ranson

AniMill said:

“ Apple denied any wrongdoing…” 

Ummm, I have great respect for most Apple products and business practices, but the Butterfly Keyboard was an unmitigated disaster in design and durability. I understand they have to deny culpability, but they should send this bill to Jony Ive. Maybe this (along with the Apple Watch tree removal fiasco) were the real reasons they pushed him out, and cut ties to his new venture.

To be clear, there is no wrongdoing here. Wrongdoing in the legal sense means with nefarious intent. Clearly Apple did not intend to make everyone's life miserable with this terrible keyboard design.

I'm glad AI decided to write about this project. The story first appeared on ArsTechnica last night (where Malcom probably first learned of it but chose not to give a shoutout), and over there they have much more detail into how it was made. It's not just that the dude designed and 3D printed a chassis, but rather that he demonstrated a very high level skill across multiple disciplines. The recreation took many months of painstaking work. The hardware and electrical engineering involved is particularly impressive. For example, the 10" 4:3 LCD screen he procured came with a nonfunctioning CFL backlight; it was refurbished and updated with more modern LED backlights. I definitely recommend watching the full video if you have 48 minutes to spare.

"[RCS] is too little, too late unless Google makes significant changes and improvements"

Andrew, I appreciate the article, but i'm curious about this statement. What significant changes to RCS should Google make? You don't bother to elaborate on any of that in the article. You mentioned that RCS doesn't support e2ee out of the box, but Google has already added it for one-on-one messages while groups are still in the clear. Is there anything else?

DAalseth said:

The bride and groom get to say what they and the wedding party wears. Other than “formal” or “semi-formal” they don’t get to say what the attendees wear. 

13485 said:

 Huh. I had no idea something I wear under a shirt sleeve and a jacket sleeve would be considered to be so offensive to delicate fashion sensibilities.

Or maybe we go to the wrong weddings, the kind where people have fun no matter what they wear. Everybody gotta be somewhere I guess.

We really don't have enough info about the situation to judge anyone here. Perhaps the wedding is 10 or 15 people? In a smaller wedding, it's absolutely acceptable to ask guests to dress a certain way. In this case, they're not telling the attendees what to wear; they're asking them not to wear one specific item (and one that is not even an article of clothing). I think that is fine.

I've been to beach weddings where the dress code was sandals, khaki pants and a linen short-sleeve buttondown. A watch on my arm would've been visible in group photos, which is maybe what they're trying to avoid here.

Or maybe the bride or groom work for an Apple competitor and want to avoid judgement from their colleagues who attend or see pictures.

Or maybe the wedding is being filmed for a professional documentary, where name-brand items (logo visible or otherwise easily identifiable) are prohibited.

There are a million possibilities here. And since none of us are invited, it's not really our business or place to judge how random strangers conduct their private wedding.

In the end, the only thing that is important is that the bride and groom have a perfect, drama-free day that leaves them with a lifetime of happy memories. The sole job for the guests is to help ensure that outcome; meaning, put a smile on your face and do what the bride and groom ask on their special day. I'm not sure this guy tweeting about the dress code accomplishes that, given that it's all over the internet now.

ALSO - have you looked at this guy's twitter feed? He believes the 2020 election was stolen; that the UHC murderer went crazy from the covid-19 vaccine; that Canada should not be a country; that Roblox is for pedophiles; that climate change is a hoax. Clearly an unreliable narrator who is thirsty for attention/clicks, which William happily gave him.

For the "Microsoft sucks, this is their fault and they should have never let it happen" crowd - 

1 - Yes, Windows has historically been terribly insecure and full of bugs for 30 years.  2 - This incident was not Microsoft's fault.  3 - Both things can be true at the same time.

CrowdStrike is a third party security solution that many companies pay for, just like others use Symantec or McAfee security solutions. Microsoft has nothing to do with CrowdStrike, just like they have nothing to do with Symantec. CrowdStrike's Falcon service (which is what failed) is not something that just comes on every Windows machine or is even sold by Microsoft. It's not something Joe User can just install on their personal home computer. A company's enterprise IT team installs Falcon via Group Policy to its fleet of Windows and Mac machines, because they pay CrowdStrike a license for it. In this case, CrowdStrike pushed out an update to their own software that was faulty for Windows machines. So, at least in this case, if you are blaming Microsoft, you need to check your ignorance.

foregoneconclusion said:

LOL…you can play NBA2K on ATV but they can’t get their emulator to run?

The difference is that a download of NBA2K from the app store will include all of the game assets in the app, so the game itself is not subject to this max 500K limitation and will happily play. Conversely, emulators can't ship with actual games (ROMs) in the app distribution (since they are copyrighted). The user must load the game ROMs into the system, and Apple does not provide a persistent storage solution for downloadable content or misc file like these ROMs.

So to be clear, the emulators work and runs just fine as-is. But imagine a situation where after a few weeks of everything going great, the AppleTV decides to just randomly delete some or all of the ROMs that the user had loaded in.

That is what can happen and why there is a deterrent to developing apps/games on AppleTV that make use of DLC. This is not just a problem for emulators, but for any app or game that has downloadable content separate from the core app distribution. The same can happen to you on streaming video apps that allow downloads for offline viewing. Those downloads are not guaranteed to be around if the device decides to purge the cache. Apple should just allow up to 10GB (space permitting) for persistent data files.

As it stands in October 2024, certificates have a lengthy lifespan of about 13 months. 

The lifespan of TLS certificates can actually be between 1 day and 13 months (or longer if you roll your own Certificate Authority), and it varies from solution to solution. Most places go with exactly 1 year because it is easier to remember the same day every year.

Anyone using a modern public cloud solution (CloudFlare, AWS, etc.) to operate their web offering will not have any problems with increasing the cadence of TLS renewal and the overhead involved, because the cloud provider handles it automatically behind the scenes. So anyone complaining that it is too much work to renew more frequently has chosen not to use the available public cloud automations for this and has also chosen not to invest in an alternative or homegrown automated certificate renewal solution. Instead, they are manually renewing and loading certificates - in an age where good systems administrators do everything possible to avoid manual deployments and the potential for human error that comes with it.

What a ridiculous, misinformed, clickbait article. Nobody's thermostats are being tampered with. They opted into a program that allows this, and in exchange they receive financial perks on their power bill (including the power company providing the smart thermostats to them for free). This article needs a major overhaul, or to be retracted completely.

I have been reading AI for over 20 years, but if you keep churning out trash like this, you will quickly fall off of my bookmarks. There are plenty of other reputable sites covering Apple that post the same news as you do, just as timely. Clearly they are more informed about the topics they are reporting.

Engadget similarly posted a trash story about smart thermostats a few years back (here), and I promptly removed them from my news feed and have not been back.

If anyone plans to use this, I have one recommendation, which is to "git init" your project and commit your own changes before letting an AI edit your code. Do this even if you just plan to work on the project locally and are not planning to push it up to github or some other remote location. The reason is because, just like collaborative coding with another human, it is important to know what was changed and when. Doing this will allow you to see (via VS Code's built-in git diff feature) exactly what lines were changed, and easily discard those changes in the event that GPT has introduced a defect or other undesirable outcome in your code.

Just wow, Andrew. You mentioned Secure or Security 4 times in this article to describe WiFi QR Codes. Please educate yourself.

PSA:    Using WiFi QR Codes does not secure your network or improve network security. They are a convenience-only feature.

Here are the facts:

• As @madprof73 stated, the QR code is actually an encoded (not encrypted) string of text that includes the network name and password. So saying the QR Code is secure is the same as suggesting a base64 or rot13 encoded string of the WiFi credentials is secure. Anyone can decode the QR code to its text value and see the credentials in plaintext, the same way an iPhone, iPad or Android device decodes the QR code to capture and input the credentials.
• Scanning the QR code and connecting to the WiFi stores the WiFi credentials into the user's Keychain, so they can then retrieve the credentials via KeyChain Access at any time
• The point of WiFi QR codes then, is simply for users to be able to connect to the WiFi without having to go through the process of manually transcribing the password with the device's virtual keyboard, character-by-character. They ensure that the password is entered correctly, seamlessly and without human error. That's it.
• In Andrew's example of an AirBNB rental, the owner would need to provide the credentials in plaintext alongside the QR code anyway, because most people would want to connect their laptop, nintendo switch, etc., which may not support WiFi QR Codes or even have a camera at all.