kirklennon @ kirklennon @kbin.social

Posts

0

Comments

333

Joined

2 yr. ago

The western Allies and Soviets both actively took Germany, coming in from either side and meeting in the middle. They split the country because they were already there. The Soviet Union never really made it to Japan proper. They took over Manchuria and Japan surrendered ASAP to the US alone once it became obvious that the only alternative was to surrender to both powers later and likely be split like Germany.

It’s worth highlighting that this was the immediate impetus for surrender. The atomic bombs were basically non-factors.

IIRC in Seattle it effectively depends on whether anyone cares enough to report you. If your neighbors don’t mind you gardening naked in your front yard then you’re fine. If they gripe about it then you have to put clothes on.

That’s not the case. You do not have to put on clothes just because your neighbors don’t like it. Gardening nude is fully legal even if someone complains.

Nudity itself is not obscene, only obscene actions can make it obscene.

They’re slowly transitioning into the type of megacorp you usually only see in science fiction.

Apple isn't technically a bank in this case, but even if they were, it's pretty common and not at all a dystopian sci-fi thing. Sony owns a bank. Hyundai owns a bank. In the US, GM made a bank over a century ago, spun it off in 2006 (it's now called Ally), realized that was a mistake, and bought an existing bank in 2010.

Where are the anti-war democrats?

Voting to send Ukraine all of the weapons and resources they can possibly use. That is the only legitimate anti-war stance. It's a remarkably black and white scenario where an authoritarian country invaded its democratic neighbor. Russia could end the war immediately simply by leaving. Ukraine, on the other hand, needs to actually win the war. Anything other than an absolute Ukrainian victory where Russia is forced out of all of Ukraine is a victory for war. The real-world anti-war position is that war must not be allowed to be an effective means of aggression. If war works, we get more war. When dictators learn that war doesn't work, we'll have less war. As long as Putin isn't willing to pull back his soldiers and abandon all claims to all Ukrainian land, the only other option is to defeat him in battle.

Anybody who opposes arming Ukraine is objectively pro-war because the only plausible outcome in that scenario is a Russian victory.

Developers are going to hate this, but it’s good for the rest of us.

Some, but not all. There's no reason a developer should have to explain why they're using UserDefaults. It's a local-only place for storing very small amounts of data. The data is created in the app and read only within the app. There are no privacy or other concerns in its use. It's just a tedious waste of everyone's time to provide a reason.

I thought it sounded interesting when it was new but the more I've learned, the more convinced I am that it's completely useless. I've never seen anything done on a blockchain that couldn't be done faster, cheaper, and more securely in a SQL database. Even the not-a-scam applications are ridiculous and fall apart upon examination. Blockchain as a definitive record of ownership? Absolutely not. There's no way to force a person to update a record. Lose your house in a bankruptcy? The sheriff on his way to evict you isn't going to care that you've got some NFT saying you still own the house. Anything involving contracts at all? If a court can't unilaterally update the blockchain record, then the record is unreliable. But if the government can unilaterally update a record, then you're not relying on community consensus and immutability in the first place.

Blockchain isn't useful for anything important, and it's not a logical choice for anything trivial aside from literally just playing with blockchain stuff for the sake of playing with blockchains. I think it's a dead-end technology.

Why would you allow a virtual assistance to spy on you constantly?

Because it’s not? A low-power process on my phone is listening for the wake word. When it hears other stuff, it ignores it. When it hears the wake word, it processes my request, tied to a separate anonymous identifier used only for Siri itself. I’m not really losing any privacy at all.

And as a side note, is there a way to kill Siri completely on IOS (not just go trough all app settings and disable siri there)?

It’s just the first two toggles (Listen for “Hey Siri” and Press Side Button for Siri) in the Siri & Search menu that you’d need to turn off. There’s not much to it.

They still intended to start scanning your photos and that is worrying.

They wanted to scan photos stored in iCloud. Apple has an entirely legitimate interest in not storing CSAM on their servers. Instead of doing it like every other photo service does, which scans all of your photos on the server, they created a complex privacy-preserving method to do an initial scan on device as part of the upload process and, through the magic of math, these would only get matched as CSAM on the server if they were confident (one in a trillion false-positives) you were uploading literally dozens of CSAM images, at which point they'd then have a person verify to make absolutely certain, and then finally report your crime.

The system would do the seemingly impossible of preserving the privacy of literally everybody except the people that everyone agrees don't deserve it. If you didn't upload a bunch of CSAM, Apple itself would legitimately never scan your images. The scan happened on device and the match happened in the cloud, and only if there were a enough matches to guarantee confidence. It's honestly brilliant but people freaked out after a relentless FUD campaign, including from people and organizations who absolutely should know better.

They moved the storage of encryption keys for Chinese users to servers in China instead of shutting down iMessage and Facetime.

These are totally separate things. Apple users in China can still use iMessage and FaceTime and those are still end-to-end encrypted. If you choose to store your iMessages in iCloud, those can be accessed by the government, but that's the same as they can in every other country. The UK's proposal is to directly break the security of iMessage itself, something worse than what China has done.

If your device locally analyzes your behavior and files, then Apple itself is not actually collecting and analyzing your data. The "locality" is a fundamental difference in who is doing what. If your private information never leaves your phone, your privacy is still fully maintained.

Apple refers to them as “portables” rather than “laptops” for this exact reason

They may use the term somewhere when they want to collectively refer to MacBooks and iPads, but they absolutely use the term “laptop.” Big letters at the top of the comparison chart on the MacBook Pro page: “Which laptop is right for you?” The tag line for the M1 MacBook Air: “The most affordable Mac laptop to get things done on the go.” The MacBook Air line, incidentally, no longer has vents at all.

When they released the iPhone X back in 2017 at $999, people were outraged at the price increase for the average iPhone price

I don't really remember it that way. It was explicitly presented as a bifurcation of the line. The iPhone 8 was the successor to the iPhone 7, with comparable pricing and the same year-over-year upgrades you'd expect. The iPhone X was positioned as a bleeding-edge offering for a price premium. Was there clickbait faux outrage and pearl-clutching at the price? Sure. Were actual customers outraged? No.

These specific prices are based on a single rumor, and even that was only "up to" $200 increases. Even if this latest "confirmation" were accurate, it could easily be $50 increases. A month ago Apple released a major update to the Mac Studio but kept the price the same, unveiled the 15" MacBook Air at a reasonable price, and dropped the price of the 13" MacBook Air. That doesn't really sound like a company that's about to announce a 15% price increase to their most popular product but rather one that's being quite sensitive to price pressure on buyers.

But in case that wasn’t enough of an iPhone vibe for you, the other big update that comes with this public beta is that you can now put widgets on your desktop. Widgets! ... Now, this is neat. It also strikes me as one of those iOS carryovers that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense on a computer.

Is the writer even aware that Apple first introduced widgets in 1984 as "Desk Accessories"? This isn't an iOS thing that carried over to the Mac; it's a Mac thing that went through a lot of iterations over the years, migrated to iOS, and then came back to the Mac in a form that's almost exactly the same as when they were originally introduced decades ago.

Apple refuses to implement RCS on their devices in a way that is compatible with non-Apple devices.

I think it's important to note that "RCS" in this context actually refers to a proprietary messaging platform by Google, running on Google's servers. There is no industry-standard RCS in use in America; it's just Google's forked version, which in practice is exactly as proprietary as iMessage. Nobody should expect Apple to implement someone else's proprietary messaging platform on their devices, especially one run by Google, which has the worst history of managing messaging platforms of any company on the planet.