Yeah, it's the reverse of what's often pushed in the media. There have even been initiatives for autonomous EU security projects, with the US (I think even Trump at some point, despite what he says now about NATO) being against anything that would undermine NATO.

The first part of this comment is a bit of a straw man, but I'll bite.

The reason is that the discussion is nuanced, a smartphone plays a very different role in someone's life than a Nintendo Switch. For better or worse, a smartphone has become a requirement for critical services that we all rely on.

> The reason is that the discussion is nuanced, a smartphone plays a very different role in someone's life than a Nintendo Switch.

That doesn't really align with the arguments people actually put forth for sideloading on iPhones. "It's my device, I should be able to run whatever I want" is the most common, and doesn't leave room for the nuance you're referencing. Like it or not, most people arguing for iPhone sideloading are using arguments that also demand sideloading on game consoles. It's not at all a straw man.

This isn’t true you can set the target multiple versions back. The main problem right now is a huge amount of churn in the language, APIs and multiple UI frameworks means everything is a moving target. SwiftUI has only really become useable in the last coupe of versions.

Every time Xcode updates, it seems a few more older macOS and iOS versions are removed from the list of "Minimum Deployment Versions". My current Xcode lets me target macOS back to 10.13 (High Sierra, 7 years old) and iOS 12.0 (6 years old). This seems... rather limiting. Like, I'd be leaving a lot of users out in the cold if I were actually releasing apps anymore. And this is Xcode 15.2, on a dev host Mac forever stuck on macOS 13.7. I'm sure newer Mac/Xcode combinations are even more limiting.

I used to be a hardcore Apple/Mac guy, but I'm kind of giving up on the ecosystem. Even the dev tools are keeping everyone on the treadmill.

You can keep using an older version of Xcode if you like. I mean, every other tool chain that I can think of does more or less the same thing. There are plenty of reasons to criticise Apple's developer tooling and relations, but I don't see this as being especially different to other platforms

> It's a sad state of affairs that AI is taking over arts/music/creativity stranding people with boring, routine, meaningless jobs"

So far it’s not though.

Oh. It already is. Artists are already saying that a lot of commission work is drying out (e.g. illustrations).

> The problem is AI current best use case is creative work, art, music, programming

This is where it’s being pushed and marketed but I’m not actually sure it’s the best use case.

> Why? Either they're idiots who think they need control or they are tyrants

Many politicians are individuals without any talent who desire power and control, politics is the only avenue open to people like that.

And many are sociopaths and psychopaths who love to wield power over others. Some of those sociopaths and psychopaths are very very smart.

> the electricity is usually produced by coal plants or rare earth mined renewables that have an even greater environmental burden

Renewables don't typically rely on rare earths, maybe small amounts in some wind turbine magnets.

Yeah this is a fancier version of what we do at work, although we just poll the event table.

Surely the landfill employees would have recovered it and divvied it up if it was ever recoverable or even there.

How would they? Have you ever been to an actual landfill? They are absolutely enormous, with tonnes of refuse being added every day - it's impossible to recover anything from a landfill, not without a concentrated search effort. And landfill employees are busy doing their actual jobs.

I'm sure the dude that lost it, knows his addresses and can tell if his coins have moved or not. Otherwise, he probably wouldn't be still looking to recover it.

The bitcoin wallet is encrypted

I agree but have been on teams where this slows down PR review or arguments break out. Delegating to the linter and format on save can get the team past this.