Any idea why there hasn’t been much if any enforcement from the FTC and co about the sketchy VPN review blogs? Seems like especially Lina Khan’s FTC would be interested to find a way, because giving the impression of an independent review and then adding a little “actually we’re extremely biased” disclaimer somewhere doesn’t seem like it should be acceptable. They might be offshore, but they do plenty of business with US creators.
The “USB-C invented by Apple” legend was even presented as fact on Wikipedia for a good while. Someone fixed it a few months ago. The source, of course, was Gruber and some “little birdies”. Ironically, the referenced 9to5mac article goes on to look at specs/press releases and conclude that there’s no evidence to his claim, in fact, the credit mostly goes to Intel and TI.
Is that not the point of a README? This one seems very reasonable, and a few sponsor ads seems fine for a very actively maintained free passion project.
Indeed, I knew it was an important resource many people would need, but also that I had to make clear that getting fully patched up on XP or 7 is of course nowhere near the same as running a current OS with 10-20 more years of security innovation baked in. Although I do try to assume most of the target audience have this level of understanding about security already.
I feel YouTube is on the up and up in terms of high quality content, but the site is terrible at surfacing that content, because the ones that play the algorithm will always win the game of getting their content in front of more eyeballs. There are more channels than ever producing content that’s super interesting, informative, straight to the point, with at least bare minimum production values (i.e. they at least appear to be trying to do more than hit record on their phone/webcam, even if they have a long way to go on framing, lighting, editing, and all that). Some examples of channels that have risen into producing solid content in the tech space only very recently include Adrian’s Digital Basement, DankPods, and Dave’s Garage. I’m also fond of Tech Tangents and Cathode Ray Dude who aren’t as new but still have that smaller channel vibe.
The issue I feel is more to do with the algorithms that push content to you via homepage, related sidebar, and search, and the incentives this naturally pushes upon creators. Sometime recently Linus mentioned in a WAN Show that the goal of YouTube now seems to be entirely on having the algorithm figure out what you want to watch, rather than using straightforward signals such as the channel you’re currently watching, your subscriptions list, or the most relevant search results. You constantly hear creators complaining about videos being buried by the algorithm, which is why “click the bell” is part of everyone’s outros now. Loyalty from their follower base has become more important than ever so YouTube has all the positive signals to decide the video is worthy of being pushed outside of that small sphere - that is, it decides whether you’ll be allowed or denied growth on a video-by-video basis by pure luck you can’t control. This is an absolute shame, because creators who deserve views aren’t getting them even from their own subscribers, and those of us who really don’t give a care for the type of content that feeds the algorithm what it wants can’t escape it because the algorithm is begging us to please click on those videos. I noticed if you play any video in an incognito window, it will always display completely unrelated clickbait in every position of the related videos sidebar, probably because it hasn’t figured out your interests yet.
Plus, when VPNs and oddball mobile games see your success, they’re not going to snooze capitalising on it, and let’s be real, it’s hard for many people to say no to easy money for mindlessly reading a 30 second script. In some cases I’ve seen creators post about the business proposals they turn down and they can be absolute junk such as factories trying to move some random Amazon sludge. Luckily it seems these ones are being consistently turned down as just too far below any creator’s morals. I don’t enjoy it but I’ll sit through being introduced to Squarespace for the millionth time or a highly misleading VPN ad read that ticks me off if it means a creator of integrity can quit their job and work full-time on producing top quality content. But YouTube sure could help not make it so high-stakes to find where that sweet spot of quality vs profitability is, and should work out why so many SEO spam videos keep making it past the filters.
Just as a sidenote on the Reddit point, you can force old Reddit from your settings after you log in. That setting seems to stick even if you log out/your session times out, and you can go back to new Reddit with new.reddit.com.
Your own habits aren’t everyone’s habits. Not everyone is on a two-year upgrade cycle, especially when the iPhones are worth near or above $1000 now. Many people who own a smartphone only have it at all thanks to the affordable prices of refurbished (i.e. repaired) units on the second-hand market. It’s silly to say repair is unimportant when you consider how many tons of waste this creates - and how little is actually recovered through the recycling processes Apple and other retailers push hard to make you not feel bad about upgrading. It’s eventually someone’s problem to deal with how unrepairable your disused phone is, ultimately depleting the raw resources we all rely on, so yes, you should care.
iPhone SE are sold starting at $400, 11 at $500, 12 at $600. I used the original SE, which I also got well under $1,000, for 4 years before getting the new SE. And the original SE still works.
There has not been a need to update every two years for many years. And there is far more waste from lower quality products that last fewer years.
The average American produces 5 pounds of garbage per day. The rest of the world isn’t that far behind. Granted, the chemicals in an iPhone are probably much worse for the environment than the paper, plastics, and food waste that make up the bulk of that number, but virtually all of the most harmful chemicals do get recycled. Phone waste would be a rounding error even if people upgraded their phones every month, let alone every couple years.
When I see these “xx pounds of garbage per day” figures, I always wonder if it includes everything that went into producing my garbage, or just what’s in my garbage can. For example, when I throw out a pair of jeans, does this “xx pounds” figure include the fabric that the jeans manufacturer wasted.
Point being, given the enormous amount of raw materials it takes to make a phone, and the environmental damage that comes from extracting them, I wonder if it’s a good idea to be cavalier and see it as a “rounding error.”
Not caring at time of purchase doesn’t mean they don’t grumble and curse the brand later on after an experience where the phone breaks and the options are limited to a costly manufacturer repair. I consider myself an iPhone person, my current phone is an iPhone 12 Pro Max so I paid a pretty penny to Apple for it, it’s also insured, but it still doesn’t mean I won’t condemn Apple for making dubious decisions that hurt repair options. Not all that different from getting your car repaired at a mechanic rather than the dealer.
Right, but then, if you go and buy another iPhone, does it really matter that you "condemn Apple"? From their point of view, you're a happy customer, since you're coming back!
Now even if Apple hears people cursing them and grumbling on forums, the fact that they keep on buying their product means that it's not enough of an issue for them to stop buying it.
It's possible simultaneously for something to have a large societal cost, and for it to not affect any individual person enough to change their decisionmaking.
Adding onto your point, I’m reminded of the video “Chain of Fools”, where a machine is upgraded from Windows 1.0 all the way through to Windows 8. Once he reaches XP, the theme he configured back in one of the first Windows versions just disappears and gets overridden with XP’s defaults. Then it happens again and again for every version since then, despite the guy changing the theme back to his custom one before each upgrade.
So the phenomenon really started with Microsoft themselves. Sure, the more muted dialog backgrounds and vibrant foreground elements introduced since XP look far better than the Win95-esque greys, but I’m sure people who created their own themes (probably due to disability like color blindness) like their colors better than Microsoft’s.
That document is definitely very out of date, I don’t think any of it is even relevant any more. The unsupported features listed were implemented a long time ago. Safari does handle mouse events (e.g. hover) as best as those concepts translate to a touch platform.
On iPadOS 13 it actually goes as far as pretending to be a Mac. Developers have resorted to using hacky client-side detection such as checking for touch support to determine if they’re on an actual Mac, or an iPad pretending to be a Mac. (https://stackoverflow.com/a/58064750)
Pretty much they don’t want you to treat iPad as a big iPhone, but if they can pull that off with iPad, it implies both iPad and iPhone Safari is a desktop-class browser with almost complete feature parity.
It’ll work, may have to disable secure boot/enable legacy BIOS mode though. Of course you’ll be limited to 4GB RAM and there may be software you use that’s gone 64 bit-exclusive in the past few years.
> Windows automatically enables PAE if DEP is enabled on a computer that supports hardware-enabled DEP, or if the computer is configured for hot-add memory devices in memory ranges beyond 4 GB. If the computer does not support hardware-enabled DEP or is not configured for hot-add memory devices in memory ranges beyond 4 GB, PAE must be explicitly enabled.
> PAE does not change the amount of virtual address space available to a process. Each process running in 32-bit Windows is still limited to a 4 GB virtual address space.
So, TL;DR, what you said :). But I'm glad I checked!
Under PAE, each process is still limited to a 4 GiB address space, but the total usable physical memory is extended beyond 4 GiB.
Unfortunately, PAE on Windows is a sad story. Unlike what the knowledge base said, in practice, you cannot use PAE for this purpose on Windows. Officially, PAE is only supported on Windows Server, and unusable on desktops.
Technically it's supported and almost always activated by Windows (since PAE is needed for the NX bit / DEP). But on desktop systems, Microsoft intentionally crippled PAE by locking the maximum memory to 4 GiB by a software license restriction [0]. Microsoft didn't do it because it wanted to force you to buy licenses, but due to compatibility problems, especially, all types of device drivers are problematic. Using more memory requires patching the kernel to bypass this license restriction, with unpredictable consequences due to incompatibilities.
* PAE is technically enabled on most machines, but only for side effects like DEP, and there's a software lock on using more than 4GB memory.
* Via either spending lots of money or patching some files, you can get a 32-bit version of windows to use 64GB of memory. As long as your drivers don't explode.
* "4GB virtual address space" is a bit misleading. A normal 32-bit process can only use 2GB on 32-bit windows. (or 3GB if you change some settings)
The upper part of the address space has to be reserved for the kernel. If you want the entire 4GB for your process, you have to run it on 64-bit windows.
As long as you can make it work, getting windows to recognize more memory despite per-process caps is a massive improvement and "limited to 4GB RAM" really undersells it.
