nirava

Would I sell you something if there was a 1 in 100 chance that I have to steal it back from you sometime in the future? Nope.

Would I at least refund you for stealing back that thing you cherish and have possibly watched with your family and kids many times? Absolutely. Wouldn't be able to sleep otherwise.

But I guess that's the morality speaking, and we must kill it violently for marginal profits.

there are obviously measures in place to ensure the added noise is statistically homogeneous. the changes don't affect the final aggregates significantly, just enough to avoid saying much *about any individual person*.

know how you can buy "anonymized" data from data brokers and drill down until it's not anonymous anymore and in many cases point to the exact person? differential privacy would prevent that kind of thing.

If someone actually wanted to achieve political objectives by tampering with census data, there are better means than tampering with homogeneous statistical fuzzing.

Couldn’t you do this by turning off Siri and Apple Intelligence, two global toggles?

I really enjoyed this comment! The right intersection of everything to fire reward receptors in my brain lol.

Edit: "fire reward receptors in my brain" is probably nonsense scientifically but hopefully it gets the point across

Any (sealed) container designed to hold hot things should have a pressure release system.

It can be seals that buckle before the lid. It can be a tiny hole with a soft rubber stopper. It can be one of many things that cost a couple of cents extra and a bit more engineering and testing effort.

The cheapest disposable coffee cups I've used have a tiny hole for the express purpose of not pressurizing and spilling hot liquid everywhere.

There's a lot of conversation in the comments about "was there was an expectation that the pressure release valve would be there" There absolutely is a safety expectation that a sealed container of hot food is designed with a pressure release system.

BTW the fermented food thing is a misdirection. The pressure release system should have released pressure way before it even reached ballistic territory.

at the same time, I've never had any faith in that software.

maybe because of it's association with really cheap, buggy hosts i explored in my teenage years. maybe because of their largely unnecessary complications (except enterprise maybe). maybe because of the tendency of large bloated depressing organizations to use these even in places they shouldn't.

not that many software have faith in are faring any better in this cve-storm.

Exactly. Any security person absolutely KNOWS that the distros are still going to be vulnerable. They're exploiting this process loophole to knowingly cause chaos and gain notoriety.

At this point this is not really white-hat/ethical hacking anymore.

Ofc the kernel-distro security loophole is stupid and should be patched ASAP, but that doesn't absolve this company of wrongdoing.

If the return policy explicitly allows "change of mind", I'd say it's in the gray area. Though ofc it isn't sustainable if everyone starts doing this. I assume there's a ((returns:buys)/payment identity) metric to ban the largest offenders.

Also, there should be some universally accepted way to have access to your data and a secure personal computer in the duration your device is getting repaired.

No practical way I should say. Realistically, it's pretty clear that lawmakers really just want to shove it through in the simplest way possible. Which is probably private third parties.

And private third parties are very shady. They have effective monopolies and no significant public face to care about. I think we have seen this pattern play out in healthcare, compliance and other industries already.

Also idk about banks being the effective gatekeepers to the internet and eventually all technology. Just feels like its not their place to do that.

Private companies now can link all your online activities to you. Not an advertisement ID, but directly to you and your loans and your health data and whatever they're selling in the black market. Every data breach is a 100 times. It was already almost possible to directly know about you by buying data, now it's easier.

The point of this is not to verify age really. It is to verify identity. There's no way to prove someone is some age without presenting a legal ID.

Also, it's not just porn, facebook, online gambling etc. It is the OS based on some bills. So ALL your activities.

That's true. But leaking an age threshold is not the same as private companies being able to link all your online activities to a single legal person.

Read every alternative volunteered here. Imagine any world where in the next 5 years they can't be enshittified, sold to a predatory private equity, their support lines AI-ified, their headcount reduced by 40% without your knowledge, etc etc. 27 years is a very long time.

A competent IT person can have a backup plan for every expected failure. They can't control registrar level screw ups.

Companies explicitly selling you "bulletproof domains" like MarkMonitor have screwed up big time.

Also as an IT guy, asking to register a new domain with X is much easier than asking to transfer a long held domain away from Y.

500mg from a capsule and 500 from cough syrup 4 times a day is still fine. With a 100% safety margin still.

If you’re taking more meds than that without clinical supervision Id say something is wrong in the system or your medicine practices.

Where I’m from it’s common to walk to the nearest pharmacy and get meds when needed. Even over the counter stuff like paracetamols. And talking to the pharmacist. They’ll ask what you’re already taking and tell you what else to get.

At this point not assuming malice is probably naïveté, but I respect your optimism

There is no other technology to do age verification at scale.

Apple, Google and such will contract out this age verification to a third-party which will ask you to upload your ID and a 3D face captcha, which the third party will delete within 15 days, but somehow magically still make it into an unfortunate, unavoidable data leak a couple of years later.

I agree. App store is really horrible. Why is it that when I'm searching for a first party or a very very popular, the first result and many of the other results are weird scammy malware like things? I don't particularly care about the stupid homepage ads tho, I think thats just because I have "personalize app store recommendations" turned off.

Search inside Settings (both mac and ios) was also really really stupid for a long while. Why are you taking me to some random accessibility toggle when I'm looking for "displays" ? But I checked right now and it's good.

LOL at the risk of sounding like a shill, I think Apple was right on time with these features. They added it after on-device CPU/neural engine was finally powerful and efficient enough. These features arrived at once on macs, iphones and ipads, and they arrived at the same time on your friends' devices.

IMO Android suffers from not controlling it's hardware. I can't ever be sure if the hyped new feature will come to my phone because I'm not using a Pixel or a Samsung.

That's the thing: you don't! The charset for passwords should be always inputable even if no one is using it.

If you wanted to reduce the size of the charset, you'd basically create a transition plan, and ask everyone in the world with a passcode to set a new passcode and validate that against the new charset/rules. A company that can perfectly transition the world from x86 to ARM can surely manage that.

I am 100% sure that Steve Jobs could have shipped a broken Czech keyboard if that was in pursuit of some random abstract like purity or minimalism. "iOS keyboard has too many keys. Reduce keys make them larger. People should not use these obscure symbols anyway". (extrapolated from a couple of biographies and a couple of books on 1980s Apple I read, this is very consistent with his character).

As for iOS 26, no reasonable person would have let it ship. From one source (John Gruber -> "Bad Dye Job") the previous head of Apple's UI design team who lead the UI team was just not a UX designer, he was just a visual designer or something. I think it shows.

I just have a cheap second hand PC with a couple of good drives running LAN only Immich and a few other backup tools. This, in parallel to cloud backup, makes the setup both mobile and reasonably fault tolerant.

I'm quite wary of using SD card for backup. Too easy for me to lose.

There is a list of valid characters accepted for a passcode. That list was created, the characters debated, and a consensus reached by Apple engineers (I hope, for all our sakes. I don't want to imagine a world where this bare minimum level of engineering diligence wasn't done by a trillion dollar company)

Just have an automated keyboard test for every new release to ensure those characters aren't broken.

He famously shipped the original Macintosh with a keyboard without arrow keys to force buyers to use the mouse.

His vision of perfection didn't always match common sense. There are quite a few examples of this.

I always cringe a little when I read these "jobs would have rolled over in his grave" comments.

Ok that's fair ig. I used to be a fairly heavy user of the middle click scroll feature on windows like a decade ago. Made the switch to Debian w/ Awesome, and that habit just casually fell away. The switch is probably a 3 day annoyance at most. IMO arrow keys and scroll are fine. On laptop trackpads two finger scrolling and momentum scrolling are far more accurate IMO. Also if you have the mx master mouse, it has a crazy good scroll wheel that you can "throw".

Also you can turn on Firefox specific middle click scroll feature "autoscroll" which is the same thing. They may have similar stuff for other browsers. Long story short, in less clicks than it takes you to turn off stupid notifications and ads on Windows, you can get a semi decent middle-click-scroll feature where you need it the most.

Depends on whether using someone else’s windows machine leaves you crazy annoyed.

My windows machine is also “fine” for the most part because i turned off whatever I could and tried to mod whatever I could not. Even so, every once in a while, typing “code” and being taken to an edge bing search makes me want to rip it to shreds.

And I delay every update as far as possible and am filled with dread when it finally wont let me postpone it.

It isn’t that fine now that I think about it.

So you switched something as fundamental as the OS, and were pissed that it was … different?

You can fault Linux as the primary desktop environment for a few things, but that it’s different to MS is not one of those.

Do you also rant about having no windows key on a MacBook?

being fined != physical, possibly fatal violence with body-cam turned off and irrevocable immunity

Outside corporate setting, it is also the fact that most windows systems you encounter are installed on cheap machines by people who just care that their word processor works a few times a month. And you were probably forced to fix it.

At the same time, as someone with a well maintained Windows gaming rig, I don't like spending time in the OS these days. Something about transparently doing stuff that puts money in their pocket while inconveniencing me gives me the ick.

I think it's truer now than it was in 2019. Don't you think? This doesn't have to be a binary thing.

did not care enough to make the experience good

Part of that good experience is talking to a genuine human

While that's true, I also think these things tend to happen as a gradual build up to the tipping-point effect where the zeitgeist shifts so suddenly that a massive player is suddenly irrelevant.

Microsoft is structurally incapable of making Windows better. Intel is intrinsically incapable of making x86 better (enough to matter). x86 hardware manufacturers are in a price race to the bottom, and there's no way around that.

Apple doesn't have any of those problems. Instead, more and more young people can afford and aspire to get a Mac. They want to buy software that works on the mac, and they'll want to write software for the Mac. The network effect compounds.