BitwiseFool

"The electron wave function will simply just appear wherever it wants (within the electron probability cloud)."

I don't know which is more ridiculous, the fact that reality works like this, or, that a species of apes was able to figure this out.

It needs to load in all those recommendations for you to ignore.

"I've got no idea what he's like as a person"

Case in point? From what I've read he's reserved, keeps a very low profile, and is dedicated to his work. We know next to nothing about his personal life.

Personally, I hope the lack of advertisements in Apple Maps comes bundled with the fact that I purchased an iPhone. A lack of ads is a selling point.

While I have many grievances with Windows 11, I am particularly upset about the taskbar. Back in Windows 10, I used a double-height taskbar positioned at the bottom of the screen. I forget the name of the specific setting, but all windows would appear as their own item, and, the taskbar would ensure that all items retained the same width.

The taskbar in Windows 11 is a downgrade in every conceivable way. I can look past having the icons be centered and grouped by default, as that is an option that can be configured. I can't get past not being able to at least make a double height taskbar. But the biggest frustration is that Windows 11 refuses to make ungrouped items have a static width. Moreover, the width of a taskbar item will depend on the title of the window. So when I have a browser open with multiple windows the taskbar will animate the taskbar item expanding or contracting based on the title of the page I am looking at. I, personally, find this incredibly distracting, especially considering how often one visits a different page or tab while browsing. While Windows 10 also changed the size of taskbar items, it only did that when opening a new window and the taskbar was full. Even so, it would resize all existing items to the same dimension.

This became nigh intolerable for me, but thankfully, I was given permission to install a third-party taskbar and start menu replacement called Start11. I would say it gives me about 95% of the functionality I wanted back. At home, I'm still running Windows 10.

"It reminds me of the web before Apple-style minimalism took over."

The loss of color and texture is my biggest gripe. So many webpages and user interfaces abandoned the idea of distinguishing components using different colors and just went with making the page as close to bleach white as possible. I suppose an upside of this is that it made dark-mode easier to adopt. That being said, good dark mode support seems relatively recent.

Liquid Glass looks pretty from a distance, but my biggest gripe with the design language is just how difficult so many things become to read or interact with. Given that the whole raison d'être of liquid glass is transparent effects, the options to limit that or otherwise increase contrast simply do not go far enough. I also balk at how much extra computing power is needed to generate effects I find no value in and would prefer to disable.

My hope was that Apple would be forced to course correct in subsequent releases but that doesn't seem to be happening.

I would love to switch away from Teams. Sadly the organizations I belong to do not want to pay for anything else.

This is quite well made, thank you for sharing. I appreciate the relevance and knowledge section on each page's subject.

Imperial China thought they were the Middle Kingdom, but that title belongs to New Zealand.

I'm told that was the reason, which is a shame because I would continue to buy the "mini" version if they kept making them. Sadly the only dimension Apple seems interested in reducing is the thickness.

"I'm pretty sure I'm that guy on some topics."

The use of 'pretty sure' disqualifies you. I appreciate your humility.

"It didn't help that the LLM was confidently incorrect."

Has anyone else ever dealt with a somewhat charismatic know-it-all who knows just enough to give authoritative answers? LLM output often reminds me of such people.

That's a strike against your character but I'll let it slip.

"But seeing all governments are looking closely to regulate the coins, I believe it will be locked down just like the credit cards."

The Bitcoin crowd is adamant that no government can regulate Bitcoin. They are correct in the sense that Congress is unable to pass a law dictating what the Bitcoin protocol must do, and that as a decentralized network people are free to follow whichever fork of Bitcoin they choose.

However, they have not given much consideration to the fact that governments have full authority to regulate those that use Bitcoin. In other words, no government needs to change Bitcoin. All they need to do is dictate what the lawful use of Bitcoin looks like in their jurisdiction. There is nothing stopping a government from declaring that all wallets owned by their citizens must be registered, and that all transactions must be voluntarily reported to the authorities. In the context of this article, I doubt that a government would prohibit the sale of these games, but I agree with your assertion that the government is likely to start locking down cryptocurrencies in some way that impedes privacy.

Plate tectonics created a serious rift in the Geology community, with both supporters and detractors citing serious faults.

This is a pet peeve of mine, but I dislike when any corporation resorts to using "One" to brand something. It signals a lack of creativity; it is just so bland.

Personal anecdote: As a child I played a lot of Sim City. In those games bridges must be perfectly straight and as a result I developed a mental model that curved bridges simply don't exist. When I first drove over a gently curved bridge in my late 20's I felt a serious disturbance to an irrelevant worldview that I never questioned.

I like to believe that, by definition, the only person who speaks English properly is the King of England. Everyone else has an accent.

Fascinating. Do you have a link to that, or the name of that species?

The JWST is a marvel of engineering. It is also a machine designed around the restrictions of what the most powerful rockets of the 1990's were capable of. Just imagine how capable future telescopes will be now that we have multiple super-heavy launch vehicles with cavernous payload fairings in development.

As unsafe as it may be, I plan to just keep using Windows 10 past the EOL date this October. I practice reasonable discipline in regards to online security and I will just handle all of my sensitive accounts and login activity on my Mac. I just really don't want to use the mess that is Windows 11 unless absolutely necessary. The way I see it, that's probably a few years away.

Edit: I am also comfortable using Linux, and I may end up spending a lot of time searching for the best distro that will work for me as a daily driver. I'm certainly open to that, but for now I plan to just keep chugging along with what I've got until I build a new PC.

You can simply disable these by paying for the monthly SmartHome One™ Plus subscription.

Quite frankly, that quote sounds like the premise of some new Netflix original series.

I belonged to an organization that had password complexity requirements. That's normal and understandable. However one requirement was that no part of my password could contain a three character subsstring that was included in my full name. I won't give my real name here, but sadly it includes some three letter subsequences that are somewhat common in many English words. I can understand a policy that prevents someone from using "matthew1234" as Matthew Smith's password, but this rule also prevents such a person from using "correcthorsebatterystaple" because it has 'att' in it.

Turns out, this rule was not from IT. It was a requirement from the cybersecurity insurance policy the organization had taken.

Computers refer to this as 'the Big Boot'.

I understand that many people yearn for a religious explanation to answer the question of what caused the universe to exist. I myself am content with the "it just happened" explanation, as any information prior to the big bang, if it even exists, is unknowable.

There are countless other religions that believe in a deity who created the universe. These deities either created themselves, or had always existed outside of space and time. To that end, any one of those deities would be on equal footing with YHWH. I don't think that it is appropriate to axiomatically claim that a certain deity exists because only that deity could have caused the universe to exist.

I suspect ego played a part in Steve Jobs selecting Tim Cook as his successor. Famous CEO's tend to pick a successor that is less charismatic and more risk-averse than they were. CEO's that retire 'honorably', so to speak, don't want someone who will outshine them or make sweeping changes to the brand or the company's organization. In other words, they want to preserve their legacy.

Tim Cook is exactly this kind of executive. While he has done an incredible job with leading the business and operational side of Apple, the public doesn't give credit for that sort of thing. Now imagine if Steve appointed someone just like himself and the business fumbled. Steve would hate for his legacy to be tarnished by appointing a brash successor.

All that being said, for what it's worth, I don't think anyone could have lived up to Steve's reputation. It is quite unfair to Tim Cook that he will always be compared to what people think Steve Jobs would have done.

I've seen a few instances of an arrow pointing down into a box/tray. I'm not sure how I feel about it. It seems appropriate, but the only caveat is that a lot of applications already represent 'download' with a similar icon. I imagine some product designers would be unhappy with a download-looking icon representing saving to a location in "the cloud".

MIPS was a genuine attempt at creating a new commercially viable architecture. Some of the design goals of MIPS made it conducive towards teaching, namely its relative simplicity and lack of legacy cruft. It was never intended to be an academic only ISA. Although I'm certain the owners hoped that learning MIPS in college would lead to wider industry adoption. That did not happen.

Interestingly, I recently completed a masters-level computer architecture course and we used MIPS. However, starting next semester the class will use RISC-V instead.