The tax should also go to fund a UBI.

Agreed. Essentially it's either you create jobs directly, or you contribute to the UBI fund.

I built a CMS back in 2010 in Ruby on Rails (it powered a once popular site that I shut down for unrelated personal reasons). It originally used a thin layer of javascript along with a few buttons to wrap around some HTML. I later extended it to use markdown for fast editing. I didn't spend more than maybe 3-5 days on the entire project, including testing/deployment, and it stood up for over a decade until I retired it due to reasons mentioned.

I bring that up because when I see headlines like this, I know EXACTLY the type of person who wrote the content.

For my part, there were a few occasional issues/bugs early on, however I was able to catch them and fix them quicky thanks to testing, user input, and understanding of the code base.

Side note: I still own the domain. It sits on Cloudflare and resolves to an IP address which isn't valid. The AI traffic that has been hitting my domain has been about 4X the user base I had. This isn't CF spitting this number out...I've verified it.

Thankfully CF doesn't really have usage limits that folks like me would ever notice.

I don't know where this whole "Apple is slowing down my device" comes from, but it is misguided at best, and outright false at worst. My decades old iPod Touch, for example, still works today without performance issues. My oldest iPhones have no performance issues either, and they are (respectively) 9 and 10 years old. Do they still receive updates? Of course not! Neither do any of the other devices I have from the same era. My PC, built around the same time, doesn't even support Windows 11, and hasn't received a single BIOS update since 2020.

Apple was slowing down phones for a while, however, the general public entirely misunderstood why: At a certain point, the battery could not maintain the voltages required to keep the phone operating properly at all (if you understand silicon, you will understand why...CPU needs 1.5v, battery can provide 1.4v...and boom!), so Apple did the most graceful thing they could and they down clocked the phones rather than letting them abruptly turn off. That led to millions of people in a certain era of iPhone being able to use their phones...just more slowly...vs not being able to use them the second voltage > supply voltage...which basically means any remotely demanding app. They were (rightfully) sued because they made the change without informing the user first. They didn't have to touch the phones, period. They tried to allow the phones to be used/data recovered from gracefully.

Don't misunderstand me, I am not willing to defend the practices of any business at all, especially Apple (I've worked from, and walked away from, some despicable companies in my time as an engineer), however Apple went above and beyond to let folks continue to use their devices. If you think otherwise, I've a box full of android and non Android phones and tablets that the likes of Google, Samsung, LG, HTC, etc. all quickly abandoned.

For comparison, the Google Pixel 3a (among others) was released the same year and saw it's last major OS update in 2022. iPhone 11? Still receives updates to this day. No, they aren't slowing the phone down. Trust me, my non technical spouse would have complained super loudly by now. More importantly, I, as her tech support person would've. She is on 26.2 right now.

There is a time and place to bash Apple, however hardware/software support definitely isn't the place. If you think that the current OS/update you have installed is purposefully and intentionally slowing your phone in order to push you to update, please feel free to publish your testing and results...and make sure you isolate every other variable like filling up internal storage, running 50,000 apps at once, expecting any application made within the past 6-7 years to peform at top speed, etc.

Also make sure you aren't falling for things such as confirmation bias or worse: you simply parrot what others say because your decade old phone, much like your decade old PC,feels slower now than it did a decade ago, when apps and games were simpler, and didn't embed entire browser engines in order to display content.

Cheers, btw, and I mean no disrespect to anyone. Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays.

I have a 4 year old M1 macbook pro running macos 12. It runs as good as when it was new. So you honestly think that if I upgrade it to macos 26 it wont start lagging? I am extremely confident that it will. Even without changing the other software running on it.

Probably for a day or two as various indexes and caches are rebuilt in the background, and then not.

I use 26.x on an "original" 8GB M1 MacBook Air and it's as fine as it ever was.

(I also have a MBP, various Mac Mini's and other desktops, so it's not that I'm just used to everything being slow).

FWIW, my work M1 is on macos 26 and it runs just fine

Honestly, the closet I mentioned were late PPC to mid Intel era. Those machines (putting aside the architecture changes) regularly outlived their ability to practically run the latest Mac OS, full stop. I am not even willing to say that wasn't intentional, because it was so conspicuous. Perhaps it wasn't 'designed' to do that, but minimally, I can say Apple did not maintain what I would consider minimum performance standards for the hardware they claimed their OS to support.

Maybe that's ancient history now, but from what it sounds like, they still have users that distrust their releases. When you say "I don't know where this is coming from" then a few lines later describe the known practice and the reason, well there you are. I guess it's a brand trust thing, and it sticks.

Same. I have a wood cutting board and I always use hot water and dish soap to clean it after.

For the same reason we don't reinvent the wheel. Or perhaps, the same reason we don't constantly change things like a vehicle. It works well, and introducing something new means a learning curve that 99% of folks won't want to deal with, so at that point, you are designing something new for the other 1% of folks willing to tackle it. Unless it's an amazing concept, it won't take off.

> Or perhaps, the same reason we don't constantly change things like a vehicle.

Are we stuck with the same brake pedal UX forever?

That's great for you. But some people need to pick a specific country. People in different countries often get different prices for things like airline tickets or online subscriptions. Maybe you need to appear from a particular country to access certain media.

I mostly use it to avoid exposing my IP address too, but if I knew my VPN was comfortable with a little light fraud, I'd be concerned about what else they're comfortable with.

NordVPN calls out when a location is virtual, so unless ipinfo is claiming they have virtual locations that are not labelled as such, they are at least transparent about it. They did document the physical server locations of their virtual locations at launch, but I'm not sure if there's a live doc for new locations. https://nordvpn.com/blog/new-nordvpn-virtual-servers/

All the ones I use pick one for you, it is up for you to change it, and you play a fat rate per month or year regardless of what you pick.

That may be your use case, but it by no means it's reflective of anyone else's. I live in a country that actively blocks and limits your connectivity to (ordinarily) public websites. Choosing an exit point that's in a different country is very relevant and important.

You are in the minority. Most folks that subscribe to VPNs are folks in the US, Canada, EU, and other "First World" countries. (I had a source a while back for something completely unrelated, however I didn't save it)

I'm not discounting you at ALL, I'm simply stating that the majority of traffic originate from these countries. Most of these folks just want to hide their IP address for various reasons. Privacy, Piracy, etc. Most don't care if it's in the next largest city, they just don't want it to appear to come from them.

Folks in countries like yours will likely pick endpoints to bypass the government. Folks up to nefarious stuff like cracking web sites, social media influencing, etc. will likely pick the target country more carefully. Anyone else? Whatever is the default.

I recognize this is a hard concept to understand for folks on this site, but the average joe signing up for a VPN doesn't even remotely understand what they are doing and why. They were pitched an idea as a way to solve privacy issues, block ads, etc. and they signed up for it. The software suggested a low latency link, and they went with the default.

The ads for a lot of VPN providers literally use scare tactics to sell the masses on the idea.

Last time I checked the UK was considered a first world country.

Edit: I commented earlier that I never considered myself part of the market that VPN companies hawk their services to. I've been living in the UK for 5 years now and the number of sites that have become unavailable to me are material and concerning for what their abolishment means for free speech. I'm as square as they come, if I feel this strongly you bet others do too.

> I recognize this is a hard concept to understand for folks on this site, but the average joe signing up for a VPN doesn't even remotely understand what they are doing and why.

Really this is the answer to half of the comments on this thread.

> I recognize this is a hard concept to understand for folks on this site, but the average joe signing up for a VPN doesn't even remotely understand what they are doing and why.

So what? This article isn’t for them and this isn’t a major news site for the general public, it’s a site for people who want or need to know how things work.

Re: random countries, sometimes with PIA the Panama exit has a crazily low ping time (I'm physically in California). I wonder what leads to it? Hawaii I can understand, there's a cable landing not far from my physical location, but Panama is a mystery to me.

If you look at the list in the PIA menu, you'll see Panama has the "geo-located region" icon, which means that it's a virtual one and isn't in Panama.

TIL, thanks!

Well, that was a wild read. I'm surprised it isn't getting more traction.

So, full disclosure, I'm no longer a developer due to disabilities, including one that keep me from being able to write code, however: I love C# and .NET, and a good portion of my early career was working with C#, .NET, and SOAP. That being said, Microsoft's response to this bug alone have turned me off to the language and framework. They clearly don't take security seriously. They favor possible compatibility issues over the hijacking of a bunch of servers on the internet. That attitude is not okay. I bet a simple code scan could probably find a whole bunch of endpoints that are vulnerable to this.

I would not be surprised if some of their own web applications are affected by this vulnerability.

Thanks for the read.

Note- 1) this is .Net Framework- which is in a holding pattern. 2) this requires inherently insecure code to be written- 3) I can't find it right now- but I seem to recall there being an option when defining the service in a web.config to write to a file instead of a http endpoint- ostensibly for development purposes.

These don't completely negate a WONTFIX response though- after all, .Net Framework 4.?? Disabled XML External Entities and schema loading by default.

I suspect you are full of it. I've been to lots of McDonald's locations, and I've rarely seen homeless people inside. Keep in mind I've been everywhere from California to Maine, From Kentucky to Florida to Texas. Nearly every state except the PNW, and I've never seen homeless people sleeping in a McDonald's (McD's used to be my goto with the $1 value menu when traveling). Ordering food? sure. As someone who once worked in fast food, I also know for a fact that management would kick them out, and so would the few dozen police officers in a lot of areas that walk in to get breakfast/coffee.

...Unless you mean Canada of course, however, I bet a well traveled Canadian would say the same thing.

Also, stop vilifying the homeless.

Nobody’s vilifying the homeless. Tons of homeless people are perfectly fine human beings who don’t bother anybody. Unhinged and dirty drug addicts on the other hand, are pretty categorically unpleasant. If you enjoy being around them, you can let them move in with you and then they won’t be homeless anymore.

The non-technical folks don't understand the very real limitations, hallucinations, and security risks that LLMs introduce into workflows. Tech CEOs and leadership are shoving it down everyone's throats without understanding it. Google/Microsoft are shoving it down everyone's' throats without asking, and with all the layoffs that have happened? People are understandably rejecting it.

The entire premise is also CURRENTLY built around copyrighted infringement, which makes any material produced by an LLM questionable legally. Unless the provider you are using has a clause saying they will pay for all your legal bills, you should NOT be using an LLM at work. This includes software development, btw. Until the legal issue is settled once and for all, any company using an LLM may risk becoming liable for copyright infringement. Possibly any individual depending on the setup.

My comment has been weirdly controversial, but I'm not sure why.

I get that LLMs have problems.

I was recently looking into the differences between a flash drive, an SSD, and an NVMe drive. Flash memory is one of the technologies I had in mind when I wrote my comment.

Flash has a bunch of problems. It can only be written over so many times before it dies. So it needs some kind of wear-leveling abstraction that abstracts over the actual storage space and provides a smaller, virtual storage space that is directed by a controller that knows to equally distribute writes over the actual storage, and avoid dead cells when they manifest.

NVMe extends that with a protocol that allows a very high queue depth that allows the controller to reorder instructions such that throughput can be maximized, making NVMe enabled drives more performant. Virtual address space + reordered operations = successful HDD replacement.

My point here is that LLMs are young, and that we're going to compose them into into larger workflows that allow for predictable results. But that composition, and trial and error, take time. We don't yet have the remedies necessary to make up for the weaknesses of LLMs. I think we will as we explore more, but the technology is still young.

As for copyright infringement, I think copyright has been broken for a long time. It is too brittle in its implementation. Google did essentially the same thing as OpenAI when they indexed webpages, but we all wrote it off as fair use because traffic was directed to the website (presumably to aggregate ad revenue). Now that traffic is diverted from the website, everyone has an issue with the crawling. That is not a principled argument, but rather an argument centered around "Do I get paid?". I think we need to be more honest with ourselves about what we actually believe.

I've never had issues at all. I use their consumer offerings (iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, etc.) and I've never personally witnessed an outage or problem. I regularly transfer stuff to iCloud from my PC running Linux, and I use the email service with a custom domain that used to live on Google until Google canceled the free tier of small business and also raised prices on the paid tier.

It’s a bit hidden, for example if Apple Music isn’t working it will act as if my device is having an issue with the app playing; it doesn’t look like its a service problem because it hangs and freezes the UI for play- and pretty often I will force my mail to refresh and it will say the imap server is unreachable.

Regardless, these kinds of things tend to be somewhat regional. I’m based in Sweden.