I do not understand this rhetoric of Apple hardware being so amazing. The only moderately impressive thing they've done for years is the M chips. Beyond that, it's just crippled, overpriced, and unrepairable.

They have shiny cases, yay. I'll take my ugly Thinkpad and actually get shit done over a shiny case and glossy screen.

I think it's a bit more than that. I like that I can easily swap the SSD and DRAM in my Thinkpad. But Apple has definitely done some interesting things including:

- good thermals (especially vs. Thinkpad P series), even supporting fanless operation on the MacBook Air

- excellent microphone and speaker array (makes people much more intelligible on both sides during Zoom calls)

- excellent multitouch trackpad with good palm rejection (though for a trackpoint device Thinkpad is your best bet)

- unified GPU and CPU memory with up to 135 GB/s bandwidth (downside: DRAM is not upgradable)

- host-managed flash storage (downside: SSD is not upgradable)

And of course the 10-20 hour battery life is hard to beat. Only downside is I'll forget to plug in at all.

Historically, Apple has innovated quite a bit in the laptop space, including: moving the keyboard back for the modern palm rest design (PowerBook, 1991); active-matrix color display (PowerBook 180c, 1993); integrated wi-fi and handle antenna (iBook, 1999); Unix-based OS that could still run MS Office and Photoshop (Mac OS X, 2000 onward); full-featured thin metal laptop with gigabit ethernet (PowerBook G4 Titanium, 2001); pre-ultrabook thin laptop that fits in a manila envelope (MacBook Air, 2008); high-resolution display and all-flash storage in an ever-thinner design ("Retina" MacBook Pro, 2012); going all-in on USB-C/Thunderbolt and 5K external "retina" display (MacBook Pro, 2016); unprecedented performance, and a tandem OLED display with <10ms touch-to-pixel latency, in an absurdly thin iPad, which can also be used as a "laptop" (iPad M4 + magic keyboard, 2024); etc. Some of the innovations also failed, such as the touchbar, dual-controller trackpad, and "butterfly" keyboard which plagued the 2016 models.

I mean, having 2 hours of active use vs 10 hours is quite a bit of difference, quite a bit more meaningful than "shiny case".

Finally, a comment that understands the concepts instead of insolently ranting about how useless it is.

It feels similar to people conflating green https check marks in browsers and trustworthiness.

exactly!

Social media ban for under 16s is the latest half witted idea enacted by the government here.

This week we've had the federal laws strengthend to a one year minimum jail time for nazi salutes. I think saying "punch a nazi" unironically could now also get you a year in jail, but I'm not sure about that one.

Oh, you feel the need to defend nazis?

No, the neo-nazis can defend themselves. I just support personal freedoms.

You’re deflecting.

As such you demonstrate that you will not be an ally in case of a surge of unethical behavior.

The point isn’t for nazis to defend themselves - it is to defeat them while you can.

I'm not deflecting I think we just have different points of view.

> The point ... is to defeat them while you can.

That can be your point, and with that framing almost anything is permissible! My point is generally to let free, open democracy run its course without putting our fingers on the scale too much.

I'm not scared of people doing a salute in the style of a movement that's been dead for almost a century. I'm not scared of communists flags or chants, or people chanting from the river to the sea. I think it's all healthy as long as it's non violent. The argument that it leads to violence is not logically sound and very minority reportesque.

> The argument that it leads to violence is not logically sound and very minority reportesque.

That a nazi salute, corroborated with converging political views…? You obviously don’t understand, don’t see how things happen.

Or you do, and you know downplaying “nazi wannabees” is part of the game.

It’s not about being scared but principled: an open democracy does not tolerate ideas going against its very foundations: it makes sure these are, expressed maybe, but kept in a very strict perimeter which they ought no get out from.

We don't ban Maoists or Stalinists or Mussolini style facists. We don't ban Napoleonics or Confederates.

After WW2 there was a period of strong Jewish support for nazi rights. Were they not an open democracy? Is the risk in 2025 stronger than what they faced?

I don't know really, is it that every era needs a boogeyman or is it just that we are on a grand cycle away from liberality? Both maybe?

We don't? Maybe you don't. From where I am (France), maoists, stalinists, mussolinists, napoleonics or confederates are pretty badly considered, maybe only considered weird and silly as long as they are just spouting vague theory stuff or giving some substance to the conversation.

But as soon as they associate their "thing" to a violent/segregationist personality/behaviour, you can be certain that they are banned, and in no gentle manners.

Wow, I don't know either. Saying nazis could be sort of boogeyman or victims?... that tolerating nazis would be liberal? Wow. Sounds like a line from "OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies".

You seem not to understand how a society works or what liberal even means... A liberal cannot tolerate ideas that are explicitly against tolerance, as those lead to illiberal behaviours. The best illustration of it is the actual suppression of speech that is happening in the USA, by the very people that reclaimed freedom of speech.

Or again, you do know.

Either way, you're certainly not in the middle, you're actually supporting the violent ones to be violent, asking the ones reacting to that violence to accept it as it is. Not too good looking.

> Sounds like a line from "OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies".

Thanks I'll check it out.

> Either way, you're certainly not in the middle, you're actually supporting the violent ones to be violent

I think I understand where you're coming from but I would instead state it as supporting first amendment style laws for my country, warts and all.

Would you argue that the first amendment should be annulled?

No, I’d argue that you do not understand the implications of your first amendment:

because you have an absolute free speech, you also expose yourself to the absolute consequences of what you say, or do.

Exposing oneself as a nazi exposes one to consequences.

Once, not that long ago, your country was proud of kicking nazis dead, for good reasons (albeit a bit hypocritical too when one reads history).

Banning Social Media for under 16s is a great idea. Hopefully other countries follow soon.

We just got a whole bunch of new radios for fire brigade in our state. Every radio has a SIM and fails over to the public cell network if the primary (licensed) network is unavailable.

Which ironically is one of the first networks to fail when we have widespread storms etc.

Could the idea be to use satellite cellular as that becomes more commonplace?

The cell network is much more reliable than typical emergency comms, especially when you factor in ‘radio shadows’, etc.

Or at least will be out at different times/ways.

Oh, unless there is a major disaster, but those are rare.

A lot of money goes into building the cell network.

I don't know. Seems like where I live the cell network is about as reliable as power. Its why I switched to starlink as at least that stays up/comes back quickly during storms.

> Seems like where I live the cell network is about as reliable as power.

Power is extremely reliable in most places I've lived. But I guess you are in the middle of nowhere?

Not really. I live in the suburbs. We get a lot of thunderstorms, tornados and hurricanes here (southeast).

Visual distraction in IDEs is amazing. I see my co-workers using Visual Studio or something, and I can't even identify the code they're working on among the mess of the screen. There's so much going on. The clean and pure display in vim in my terminal let's me just focus and get shit done. I honestly don't understand how they get anything done, but to each their own.

While you're technically correct, what I gathered from their experience is the consistency of usage, between not only their own projects but third-party projects too.

They could make technical improvements to their own Makefiles, sure. But it's more about being able to enter a project and have a consistent experience in "getting started".

> But it's more about being able to enter a project and have a consistent experience in "getting started".

I'd say putting the Makefile content in `package.json` would be more consistent, especially as they are already using Gulp as the build system.

You can't put comments in package.json, JSON should never have been used for something maintained by humans.

We are not arguing whether not declaring phony targets is worse than using comments in `package.json`?

But anyway, comments in a Makefile or `package.json` are not documentation anyway, that's what the `README` or `INSTALL` (or whatever) is there for (in projects like the one the Makefile is written for).

Which is ironic since a lot of people probably only deployed crowdstrike to satisfy their insurers' requirements.

It's the only reason we have it deployed.

I recall working on a PICK D3 system, which was a "multivalue" database. Each field could have multiple values, those values could have sub values, and a third level beyond that.

Values were separated with char(254), subvalues were separated with char(253), and the third level were char(252) separated.

It was... unique, but worked. And to be fair, PICK originated in the 60's, so this method probably evolved in parallel to the ASCII table!

This is the original reason for having /bin vs /sbin

The sbin directories are supposed to contain "system" (or superuser) commands, and regular users should NOT have those directories in their PATH.

This has been broken for a long time on every distribution I've looked at though.

I remember as a kid loading up the Encarta95 CD on the family 486, and the anticipation of what I could discover in the seemingly endless world of information that little spinning silver disc held within.

There is no contemporaneous equivalent.

Encarta paid for licensed content too, so it had nice audio clips of, say, Malcolm X speaking. Wikipedia is of course much more expansive in content, but since it all has to be Free, in some ways it doesn’t match what Encarta had.

I remember playing that game that was within Encarta where you would move between different rooms.