AppleZulu

loopless said:

We have one of these, and it's the only way to bring our garage door into HomeKit - the garage door uses RF to communicate with the bridge.  It has been very reliable in general with only one off-line incident in several years.

I'm not sure what those other 99% of people are doing? 

It’s not the only way. I use a combination of the Bond Bridge device and an Eve door sensor. 

Hewing to “the narrative” is the most dangerous aspect of mainstream media right now. Put simply, reporters and editors spend inordinate amounts of time reading and reacting to social media. When a news item starts to trend, they all race to affirm the trending thing with sources (some spend less time bothering with sources) and push out reports that fit “the narrative,” which are then link-posted on twitter, further affirming the trending item as both “significant” and “factual.” This is literally an algorithm-based human confirmation-bias feedback loop. At its most basic, this is dangerous because it promotes things as important that may not actually be important, and it confuses feedback-loop repetition with factual verification.

What makes this effect truly dangerous is its susceptibility to manipulation by those with agendas. For instance, FoxNews does run stories based on talking points established by their management. In some cases, the talking points are meant to promote specific political ideas. In others, they are meant to capture the attention of their viewers as a means to distract them from noticing disfavored information in the news. So Fox runs their talking points, then promotes them on social media, and they’re picked up and re-shared by conservative politicians and other like-minded people. That feeds the algorithms with trending data, and primes the pump to generate a “narrative.” Soon after, mainstream media is responding to things that “people are saying” as though they are both important and given fact.

In this case if, as has been suggested by others here (I have not independently verified the timeline), FoxNews started running with the Apple security update as a distraction from other news, it simply followed the well-worn path and became “the narrative.” Information of this sort can be particularly vulnerable to such narrative-based spin-up because the mainstream reporters have no idea how computers work or what actually constitutes a critical vulnerability. It sounds scary so it must be both important and true. It also makes great click-bait, so everyone is happy. 

Using a tape measure on your wrist is perhaps low-tech and vaguely inelegant, but calling watch band sizing the “single most confusing choice buyers have to make” is just a bit (or a lot) hyperbolic, isn’t it?

I’m imagining a slow motion, black-and-white Ronco commercial clip of a complete imbecile getting hopelessly tangled up in a tape measure. 

I mean, the folks at Edison Labs would’ve been fascinated by the trick of putting three channels in one plug, and at the manufacturing advances required to miniaturize the plug. (Even more than that, they’d be amazed by the ability to travel back in time to show them a headphone plug…)

Still, eventually some clever guy at Edison would raise an eyebrow and ask if, after 130 years, the best we could do was miniaturize and add channels to the same plug he had in his desk drawer. 

I have to laugh a bit when people still get worked up over Apple moving on from a connector that would’ve been recognizable at Edison Labs in the late 1800s. The overwrought angst over the switch from USB-A connectors to USB-C is dwarfed by this one.