This is not even vaguely close to true, although classic MacOS was designed like security didn't matter. All of these operating systems were built after the invention of the computer virus and two of them had security baked in. The third required two antivirus programs for relative safety (gatekeeper and disinfectant) because it had no security, which was always stupid. The modern MacOS is descended from an OS where security was understood to matter. The state of the art in computer security was simply undeveloped compared to what it is today.

When China demanded that vendors operating app stores bend over completely for fascism, Google pulled out and Apple did not. Thus we knew conclusively that they would rather support fascism than leave any amount of money on the table.

Now we (Apple's detractors on this issue) can see that exactly what we predicted has come to pass. Apple is joyfully assisting with oppression anywhere they can do so. To them, government demands for totalitarianism are irrelevant, because Apple sees no problem with forcing users to behave a specific way for their benefit to the detriment of their freedom. Why would they see government oppression in any other way than simply the terms under which they must operate in order to maximize profit?

Corporations never have qualms about bad behavior, but sometimes the people who operate them do. This appears not to be the case for Apple.

The AI editors and AI "fact checkers" will have been coded by the same people (or, eventually, the same stupid AI programming code) and trained on the same data and will therefore not SPOT the errors, not require the retractions, and almost certainly "fact check" the errors as "true", thereby becoming the obstruction to actual humans correcting things.

AI is likely to produce a new world in which people can believe NOTHING in electronic format, and they need to return to being trustworthy and honest and getting information, and doing transactions, on a handshake with a trusted human, face-to-face.

Congrats to all you people working on stupid large language models and lying to everybody by mis-representing this form of "AI" to the general public as though it were Artificial General Intelligence. You are on the cusp of destroying modernity and forcing society to step backwards 80 years or so. Those of us who worked to bring about the computer revolution INTENDED to build a bright future where computers made everything better, faster, more-efficient, more factual, etc but you are in the process of flushing it all down the giant cosmic toilet. Oh, and before you ask: NO, no additional algorithm can fix this. Algorithms cannot fix human nature, and human nature defaults to abusing every new technology. The current generation of AI is the most-powerful yet least-understood-by-the-public tech to come along. It's already mis-leading people by the millions - just look at the MOUNTAINS of AI slop ruining the YouTube experience already. It only gets worse from here...

We need new drugs for cancer, diabetes, vascular problems, liver problems, rebuilding nerves, destroying proteins and collagens that build up in eyes and blind people, etc. and we have a bunch of drug researchers who are, instead, working to supply a bunch of new (almost certainly addictive) mind-altering drugs to keep people with addictive personalities properly numb?!?

Sheer madness. Probably driven by cash - people will ALWAYS pay for a "high", and some will pay any price to any low-life vendor to live a strung-out life. We'd be better off to create some gated communities and tell people who want to get high to go there and do all the drugs they want within the gates, as long as they never leave without being "clean". Then just legalize all the tried-and-true mind benders for use in those places. Have at it folks! cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, lsd, whatever you want... you just cannot leave and hurt innocent people.

We need drug researchers to be working on serious medications for people with actual serious medical conditions.

Sorry for the rant, but the longer you live, the more decent people you will have known who suffered (and often died) for lack of help with actual serious medical conditions. I no longer am able to muster an ounce of sympathy for anybody who just wants to destroy a few brain cells over a weekend for recreation, and little patience for anybody dedicated to helping them.

you want human beings to ever be anything more than scurrying about on Earth becoming gradually better at killing each other until they eventually succeed or the sun burns out (your choice).

Here's the thing: ANY human voyage to any other place in the universe will be vastly more difficult and dangerous and require more time away from Terra Firma. Therefore, the Moon is a perfect place to learn what we need to learn, and to practice (and get good at) the things we will need to be excellent at in order to manage ANY further exploration. If we cannot get the toilet right on a lunar mission, then any other space destination is right out. We could learn all the same lessons with a destination like Mars, BUT that would be vastly more expensive, and take a huge amount of additional time (each flight would take months vs days, and the launch windows are years apart rather than weeks apart). This is what even Elon Musk has recently surrendered to. When we have mastered the regular lunar flights with sustained time on the lunar surface, we will finally know how to learn to do Mars without going bankrupt and killing lots of crews.

Developers don't have a culture of being economical with resources.

That's because in say, the 60s and 70s, computer time was expensive. It behooved you to make your code as efficient as possible - like today's cloud services, they often billed by the CPU cycle. And the run-debug cycle was on the order of a day, so you didn't want to make a stupid error because it meant your job got delayed a day at the least.

Sometime around the 80s and 90s, this flipped - human time was expensive. Computers were cheap and getting cheaper, RAM was plummeting as was hard drive space. The math started to work the other way - you don't want developers wasting time debugging code so libraries were popular - because it was more efficient (cheaper) to utilize the fact one person presents a well-debugged library that other developers could use and that means developers don't have to write that code, and they don't have to debug that code either.

That's why we have bloat - because it's cheaper that way. You could have a developer write nice and tight code, but how much are you willing to pay for it? If it takes them an extra week to make their library run 10% faster, was it work say, the $5-10,000 it cost? ($5000 a week is around $250K/year including benefits, or around $150K take home pay plus benefits, while $10,000 is $500,000K/year including benefits, or around $250,000-300,000 without benefits). Will that improvement let the company make back that investment?

You have to realize that if you want to charge $150K/year salary, spending a week optimizing costs the company $5000, so unless they can save that $5000 elsewhere (e.g., in reduced cloud compute fees, or customers will pay extra), there is no incentive to do it.

And that's really a valuable consideration. Also, compilers are really good these days. Like, really good. They will often so very strange things to save a few cycles. Some, like Clang, can be "too smart" and apply closed-form mathematical transforms to your computation (E.g., if you attempt to sum integers from 1 to n, and you do the "stupid way" with a loop, Clang will recognize it and actually generate the code to calculate n(n+1)/2 and eliminate the loop).

So it's a mix between the cost of a developer to optimize their code, the increasing intelligence of compilers to optimize code, and other things.

If you want to learn more about how compilers generate code, including being able to add in 0 cycles (hint: it uses the CPU's address calculation unit instead of the ALU to do simple addition and subtraction and even multiplication when it can, so the actual execution time is zero since the computation was done as part of operand calculation), Matt Godbolt of Compiler Explorer fame runs through a whole series in his Advant of Compiler Optimization series. (Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playli... ). Trust me, it doesn't pay to outsmart the compiler.

I can imagine a lot of expletives in response to blatant hallucinations...

Oh no, there is no victory. Your summary is pretty good here. But the idea that Linux is provably less secure because old bugs were found is flatly wrong. They were found late, but they were indeed found. How many ancient bugs are lurking in proprietary software that nobody has found for positive reasons and made full disclosures of so affected parties know they need to mitigate? Nobody knows!

Server OSes are more likely to have older versions of software and then backport fixes. Desktop OSes are more likely to default to doing automatic updates, or at least hassling the user to do them.

What's more, you really have to know what you're doing to coax it into re-using code, rather than rewriting the same functionality with each prompt.

The only difference is that servers are more likely to have more outdated software.

Love of convenience, I guess. I often find it astonishing myself. The software might do 100 times more but it takes 1000 times as much memory...

Complete 24/7 tracking of you as an individual. They have to have a unique identifier for you and it has to be stored somewhere for this to work.

And we are just letting it happen because why the fuck not? Any politicians it's going to oppose this is also not going to play into our love of moral panics and knee-jerk reactions. Making them completely non-viable.