I don't like ads either, but I do like that they (at least for now) have a paid tier with no ads. If there was an option to use google services at some paid tier, without being part of their ad network, I'd probably pay it. But there isn't and llm is as good as search these days (in many cases anyways) so I'm happy to jump ship. Piss off, google.

Trump in his first term was willing to go all-in on human spaceflight to mars...until he realized he couldn't get it done before the end of his term. Trump has always been interested in space stuff...but only if it's achievable within his term. This seems like a play to keep contractors employed and skills sharp until the next administration is seated, which will hopefully be willing to invest in goals longer than 4 years.

Unfortunately everyone picked an opinion two years ago, when AI was genuinely garbage beyond some basic bash scripts or a top 1000 bug/question on stack exchange (which mostly overlap). AI started getting really good in Dec '24, particularly spring '25 and by August 2025 even the $20/mo tier of chatgpt was starting to get legit as OpenAI started to try catching up with (now market leader) Anthropic and their blessed claude code. The 4.5/4.6 models released this year are nothing short of incredible, and the Qwen 3.5 series of models are right behind the state of the art models. Google is doing some stuff too but I'm kind of done giving them my money.
 
In 2-3 years we'll have found all 20,000 top reasons LLMs hallucinate things and solved for 95% of them
 
Creatives rallied against LLMs but as has been proven, nobody actually cares about making funny pictures of , they just want to know that they can.

>What's a better solution, if any?
 
Open source firmware

1. Fertilizer is made from methane, so that's also stuck there. This is a HUGE problem for countries like India.
2. Poor countries are already switching to 4 day work weeks to save fuel.
3. Iran is letting ships whose balances are settled in Yuan leave. That means the power of the petro-dollar is under serious threat.
4. Countries that can no longer get Iranian oil are now buying non-Iranian oil, which drives the price of ALL oil up. There's speculation that it will hit $200/barrel. That's more than 3x what it was over the last few years. That will affect the price of literally everything. All transportation costs go up, so costs for all goods go up.

At some point, the price will get high enough that some countries won't be able to buy it at all, they'll give up. At that point, some interesting things might happen, since the demand drop-off vs. the price drop off will cause a wobble in the price. People will start looking elsewhere for energy.

Solar and small-battery vehicles (e-bikes, e-scooters) might start taking off even more. You might not be able to buy petrol for your car, but your e-bike charges quickly and can still tow a few hundred pounds worth of stuff. Maybe BEVs adoption will become even MORE popular, since it's one less way you have to directly pay for petrol.

But this war is all con. 100%. Like, Trump didn't even fill up the oil reserves before going to war. China's been buying oil for MONTHS at low rates now, so they're actually the least impacted here, despite the fact that they get a lot of oil from Iran. That means they have zero impetus (not that they had much previously) to do anything about this. This is purely punishment for the USA. Those are expensive weapons being wasted on Iranian targets (in some cases, planes that are actually just paint on the ground). It might be possible for the USA to open up the strait again, but the second they leave, Iran can just close it off again. This might be the most forever of the forever wars, or it might just be an outright defeat for the USA.

This whole thing is such a mess on so many different axes. I didn't even get into how Israel is driving a lot of this, and it's all because Netanyahu is a corrupt warmonger. He's firing in all directions, and he's relying on the USA to protect him.

It wasn't just to maintain value for their corporate properties, it's because they love seeing people in the office, doing their bidding. They'd be able to save so much on capital expenditure if everyone worked from home, but they keep people in the office because they looooooove to see who they're oppressing.

Yeah, there was just fuel rationing and it FUNDAMENTALLY changed the car industry for decades? Big cars went out of style and Japanese econoboxes became a thing because people wanted to spend less on gas?

I get it, you were a KID in the 70s, so you didn't really understand what was going on and what the challenges were. But you could go and read about them now if you want--you're probably north of 50, I think you're ready to learn the truth.

Their stock price cratered when everyone realized you can vibe code a ticketing system very easily, which is what jira is at the end of the day. Cutting payroll is the easiest way to shed costs

TouchID is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. I have a Mac Mini and I have no way to get TouchID on this thing and it doesn't make it a bad computer with no security.

The extra storage is the REAL thing you want for MacOS. 256GB is almost unworkable, IMO. It's what I have on this Mac Mini and I've had to fight pretty hard to keep my disk space free, even with a bunch of external drives hanging off of it.

For a laptop, the chip is fine. The A18Pro is faster than the M1 Mac Mini that I'm typing this on, and the M1s are all still getting along just fine--I'd like a newer machine because I compile code now and then and it's punishing on this thing, but for day-to-day use, it's still going strong. The REAL limiting factor on these machines is storage. 256GB is *barely* enough. macOS is bad about allowing you to offload certain things to external drives without jumping through some hoops, and once the space starts to run out, the OS flips out pretty hard. So storage management is kind of always an ongoing thing.

But if you're mostly using it for a bit of schoolwork, web browsing, some spreadsheets, and you rely on the cloud for all your photos and music, it's probably fine.

Seriously, this is a very good deal. I do agree that they should have physically marked the USB 2.0 port SOMEHOW, but other than that, this was a decent set of compromises to make to drop the price.

It's making a comeback. It's WAY easier than painting, and the glues are better so it's easier to get the paper off afterwards if you want to take it down.

There are now THREE core types:
Super (previously 'Performance')
Performance (new)
Efficiency (same)

The M5 Pro and up chips have a mix of 'Super' and 'Performance'.
The base M5 chip has a mix of 'Super' and 'Efficiency', but has no (new) 'Performance' cores.

It's not straightforward, but it's not the same as Apple making the chips worse and renaming the cores so you don't notice.

I have Apple Music and it's FINE, but I'm annoyed at how often I have to authenticate myself for my own goddamn music. Now, a lot of the music is stuff that I already own that I've uploaded to Apple to match for me, but I want to be able to say that I own my music, that I can take my ball and leave any time I want.

The main reason I still use Apple Music/iTunes is that there is STILL no music player with smart playlists as good. I still have playlists that are things like, "select 25 songs by least recently played from the compound list of other playlists that are selected by rating and play frequency". I've looked, and nothing else is remotely as powerful. But I want to be in control of that music so if one day I decide I'm gonna put it on an SD card and just play music only on a physical device hooked up to speakers and never use my phone again or whatever, I have that option.

And I love some of the artists whose albums are in my library as streaming only. I want them to get paid for the amount of enjoyment I derive, and I know that streaming rates are absolute garbage. Return me to the days of the iTunes Music Store and CD Baby and Bandcamp. (I still buy from Bandcamp quite a lot. More this year.)

Last fall I bought a knock-off iPod mini with the intentions of switching off but haven't come up with a good way to load my daily podcasts on it before work each morning (without some manual step). I keep meaning to quit it, but haven't managed to do it yet as playing music on the smart speaker is part of our kid's bedtime routine. I loathe spotify, i loathe their not-an-ad ads, I loathe the pop ups, i hate everything about it. If they go out of business so much the better it will finally force me off their cursed platform.

Why would you not leverage open source software in this way? That's the whole point, right? "I don't like the direction this thing is going, I'm forking this thing, and fixing all the problems I see with it". It's no accident the "fork" feature on github is so prominent.