What does Garmin gain by killing off an older device if the owner still pays for a subscription?
Also, it's not like this is a hypothetical question, they've been around for decades. They do have a track record you can refer to, instead of just blind faith.
It's not as though my cell phone will continue working forever. Nest discontinued Nest Aware. I've gotten bitten by this exact phenomenon more times than I care to admit.
I don't care about Garmin's reputation, it's simply a fact that having satellites talking to specialized devices requires a critical mass of subscriptions. There's a chain of vendors that need to all be on board to support all the hardware that keeps those devices online and updated, and at some point they will be discontinued. Probably sooner rather than later, especially when plenty of new phones make the functionality here redundant.
This is not whataboutism. The argument described in GGP would apply the same way to GP's case. Cigarette taxes are a sales/consumption tax (specifically one aimed at discouraging consumption, but cigarettes are addictive) and they are necessarily, inherently regressive, for the simple reason that people with orders of magnitude more income and wealth cannot feasibly spend proportionately more on cigarettes.
It's bringing up an entirely unrelated topic as some sort of "gotcha". Cigarette taxes were not part of the GGP's comment. I.e. a red herring
> The communication intent is often to distract from the content of a topic (red herring). The goal may also be to question the justification for criticism and the legitimacy, integrity, and fairness of the critic, which can take on the character of discrediting the criticism, which may or may not be justified.
> It's bringing up an entirely unrelated topic as some sort of "gotcha"
Expecting people to be consistent, and treat similar situations similarly, is not a "gotcha". Challenges like this are raised exactly to hold people to their own standards and question whether they are really okay with the consequences of what they just said.
The topic described is not at all "entirely unrelated". There is a clear natural category which encompasses both tariffs and cigarette taxes.
No, it’s not whataboutism. The original comment made a single argument: regressive taxes are bad. I provided a counter example: the cigarette tax is an example of a regressive tax that is good. This invalidates their argument. That doesn’t mean their position on tariffs is wrong, but they’ve provided an insufficient argument to support their viewpoint. There’s also an implicit corollary that they don’t fully understand tariffs if this is their position.
Whataboutism would be something like someone from the US arguing that China’s treatment of Uyghurs is bad, and someone from China countering with “well, what about America’s treatment of Native Americans?” The Native American argument isn’t a counter example of the Uyghur argument. Both positions can be true. It’s unrelated. That’s not the case here. You can’t be anti-tariff purely because it’s a regressive tax and also be pro-cigarette tax.
That’s not Whataboutism. Cigarette taxes are excise taxes, very similar to tariffs, and often implemented to encourage behavior by raising commodity cost.
In the case of cigarettes and alcohol they are partially “sin taxes” to discourage negative behavior.
In the case of the Trump emergency tariffs, they are seeking to pivot the entire economy.
So there’s a nuance and multiple ways to look at it. If you’re GM, the ability to make better margins on shitty cars is a net positive. If you’re in the technology or medical field, well, you’re fucked.
I’m assuming a friendly tone here, and in a similar tone its funny because I also think Nix is not adopted because its benefits just aren't worth the cost to users (devs)
I did indeed deploy Nix to moderate success in a prior gig, but have held back pushing it at my current one; we're simply not at the scale where the problems that Nix solves are worth the cost (yet, maybe ever).
For a less controversial take, consider alpine's apk package manager. For a single-use container that runs one utility in an early dockerfile stage, apk can probably produce that image in 2-3 seconds, whereas for an apt-based container it's more like 30 seconds. That may not matter in the grand scheme of things or with layer caching or whatever, but sometimes it really does.
That's of course also a reasonable question to ask! We all hope by asking these questions some Apple employee using a throwaway account will provide an answer on HN. HN is that magical place where such questions have the best chance of getting answered.
(Yes, you can store a filesystem in a file - and that's a trivial sort of disk image, but one with some serious drawbacks like "you have to allocate all of the space up front". We can do better.)
Some of the most popular disk image formats are basically a sparse file abstraction for non-sparse files and nothing more. You have a bunch of blocks, a table mapping each block to its virtual location, and a couple convenience headers.
If those count as a disk image when you put a filesystem inside, then I say a normal file is also a disk image when you put a filesystem inside.
Especially because the sparse mapping is optional. For example, lots of VHDs are a raw file plus a 512 byte footer.
