I've started to see warnings in terminal when using keyed SSH, something along the lines of "vulnerable to store-now-decode-later attacks". I assume this is due to not using eliptic-curve codes in my PK generation?

The most recent crashes I've had were all due to external hardware. (usually a dock being unplugged) I haven't seen that recently though so maybe that was addressed.

I've also had issues in the past with not going to sleep / waking back up properly, but again haven't really seen that recently so maybe that too was addressed.

Pretty much 100% of my recent related issues have simply been "system's getting slow, and no my memory hasn't all leaked away, it just wants a restart", and so I DO restart it, and I get all my performance back. It's annoying, but not impactful. Not sure what's getting gummed up under the hood, I don't see anything getting logged or showing up in any monitoring tool.

I tend to push my machine pretty regularly though, and end up being coerced into rebooting about once a month.

I do a lot of photo manipulation, and I HAVE ran into a problem with Finder's QuickLook gradually getting slower after tens of thousands (yes really) of videos and images being quick-looked, but I can just kill the Finder's QuickLook process and it automatically bounces back fresh as a baby. So whatever "general slowness" issue I've been encountering after weeks of uptime could probably be fixed if I knew what needed to be bounced, but nothing is making itself obvious with high cpu time or memory use, so I just have to reboot to get it back.

A bit OT but I do find it a bit sad that windows has decided to do away with the traditional BSoD, not by making the OS more stable, but by hiding it when it happens. "Nothing to see here, everything's fine!" (NakedGun)

maybe not? Look at cache for example, there's L1, L2, and L3, each getting bigger and slower. Just because L2 is slower doesn't mean it doesn't get used.

Or look at some of the older storage techniques like hybrid drives. (such as 1tb of spinning platters, with 32gb of ssd)

Modern SSDs are even doing that. Watch the IO speed when you write a large file, see how it's fast to a point and then gets slow? that's a write buffer getting filled up.

Maybe the same technique could be used with ram, basically on the same lines as the VM files that unix systems (including Mac OS) use?

So there's plenty of precedent for adding higher latency storage, simply because the big increase in capacity is worth a little added latency. Carefully managing what you use it for greatly reduces the impact of the latency.

I suspect Windows supporters will claim Mac users are less intelligent, which would suggest they do MORE stupid things. And if stupid things correlate with crashes, Macs would crash more.

But they don't. So somebody is wrong about something, or there's more missing information.

Legally speaking, threats fall under "assault". If I raise my fist to you and step up and punch you, I'll probably be charged with "assault and battery". Where "assault" is the "imminent, credible threat of physical violence" of raising my fist and approaching you, and "battery" is my actually hitting you, (and if I miss or you dodge, that trades n the Battery for a second Assault charge) It's an important distinction because the laws and consequences differ

A threat of physical violence must be credible to be assault. That usually places the bar at "a reasonable person would genuinely fear for their safety as a result of the words and actions".

"Remote threats" are handled a bit differently. They used to go through the US Mail and so were addressed with "mailing threatening communications" (part of 18 U.S. Code) although that requires a lot more investment and consideration. Get out pen and paper, think about what you're going to write, draft the threat, stuffit in an envelope, add a stamp, take it to a mail box. That involves lots of time to reconsider, plus the investment of time, paper, envelope, stamp, and finally time to go mail it. (all while reconsidering and being able to change your mind) Most threats never made it into the mailbox as tempers cooled and emotion gave way to reason. But if it made it all the way through that process, a reasonable person would more easily be able to conclude the threat was credible

Now, it's fifteen seconds of "furiously type a line or two of rage and click Send." And it's handled by the FCC now since it's using an interstate communications network. There's a separate "legal bar" for it to pass, but it's essentially the same thing. The laws are much more recently authored, and so require a bit more since courts now rely more on letter of the law than interpretation by a judge. They're looking for Intent (specifically, are you venting, intimidating, or announcing your intentions), does the message describe a credible threat to the victim, and is it specific about what's being threatened.

"I'm gonna dance a jig the day someone ends you!" - lacks intent
"if I get my hands on you l'm going to launch you into space and watch you suffocate!" - not credible
"you're going to regret the day you pissed me off!" - not specific

(Law Abiding Citizen demonstrates masterful avoidance of legal classifications by careful choice of words)

Although as mentioned above, power and money can press a thumb down on the scales of justice and get an investigation launched regardless of established legal standards.

No argument.

Obviously. Until you add external input and command injection becomes a thing.

Agreed. General LLM tech is obviously a dead end, at least without some fundamental breakthrough. Specialist models may or may not fix hallucinations and command injection, but at least there seems to be a reasonable chance that they will or that other safeguards can be put in place.

Most people are not smart and cannot assess reality adequately. Hence I would say this is a fundamental product defect and should make the providers liable for any and all damage done. This is, after all, a product marketed to the general population, when it clearly should be experts-only.

While not surprising (LLMs are not reliable instruction followers and cannot be), this pretty much kills the idea of LLM-Agents in most usage scenarios. And it is even worse: As LLMs do not have a separation between data and instructions, this means that command-injection attacks seem to be getting even easier. Another reason that LLM-Agents are a very bad idea.

A truly non-lazy person, then, would have to conduct a detailed spectrographic assay of all of the pipes (or at least sufficient samples from each lot) to accurately determine the precise composition of each, because all of them contain impurities and aren't merely copper and phosphorous.

In general, getting a truly pure sample of almost any element is incredibly-hard, and outside of laboratories (and even in laboratories, most of the time) it just doesn't matter. In the case of transporting anti-protons, standard "pure" copper is apparently inadequate, because it's not pure enough.

Even with the reduced precipitation there's still plenty of water for residential and commercial use. The problem, at least where I live (Utah), is agriculture. 80% of our water goes to agriculture. It would be one thing if we were growing regionally-appropriate crops for local consumption, but nearly all of that agriculture is to grow alfalfa (a water-hungry crop that isn't appropriate for the high desert climate), and nearly all of that alfalfa is shipped out of state, much of it out of the country, to feed cattle elsewhere. China is one of the biggest buyers. Essentially, our farmers are selling the contents of our aquifers to the world.

If we had plenty of water, letting our farmers buy it at a deep discount and sell it to willing buyers elsewhere would be fine, just another commercial use of a local resource, which is what trade is all about. But we definitely don't have plenty of water.

The solution is simple and straightforward (though legally complicated): Don't discounts. Set the same price for water across the board, residential, commercial and agricultural. There can and should be minor differences in delivery cost, and surcharges for purification, but the base cost of the water should be set through a single government-managed market, probably at the state level, probably divided up by drainages (drainages with more abundant water will have cheaper water; if this creates an arbitrage opportunity for someone to pipe water between drainages, great!).

Yes, this would probably put the alfalfa farmers out of business, but that's good because growing alfalfa in the desert is a bad idea. It might also raise the price of local produce, but that's as it should be, putting agricultural water use directly in competition with other water use. If prices go up, people will find ways to be more efficient. Farmers may switch to drip irrigation. If you build too many houses for the available water supply, well, those houses are going to have very expensive water and residents are going to want to find ways to conserve -- and maybe the high cost of water will disincentivize new move-ins.

The bottom line is that efficiently allocating scarce resources is what markets are good at. The problem with water isn't that there are too many people or not enough water, the problem is that we don't properly allocate the water or encourage conservation in the right places. Trying to fix this through regulation rather than market pricing will always be subject to regulatory capture and will never be as efficient or as effective as just enabling a competitive market and letting it work.

There's no reason a smart TV MUST have an account with the manufacturer or seller unless they want to enshittify it.

You may want to have accounts with various streaming services or perhaps you just want it to stream video you have on a NAS.

To be fair, you don't have to DO anything criminal, you just have to be a suspect, or piss off someone with power and money. (like Patel) Then they get a court order, and then information is legally required to be handed over for investigation.

And so as long as you didn't actually do anything criminal, your identity should stay private and only visible to the investigators, and get swallowed by the system as the investigation gets closed. (unless above power/money pushes for a public arrest/hearing, regardless of merit)

Thunderbolt (4 etc) has been leading to things like external graphics cards and external PCI slot boxes hitting the market. This may end up taking a significant share of the "expandability" crowd away from the "internal upgrades" market.

I see this as especially significant with laptops. For years I've been using a large thunderbolt dock with my laptop at home, making it a pretty good desktop machine when I'm at home. It adds a 24" display, big external speakers and bass, camera, conference mic, external storage, gig ethernet, etc. And yet I can pull a single plug, stuff it in the bag, and hit the road with it, something not easy to do with a desktop computer. (not that it stopped us from hauling towers, monitors, keyboards, etc to LAN games in the 90s!)

I'm a little surprised I haven't seen performance CPUs or additional ram available via thunderbolt 4 yet. (or does it exist and I've just missed it?)

Maybe the next "mac pro" won't be a stand-alone computer, but instead it'll be a plug-in accessory that turns ANY mac into a mac pro?