riversflow

Power seekers acquire power, not knowledge seekers. This is from Plato’s The Republic so about as old as it gets.

> testimonials from real humans (probably)

(X) Doubt

I think people should be allowed to be noisy.

I have no idea. A wild guess is that it might have to do with my setting option that preserves the last camera mode on re-launch, but I was never able to replicate a crash. I have not gotten a camera crash since I upgraded to iOS26. It only happened a few times, but once is too much.

The only issue I have with the camera now is that under low light conditions and fog, it will refuse to focus on a distant subject unless I cover the LIDAR.

Getting sick isn’t just life or death.

My parents both got measels, and they had no hesitancy getting me vaccinated. I’m significantly taller than my dad, who lost 40 pounds when he got German measles when he was 17. I grew several inches that year.

People who don’t get vaccinated are bad people. I have no qualms saying it.

I upgraded to a 16 pro from an iPhone SE 2. Things I noticed:

Pros:

Better screen, cameras and build quality. Like way better. The glass on this phone is durable enough to not use a case and I don't. After beating it up for a year, its looks and works great. The build quality of this device is bordering alien.

Face ID is very nice. Touch ID does not like my skin.

I like the magnetic accessories and MagSafe.

Visual intelligence is actual quite useful for helping to identify stuff. I’m a curious person and actually use it.

Having flashlight on the action button makes it feel like a tool. I use the flashlight virtually every day.

It’s nice to not have my phone lag, which was a problem for the SE2. This phone is very capable, battery life is much better too.

Cons:

I have had more camera crashes on this iPhone than any I’ve ever had on a new flagship. Less than on my dying SE2, but the camera should not crash on a new flagship. It’s mission critical equipment in my book.

> you have no choice but to give it to them

There is always a choice.

Yeah this whole thread is absolutely filled with prudes as far as I'm concerned. Everybody poops, get over it.

on the topic of platonic friendship, I couldn’t disagree more with a lot of the comments. I have plenty of friends yet I don’t do clubs and will never, ever do organized religion. People advising it are religious freaks in my opinion. Some of my best friends took this advice to go to church and bible study. They complain every time I see them about the people in their church. Meanwhile I’ve made more and better friends online. Its not hard, get on social media, find an influencer/streamer that matches your vibes and go jump into the official or adjacent discord community and play video games with people in that community. If you engage in active listening and are a decent person, you will easily make plenty of friends. Additionally, I think in person hangouts are kinda mid, but I hangout with my friends in-person (at a minimum) every other day when I weight lift. Like seriously, I often would rather chill in Discord than go and hang out in-person.

To me the male loneliness epidemic is more about a lack of ability to find meaningful romantic relationships. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and as somebody who has been doing online dating since it essentially started, I am pretty sure that the problem (or at least a major piece) is that match group has commodified romantic relationships.

I know a lot of people will focus on meeting people in public or whatever, but it has been my experience that dating has become completely garbage and a large part is because all of the current popular dating apps disallow index search and funnel you into swiping. From a mate selection perspective this makes no sense. Not only does it muddy the waters about who is actually a real match, but it also does psychic damage to make so many shallow judgements.

Back before match group bought OkCupid, I used to have excellent results finding people their who shared a lot of common ground with, messaging them with a thoughtful message, and going on dates. Swiping is an absolute crap shoot, and often I feel like I am being used.

Huh? its 2026. Auto-translate is like table stakes at this point. It is one of my favorite modern innovations, reading foreign journalism is nifty.

Crazy that you are the only comment that noticed this. I stopped reading at,

> Translation: Building airplane engines is hard

There are many hints previous to that, but that gave it away for me. If I want LLM output I’ll request it from the model myself, thanks.

I don’t want screens in my cabin.

Dashboard screens are so cringe, I’d be happy if they were banned outright. I want dials and dim indicator lights for the console, and knobs and buttons that have the dual purpose of interface and display on the dash. This is a machine, not a video game, everything should be in service of making the driver look out the windshield.

Modern cars are absolute shit, the UI on my 30 year old Camry feels amazing by comparison to any car that I’ve driven that has come out since 2010.

> like the awful Siri assistant

Ironically, I just talked to all my mates about our Apple Watches, and universally Siri on your wrist for setting timers and replying to messages with voice, completely hands free, was the killer app that everyone agreed on.

Setting a timer is as simple as bringing your wrist to your face and saying the amount of time.

I wish apple would deprecate the old way and force apps to adopt the new photo picker.

could you provide an example of that happening?

People are part of the universe, and they have a concept of deserving.

Nah, Tiktok got popular not just because of the Algo, but also because of the creator fund which makes the Algo rich with good content. Since they stopped that 2 years ago Top creators (different from influencers, who make money from advertising/sponsors) are moving to first Instagram Reels and now Youtube Shorts because that’s where the money is at. Any firm who wants can build an audience by paying creators. It takes time though, because the creators have to convince their audience to switch.

Reddit died to me when they allowed private profiles this summer.

My position is simple and has 2 parts:

To expect anyone to create meaningful regulation on every sector of the economy is absurd, our system is far too complex.

We need regulation if we want to live in a safe & healthy modern society.

Unless you just disagree with the second proposition, it seems your implication is that every congress person should be an expert on every sector of the economy and fiscal policy, and be able to craft meaningful laws, or at least have strong opinions about them. Otherwise, they would just be accepting laws written by other people, just like delegating to the regulator.

Corruption exists in every system. I grew up with clean air and water thanks to the current regulatory system, and have benefited from a safe work culture my whole life. Best I can tell the only guy who has really done anything to stop that is the current President, so kinda a crude characterization to say that they change with every admin.

Expecting Congress to directly regulate the minutia of industry, medicine or technology is absurd, these are giant categories with their own subfields that need specialized technocratic leadership.

I long thought this way, but I’ve realized ad-supported social media/internet is an objectively egalitarian funding path that has allowed the open web to thrive and flourish. If you have a way of funding the internet that doesn’t shut out literally Billions because they cant afford it, I’m all ears.

Complaining about ads is kinda like complaining about homeless people. You are just servicing your own annoyance without actually engaging in critical thought. It is selfish behavior.

I actually had Monday help me write a system prompt to replicates its behavior. I vastly prefer Monday. It feels much more grounded compared to the base model. It was also a big learning moment for me about how LLMs work.

> 1. The Apple experience, at least on the OS side, matters less and less in the webapp world.

I see it the opposite. At least for iPhone owners Universal Clipboard and file sharing with Airdrop are killer apps.

Pretending that this about taking a stand against patent holders of HEVC is absurd. HP and Dell clearly see the writing on the wall. PCs are a mature technology now—my 10 year old i7 6700k runs AAA games from this year fluently (albeit with an updated GPU). A laptop bought in 2025 should be entirely adequate for virtually any business task for a decade barring wear and tear or an entirely new software paradigm.

M

Thanks for this comment. I was able to fix this issue, finally. Had to toggle the switch in setting> apps> App Store > search and restart my devices. :)

I thought it was some legal thing about App Store competition.

The app store is the only application that I am aware of that you can't find through spotlight search. You can search the app store directly from spotlight search, but it will never list the App Store as an app. Very annoying.

> No social networking

What an airball. Social networks are the single most valuable aspect of computers and the internet. It is a dark world where we all just talk to LLMs instead of each other.

> I wonder if domestic cats attack bats.

I have no doubt. Cats have an incredible prey drive, and it would be down right batty for them to have some sort of hardwiring to avoid bats when they happily attack moths who have a similar flight pattern. I haven’t personally seen one catch a bat, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all. A cursory search says indicates it happens.

Although for whatever reason I would be more concerned about a dog finding, rubbing in and eating a dead bat. I mean I don’t know what percentage of bats die while out, but it can’t be zero, and dogs—especially spitz-types—are remarkable at finding dead animals. Now that I think of it, I could easily imagine a person getting direct exposure to diseased bat remains through that vector. People typically put their hands on the shoulders of dogs and think little of it.