I have no opinion on this topic. Just thought the entire world needed to know that.

And here come all of the obligatory, "I knew it!!!1!" posts, in all of their obnoxious glory.

(sigh)

This sounds like a perfect use case for the Lenny bot.

I'm not a 23andMe customer, so I don't have a dog in the fight... but a part of me really wants someone with standing to wait until after the 30 days have passed and then proceed to sue them, if for no other reason than to establish a legal precedent on these idiotic forced opt-out manipulations being non-enforceable. The only contract that should even have a chance of being binding under law is one that has been actively agreed upon by both parties at the time that the contract was initiated. One party attempting to force the other party to explicitly disagree with a contract modification in order to retain their legal rights is absolutely scummy, scammy behavior, and this kind of activity should die a painfully expensive death.

I'm not the target audience here, so I don't really know how much that misspelling "offends" their customer base... but my first instinct is to say, if you have one of the misprints, keep it. After all, what real harm does the misprint do? And if most people return theirs -- or if there weren't very many in the first place, which I imagine there weren't -- than you have the potential for a collectors item that's maybe worth a lot more than the non-misprinted version, some number of years down the road.

I mean, maybe I'm just being crazy... or maybe some lucky schmoe is going to look back on this moment thirty years from now, and mentally thank me. Who knows?

Actually, I discovered that the app for the plug-in devices I use had finally been updated to be directly compatible with iPhone shortcuts. So really, in this particular case I was just removing a middleman which was thankfully no longer necessary. It seems to me that a number of product vendors have realized the value of being able to directly interact with Apple's APIs and have updated their apps accordingly, so a lot of what IFTTT does (did) is no longer even necessary.

That said... if the device and/or the app for your device hasn't yet received such integration: I've heard a lot of good things about Raspberry Pi based solutions. I'm considering examining that option for my garage door openers, but just haven't gotten a round tuit yet..

Oh! Is IFTTT even still a thing?

Sorry... let me catch you up, in case you lack the proper context for my sardonic quip. When the folks over at IFTTT decided to go all-in on the paid subscription model a few years back and effectively crippled their non-commercial "free" tier, (restricting it to something like only three "free" applets before holding out their hand meaningfully and tapping their foot impatiently) I promptly dropkicked everything related to IFTTT. At that point I think I had (ahem) only created a little over a dozen or so actions -- all associated with the simple tasks of toggling four sets of lights in different ways. Whittling that down to just three actions? Yeah, that wasn't going to work for me. I was able to very quickly determine that IFTTT was by no means the only way to accomplish those tasks, nor even the only free way. So after a fairly brief refactoring session, my lights continued to work exactly the way I wanted them to, without IFTTT and with not a single dime spent.

So yeah... I hear the pleading voice of the IFTTT PR person, trying to make out like this issue needs to be blamed on Amazon and the limitations they are "unfairly" placing on Alexa integration -- and that pleading voice falls entirely on deaf ears. IFTTT lost me three years ago due to their greed; regardless of who is actually "to blame" for their current plight, I will shed not a single tear.

Seems like crypto was already suffocating just fine all on its own, to me.

Oh, believe me, I'd love to! Thing is, like many people, I don't actually have the luxury of a separate "sick leave" pool of hours... my employer (and every one of my previous employers since the '90s or so) has opted to make vacation and sick leave both part of a single pool, called PTO (Paid Time Off). And these days, I also have a family, multiple kids and all that comes with that. Even with a stay-at-home wife, that means that there are times when I absolutely have to take time off for things other than vacations or for me being sick. (And it should go without saying that the finances are going to get pretty seriously strained if I take any significant amount of LWOP.)

So when the time comes that I do happen to be sick... sometimes, there just isn't an option to do anything but mask up, take a DayQuil, grab a bag of cough drops and hope for the best. You can self-righteously assume that I'm just a jerk all that you want; I'm still going to do what I have to, in order to make ends meet and to honor my family obligations. Those things are more important to me than some rando deciding (unfairly, IMO) that I'm just doing what I do to be a jerk.

Sometimes... the "jerk" is really just someone that you don't yet know well enough to judge.

Let's just put that all in perspective... while I obviously don't condone what the hackers did, that "lost profit" figure -- assuming that we take at face value that it's a genuine figure -- is really just $100 million of money that casinos didn't get to bilk out of their vast customer base... a disproportionate number of whom are gambling addicts who are constantly struggling with their finances.

So, you know... I'm not so sure I can find it in my heart to feel sorry for MGM, here.

So let's see if we can suss out what Sweeney really meant to say:

Epic (and Sweeney) needs to stop pretending that they're some kind of altruistic white knight on a mission from God himself. They're just another profiteering company with a product to sell.

"So just to clarify, were they closer to the lunar south pole than your vehicles?"

"Well... yeah -- but still!!"

As others have noted, the technical capability has indeed existed in Apple's mobile OS from the very beginning -- which shouldn't be particularly surprising, since iOS is in many ways simply a slimmed down and repurposed version of macOS (nay, BSD Unix). The perceived shortcoming of previous generation iPhones could perhaps be more readily viewed as a lack of awareness that hardware support was even available: there just weren't many obvious use cases for Lightning to Ethernet adapters, so therefore they were fewer in number... but they obviously do at least exist and are easily discoverable, if you think to look for it.

(Also for the record: the original article over on MacRumors also points out that Lightning adapters are a thing.)

The powers-that-be at Reddit (and a few external armchair commentators) have recently tried to convince the world that everything is basically back to business as usual at Reddit, post API protest blackout. This pay-for positive-contributions plan reveals that things are maybe not nearly as rosy as all that, after all. Reddit may itself be operating roughly as before, with several of their formerly protesting communities now "under new management"... but they still lost a fairly significant portion of their active contributors, in the gambit. That they are now considering throwing real cash at users to get them to start making positive contributions again seems awfully revealing as to just how bad things really are, at this point.

Sarcasm aside: I never had the conversation with the network guys about the real source of the problem, but my suspicion was that it had less to do with bandwidth and more to do with poorly tuned multi-threading settings on the individual workstations. Windows would lock up entirely for minutes at a time, while Gmail tried to do its thing -- but absolutely nothing else I did on that workstation had that same impact on performance; it was literally just Gmail. It was admittedly very odd.