I enjoy your contrarianism, tsunamifury, but I'd enjoy it more (and I think you'd get more thoughtful engagement) if you weren't quite so spiky about it. (This goes for a couple of your recent posts.)
I think it's a stretch to call Apple's ARM transition "planned obsolescence". The M-series chips are very clear improvements on what came before and there is a clear rationale for that transition.
We're talking here about an OS that hasn't even come out yet, that will get years of security support, for computers that Apple hasn't been selling for several years now. Seems pretty reasonable.
I said "manufactured," not "planned." I don't think Apple intended to do this at the outset. Tim Cook wasn't leaned back in an office chair, twirling a moustache saying "yes, let's make every mac made before 2019 SUCK!"
If it was planned, Rosetta 2 would have never existed in the first place. It would have been a qemu fork haphazardly crammed into Xcode.
There was no "planning" here. Here's how I imagine it went: a developer whined about tech debt, management seized an opportunity to generate revenue, neither party considered, yknow, humans, and now we're here.
The average user cares about their fans going full-blast when running some garbage electron app and their battery life being shit. You're just being dense.
Back when these machines were released they were hallowed as being the ultimate in mobile computing. What happened here what did not happen to other Intel-based machines from that era?
For developers, the difference is like night and day.
My 2019 MacBook Pro used to sound like a jet plane taking off whenever I did any sort of build. On a bad day, I could've baked some cookies on it. Admittedly, the corporate spyware that was constantly scanning every single file didn't help matters.
Eerily similar story here. My wife was using her 2017 MBP (the one they got sued over) and she adored it until Tahoe suddenly caused Chrome to run like hot garbage. I bought her an open-box M3 Air. She likes the color. It doesn't provide any more value to her life than her 2017 MBP did, and yet we're out $1000 because Apple said so.
So on the one hand you are so much aware of the obsolescence issue and on the other hand you just decided that upgrading a 2017 MBP to Tahoe is a good idea? I am on a M4 Pro Mac mini and it is still running Sequoia.
They all suck. There are no good polities in the Middle East. At this stage into the genocide-counter-genocide cycle, there are no clean hands left.
We need to switch to renewables asap, and just withdraw completely from the Middle East. They all want to kill one another for fanatical or ethnic reasons, and we clearly have no capacity to stop them. We should insulate ourselves from the region and restrict any involvement to humanitarian assistance.
> Theocracies oppressing their own people while aiming for expansion, particularly, must be dealt with.
> Else, they will eventually oppress the entirety of humanity.
We poured trillions of dollars into Afghanistan trying to do just this. It failed. It is not within the power capability of any state to bring liberty to people that do not want it.
The era of global internationalism you're alluding to is receding. If the Iranians and the Saudis want to nuke one another, that is very sad, but we will not be able to stop them in the long run. The best we can do is to keep as far away from any such conflict as possible.
The world are not children, to be minded by us. They're autonomous humans with agency, many of whom sadly happen to be blood-thirsty fanatics, chomping at the bit for a chance to do some genocide. As demonstrated by the last fifty years of Western policy failure in the third world, we do not have the capacity to fix this and it is folly to try.
it's a bit too late, might even make things worse when all the petro-states start going hungry and desperate. I suspect in the timeframe it takes to wean off of oil as fuel source, there will be other resource issues arising such as water and climate-driven migration.
That's how all education works. It's the spiral model of teaching. In one grade you learn a bit of this and a bit of that, then the next year you retread, and flesh all those things out by adding more depth and complexity. Rinse and repeat every grade.
What would the alternative look like? Should a foreign language course spend three years on Nouns, just to make sure they're comprehensively covered, before you ever see your first Verb?
> "We're unable to serve this website without compromising your privacy... "
More accurately, "we do not have the staff or funds to figure out what every single random law around the globe requires of us, and since foreign countries are not a realistic advertising market for a local Michigan newspaper, there's really no reason for us to try."
Well, you don't have to do any of that stuff if you either are upfront about selling user data and ask if it's OK, or if you just don't do that stuff at all.
But to know that you would have to study the laws of other countries or in this case EU which costs money and in this case is not an obviously beneficial investment.
Why not? That continent is not their target audience.
It probably wasn't worth the effort to block foreign countries just from random unnecessary compute cost to serve a site to them, but when those countries start being serious about penalties you could face for serving their residents? Now it's justifiable to block non-US countries.
I'm sure they (or whoever sells the product they use to publish) did get legal advice, of the "what is the cheapest way to ensure this isn't an issue for us" and the response was "block 'em all, let God VPN them out."
After all, using a VPN doesn't absolve companies of the GDPR.
No, it can also be saying "I simply have too many other things to do than worry about what the correct data retention or ban appeal or DSA statement of reasons requirement or DSA statement of reasons transparency DB API or UK Ofcom age verification requirements or..."
Sometimes if you're just one person and the EU isn't a core market and you are a small business or non-profit, it's easier to just say, ok you know what, no thanks to all this for now.
That's absurd. Are you, right now, compliant with all relevant laws and regulations in Turkmenistan? Do you have legal advice to back that up? Why not? Is it because you're a criminal?
No! Of course not! It's because you don't care about Turkmenistan, to the extent you've never even bothered to look up what is and is not legal there, let alone get legal advice about it. That's a perfectly fine answer. This random Michigan newspaper doesn't care about the EU. That's a perfectly fine answer too.
No Turkmen official will approach you to ask that question. You would need to anticipate what the important questions are to comply with Turkmenistan's laws (or hire somebody to figure this out).
That would be rather surprising to the large number of law schools that teach European Law as a core subject, such as the Panthéon-Sorbonne (Droit européen), Bologna U (Diritto Europeo), and Humboldt U (Europarecht).
Also not a "European law" by any measure or understanding, that's a international organization that does police cooperation across the continent (and further), it isn't even a law enforcement agency... Not exactly sure how you could confuse that with laws, but here we are.
If your site is covered by GDPR and you do not have a physical presence in the EU you have to appoint someone in the EU to receive mail on your behalf, so people who want to make GDPR requests by mail can write to them. See Article 27.
There are services that will do this for you. Last I checked they were typically in the neighborhood of a couple hundred Euros a year.
Whether or not GDPR applies to a site not in the EU is somewhat subjective. It comes down to whether you envisaged serving people in the EU.
If your site does not need EU visitors it can make some sense to block them. That provides evidence that you did not envisage serving people in the EU, and then you don't have to figure out if you need to be hiring a service in the EU to receive GDPR mail.
>since foreign countries are not a realistic advertising market for a local Michigan newspaper
This may be true for in house ads, but there are ad networks that already are able to personalize ads and have ad inventory for such foreign countries.
reply