skibble

All of them? Hmmm.

I'm not from the U.S. but as my country's elections work the same way, I feel compelled to weigh in on this. Here in the UK, you go to your local polling station, you give your name, they check it against the list, then cross you out and hand you a ballot. (This was tweaked in the last few years to require government ID, but the process remains the same. More on that later).

While it's true you could in theory say you were anyone on the list, you'd have to first know you were picking a name that wasn't going to be used, or hadn't already. This is already something of a reach. If someone uses a name that had already been used, or someone turns up later to vote and finds their name crossed out, it's going to set off alarm bells.

On top of the logistical challenges, this is a high-effort endeavour. A single person going to multiple polling stations repeatedly doesn't scale super well. Obviously you can try and do this en masse but the more people are involved the harder it would be to keep secret. If you're trying to rig a local council election with low turnout, it might make a meaningful difference. Does it work if you're trying to swing a congressional race or higher? I see the mentions of carousel voting, and am aware of the likes of Tammany Hall, but these are more of an open secret. What the likes of the GOP are alleging is that there's an invisible epidemic of voter fraud to engineer distrust of the system generally.

Sadly in the UK our long-established voting system was tampered with by the government of the time, who took a leaf from GOP voter intimidation and suppression tactics and mandated government-issued ID at the polls to solve a an almost non-existent issue, leading to tens of thousands of eligible voters being turned away at the polls. Thankfully this moronic and clear abuse of process is likely to be reverse before our next major election, however.

I have set up Time Machine backups for literally hundreds, if not thousands of people in a support role over many years and have hardly ever witnessed this happening. It's one thing to say you may have had to do this once or twice in a decade or the like, but every few months is ridiculous and speaks to some other underlying issue with your setup, like a quietly failing drive or bad cable, etc.

I'm not one of these 'it hasn't happened to me, ergo it's impossible people'. I completely think that many of the design elements of Tahoe are a horrendous regression versus even Sequoia, but I think asserting that Time Machine is completely broken in the shipping version of macOS is a bold statement that deserves a bit of pushback, even among the fire raging in a lot of other places in macOS!

This is incorrect. Mac minis (starting with the M4 model) and Mac Studios simply need to be restored via DFU mode following physical installation of another SSD (be it a larger one or simply a replacement) to function. There are third parties who have reverse engineered the design of the PCB and paired it with the same Hynix and Sandisk NAND chips Apple use.

I can never understand this tired line. Do you and all the people who bleat the same thing also post the same thing about Nintendo and PlayStation bloggers? He’s an Apple commentator. Doesn’t it stand to reason that he does that full time because he’s fundamentally a fan of the company, rather than because he’s suborned his integrity in service of… getting to play with new Apple hardware a week before it goes on sale?

They do, sort of; iCloud Private Relay. Details: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/102602

I’m not validating the automatic anti-China sentiment you can sometimes get in these discussions, but there is a major difference between the two. If you live in any mainstream European, or for simplicity’s sake, ‘Western’ country, regardless of your feelings towards U.S. intelligence gathering, these are political allies who share intelligence as a matter of course anyway. China is an actively hostile power who just recently penetrated the domestic U.S. phone network.

Obviously skepticism on this topic is a generally good thing, but I think nihilism to the point that one thinks the U.S. is no different to China, Russia or North Korea is neither accurate nor particularly helpful.

If you still have one, I’d love to finally get in! Been on the waitlist for months with no luck.

Edit: thank you SO much!

Yep, in macOS Sonoma (14.0) and iOS/iPadOS 17.0).

Fire up the built-in Screen Sharing app, type their Apple ID email address in and hit connect. It should bring up a prompt their end that they can accept and you can then observe/control their screen!

I use this all the time for tech support (for family and work).

Your comment about iPhone build quality is as anecdotal as they come. Here's my counterpoint anecdotal take: I've had pretty much every iPhone model since the iPhone 3G, and the tiny number of issues I've had have been straightforward (a free screen replacement as a result of a publicly acknowledged issue, for example). I also work in the repair sector (not for Apple), and have seen absolutely no evidence to support your claim that iPhones are dying left and right.

When Apple do entire device replacements, this is simply because for weird issues it's a quicker and easier on-the-spot resolution for both the end user and the Genius Bar than spending days depriving the owners of pretty vital devices trying to reproduce odd issues. Articles abound detailing how exacting Apple are with suppliers, e.g:

https://www.theverge.com/23743095/apple-watch-band-release-x...

The premium version is needed for codec support (basically anything above basic Dolby, so all the lossless codecs and possibly Dolby digital+). It’s well worth the annual cost, been using it for a few years now and it’s a bulletproof setup for me. I use it with a local SMB share as I’ve no need for multi user support or remote access.

What kind of taxi? Do you mean black cabs?

That is very cool! Without utterly derailing this thread I'd love one too, I've been on the waitlist for a little while too but no luck yet. Eager to reserve my handle and kick the tyres early on.

I will say to be on topic that I am enjoying Mastodon, but the network effect isn't there yet. It's a pretty small minority of users from my feed that have either switched or are dabbling in both, so tech stack aside, I feel if Bluesky gets momentum it has the best chance of being a drop-in replacement for Twitter in the near-to-medium term, given the relative simplicity (this isn't a knock against Mastodon, more an acknowledgement of simplicity's factor in mass appeal).

I think a big reason for Anandtech losing the deep dive expertise is that the founder of Anandtech, Anand Lal Shimpi, was hired by… Apple! That was a while ago (2014), but that sort of knowledge isn't easy to find I imagine.

There’s a GUI app version here: https://github.com/vrunkel/F3XSwift

It doesn’t sound like you read it very carefully, as it only mentions two makes by name, both of which are only available on the secondary market.

It’s mostly hysteria. I’m enjoying it a lot more than the clunky GoT prequel series, for instance. I can’t possibly see how it could move someone to join in a one star review-bombing campaign unless they had a political agenda they weren’t being honest about.

I’m not saying you can’t have an opinion, of course. The recent Star Wars trilogy isn’t exactly an unparalleled artistic achievement. But unfortunately when the internet’s overflowing with misogynists and racists desperate to hold their crumbling cultural Maginot line, any legitimate criticism isn’t going to be heard.

I’m sorry but this is profoundly and aggressively incorrect. The civil war was not reframed after the fact to be about slavery, quite the opposite in fact. The ‘reframing’ is in fact what you’ve tried to assert, in that it was supposedly a matter of economics rather than slavery (though of course other factors were certainly at play). It’s part of the ‘lost cause’ narrative furthered by the southern states after the civil war.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederac...

https://imperialglobalexeter.com/2015/03/02/debunking-the-ci...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/the-lost-c...

Fascinating take. So I'm typing on a scarf right now? The future is truly wild.

If you disable automatic connection for that network, you can have Wi-Fi on without being connected (I have this setup on a work Mac connected via Ethernet so I can use AirDrop).

My memory of this is hazy, but when I was younger Apple had a feature where you could log in with your voice. Really! It would have been either OS 7 or OS 9, probably OS 9. I'm almost positive this is either the phrase you had to say, or at least one of a few options. I don't imagine it was in any way secure, especially compared to the likes of Touch ID or Face ID, but it felt pretty cool at the time.

Oh please. Just because there’s someone shouting this in every such thread doesn’t make it automatically true. You can set up a Mac without ever connecting it to the internet and it will work perfectly.

These are defensive measures to protect the general user base from malware. Yes, using HTTP in 2020 is worthy of scrutiny, but not using every such incident as a new piece of armour for this tedious narrative. Apple’s entire platform offering is based around curation. If you disagree with it, there are many other platforms out there you can elect to use. The bitterness that flies around whenever Apple comes up around here is almost inexplicable.

How charming. I take it you spend most of your waking hours glowering at anyone you see in public with an iPhone in hand. Thank you for your invaluable service!

It's 11.0, and the initial release is actually 11.0.1, so there's that!

You’re using a gigabit connection to capacity with less than a dozen people (assuming numbers, of course!) just streaming Netflix/HBO/Amazon Prime? I don’t mean to be sarky, genuinely curious!

My S4 easily lasts the best part of two days. Perhaps you had a software glitch?

This absolutely does work. If you get outbid normally on eBay, say at least half an hour or so before the auction ends, then people get irrational and you quickly end up in a bidding war. This way, as a bidder, you set the maximum price you are willing to pay outside of a heated 'damn, I missed out' mentality and people don't have time to respond.

Also this helps when placing bids on auctions that end when you're asleep and you want to effect the above. I've tried to do it manually in the past but naturally life intervenes and you're somewhere with no signal or in the middle of something. Having tried it both ways sniping is definitely better than regular bidding.

Sorry, yes I should clarify. What I mean to say by that is that while there is objectively a difference between a 256kbps MP3 and a FLAC copy of a song, it's very hard to discern, but the difference is there. But personally, I can't imagine being unhappy with a $30-50 bottle of wine. I suppose this is part of the attraction here — mattresses aren't a regular purchase and the notion of 'cutting out the middleman' is a big part of the value proposition for lots of companies these days (Warby Parker and Everlane make a big play of this in their marketing).

Being able to slap a label on someone else's product and have them handle both production and distribution while you just do the marketing is the dream for a large chunk of the Valley, I guess!

Slightly off-topic, but if you genuinely think that there's no such thing as high-end wine, I feel a little sorry for you. Surely you can tell the difference between the Budweiser/Calsberg-type beer and beer from an independent brewery? If so, then surely you can imagine the same might be true of wine? I get that the fact that some bottles cost thousands may offend some people's sensibilities, but this hardly covers the wine mainstream and is usually down to intangibles that go beyond the wine itself, just like a piece of art.

It's certainly the case, of course, that while there's a big gap between a $10 and a $50 bottle of wine, naturally the gains for price points above that get incremental pretty quickly in much the same manner as TVs — is a TV that costs $9,000 over four times as good as a $2,000 model?

Wine experts often stumble on double-blind tests, sure, but then again, so do audiophiles trying to differentiate lossy and lossless audio.