Yes, once the orderly destroying is done, the sensible people can step in and recreate these institutions from scratch while everyone else waits patiently.
Or, everything just gets way worse, for almost everyone.
I haven't been in the App Store ecosystem in a while, but the restriction is generally on running new Machine Code, all machine code needs to be signed on iOS. Interpreters get around this limitation, only the interpreter code that is compiled AoT and signed is actually running.
This tracks as the reasoning behind a lack of other browser engines, nobody can get comparable performance without a JIT, which would be compiling net new machine code that wasn't shipped with the binary.
The best way to handle this I would imagine within the current bounds of Apple's restrictions would be WASM.
Apps don't get removed for breaking that rule, though, because they can't break it in the first place. The system won't allow you to mark a freshly written page as executable.
Years ago I watched a bunch of people stop an apartment building from being built. They did this by employing a legal concern that they didn't actually care about, but that they knew would stop the development in its tracks. It worked.
That was the day I realized that for a lot of people, rules aren't actually rules. They're tools that they can use to stop something they don't like, no matter what the rule is really about.
I think this is a disgusting attitude, but it's unfortunately the way a lot of people operate.
So it might be that Apple has this "no external code" rule to stop things they don't like, and the category of "things Apple doesn't like" doesn't actually include every app that runs external code. It includes a lot of them, but for whatever reason Apple chose not to codify the details. Crummy if true, but I wouldn't be surprised. Every regulator I've ever dealt with leaves themselves an "I know it when I see it" escape hatch that lets them ban whatever they want.
If you read the actual rule the exceptions are relatively well defined. Stuff like pythonista falls into their educational/coding app exception as they define it
Apps should be self-contained in their bundles, and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they download, install, or execute code which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app, including other apps. Educational apps designed to teach, develop, or allow students to test executable code may, in limited circumstances, download code provided that such code is not used for other purposes. Such apps must make the source code provided by the app completely viewable and editable by the user.
There are not "exceptions"; there is one exception, and that's educational apps. But it's unclear why Pythonista is educational while the apps mentioned in the article are not. In fact, Pythonista is even listed in the "Productivity" section in the App Store.
Those are terminal emulators, not actual terminals. You can't fork or exec on iOS/iPadOS, so they're not actually running e.g. a python process, they're just running python interpreter.
As I understand it, ish implements x86 instructions and Linux syscalls as functions and translates running programs into arrays of calls to these functions, so all the machine code that will ever run is included in the app bundle, which at least satisfies the rules iOS enforces at runtime.
As for the rules as written, I suppose you could make reasonable arguments either way.
And it's always been a stupid rule. If I ship an app with a browser view, I can run any custom code I want in it. The rule is just a bandaid on Apple's lack of true sandboxing for apps.
> The rule is just a bandaid on Apple's lack of true sandboxing for apps.
That's not it at all. If an app can run arbitrary code then it can run other apps and that can by-pass the app store. They are specifically trying to prevent something like Wechat on the iPhone. It's not about security, it's about money and control.
Wechat is large enough to be able to negotiate requirements with Apple. They are the gateway to an entire continent and close to 2 Billion users. And since they are a 'everything app' the frequency of use and reliance is likely compounded.
Apple's not picking up the phone for 50 million users. So we shouldn't expect anything different here.
Luckily there are other phones and mobile os's to develop for.
Yeah that's not what I meant. When you click OK on this thing, you're saying "I understand Apple hasn't vetted this application, and it could do unpleasant things to my computer"
You seem to be implicitly trusting the creator of the app, which is a mistake.
Well yes, ideally any code running on macos will have paid the requisite fees to Apple so the scary message goes away.
That being said, I'm quite confident it would be possible to both get that assurance and have the software behave in ways that are unexpected or undesirable.
Furthermore, it does appear to be open source, so you could always download a copy from github and go over the code line-by-line if you desire.
My point was that, at the point where these devs seem to be at, it's quite innocuous that they haven't paid the apple tax yet.
Rebooting a machine running an LLM isn’t noticed by the LLM.
Would you feel comfortable digitally torturing it? Giving it a persona and telling it terrible things? Acts of violence against its persona?
I’m not confident it’s not “feeling” in a way.
Yes its circuitry is ones and zeros, we understand the mechanics. But at some point, there’s mechanics and meat circuitry behind our thoughts and feelings too.
It is hubris to confidently state that this is not a form of consciousness.
I'm not entirely opposed to the kind of animism that assigns a certain amount of soul, consciousness, or being to everything in a spectrum between a rock and a philosopher... but even so.
Multiplying large matrices over and over is very much towards the "rock" end of that scale.
If we accept the Church-Turing thesis, a philosopher can be simulated by a simple Universal Turing machine.
If one day we are able to create a philosopher from such a rudimentary machine (and a lot of tape), would you consider that very much towards the "rock" end as well?
Can a Turing machine of any sort truly indistinguishably simulate a nondeterministic system?
If a Turing machine can truly simulate a full nondeterministic system as complex as a philosopher but it would take dedicating every gram of matter in the visible universe for a trillion years to simulate one second, is this meaningfully different than saying it cannot?
I suggest the answer to both questions are no, but the second one makes the answer at worst "practically, no".
My feeling is that consciousness is a phenomenon deeply connected to quantum mechanics and thus evades simulation or recreation on Turing machines.
One thing about Turing Machines that some people might miss is that the "paper tape, finite alphabet and internal states" thing is actually intended to model a human thinking out loud (writing their thoughts down) on a piece of paper.
It was designed to make it hard to argue that the answers to your questions are "no".
Of course there are caveats where the Turing machine model might not have a direct map onto human brains, but it seems the onus would be for one to explain why, for example, non-determinism is essential for a philosopher to work.
That said,
> Can a Turing machine of any sort truly indistinguishably simulate a nondeterministic system?
Given how AI has improved in its ability to impersonate human beings in recent years, I don't see why not. At least, the current trend does not seem to be in your favor.
I can see why you think the answer is "no". My understanding is that QM per se is mostly a distraction, but some principles underlying QM (some subjectivity thing) might be relevant here.
My best guess is that the AI tech will eventually be able to replicate a philosopher to arbitrary "accuracy", but there will always be an indescribable "residue" where one could still somehow detect that it is not a real human. I suspect this "residue" is not explainable using materialistic mechanisms though.
I am not following what we are talking about here. I am a basic human being, I cannot truly simulate a nondeterministic system. Does it mean “I am not thinking”?
I'll add that rocks are, if needed, objects that can exhibit quantum behavior.
In classical computing, we design chips to avoid the quantum behavior, but there's nothing in theory to prevent us from building an equivalent quantum Turing machine using "rocks".
Or, everything just gets way worse, for almost everyone.
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