Both OSX and iOS are good. And if you're willing to lock yourself in the walled garden, the ability of laptop, tablet and phone to work together is very nice. I'm not so willing; in fact, I don't own any Apple hardware these days. But Apple should be lauded for their integrated system, and then excoriated for their paranoid money-grubbing which keeps them from allowing non-Apple systems into the garden, and for their inability to build their own secure-but-flexible cloud services.

Apple designs amazing hardware and great software. But when we get to online/networked/cloud... It's kinda shit, yeah. Which is notable because other companies have done extremely well in that space, to the point that Google's good-but-imperfect network services get more public complaints than Apple's dear-god-why network services. We just expect it now.

I heard about this a couple of years ago when the court case was still going on, the podcast Behind the Bastards did a 2 parter on it, and it's just absolutely *weird* that anyone at eBay gave two shits about this newsletter. 99.9999% of eBay users on both sides of the transaction would have never heard of the newsletter, much less read it, so who cares? And the CEO involved here, he's not eBay's founder, he's like hired gun #12 or whatever for the slot so it's not like they're slagging his lovingly handcrafted lifelong labor of love or anything.

The BtB podcast eps on it are worth a listen if you're into that sort of thing, provides a lot of detail.

Eh, kinda, established case law, even citizens have limited rights near the border (with "near the border" being interpreted quite loosely). US citizens can refuse to give a password, but the govt can refuse to return the device and can make your life very difficult. This case, where data was destroyed, doesn't fall under existing case law, but if it gets to SCOTUS as long as a Republican is in the white House I expect SCOTUS to give all power, all the time, to the executive branch and none to us lowly peons, err, citizens.

Of course, ICE is known for laughing at laws and judicial rulings, so YMMV, IANAL, good luck and stay safe.

TOTP has the huge disadvantage of being a pain for non tech folk to understand and use. The selfie-video is less secure than TOTP, but more secure than SMS texts. Passwords are reused between different sites.

If you are happy with your security, keep using it. And if you have a friend or relative who use ones password for every site, switch them to the video.

That... didn't happen. What you are probably thinking about is that during COVID, during both the Trump and Biden administrations (so your "sides" comment is laughable), there was a govt group which identified misinformation about COVID (yum yum gullible ivermectin!) and notified the social network owners. Those social network owners (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc) added this data to their own internal checks, and decided to allow, deny, or demonitize based on their internal decisions. So the govt notified about potentially false information, but the decision to do anything was 100% made by the individual companies. And while some countries treat "suggestions by the govt" as law, the US did not (until CBS cancelled Colbert to make conservatives happy, so huh, your "sides" comment does have some validity!)

So "control what people were allowed to discuss" was false until the current administration.

20 years ago, which was a few years after conservatives supported the Patriot Act which greatly increased govt surveillance of US citizens? Yeah, no real changes. The folks who want the police state now are the folks who have always wanted the police state (mostly through some idiotic idea that THE OTHER will be persecuted, but never themselves).

MORE socialism? Where's ANY socialism in the US worth the label?

Also, that capitalism is working out so well. For the thousand or so people at the pinnacle. The average people not so much, but who cares about them, they're poors, right?

"That is not how it works.
LLMs are not trained on thousands of projector models, how do you come to that idea?"

Where in the hell did I say it was 'trained on thousands of projector models'? I implied it was trained on the ARTICLES at Projector Central. You know, the ones have relevant review data in them that the search engines also scrape that your LLM also relies on? The ones that are no longer being written at the same rate because their views and ad revenue are down, the ones that will eventually stop when the site dies?

And it's going to get worse. Much of what they've trained their models on is user created information from a lot of sites that are now seeing sharp dropoffs in traffic because people aren't going there for info/answers any more, so there's less incentive to post new information and many of those sites will just go completely stale.

A perfect example is projectors. 5 years ago if you wanted a projector for a price range, you'd go to projectorcentral.com and a few other sites for detailed information. Now most people say to an LLM "I have $1000 to spend on a projector, what should I get?" And the LLM uses the information it trained on from projectorcentral and other sites to answer. Projectorcentral's traffic is dropping and so are their posts so the LLMs are training less and less from actual informed data and more from marketing crap. And it all enshittifies.

They've been trained to believe that anything said by their bubble is Truth, anything said by anyone else is lies. Which is why yesterday's Truth (release Epstein files) is today's lies (don't release, oops Trump is in it lots and lots).

"The truth has a well-known liberal bias" -a smart cancelled man

Come for the voting, stay for the gerrymandering!

But yes, quite a few Ohio folks (and other Americans) are getting the day they voted for.

But conspiracy theorists need both the government and the media to be simultaneously incompetent (so they cannot be trusted) and hypercompetent (so they can organize a illuminati-level conspiracy including tens of thousands of conspirators with no leaks).

It's the only way that conspiracy theorists can feel in control of their pointless lives, by loudly "proving" that someone else has all the control. I don't get it, but whatever.

Ivermectin is also given to humans who get worms, though in very carefully controlled doses and courses; ivermectin is a neurotoxin, so probably no change for MAGAts but in large doses a problem for rational humans. Ivermectin from Tractor Supply: yeah, sell it, they won't get any more gullible with nerve damage.

Since it doesn't really work unless you already own an Apple phone, I can say that there is no way that this is the "best map app" for most of humanity. There are many mapping apps that work on any modern phone.

Huh, looks like Apple maps now works in a web browser. Not useful for a mobile device, but still far more functional than in the past.