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Well, Apple is still trying to hang on to the iPhone Air, and according to various reports it has sold only about half the total units that the mini sold. And Air sales have cratered to virtually zero.

Folding phones will likely be an even smaller market.

I don't think the problem is that there isn't a dedicated percentage of people who would buy smaller phones like the mini, or that the sales couldn't be profitable. The problem is that the screen size to battery volume ratio is or least was particularly bad for the mini. (The Air has this problem too.) I'd love to see them try again with modern hardware. I wouldn't use one personally, but know many people who would in a flash.

Venezuelan beaver cheese?

I've heard multiple times directly from Apple employees that there is no way to login to iCloud on your work machine using a company-controlled account. Many people create new Apple ID's which they only use while working there, but others just use their personal iCloud accounts. You are, of course, not supposed to store company data in iCloud. But thanks to Apple's own efforts, it's difficult to use a Mac without being logged into iCloud (for example if you want to use the App store), and some data can easily spill into the iCloud account.

If accurate, it is of course patently absurd that Apple has left this an unsolved problem.

Stale news. Mozilla introduced a new solution for certificate revocation that solves nearly all the problems with old methods. While it hasn't really taken off outside of Firefox, that's mostly because Google and Apple haven't embraced it because they are too busy trying to shorten certificate life unnecessarily.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2025/08/crlite-fast-private-and-co...

Yep, my mom (still alive) remembers seeing many interviews with Civil War vets when she was a kid in the 40's.

Is there really that much liquidity in these bets? Polymarket is just a broker right? So people are putting up tens of millions cumulatively on the other side of these random bets?

Why victim blame him for removing the phone number? He had a logical reason for doing so, and with Google supporting many forms of authentication it's perfectly reasonable to think that removing one wouldn't jeopardize the other methods.

Does the 30% cut only apply to patrons who subscribe within the app? I’m assuming yes, but just checking since I haven’t seen confirmation of this.

I don’t think any of these are “obvious” lies. Maybe meta offered someone a $75M package and it got reported as $100M. So they can say with a straight face that the reporting is “false”, yet they never countered with any details.

You’re ignoring my point about the legitimate reason people might be getting offers in this stratosphere. No one has debunked or refuted the general reporting, at least not that I’ve seen. If you have a source, show it please.

It’s debatable that it was debunked. There was squirrelly wording about some specific claims. One person was reported to have been offered a package worth a billion dollars, which even if exaggerated was probably not exaggerated by 10x. The numbers line up when you consider that AI startup founders and early employees stand to potentially make well into 9 figures if not higher, and Meta is trying to cut them off at the pass. Obviously these kinds of offers, whatever they really look like, include significant conditions and performance requirements.

“From Eternity To Here” by Sean Carroll has some nice discussions of it. He can be a bit much at times and could stand to have better editing (the book is 25% too long), but he does have some of the most approachable modern writing on physics out there. Lots of videos on YouTube as well.

Ugh, I couldn’t disagree more. Sure, LLMs can generate some really nice introductory summaries of topics. But, so far at least, they can’t even hold a candle to brilliantly written books and long form articles. Consider the classic book Cosmos. There is more insight into the universe in any few pages of that book than could be gathered by reading even a thousand ChatGPT results.

Minor quibble with the linked complaint: the GPL doesn’t require you to post source code, it just requires that you have to provide it when asked, and only to people using your software. (But you’re not allowed to restrict anything they do, like repost it.) Just follow the whole Redhat / CentOS drama for exhibit A in this behavior.

Yay, someone posted it before I had to. This skit is 25 years old now!

Fine tuning is a pretty broad concept and is mostly orthogonal to religious beliefs.

On the topic of perfectly crafted depictions of scale in the Universe, I love this one: https://youtu.be/vcJHHU9upyE

Search YouTube for “universe fine tuning.” Then come back here in a few years when you’ve gotten through everything. :)

Interesting thanks. I hadn’t seen it elsewhere myself but I could see how it’s taken off. OP’s article almost gets there, but never says that specifically. Rather it says “c is not a property of light, it’s a property of the universe.”

I’ll steal a line from a superb YouTube physics channel (Arvin Ash): it’s not the speed of light, it’s the speed of causality. And the universe must have a finite speed of causality. Without even getting into math and physics, you can intuitively understand how infinitely fast causality would prevent time, and therefore everything else we know, from being possible.

Same here! But a friend just texted me they can see it. Internet routing snafu right now, maybe?

UPDATE: yep, works if I turn on a vpn. And works over cellular. But my ISP can't route to it at all. Either DNS is returning a bad IP in some cases, or there's some regional routing problem.

I think this may have borrowed liberally from Corridor Crew’s video about the same topic earlier in 2019: https://youtu.be/b3_Abb2Vqnc

Apologies, I somehow missed the memo three years ago that Audible turned on in-app purchases(1). I was thinking of the pre-2021 policy.

I’m still pretty sure that if an app has zero financial interactions at all in the App Store that Apple has no limitations on how the app’s financials work outside of the app. But I can understand that once you want to do anything in app, Apple might have restrictions on hybrid models.

1 - https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/16/you-can-now-buy-audiobooks-di...

I strongly suspect Patreon is playing fast and loose with the wording here. Note they say “if creators on Patreon disable transactions…” but not “if Patreon were to disable all transactions.” I’m pretty sure they could still go the Audible route where they remove all mention and links to billing options off app. But Patreon doesn’t want to go that route across the board, they still want people to be able to sign up for things in app.

Right but just because they said it doesn’t mean they’re not playing fast and loose with the messaging. I’ve never heard of a single app where the off-app billing affected the inclusion of the app in the store. I mean maybe it’s true but that seems like it would be breaking new ground in App Store rules. I suspect Patreon is playing semantics here but would be happy to see evidence otherwise. To be clear, I’m taking about the case where Patreon could decide to show no billing details or links at all in the App Store, just like eg Audible. I think the problem is that Patreon still wants to offer billing options in the app.

Yes but then they get to charge a commission for anyone following the link.

I could be wrong, but I think you’re misinterpreting it. They could remove all billing from the iOS app just like eg Audible does. But I’m guessing they don’t want to. Patreon is looking out for themselves, not their creators or subscribers.

This post has some info but seems more from a customer:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41003390

I scanned all responses to see if someone had posted this link! One of the great blog posts about the intersection between computer science and humanity.

Item 40 is the best one. Of course, the majority of items on this list will create problems in society long before they are an issue with computer systems.

LLMs remind me of a tweet I saw years ago. Paraphrasing: “Before Google, you asked your best friend’s big brother about stuff and repeated his wrong info about it for 20 years.”

One of the best channels on YouTube.