I have an iPad (not iPhone or Mac). If you don't set up Icloud, there's always an annoying bright red circle in settings that tells you to "finish setting up your iPad".

Doesn't have to be bright red, or even there at all.

Last time I had that on a laptop I was going to wipe soon afterward and didn’t want to fully set up, I clicked the “finish setting up” link and canceled out. Voila, red circle gone.

Gone until a few days or a week later, when it comes back.

Yes, that’s the only one I’ve seen. But it’s not much of a nag.

Another one bites the dust

A drop in the ocean compared to the still undiscovered Israelis

Does Brave ad blocker block these ads? Or does it only block competing ads?

Its business model has always been the latter, they're just no longer bothering with the pretense of opt-in.

Usually businesses wait until they capture the market before saying the quiet part out loud.

1 - The initial idea to create Brave was to allow users to view ads and get paid for their attention.

2 - They've been caught replacing affiliate links with their own.

Based on that information what does your instinct tell you?

Point #2 is false.

Brave partnered with a few crypto exchanges. The issue (which is on GitHub) was a bug in the URL auto suggestion feature of the chromium browser. Instead of suggesting the links, it was replacing them ONLY ON THOSE 2-3 CRYPTO WEBSITES.

The bug was fixed before it became news. It was fixed on day 1 of the report.

Your defense was to mention that they were tied up in crypto?

Maybe it's just me, but it really devalues a product when there is a crypto association.

That's a bias, then. If what the person you're responding to says is correct, being associated with crypto would seem to have nothing to do with it. I have no idea if it's correct, but it sounds like it could just as easily have happened with any kind of partnership.

How do people keep peddling #2, when it isn't even factually correct on what happened? Sure, presume malice on the campaign links to Binance, but the bug was about turning people writing binance.us IN THE ADDRESS BAR into a campaign link, not replacing anyone's affiliate links on web pages, which is how it's always presented as.

Brave does not block native ads (except for Google’s) on any website. All third party embedded ads are blocked by default.

So it blocks Google search ads, but not brave search ads?

No, it doesn't block Google's sponsored ads. It blocks embedded ads that track you.

Yes, Brave will block via Aggressive mode in Shields.

You weren't attentive.

They made a netflix documentary about the last guy who did that. He wrote a pretty good manifesto.

Americans are too expensive.

You can blame inflation for part of that. The value of a dollar is near nothing compared to even 5 years ago. And of course you need a higher salary when everyone charges you more just for being in the US. See YouTube premium pricing around the globe as an easy example.

The US economy pumps assets and dumps exports, yes. However, weakening the dollar would dump assets and pump exports. That's the opposite of what the US has been up to for the last 50 years and it's the opposite of what the US is up to today. Your understanding of macroeconomics needs work.

Hint: if your analysis does not involve US counterparties, it can only ever be correct by accident.

Near nothing? You sure about this?

At the very last, it's devalued by more than half, and this is a national trend in the housing market alone. You can also observe this in dining out (either sit down or fast food), groceries, tools, etc. And yes, a pre-2021 dollar losing half of its worth in less than a couple of years is "near nothing". That means the dollar is a terrible store of value, and an entire net value stored in dollars would disappear inside half a lifetime, if not faster if Congress does another mass printing/borrowing of money.

As an anecdote example:

* Pre-2021, my house was 160k, with about 10% down, resulting in P&I of about $750.

* Post-2021 (and no significant change since, the same house can probably sell for near $320 (& definitely $290 at the low end). To buy this, you'll need twice the down payment, and even with 10% down, your P&I is now nearly $2000 (due to the higher interest rates and huge principal).

A dollar in 2018 is worth 2.67x more than a dollar today. It's pretty apparent in equities, but also in commodities, and there's no going back to pre-2021 monetary values. "Inflation" may or may not have slowed down, but a lot of people are now stuck until deflation actually occurs or significant salary growth occurs.

>> Americans are too expensive.

> You can blame inflation for part of that.

How so? As you acknowledged, number go up internally doesn't mean number doesn't go down relative to other currency, leaving relative expensiveness the same.

yen an pound are at historic lows vs dollar. Dollar vs euro is at historic average. Let me guess, you'an Austrian/freshwater econ fan. Know theres a problem and what it is before you see the patient.

America is too expensive. The entire economy has been shifting away from creating new useful things and towards what I think of as extraction. A couple examples:

- Car companies paywalling hardware and software features while selling data (including GPS location, speed, etc.) to data brokers.

- Netflix raising subscription fees in spite of the fact that they've cancelled so many original shows and lost so much of their leased catalog.

- Grocery stores and fast food restaurants firing cashiers and replacing them with unreliable self-checkout kiosks (pushing the work off onto the customer while continuing to charge them just as much, if not more).

- Wendy's adding "surge pricing" and replacing drive-through workers with an AI that's barely 80% accurate. (So they'll charge you more just because and still fuck up your order.)

There are other examples, these are just the ones that are fresh in my mind right now.

> towards what I think of as extraction.

It is called rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

FTA: Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2][3] risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline.

Successful capture of regulatory agencies (if any) to gain a coercive monopoly can result in advantages for rent-seekers in a market while imposing disadvantages on their uncorrupt competitors. This is one of many possible forms of rent-seeking behavior.

HP printer ink..

Why even have an event at this point? There's literally nothing interesting.

2x better performance per watt is not interesting? Wow, what a time to be alive.

This still means you can pack more performance into the chip though - because you're limited by cooling.

Huh, never considered cooling. I suppose that contributes to the device's incredible thinness. Generally thin-and-light has always been an incredible turnoff for me, but tech is finally starting to catch up to thicker devices.

Thin and light is easier to cool. The entire device is a big heat sink fin. Put another way, as the device gets thinner, the ratio of surface area to volume goes to infinity.

If you want to go thicker, then you have to screw around with heat pipes, fans, etc, etc, to move the heat a few cm to the outside surface of the device.

That's not why thin-and-light bothers me. Historically, ultrabooks and similarly thin-and-light focused devices have been utterly insufferable in terms of performance compared to something that's even a single cm thicker. But Apple Silicon seems extremely promising, it seems quite competitive with thicker and heavier devices.

I never understood why everyone [looking at PC laptop manufacturers] took thin-and-light to such an extreme that their machines became basically useless. Now Apple is releasing thin-and-light machines that are incredibly powerful, and that is genuinely innovative. I hadn't seen something like that from them since the launch of the original iPhone, that's how big I think this was.

That's not exactly true, just the other day Snazzy lab complained about a MBP M3 Max throttling and making a lot of fan noise.

Those are barely competitive with the heavier but more powerful gaming/creation laptops Apple's aficionados keep deriding (if it has a 4090 it's not even competitive).

They have focused on mobility (power consumption and size) at the cost of everything else.

For this exact reason their desktop offering is really not competitive with offering around the same prices in the PC world. The only thing they do better is size (considering you can make a 3-4L top of the line PC; the Mac Studio isn't even impressive) and power consumption. But who actually cares, even if using a desktop heavily its consumption is dwarfed by most other use in a typical house, so whatever?

Thin and light are indeed a small use case overall and people who care about that have a ton of decently good options in the PC world already. It's not like the performance per watt benefits of Apple Silicon is really that relevant to most potential customers. If one is content enough with such a laptop, using it for the typical light task, thin and light PC laptops are just small enough, silent enough and have good enough battery life for the most part.

It means a lot to me, because cutting power consumption in half for millions of devices means we can turn off power plants (in aggregate). It’s the same as lightbulbs; I’ll never understand why people bragged about how much power they were wasting with incandescents.

>cutting power consumption in half for millions of devices means we can turn off power plants

It is well known that software inefficiency doubles every couple years, that is, the same scenario would take 2x as much compute, given entire software stack (not disembodied algorithm which will indeed be faster).

The extra compute will be spent on a more abstract UI stack or on new features, unless forced by physical constraints (e.g. inefficient batteries of early smartphone), which is not the case at present.

That's weird - if software gets 2x worse every time hardware gets 2x better, why did my laptop in 2010 last 2 hours on battery while the current one lasts 16 doing much more complex tasks for me?

Elsewhere in the comments, it is noted Apple's own estimates are identical despite allegedly 2x better hardware.

Aside, 2 hours is very low even for 2010. There's a strongly usability advantage for going to 16. But going from 16 to 128 won't add as much. The natural course of things is to converge on a decent enough number and 'spend' the rest on more complex software, a lighter laptop etc.

They like bright lights?

I have dimmable LED strips around my rooms, hidden by cove molding, reflecting off the whole ceiling, which becomes a super diffuse, super bright “light”.

I don’t boast about power use, but they are certainly hungry.

For that I get softly defuse lighting with a max brightness comparable to outdoor clear sky daylight. Working from home, this is so nice for my brain and depression.

First, only CPU power consumption is reduced, not other components, second, I doubt tablets contribute significantly to global power consumption, so I think no power plants will be turned off.

That's bullshit. Does that mean they could have doubled battery life if they kept the performance the same? Impossible.

Impossible why? That's what happened with M1 too.

But as someone else noted, CPU power draw is not the only factor in device battery life. A major one, but not the whole story.

Intel to M1 is an entire architectural switch where even old software couldn't be run and had to be emulated.

This is a small generational upgrade that doesn't necessitate an event.

Other companies started having events like this because they were copying apples amazing events. Apples events now are just parodies of what Apple was.

You know the main point of the event was the release of new iPads, right?

Video showing Apple Pencil Pro features was pretty sick, and I ain't even an artist

I think they are over-engineering it. I have never liked gestures because it's difficult to discover something you can't see. A button would have been better than an invisible squeeze gesture.

I used Android phones forever until the iphone 13 came out and I switched to IOS because I had to de-Google my life completely after they (for no reason at all, "fraud" that I did not commit) blocked my Google Play account.

The amount of things I have to google to use the phone how I normally used Android is crazy. So many gestures required with NOTHING telling you how to use them.

I recently sat around a table with 5 of my friends trying to figure out how to do that "Tap to share contact info" thing. Nobody at the table, all long term IOS users, knew how to do it. I thought that if we tapped the phones together it would give me some popup on how to finish the process. We tried all sorts of tapping/phone versions until we realized we had to unlock both phones.

And one of the people there with the same phone as me (13 pro) couldn't get it to work at all. It just did nothing.

And the keyboard. My god is the keyboard awful. I have never typoed so much, and I have no idea how to copy a URL out of Safari to send to someone without using the annoying Share button which doesn't even have the app I share to the most without clicking the More.. button to show all my apps. Holding my finger over the URL doesn't give me a copy option or anything, and changing the URL with their highlight/delete system is terrible. I get so frustrated with it and mostly just give up. The cursor NEVER lands where I want it to land and almost always highlights an entire word when I want to make a one letter typo fix. I don't have big fingers at all. Changing a long URL that goes past the length of the Safari address bar is a nightmare.

I'm sure (maybe?) that's some option I need to change but I don't even feel like looking into it anymore. I've given up on learning about the phones hidden gestures and just use it probably 1/10th of how I could.

Carplay, Messages and the easy-to-connect-devices ecosystem is the only thing keeping me on it.

Sounds like the ideal use case for an AI assistant. Siri ought to tell you how to access hidden features on the device. iOS, assist thyself.

To copy URL from Safari, press and hold (long-press) on URL bar

Press and hold also allows options elsewhere in iOS

Oh, I see what I'm doing wrong now. If I hold it down it highlights it and gives me the "edit letter/line" thing, and then if I let go I get the Copy option. I guess in the past I've seen it highlight the word and just stopped before it got to that point.

Thanks!

The highlight of the event was a stylus?

I don't get this line of thinking. Should suicide be allowed too? That would make this argument congruent, otherwise I can understand it.

If it is not the result of mental illness, then yes. In Switzerland, you can go and legally end your life.

If it is voluntary, repeated, and the person of sound mind, I can't see why the government should prevent a terminal patient who is in constant pain from dying with dignity on their own terms.

Are there places where suicide is criminalized?

Suicide is illegal in many places https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_legislation

Illegal != Criminal. Most drugs are illegal in Portugal, but all are decriminalized.

And what's the recidivism rate?

"Should suicide be allowed too? "

If we say that people own their body and their life - then yes, they can decide.