I mean, yes, I have backups. But that isn’t the point.

But what about an iCloud-wide alert? As in, I’ll get an alert on my iPhone about an access on my Mac even if I’m across town.

Now that would be interesting and handy.

“The early bird might get the worm, but it’s the second mouse that gets the cheese.”

Apple is hanging back, waiting for mousetraps to be triggered as AI companies make mistakes that could not have been reliably foreseen. Then it’ll swoop in, adopt the best bits, and put out a product that is immensely polished and easy to use.

That has been, after all, one of its most important strategies over the years. They realized that early adopters only became industry leaders if their error rate remained low enough to keep ahead of those who let others make mistakes for them.

Conservatives.

They require an uneducated and ignorant electorate. It’s the only way they can hoodwink voters into voting against their own best interests.

>The implication being when gov and big business get together bad things do happen. My point is they can happen yes, but also same players can make good things happen - it depends on the players (and regulatory and reporting and voting and and and )

I think you need to go back and take some elementary courses on economics and how governments operate.

Public works are not “government and corporations in the same cart”. If that’s what you are coming to, that only demonstrates your ignorance bleeding out all over the place.

And here is your argument’s fatal flaw: mistaking public works, that benefits the commons and society as a whole, with government tracking.

The two are NOT the same.

Are these the government? Is the bank the government? Is the rail company the government?

No? Then you have answered your own question.

A silo of identification between you and a service provider that uses the provider’s own tooling is still anonymity from government authoritarianism.

The fact that nearly all of these silos are leaky IRL - with the government eager to punch howitzer-sized holes through them for even more access - is not the point. It is a citizen-hostile flaw that needs patching through loophole-proof legislation, not an ID system that would violently eradicate any remaining separation of government from capitalism.

Remember: when government and capitalism rides in the same cart, it is called corporatism, and is the basis of Fascism. Which is what is happening to America.

People have a right to complete anonymity, and should be able to go across the majority of the Internet just as they can go across most of the country.

That’s what you are missing.

Don’t get me wrong, I am also in favour of a single government ID, but in terms of combatting identity fraud, accessing public resources like single-payer healthcare, and making it easier for a person to prove their identity to authorities or employers.

It should not be used as a pass card for fundamental rights that normally would have zero government involvement.

That’s how fast the landscape is changing.

And remember: while the report might have been released in 2024, it takes time to conduct research and publish. A good chunk of its data was likely from 2023 and earlier.

Sorry, but faxes don’t work like this.

A fax takes in the entire transmission over the phone line, ends the call, and then - IF it has been set up to do so, instead of just storing the fax - it prints it out.

Which means that Karen had every ability to tell her fax to stop the print job herself. A fax is not like a printer, where the sender has the ability to tell the printer to pause or cancel the job. Once the fax starts printing, that original communication - the phone call with the fax transmission - has long since ended.

And if this fax machine can retrieve faxes from a fax server elsewhere on the network or on the Internet, that communications disconnect is even more severe.

Which makes me very suspicious of the entire story.

The whole case is the heatsink. The exterior case, and not the SSD or the mainboard or the RAM or any of the other parts; only the case.

“Computer” is the case + everything inside of it.

This irritates me just as much as when people say “my body is sweating”. Like, NO. It’s not your body that’s doing that, it’s your skin. Your internal organs aren’t sweating to cool you off, only your skin is. Your body as a whole might be overheating, it might be sending the signals to your brain to start the cooling process, but it is your skin that is actually doing the cooling. That’s your skin’s job. It’s the only organ who can do that job.

People have children when they see a future for those children to inherit, when they can see a place in the future for their children to occupy.

People have children when they have hope and optimism, when they see their family unit benefitting more with children than without.

Put women into an environment that denies them all three of these, and despite many to most of them wishing for children at some point in their lives, most will go through extreme lengths to avoid having them.

It’s why, for example, many younger climate scientists are also forgoing children… because the emerging, pre-publish data that is not yet accessible to the public at large is absolutely horrifying, and they simply don’t want to curse their own offspring with the future that the data says we are hurtling towards.

Absolutely true. Even meta-analyses of all UBI experiments to date - encompassing tens of thousands of adults - shows an increase in labour participation, not a decrease.

And if formal, capitalistic, profit-based jobs are no longer available, what barrier do we have against creating social jobs that need doing? Just because the Parasite Class cannot extract obscene amounts of wealth from those jobs doesn’t mean they don’t need doing. It just means there is no profit angle to have in doing them.

If I had no worries about my needs, I would love to work on open-source projects. Failing that, it would be ecosystem restoration or bioremediation. All jobs that can be free of government and capitalism, but which desperately needs bodies to yeet ant the issues at hand.

In this case, the onus was on Perry to ask, “gays, as in gay people?”, and things could have gotten cleared up long before offence was taken.

Because there are just too many damn homophones in the English language. To take offence at one without confirmation is just stupid.

Except for a tetrachromat. Specifically, a strong tetrachromat that has both four colour channels in the brain and a different frequency on the fourth cone.

Who are, admittedly, hella rare. Apparently there are less than a few dozen confirmed world-wide.

But they do exist.

Yes, Java is robust and bulletproof, but modern?

They had to pull their version of string interpolation in 2024 because they couldn’t make it work.

C# has had string interpolation since 2015.

2015.

And it’s gotten a hell of a lot slicker and easier to use in the meantime.

Don’t get me wrong, you WANT Java if your app needs to remain up and running for years on end with tens of thousands of actions a second. There is a damn good reason, for example, why Azureus/BiglyBT is written in Java, after all… it remains up and running with absolutely crushing loads long after other torrent clients go titsup.

But “modern”??

Sorry, that is all sorts of hilariously wrong. From where I stand, “modern” Java feels a lot like C#… circa 2012.

Why? I am a power user, and if I didn’t already have a copious stable of second-hand machines (a side effect of also being in the hardware end of IT), I would gladly pick one of these machines up as a “vacation/personal device”.

I mean, as a power user I am going to need high specs… for my work.

In my off time and on my vacation time, all I need is something that can connect to the Internet, let me do basic eMail and web surfing, and lets me connect remotely to my iron back in my office to keep a light touch on things.

And in that regard, this machine is perfect.

My issue with the device is in term of long-term ownership, where 8Gb RAM and 512Gb of storage isn’t going to get me all the way out to 7-8 years of usage in a comfortable manner. Even with light duties, imma gonna see the seams stretch uncomfortably so somewhere in the 4-6 year stage.

I would argue that ecosystem integration is the only primary consideration that you need to use at the top/first-culling-step of the flowchart to either include or discount Apple products in any purchasing decision. Anything else is secondary, and has workarounds.

> UI has regressed

Honestly, I love the UI of MacOS 9.2.2 the most. But I don’t have a Time Machine or Elon Musk levels of wealth to chart a different course.

And sure, some UI decisions of late have been questionable. That is always the case with non-niche products that don’t have highly focused and largely conforming users. Apple moved out of that category back in the early 2000s, and it is forced to make the same UI tradeoffs that Microsoft makes.

I actually don’t mind the modern UI, and aside from a few warts I think they’re going in a very user-friendly direction even if power users feel slighted and abandoned.

However, I think that two will bring sour tastes to people’s metaphorical mouths much more than expected: the RAM and drive space.

There should have been a 16Gb option. Nosebleed the price if you have to, or include a SODIMM slot if needed, but the option should have been there to expand the memory to 16Gb either on spec or at a later date. Because each version of MacOS gets weightier and more demanding of hardware - Windows isn’t the only resource hog out there - and at 8Gb the pain will begin to be felt long before the 7-year usability cycle comes to an end.

There should have been a 1Tb option. Not because people use that much drive space - many don’t - but because 1Tb is the level which provides enough cells in parallel to properly saturate the PCIe bus, ensuring maximum performance. Not always at that 1Tb level, and not on every machine. But typically 1Tb or above, rather than below. Even if it required a hairdryer to unstick the original due to the constrained space not permitting a lock-down screw, the drive should have been either replaceable or with the size as (again) a nosebleed-price option at provisioning.

Because while I see every other compromise as acceptable, it is those two which make me hesitate on getting this as a long-term secondary/casual system.

Other than that, this is a laptop which can only goose Apple’s further adoption among students and casual users.