I'm reminded of the 1995 interview in which Steve Jobs elucidated the fundamental reasons that Xerox missed its golden opportunity to own the computer industry and why former PepsiCo CEO John Sculley later ultimately failed at the helm of Apple.

It's fundamentally the same issue with a number of gaming conglomerates nowadays. These companies are more interested in increasing the sales of sugar water than making great games. Perhaps, then, it's not surprising in the least to learn that former Activision Blizzard boss Bobby Kotick was on the board of Coca-Cola for a decade.

Given the complexity of modern 802.11 protocols and the prevalence of WiFi radios in devices of all kinds, I find it well within the realm of possibilities for anyone to observe 802.11 traffic that is sufficiently ambiguous to create the confidence necessary to be a mentally workable substitute for evidence of a targeted attack. There may be a lot of evidence that could be found to refute that very same premise, though, if one knows what to look for.

    $ ls -al /dev/std*
    lr-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  0 Feb 24 15:08 /dev/stderr -> fd/2
    lr-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  0 Feb 24 15:08 /dev/stdin -> fd/0
    lr-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  0 Feb 24 15:08 /dev/stdout -> fd/1
    $ ls -n /dev/fd/[012]
    crw--w----  1 501  4  0x10000000 Feb 27 13:38 /dev/fd/0
    crw--w----  1 501  4  0x10000000 Feb 27 13:38 /dev/fd/1
    crw--w----  1 501  4  0x10000000 Feb 27 13:38 /dev/fd/2
    $ uname -v
    Darwin Kernel Version 24.6.0: Mon Jan 19 22:00:55 PST 2026; root:xnu-11417.140.69.708.3~1/RELEASE_ARM64_T6000
    $ sw_vers
    ProductName:  macOS
    ProductVersion:  15.7.4
    BuildVersion:  24G517

    $ zsh -c 'ls -al /dev/std*'
    lr-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  0 Feb 24 15:08 /dev/stderr -> fd/2
    lr-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  0 Feb 24 15:08 /dev/stdin -> fd/0
    lr-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  0 Feb 24 15:08 /dev/stdout -> fd/1
    $ csh -c 'ls -al /dev/std*'
    lr-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  0 Feb 24 15:08 /dev/stderr -> fd/2
    lr-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  0 Feb 24 15:08 /dev/stdin -> fd/0
    lr-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  0 Feb 24 15:08 /dev/stdout -> fd/1
    $ tcsh -c 'ls -al /dev/std*'
    lr-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  0 Feb 24 15:08 /dev/stderr -> fd/2
    lr-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  0 Feb 24 15:08 /dev/stdin -> fd/0
    lr-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  0 Feb 24 15:08 /dev/stdout -> fd/1
    $ ksh -c 'ls -al /dev/std*'
    lr-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  0 Feb 24 15:08 /dev/stderr -> fd/2
    lr-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  0 Feb 24 15:08 /dev/stdin -> fd/0
    lr-xr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  0 Feb 24 15:08 /dev/stdout -> fd/1

It's probably a good idea for anyone to check themselves every now and then by playing Angel's Advocate just as much as they might play Devil's Advocate, but I don't think rejecting his premises out of hand with a drive-by diagnosis is all that helpful.

I looked up the product you mentioned and you're right -- it does look like deodorant! It's a gel that contains glyphosate and isopropylamine salt. Neat!

> It's a non-selective herbicide in this context, it kills everything.

It is a non-selective herbicide, but it's not a systemic herbicide. It functions by interfering with photosynthesis, but since it is minimally absorbed via root systems, it must be applied directly to the foilage. You can spray it on the ground around a plant and that plant will happily ignore it. This is why the instructions are explicit about applying directly to the foilage during sunny days when the wind is light.

As a homeowner, I loved glyphosate. It was cheap, simple, effective, and could be applied in a selective manner. It's not the best choice for getting rid of broadleaf weeds in a lawn, but I used it all the time in my gardens to kill weeds and keep the bermudagrasses out.

In my heat pump, none of the thermostat wires directly control the contactors. They all run into a logic board that applies logic like time delays, temperature-controlled defrost cycling, and active protection lockouts for the compressor. I mean, there's a seven-segment LCD on the logic board for system troubleshooting. The air handler has a variable speed blower as well.

I understand that HVAC equipment varies wildly, but if you try to solve every possible problem or scenario and target every possible customer, you'll never make it to market.

I also understand that I am the target demographic.

Anecdotally, I have a first generation Nest and haven't had a problem. Maybe some of the earlier hardware had fewer protection against misuse (e.g., with non-24VAC systems or otherwise incorrect installation), but that's generally the case with most new things.

For binary, it looks like (1-(b-1))/1=b-10 or (1-(2-1))/1=2-2=0 in decimal.

For trinary, it looks like (21-(b-1))/12=b-2 or (7-(3-1))/5=5/5=1 in decimal.

For quaternary, it looks like (321-(b-1))/123=b-2 or (57-(4-1))/27=54/27=2 in decimal.

Essentially and perhaps unsurprisingly, the size of the slices in the number pie get smaller the bigger the pie gets. In binary, the slice is the pie, which is why the division comes out to zero there.

You must be relatively young. Software existed before the widespread adoption of the Internet.

> I remember very clearly buying software on physical media and never, ever "receiving" a single patch.

You had to take action to receive them. They weren’t automatic updates like they are today.

> I don't even know how that would have looked... "buy this floppy disk, it's a patch for a bug in the other floppy disk you bought recently"?

That’s exactly what it looked like. That’s still the process today for some systems —- avionics updates for Boeing 747s are provided on 3.5” floppies.

The podman CLI is nearly a drop-in replacement for docker such that `alias docker=podman` works for many of the most common use cases.

If you don't care about the security implications of running containers as root via a client/server protocol, then by all means keep using Docker. I've switched to podman and I'm happy with my decision, but to each their own.

I've also experienced enterprise OpenAPI deployments where the API specifications were owned by a separate enterprise API architecture team and were fed into some central consumer-facing documentation portal along with whatever unbeknownst infrastructure sat between the application and the Internet. Developers had access to the spec repository, but API architects reviewed PRs and made any recommendations for normalizing interfaces or using existing or canonical types.

Either way works, IMNSHO.

Edit: I should also say that I have likely misrepresented the deficiencies I experienced with API Blueprint. Take it with a grain of salt; I literally do not remember because it's been ... checks code ... nearly five years since I touched that project. The issue I ran into may have been as simple a problem as providing two example POST requests with slightly different payloads or two example HTTP 200 responses with slightly different response bodies. This is something that API documentation might often include to show multiple common use cases. It may have not have even been part of the actual spec or it may have been only a limitation of the specific UI renderer I was using.

I ran into some deficiencies, though, at least with the parser I was using with Node/TS -- IIRC (and it's been a few years), I wasn't able to specify a wide variety of disparate responses (e.g., an HTTP 200 with an application/json Content-Type header, an HTTP 200 with a text/plain Content-Type header, and an HTTP 400 response with an X-Error-Code header). Since API Blueprint was introduced, the tooling around OpenAPI has improved dramatically and it's become a de facto standard, so I'd probably avoid API Blueprint for anything serious.

It's unfortunate, though, because I really liked the idea.

I will say that in the event that an app is not using PHPickerViewController, sometimes it's still possible to emulate it by exiting the app, going into the photos app, selecting the photo, selecting the little "send" arrow in the bottom left, and then picking the app to send it to. I do this all the time with the Slack app. Copy-and-paste may be another route. Sure, it's a silly workaround for a feature that should have been there from day one, but c'est la vie.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/photokit/deliverin...

What happens when the unstoppable force meets the immovable object? The unstoppable force works over the weekend to implement a store-and-forward solution.