At the beginning of August, Nassim Haramein sued RationalWiki on charges of defamation, conspiracy, and invasion of privacy. Regardless of the merits of the suit — I write, trying not to fall afoul of an obviously litigious individual — RationalWiki is a small, volunteer-run operation and will need legal representation to avoid losing next week by default. The site is currently soliciting donations.

I think the world is better for having RationalWiki in it. If you have the means and would like to chip in, I am sure the administrators there would appreciate it.

Update: RationalWiki has been SLAPP-ed into settling. Donations will go toward a proper legal fund.

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Here’s a useful habit that’s more than a hack…

The next time things are going well, when a project is about to launch, when a meeting has been successful, when the sun is shining… take your phone and go for a walk.

Hit record on an audio app and make a twenty-minute audiobook. Talk about what you know, what you see, what you hope for. Talk about the change you seek to make and how you’re going to get there.

And then save it.

Save it for when you need to hear from that person who recorded it.

It might become the best audiobook you own.

For years, the Patreon app on iOS has allowed users to buy digital subscriptions without using Apple’s In-App Purchases model.¹ Instead, it throws up a Safari sheet with its own payment form. In 2021, Jacob Kastrenakes, of the Verge, contrasted this with the mandate given to Fanhouse, a similar platform, to use In-App Purchases. Kastrenakes followed up a few weeks later after Jack Conte, Patreon’s CEO, was interviewed for the “Decoder” podcast:

Patreon has been one of the odd exceptions to the rule. The platform’s iOS app has been able to accept payments outside of Apple’s in-app purchase system, which lets the company walk around that 30 percent cut. Conte suggests this may be allowed because users don’t come to Patreon to discover creators and content. “A lot of the actual engagement is happening on other platforms … So it’s just not the primary behavior that’s happening on Patreon,” Conte said. The Verge has reached out to Apple for comment.

That is a fair argument. Apple says its cut reflects services it provides, mostly marketing, though it does also admit it is just making money off its platform because it can. Patreon users do not benefit from the former. If Apple promotes In-App Purchases from third-party developers at all, I could not find an example in the App Store. Even if it did, Apple would not be a bigger draw for fans of people who make their living on Patreon than those individuals themselves.

Even so, Apple is now demanding Patreon make the switch:

As we first announced last year, Apple is requiring that Patreon use their in-app purchasing system and remove all other billing systems from the Patreon iOS app by November 2024.

This has two major consequences for creators:

• Apple will be applying their 30% App Store fee to all new memberships purchased in the Patreon iOS app, in addition to anything bought in your Patreon shop.

• Any creator currently on first-of-the-month or per-creation billing plans will have to switch over to subscription billing to continue earning in the iOS app, because that’s the only billing type Apple’s in-app purchase system supports.

That earlier announcement was made in December 2023 and it seems as though Apple did not provide a specific date, just a rough timeframe.

This is both a naked attempt to take an outsized cut from independent creative professionals, and a more consistent treatment of In-App Purchases. There are so many unanswered questions. Why was Patreon allowed an exemption in the first place, and for so long? Why did Apple change its mind late last year but also permit a long transition period which Patreon will complete next November? What changed? It is not as though Patreon is untrustworthy, or that cancelling a subscription is a laborious Amazon-like or New York Times-esque process.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

If you in the EU had left the App Store and were offering your app in an Alternative Marketplace and using Patreon as the monetization behind it, and your users are subbing in the Patreon app, now Apple will be taking the Core Technology Fee plus 30% of your revenue. They can tax both sides of the equation.

This would be similarly true for any Patreon competitor. Apple seems to believe it is entitled to a share of any financial gain from its platforms — except for physical goods, or transactions made through Mac apps distributed outside the App Store.

The 30% fee is also notable. As far as I can tell, only a handful of Patreon users would exceed the million-dollar annual threshold for Apple’s Small Business Program. That is, everyone who earns less than a million dollars per year through iOS Patreon pledges should, in theory, fork over a 15% commission rate to Apple. But it appears it is Patreon itself which is subject to the 30% rate. Whether that decision was made by Apple or Patreon, or if it is something which is a consequence of how App Store billing works, is unclear to me. But one thing is true regardless: Apple’s 30% commission is at least double the rate charged by Patreon itself, and only the latter has any material effect on the relationship between a creative professional and their supporters.

Update: In response to a question about whether Patreon would support the third-party payment options available in the U.S., E.U., and elsewhere, a spokesperson told me the company has “looked into alternate options but those also come with complex Apple requirements. Right now, because of these requirements, we do not believe they are viable options for Patreon nor do we believe they would result in a better experience for fans or creators”.

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Since owners of web properties became aware of the traffic-sending power of search engines — most often Google in most places — they have been in an increasingly uncomfortable relationship as search moves beyond ten relevant links on a page. Google does not need websites, per se; it needs the information they provide. Its business recommendations are powered in part by reviews on other websites. Answers to questions appear in snippets, sourced to other websites, without the user needing to click away.

Publishers and other website owners might consider this a bad deal. They feed Google all this information hoping someone will visit their website, but Google is adding features that make it less likely they will do so. Unless they were willing to risk losing all their Google search traffic, there was little a publisher could do. Individually, they needed Google more than Google needed them.

But that has not been quite as true for Reddit. Its discussions hold a uniquely large corpus of suggestions and information on specific topics and in hyper-local contexts, as well as a whole lot of trash. While the quality of Google’s results have been sliding, searchers discovered they could append “Reddit” to a query to find what they were looking for.

Google realized this and, earlier this year, signed a $60 million deal with Reddit allowing it to scrape the site to train its A.I. features. Part of that deal apparently involved indexing pages in search as, last month, Reddit restricted that capability to Google. That is: if you want to search Reddit, you can either use the site’s internal search engine, or you can use Google. Other search engines still display results created from before mid-July, according to 404 Media, but only Google is permitted to crawl anything newer.

It is unclear to me whether this is a deal only available to Google, or if it is open to any search engine that wants to pay. Even if it was intended to be exclusive, I have a feeling it might not be for much longer. But it seems like something Reddit would only care about doing with Google because other search engines basically do not matter in the United States or worldwide.¹ What amount of money do you think Microsoft would need to pay for Bing to be the sole permitted crawler of Reddit in exchange for traffic from its measly market share? I bet it is a lot more than $60 million.

Maybe that is one reason this agreement feels uncomfortable to me. Search engines are marketed as finding results across the entire web but, of course, that is not true: they most often obey rules declared in robots.txt files, but they also do not necessarily index everything they are able to, either. These are not explicit limitations. Yet it feels like it violates the premise of a search engine to say that it will be allowed to crawl and link to other webpages. The whole thing about the web is that the links are free. There is no guarantee the actual page will be freely accessible, but the link itself is not restricted. It is the central problem with link tax laws, and this pay-to-index scheme is similarly restrictive.

This is, of course, not the first time there has been tension in how a site balances search engine visibility and its own goals. Publishers have, for years, weighed their desire to be found by readers against login requirements and paywalls — guided by the overwhelming influence of Google.

Google used to require publishers provide free articles to be indexed by the search engine but, in 2017, it replaced that with a model that is more flexible for publishers. Instead of forcing a certain number of free page views, publishers are now able to provide Google with indexable data.

Then there are partnerships struck by search engines and third parties to obtain specific kinds of data. These were summarized well in the recent United States v. Google decision (PDF), and they are probably closest in spirit to this Reddit deal:

GSEs enter into data-sharing agreements with partners (usually specialized vertical providers) to obtain structured data for use in verticals. Tr. at 9148:2-5 (Holden) (“[W]e started to gather what we would call structured data, where you need to enter into relationships with partners to gather this data that’s not generally available on the web. It can’t be crawled.”). These agreements can take various forms. The GSE might offer traffic to the provider in exchange for information (i.e., data-for-traffic agreements), pay the provider revenue share, or simply compensate the provider for the information. Id. at 6181:7-18 (Barrett-Bowen).

As of 2020, Microsoft has partnered with more than 100 providers to obtain structured data, and those partners include information sources like Fandango, Glassdoor, IMDb, Pinterest, Spotify, and more. DX1305 at .004, 018–.028; accord Tr. at 6212:23–6215:10 (Barrett-Bowen) (agreeing that Microsoft partners with over 70 providers of travel and local information, including the biggest players in the space).

The government attorneys said Bing is required to pay for structured data owing to its smaller size, while Google is able to obtain structured data for free because it sends partners so much traffic. The judge ultimately rejected their argument Microsoft struggled to sign these agreements or it was impeded in doing so, but did not dispute the difference in negotiating power between the two companies.

Once more, for emphasis: Google usually gets structured data for free but, in this case, it agreed to pay $60 million; imagine how much it would cost Bing.

This agreement does feel pretty unique, though. It is hard for me to imagine many other websites with the kind of specific knowledge found aplenty on Reddit. It is a centralized version of the bulletin boards of the early 2000s for such a wide variety of interests and topics. It is such a vast user base that, while it cannot ignore Google referrals, it is not necessarily reliant on them in the same way as many other websites are.

Most other popular websites are insular social networks; Instagram and TikTok are not relying on Google referrals. Wikipedia would probably be the best comparison to Reddit in terms of the contribution it makes to the web — even greater, I think — but every article page I tried except the homepage is overwhelmingly dependent on external search engine traffic.

Meanwhile, pretty much everyone else still has to pay Google for visitors. They have to buy the ads sitting atop organic search results. They have to buy ads on maps, on shopping carousels, on videos. People who operate websites hope they will get free clicks, but many of them know they will have to pay for some of them, even though Google will happily lift and summarize their work without compensation.

I cannot think of any other web property which has this kind of leverage over Google. While this feels like a violation of the ideals and principles that have built the open web on which Google has built its empire, I wonder if Google will make many similar agreements, if any. I doubt it — at least for now. This feels funny; maybe that is why it is so unique, and why it is not worth being too troubled by it.

 I was wondering what the hardest math problems were, and how to define it. So I googled 

Hardest Math Problems

The first hit is here. The 10 problems given there bring up the question of  what is meant by hard?

I do not think the order they problems were given is an indication of hardness. Then again, they seem to  implicitly use many definitions of hardness

1) The 4-color problem. It required a computer to solve it and had lots of cases. But even if that is why its considered hard, the solution to the Kepler Conjecture (see here) is harder. And, of course, its possible that either of these may get simpler proofs (the 4-color theorem already has, though it still needs a computer).

2) Fermat's Last Theorem. Open a long time, used lots of hard math, so that makes sense.

3) The Monty Hall Paradox. Really? If hard means confusing to most people and even some mathematicians  then yes, its hard. But on a list of the 10 hardest math problems of all time? I think not. 

4) The Traveling Salesperson problem. If they mean resolving P vs NP then yes, its hard. If they mean finding a poly time algorithm for TSP then it may be impossible.

5) The Twin Primes Conjecture. Yes that one is hard. Open a long time and the Sieve method is known to NOT be able to solve it. There is a song about it here.

6) The Poincare Conjecture. Yes, that was hard before it was solved. Its still hard. This is another issue with the list- they mix together SOLVED and UNSOLVED problems.

7) The Goldbach Conjecture. Yes, that one is hard. 

8) The Riemann hypothesis is the only problem on both Hilbert's 23 problems in 1900 and on the Clay prize list. Respect! There is a song about it here.

9) The Collatz conjecture. Hard but this might not be a good problem. Fermat was a good problem since working on it lead to math of interest even before it was solved. Riemann is a good problem since we really want to know it. Collatz has not lead to that much math of interest and the final result is not that interesting.

10) Navier-Stokes and Smoothness. Hard! Note that its a Millennium problem. 

NOTES

1) TSP, Poincare, Riemann, Navier-Stokes are all Millennium problems. While that's fine, it also means that there are some Millennium problems that were not included: The Hodge Conjecture,  The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture, Yang-Mills and the Mass gap (thats one problem: YM and the Mass gap). These three would be hard to explain to a layperson.Yang Mills and the Mass Gap is a good name for a rock band.

2) Four have been solved (4-color, FLT, Monty Hall (which was never open), Poincare) and six have not been solved (TSP, Twin primes, Goldbach, RH, Collatz, Navier-Stokes)

3) I have also asked the web for the longest amount of time between a problem being posed and solved. FLT seems to be the winner with 358 years, though I think the number is too precise since it not quite clear when it was posed. I have another candidate but you might not want to count it: The Greek Constructions of trisecting an angle, duplicating the cube, and squaring the circle. The problem is that the statement:

In 400BC the Greeks posed the question: Prove or Disprove that one can trisect an angle with a ruler and compass

is false on many level:

a) Nobody thought of prove or disprove back in 400BC (and that date is to precise). 

b) Why would a compass, which helps you find where North is, help you with this problem?

(ADDED LATER: Some of the comments indicate that people do not know that point b is a joke. Perhaps not a good joke, but a joke.) 

SO, when was it POSED in the modern sense is much harder to say. For more on this problem see the book Tales of Impossibility or read my review of it here.

(ADDED LATER: A comment pointed out that the constructing a trisection (and duplicating a cube and squaring the circuit) were proven impossible. I knew that but forgot to say it., and make the point of the very long time between posing and solving, so I will elaborate here:

1837: Wantzel showed that there is no way to, with a straightedge and compass, trisect an angle or duplicate the cute. This used Field Theory.

1882: Lindemann showed pi was transcendental and hence there is no straightedge and compass construction to square the circle.

So one could say it took 1882+400 years to solve the problem, but as noted above, to say the problem was posed in 400BC is not really right.)

4) Songs are needed for the other problems on this list UNION the Millennium problem. The Hodge Conjecture would be a challenge. I DID see some songs on You Tube that claimed to be about some of these problems, but they weren't. Some were instrumentals and some seemed to have no connection to the math.

5) Other lists I've seen include:

a) Prove there are no odd perfect numbers. That seems to be hard. This could have been posed before FLT was posed, but its hard to say.

b) Prove the following are transcendental: pi + e, the Euler-Mascheroni. There are other open problems here as well. 

These lists make me think more carefully about what I mean by HARD and PROBLEM and even MATH.

"As free software activists, we ought to take the opportunity to look at the situation and see how things could have gone differently," writes FSF campaigns manager Greg Farough: Let's be clear: in principle, there is nothing ethically wrong with automatic updates so long as the user has made an informed choice to receive them... Although we can understand how the situation developed, one wonders how wise it is for so many critical services around the world to hedge their bets on a single distribution of a single operating system made by a single stupefyingly predatory monopoly in Redmond, Washington. Instead, we can imagine a more horizontal structure, where this airline and this public library are using different versions of GNU/Linux, each with their own security teams and on different versions of the Linux(-libre) kernel... As of our writing, we've been unable to ascertain just how much access to the Windows kernel source code Microsoft granted to CrowdStrike engineers. (For another thing, the root cause of the problem appears to have been an error in a configuration file.) But this being the free software movement, we could guarantee that all security engineers and all stakeholders could have equal access to the source code, proving the old adage that "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow." There is no good reason to withhold code from the public, especially code so integral to the daily functioning of so many public institutions and businesses. In a cunning PR spin, it appears that Microsoft has started blaming the incident on third-party firms' access to kernel source and documentation. Translated out of Redmond-ese, the point they are trying to make amounts to "if only we'd been allowed to be more secretive, this wouldn't have happened...!" We also need to see that calling for a diversity of providers of nonfree software that are mere front ends for "cloud" software doesn't solve the problem. Correcting it fully requires switching to free software that runs on the user's own computer.The Free Software Foundation is often accused of being utopian, but we are well aware that moving airlines, libraries, and every other institution affected by the CrowdStrike outage to free software is a tremendous undertaking. Given free software's distinct ethical advantage, not to mention the embarrassing damage control underway from both Microsoft and CrowdStrike, we think the move is a necessary one. The more public an institution, the more vitally it needs to be running free software. For what it's worth, it's also vital to check the syntax of your configuration files. CrowdStrike engineers would do well to remember that one, next time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.