Archive for November 17, 2022

Thursday, November 17, 2022

Google Paid Blizzard to Stay on Play Store

Florian Mueller:

The world now knows that in January 2020, Google signed a three-year agreement with Activision Blizzard King (“ABK”), “pursuant to which Google agreed to pay ABK approximately $360 million” in order to dissuade Activision Blizzard from creating its own Android app store. Three-hundred and sixty million dollars for not competing.

That number would be staggering under any circumstances, but it couldn’t have been revealed at a more important point in time: as antitrust authorities in the U.S. (Federal Trade Commission (FTC)), EU (Directorate General for Competition (DG COMP) of the European Commission), and the UK (Competition & Markets Authority (CMA)) have to make their next decisions on Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard King. While Sony is the only vocal complainant, Google is also known to have been lobbying behind the scenes.

Previously:

Conservation of Tweets

Nick Heer:

The Times article ends on this curious exchange[…]

[…]

It makes absolutely no sense. Or, rather, it made no sense — until a few Twitter users realized that accounts which archive the deleted tweets of notable cryptosphere personalities would not be triggered if a new tweet was posted at the same time another was deleted. Bankman-Fried’s free jazz tweets is more likely an attempt to cover up his removal of over one hundred posts.

I assume the bots work this way because Twitter’s API, like its Web interface, is not very well suited to the sorts of things you’d want to do with older data. But surely there are already people poring over complete archives of his tweets to find the interesting ones, so it won’t make much difference.

Feedle: Blog Search With RSS Feeds

Brent Simmons:

Back in the days of yore, there were search engine services that 1) searched the blogosphere, and 2) let you subscribe to your searches via RSS. Each search query had its own feed.

[…]

[We’ve] just learned about a new one called feedle.

A Vision for Variadic Generics in Swift

Holly Borla:

The design and implementation of variadic generics is well underway. Equipping Swift with a set of features to enable variable-length abstraction will be done incrementally over multiple individual language evolution proposals. The first of these proposals has already been pitched as Value and Type Parameter Packs.

A vision for variadic generics in Swift discusses the overarching design for this set of language proposals. This will give you an idea of the bigger picture, how parameter packs provide the foundation for its future directions, and what sorts of use cases are ultimately supported by this design.

Previously: