There has been a major shift in IT culture between 2010 and 2015 where the general mindset went from "Let's see if we can make computer do this" to "How can we stop the computer from doing that". This is most obvious in the latest advancements with LLMs - back before 2010 LLMs would have been incorporated into IT to help both users and developers create better quality/more advanced produces but today it all seems to come down to monetizing as much as possible while providing as little as possible and restricting access as much as possible.
The biggest plot hole is why would machines need to stay on or below the surface of the Earth. They could launch themselves into space and get all the (solar) enery they could want that way.
The problem is with smoking, you can go "cold turkey" and the cravings will go away after a while and you just have to avoid starting again. Not easy but achievable.
With food, you cannot stop eating so no "cold turkey" and you have to keep a watch on what and how much you eat all the time. Much easier to slip.
Not to mention the variance in food calories for similar looking foods that can easily tip you over the max goal.
It is like walking through a mine field all day every day, it never ends, you are never "out of it".
If Apple was honest they would tell users that if/when they buy things on the iPhone it will cost them 30% more. Then we would see how many people would go out of their way to save some money and how many would keep paying 30% more for the convenience.
Nice and easy, very democratic, 100% fair and honest.
Not going to see that from Apple any time soon...and from that we can only assume that Apple is not 100% fair or honest.
Unfortunately their strategy of being the smartest involves making sure no-one else can make better system on a Mac.
I you are the only game in town, you are by definition the best.
Well, speak for yourself.
I have a HP ZBook and Metabox laptops with keyboard that is almost identical to that of StarBook and I am very happy with that layout.
Can't stand the Mac laptop style keyboards (which makes Framework laptops a no-go for me) that lack separate home/end/pgup/pgdown keys.
I will be looking for a new laptop in the next 12 months so StarBook will be on top of my list.
On one hand you are correctly concerned.
On the other hand, how much code are you (and everyone else for that matter) running that is not provisioned by "randos on the internet"?
Even if you compiled it yourself, do you check all your kernel code and drivers?
Firmware? That can just as easily crash your computer and even make it impossible to recover.
If you main worry if that "windows driver" was "Turing Complete" you should be horrified that some kernels even have their own scripting built in or available, BSDs can use Lua, and even Linux has Lua kernel module (lunatik).
Repeat after me:
Debian STABLE does not mean Debian WORKING, it just means that major versions of most of the software will not change for this release.
There are many things in Debian STABLE that are not working and that will continue to not work until next major release (or longer).
I think STABLE in Debian name is the biggest mislabeling of all time.
Have you tried?
CTRL+C on most dialogs will copy all of the text to clipboard.
Of course, there are 3rd party dialogs that are not standard Windows dialogs and they do not implement this functionality.
Dependency may not be available on target system and cannot be installed because:
1) no external network access
2) not enough privileges to install
3) different architecture that doesn't have nix dependency available
4) target does not / cannot trust nix external dependencies
Two most used OSes on the planet - iOS and Android - force you to create online accounts and do not allow you to fully use your device without online accounts.
No one complains about it and instead they praise this as a great feature.
Windows does not force you to use the online account to access all the features of your computer, it tries (more and more forcefully) to get you onboard so you get similar backup protection as what you have on your phone but minimally technically savvy users can still create local-only accounts (which is near impossible on the phone OS).
1) Things don't "Just Work" with IOS. I regularly have to help people figure out how to connect their i* to work network, install 2FA apps, find missing 2FA notifications, find freshly installed app icons..."It Just Works" if you have done it 100s of times before and know what to do.
2) That is just plain and simple user hostile behavior that is not tolerated in case of any other company except Apple by Apple users.
Unfortunately, Debian is like Linux on desktop, always 80% there.
You just cannot trust that plain Debian will get it right, even if it works that one time you install it.
Two most recent issues that made me change to something else:
1) VLC in Debian is modified so it cannot play RTSP streams so you cannot watch video from your security camera. Windows VLC wroks. Flatpak VLC works.
2) Debian kernel update in point release broke NVIDIA driver so you cannot even see your desktop.
Debian STABLE is just Linux kernel with old software. If it doesn't work now then it will definitely not work for next 2 years and if it does work now it can break at any time.
All other Linux distros are not much better. Every update has 50% chance of breaking some software from distro repository but at least other distros fix their f-ups faster than Debian.
100% agree, Apple should play their Trump card and end up in the positions where Trump is now, sued for their user hostile and ant-competitive practices.
And if Apple does pull out of EU and let their competitors roam free in a market of 400 mil people, what could possibly go wrong for Apple?
You don't have to wait for WWDS/iOS18 to find out if Apple wants to compete on software flexibility - the answer is NO, not now, not ever. If anything software flexibility for all other systems is being decreased to match Apple so why would Apple do anything about it except maybe make their software even more inflexible.
It seems that a lot of programmers have trouble distinguishing between indexing and offsets.
This is probably due to legacy of C language which conflates those two, possibly for performance and simplicity reasons. Same goes for case sensitivity in programming languages, again a legacy of C...are Print, print and PRINT really different functions, is that really what you intended???
Anyway, indexing is enumerating elements and it naturally starts at 1 for the first element and goes to Count for the last.
Offsets are pointer arithmetic artifact where first element is at offset of 0 for most but not all data structures.
Then you get "modern" languages like Python where they adopt indexing from 0 (no offsets since there are no pointers) and range where start is inclusive and end is exclusive...very natural behavior there. Oh, and lets make it case sensitive so you never know if it's Print, print, PRINT...or count, Count and COUNT until you run for 20 min and then crash.
Close - "AI" is replace high paying moderate skill jobs. Those artists, writers and developers that are being replaced are not in the innovative and creative roles, they are just the assembly workers putting together or "fluffing up" work of other people. Not great for those people and increasing the inequality overall.
So you are saying that Dell with Intel CPU could get longer battery life than Mac with M1? What does that say about quality of Apple engineering? Their marketeering is certainly second to none.
And I have a HP ZBook G3 purchased in 2016 that I still use and have no need of replacing, it came with 32GB RAM, 512GB nvme SSD, 4k display, 3 year on-site warranty and has been upgraded to 64GB RAM 2TB nvme SSD + 4TB nvme SSD.
I have mid 2020 Samsung Galaxy FE20, inherited from my wife when she upgraded on a work plan, still getting regular firmware updates and again I seen no need to upgrade this phone for another few years.
Oldest computer I use on regular basis is Samsung ATIV Pro 700T from 2013 with upgraded storage (I would have upgraded the RAM if it was possible).
At work I have a 2020 i5 macbook air which is almost useless compared to both of those non-Apple machines and 2022 M2 air which works quite nicely for now but since it is not possible to upgrade it will likely be obsolete in a couple of years (like the 2020 macbook) when Apple decides that you now must have 16GB RAM for Mac OS 14 or 15 or whatever.
So Apple hardware is neither special nor unique nor worth the premium.
Except that in Ubuntu and Debian (and likely other major distros) you don't get the unmodified version of VLC, you get the crippled version with missing features. I recently spent a day trying to use VLC on Debian and Ubuntu to stream video from network camera (which works on Windows) only to find that Linux distros removed some VLC library that was required for this to work. So i used appimage version instead which did have the missing library. Linux distro packages are no longer easiest or best way to get working software.
And if they bricked your device while doing the testing on it without telling you? What if you were going on a trip the next day and you phone was out because they were quite literally testing in production?
Why, that's just fine! You would go and buy another (i)phone and everything would be just fine, even better, you would have a brand new iphone!
On an unrelated note, there is this bridge that just came on the market, would you be interesting in buying a share?
Or they could set the format of the column to text instead of keeping it as general and everything would just work.
If these "scientists" are having this problem then they haven't spent any time at all learning how to use the tool they rely on.
Can we trust anything these people produce if this is the level of competence they have with Excel?
I can't say cyclists are my best friends either. Just had two buzz me with with few mm to spare while walking to work. Yes, I was on the footpath, cyclists are not allowed to ride on footpaths here, there was a bicycle path right next to the footpath.
If I was a dog that would be even more disturbing - a huge fast monkey trying to kill you (and your owner) while you peacefully walk.
It is hard to believe anyone would manage to fill Android phone with malware without going out of their way to do so.
Google Play is the default app store. You have to enable installing from other sources.
Google Play then still gets to inspect the app and warn you about possible malware.
Of course you can disable all the safety feature and only use 3rd party stores...but you have to go out of your way to do that. If person has done that without knowing what they are doing then they will probably fall for the first, second and 10,000th phishing email or phone call and there is nothing anyone can do to protect them.
Cyclists always have an excuse for not following the rules...until someone else breaks the rule that benefits the cyclist, then it's the end of the world and you get sworn at like you have just tried to murder them. As a pedestrian, I am more afraid of cyclists and scooters than of cars. Cars actually stop and give way to me, cyclists and scooters never do. They block the footpaths and pedestrian crossings, they ride on the footpath (not allowed here), they ride on the wrong side of the road and in the middle of the lane, they ride through red light while pedestrians are crossing in front of them, I have even seen them ride through red light into intersection in front of busses and cars and pretend there was nothing wrong with that expecting other vehicles to stop.
People on two wheels are just the most self absorbed inconsiderate a-holes.
(Most) LLMs have been trained on more data than any human will ever be able to read, let alone process. Then they have been tweaked to produce human like output (most of the time). They can just as easily be tweaked to produce incomprehensible rubbish. This means that they can generate convincing human like output for any possible combination of data they were trained on and this output will usually be as good or better than that of average modern human that has consumed and comprehended tiny amount of data (in comparison). But even the dumbest of humans can be assumed to understand what they know where LLMs are just giant repository of numbers. LLMs have no capacity to understand what these numbers mean or what their output represents, that requires a human like intelligence. "AI" term has been grossly overloaded (just a couple of decades ago, a complex if/then/else statement was touted as "AI") and as we gain better and better understanding of information science, we assign that term to more sophisticated information systems we build but these systems are still far below of any threshold we would accept as sign of intelligence from another human being. Better term for these system would be Complicated Parrots rather than Artificial Intelligence. Intelligence requires understanding and understanding, I believe, requires sentience.
That list of expected items is so versatile that is might as well be ChatGPT.
The main problem for Apple is how to differentiate themselves in marketing terms to make it sound unique and prestigious so it can drive sales of their hardware and hopefully even subscription to their (AI?) services. Now they cannot just create a clone of ChatGPT or one of the other services because that will not sound unique even if their most loyal fans might invent reasons to paint it that way...and they certainly cannot publish something much worse than ChatGPT since even the fans would not be able to ignore that. So they just wait until the excitement of other services has passed and then release something bland but covered in shiny coat and let the marketing do the rest. Amazing - AppleGPT can schedule appointments all by itself without your input or requests based just on content of your iMessage chats and emails. No other AI can do that! ...and just ignore the glaring privacy nightmare you live in where ONE company controls all your digital life.