I have a distant family connection to Santa Fe and have visited a number of times. Lovely place.

What always strikes me is the history of the city and region. Founded in 1610, it's one of the earliest European cities in the Americas.

When reading the history of American Indian sites, so many of them prospered at times for decades (or more) and then declined with ecological shifts, i.e., droughts. The greater regional area had a population in the thousands or tens of thousands at most, and that fluctuated widely. The population of Santa Fe was as low as 5,000 people at the start of the 20th century. It was a small place! But, that's probably, realistically, a lot closer to the actual carrying capacity of the land.

Desert. Too many people. Not enough water.

Something has to give!

China has been a great success story in many, many ways, but they have now passed the point of "easy gains." Central planning, as with all things, works--until it doesn't. In retrospect, it seems like they held onto the one-child policy for too long.

China's population is massive and has historically been massive (relative to the rest of the world). When the Founders were signing the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia (population circa 30,000) and the 13 British colonies had a population between 1.5 and 2 million, China's population was probably over 300 million. Anything that happens in China is massive!

China should be commended for their efforts to grow the middle class, though I feel the evidence is not entirely there yet. China's population percentage that's middle class is still dramatically smaller than the EU, US, Japan, etc. Potentially even Russia. (The Soviet Union is another great success story for pulling an absolutely massive people out of literal serfdom and into the middle class.)

Today, China's total fertility rate is reported as one of the lowest in the entire world--0.93 in 2025. And that's if you believe the reported numbers. East Asia is being hit very, very hard by crashing reproductive rates. It's happening all over the world, but China, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, etc., have just crashed.

Stagnating can mean many things (population growth, cultural growth, scientific growth) and I'm talking specifically population as the rest is downstream of that.

I wonder how this is different from....child actors and actresses? Child beauty pageants? Etc. Plenty of parents financially benefit in some way from their kids. Could, or should, Macaulay Culkin be able to get Home Alone taken down? I don't know.

I'm all in favor of allowing now-adults to clean the slate. I think your philosophy is a good one, and it's one I try to follow.

A guy I know has a troubled kid. He posted so many intimate details of that kid's life from birth through age about 15--everything from daily happenings, getting in trouble at school, what special needs camps the kid was attending, how upset he and his wife as parents were, what kind of events triggered the kid to have meltdowns, etc. He was also a paid blogger for GeekDad and way overshared there too. I was always appalled, but it took the kid basically telling the dad to fuck off and stop broadcasting all the details of the kid's life before anything changed.

Some (most?) people just cannot handle social media.

I'm also a happy Apple One subscriber. I will have to check it out again. Thanks!

Apple Maps was truly bad for many years. I switched from Google Maps maybe about 5 years ago. I try out Waze and Google Maps again every now and then, but at this point I generally prefer Apple Maps. I rarely find any large routing differences. In my neighborhood, Apple Maps is actually more correct. I've submitted a correction to Google Maps probably a dozen times (over more than a decade) for a road listing that is just totally wrong, and it's never changed. I submitted it to Apple and it was fixed within about 3-4 months.

Someone who actually uses News?! I think I clicked into it about twice before I uninstalled it and never looked back. Is it of any value??

I use Yelp because it's become the de facto registry of restaurants, open hours, etc., but I feel that at this point it's an objectively bad experience. More and more ads. Inability to exclude certain cuisine types. And did we really need politics and cancel culture coming to restaurants because of something an employee or owner or partner may or may not have said? I'm so sick of social media interactions dehumanizing everything.

As with Netflix, Facebook, and many other sites, the (stated) goal has gone from giving you recommendations that you will want to recommendations that drive engagement and produce money from sponsors. Blech.

Sounds fun. I've been very tempted to get a maxed out Mac Mini and do some local model experimentation.

I've asked multiple people, in multiple places, the same thing, and I have yet to get an answer!

I'm completely baffled, and I'm a daily LLM user!

Very interesting interview, thanks for sharing. Amazing that that goes back to 2005.

(Also of minor interest that both Eric Schmidt and Charlie Rose were accused of being sex pests, with legal proceeding still or recently ongoing.)

I'm happy that (until relatively recently) adventure was still bundled with FreeBSD installs. It's a pkg today.

Ken Williams, formerly of Sierra Entertainment, oversaw the production of a 3D remake just a couple of years ago. I've never played it, but it seems to get decent+ reviews.

So, you jump into a thread specifically about Apple supporting old devices but next you say "numbers are irrelevant" when they don't match your narrative. You make bombastic claims like "if we stop bending over for them, we can bring them to heel. They should not be allowed to abandon devices they could easily support when any significant number of people are still using them" but won't even attempt to articulate what your demand actually is. Seemingly, supporting 11+ year old devices and 5 major OS revisions is not sufficient. Forget Apple, if that gets your dander up, support is an issue for almost all developers.

Your statement has real costs that must be born by someone. Supporting more than a decade of devices (with multiple device releases each year) and five OS revisions (and maintaining build systems, testing systems and staff, etc.) is not a simple operation.

Regulations are very easy to impose through anti-corporate diatribes, when you ignore costs and consequences.

Apple was the context of the other post, but you were modded down for a stupid comment and not because of anything about Apple.

I'm still curious to see your answer.

Sure, since you missed it in my post, here's what I already asked you:

From your post, directly replying to OP about Apple, it's clear that you believe Apple is egregiously guilty of breaking your rules and "we [need to] stop bending over for them, we [need to] bring them to heel." (Nice.) Apple currently supports 11+ years of devices and 5 major OS software revisions. Well under 1% of iOS users are running something that is not currently supported.

So, what can Apple "easily support" that they are not currently supporting, and define exactly for the purposes of your rule what "any signfigicant number of people" is.

We're on the same page. Enshittification is kind of unavoidable because the vast majority of people go along with it. I'm sure I do too, in ways that I'm not criticizing!

I pirated software when I was a kid. As an adult today I buy licenses to free software, subscribe to patreons or substacks of people who produce content I use or follow, etc. It's not a ton, but I try to do my part to support individuals.

With the Spruce Eats example, it's not absolute junk. I'm sure some recipes on that site are great. But they are loaded with SEO junk, and Spruce Eats is owned by People mag that also owns All Recipes, Southern Living, Food & Wine magazine, etc. My longtime favorite cooking site was Serious Eats--and it sold to People magazine in 2020.

There are efficiencies to this situation, and it's certainly more profitable for People to not have competition, but the end result is bland, corporate, annoyingly SEO-packed, and it makes Serious Eats, All Recipes, Food & Wine, Spruce Eats, etc., all feel the same.

And yeah, everyone, self included, is complicit. It's not purelty a regulatory problem.