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.

- hosting child sexual abuse material and taking a year to remove it
- creating a means for sex traffickers to turn their victims into $$$
- providing a means to sell sexual content of others (e.g revenge porn) without consent

I've seen a lot of comments here in discussion to gig work where it's considered exploitive for Uber/Lyft to not provide health coverage and other benefits, minimum pay accounting for externalities like vehicle wear, etc. Does OF provide any of that?

They can certainly be "better" than other porn sites in ways (although the lack of any physically present third party seems like a major exploitation risk, per links above) but that isn't itself some moral achievement. The guy who peddles crack is doing less harm than the guy who peddles heroin but I don't think he's due for any citizenship awards.

And OF is absurdly profitable so if they really wanted to engage in a humanitarian mission to make porn "ethical" they have lots of financial buffer to combat exploitation. It's clearly not their objective.

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

Allow me to rephrase with exactly the same meaning, "The problem is customers could receive a $2 discount for coming in on the low-demand day." Are you sure that is... bad?

Stuff like this effectively winds up very economically progressive because people for whom that discount matters will go to the extra effort to get it and people with high-incomes won't care and will effectively subsidize the low price. What do you think that $2 coupon from the newspaper is doing? Setting up exactly the same $16.99 vs $14.99 price differential.

Conversely, consider on Saturday the person who absolutely needs the tomatoes to finish a dinner already in progress can pay the high-demand price and the person who was just thinking about things nice to keep stocked in the pantry can wait, vs pricing low so that the item is already out-of-stock from indifferent shoppers when that person who really needs it walks in.

It's easy to sell people a story in which price differentiation is a means of screwing them over but it is just as often to their direct benefit. People implicitly accept the good of this for things they already experience like coupons, but anything new sounds scary.

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.