. Them being unable to produce enough 1/2tb mac studios seems like a loss to me.
Why would anyone attack a billion dollar corporation so vehemently and not earn a single dime? Billion dollar companies also hire hundreds of thousands of employees, paying them a lot. They create products that millions enjoy.
I am surprised this take is controversial. It really seems almost certain whenever enough money is involved in controlling narratives and selling things, regardless of the details.
Certainly employees at these companies are earning more than a single dime, so even if innocent there's still an obvious conflict of interest. That doesn't mean the posters are wrong or their opinions invalid, on the contrary their direct experience is valuable to hear.
But they are certainly paid, and this is fair to remember when reading opinions.
edit: oh, I see, they're focusing on taking the last little bit super literally. great.
Some of us are motivated by interest in facts. I get that others are financially motivated, or focused on sports-style love/hate for organizations.
I can’t imagine coloring my perceptions or actions to ensure they only attack big companies.
But then I also can’t imagine accusing anyone who disagrees with of doing so in bad faith, or of being a paid shill. To me that looks like poisoning your own mind out of the mistaken belief it will somehow effect change.
BTW it’s not even a defense of Apple, it’s an explanation of how the press works. I worked in the tech press decades ago, and it’s only gotten worse since. It is not organized enough for the conspiracy theory in question to be plausible.
There are usual Apple sheeps ... and then it's you.
WOW, this is some remarkable (would rather use different word starting with R) desperate attempt to somehow turn the reality upside-down,of Apple being overpriced unrepairable unupgrade-able junk sold through pure marketing of exploiting insecurities of losers by selling them something that makes them feel "elite".
Unsolicitated "send via iPhone" SMS footer is perfect example.
>
Which is more likely? I’ll cheerfully stipulate Apple is pure evil, serves cooked babies in their cafeterias, whatever it takes to discuss based on reason rather than big-evil-corpos
I feel like you can have both. A big society with industry and laws and markets etc. and a circle of like 10-50 people that you consider close. That's basically how I see my own life.
I feel the issue we experience in the modern world that it just feels unnatural and alienating to be surrounded by thousands and thousands of people we don't know at all and who don't know us. In a small tribe you have the comfort of knowing everyone around you fairly well. The modern world is so anonymous.
