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Re:Patrick Stewart has died on Thursday October 29, 2026 @04:33PM (#50295471)
I highly recommend the audio book, he reads it himself.
I don’t actually think it’s the first time. I recall seeing articles like this in college. A lot of groups love to do victory laps before they’ve ever gotten to the field.

It’s like every article that says a judge blocked X, Y, or Z but the decision is overturned on appeal two days later.

One college granted a trivial accommodation with no government review or legal analysis. They did not make any policy changes.

I think the college made the right decision. It’s easier to grant it than to try to figure out if it’s legally justified.

I guess my take is they didn’t prove anything and they’re trying to make everyone think they did.

Re:MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @02:19PM (#50278471)
I’m not sure. macOS has had some degree of support for touch screens internally for a very long time (2010) but required hardware specific drivers.

So this probably isn’t the matter of macOS finally adding native support. More that they revealed what was already there.

Or it can be a complete rewrite. Either way they would have to explicitly implement support for external touchscreens using a generic driver instead of a specific one for each device.

I kind of feel like this is a non-story. The ask was small and reasonable. It was easy enough to grant the accommodation and avoid a confrontation. HR in companies does this all the time.
I haven’t been able to do background play in YouTube without Premium for at least 4 years. I also recall finding Reddit threads of people having the same issue.

So… not exactly new for iPhone users.

I’m pretty sure mounting weapons on a drone is already very illegal.

If someone is mounting weapons on a drone, a flight restriction isn’t going to stop them.

It’s like putting a sign on a bank that says no bank robberies. Guess who isn’t going to obey the sign? People who rob banks.

The FAA rule isn’t there to stop bad actors. It’s there to prevent bad actors from being recorded.

Re:iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 on Monday September 14, 2026 @03:18PM (#49702441)
Oh wonderful. That’s what’s happening to me. I’m an author and Apple‘s dictionary appears to be missing about half the more uncommon words in the English language. It’ll never recognize “prescient” in dictation for example. Some words it marks in red because it thinks it’s a spelling error. I know it’s not because I’ve used it, read it, and it’s in online dictionaries.

At least I’m macOS I can use Talon instead of the system dictation.

I think it matters a lot because Amazon doesn’t have their own airline. They contract out their aviation to multiple companies.

The incentive is to pick the lowest bid and that could be a company whose culture creates indirect pressure on pilots to be on time. All it takes is a dispatcher in a small company that is constantly irritated when things are late. Knowing that the other people are going to be angry with you for being late can make you hesitant to go around, causing exactly this type of accident.

Is this what happened? Probably not. Pilots get tunnel vision for any number of reasons.

Re:iPhone Duo on Thursday September 10, 2026 @02:57PM (#49648663)
Reddit has fully religious people devoted to the Apple cause. If you haven’t been around these people, you wouldn’t believe it.

Apple doesn’t need astroturfing; their fans do it for them.

The FCC takes the public commons very seriously. Given how easy it is to make radio frequencies unusable, they need to hammer hard and fast to discourage people from trying. They don’t wait for a report to be filed, they can proactively search for violators. They may only be able to fine you but they can get law-enforcement involved. Especially if your city or state has laws against what you’re doing. You usually see this when you start messing with airplanes.
I believe they do. It’s used to get an initial fix before you get gps coordinates. Wifi network names in range might also be used.
Tobacco can make you really sick if ingested.

Anything distilled may contain methanol.

Mushrooms can be a different type than what’s on the label.

Fermented products may contain poisons from dangerous bacteria. If you’ve heard about entire churches full of people dying in South America from bad food, it most likely fermented corn.

Expired food products may be contaminated with bacteria. (Unless they canned, jarred, or too dry Etc.)

Fresh apples may contain enough pesticide to make you sick. Wipe them off with a paper towel before use if you’re not peeling them.

Re:The safest job from AI may be writing on Monday August 31, 2026 @05:59PM (#49515359)
Mostly because selling and/or using it is illegal or morally offensive enough to be penalized by your community if too many people know.
There are different no fly lists. Airlines maintain their own list of people they’ve banned from their planes.
It’s not FUD. Flock is permanently storing information when they say they’re not and the police are can look back at least six months. I imagine this is a premium feature.

A police department had to get more evidence because they got the wrong suspect in six months elapsed before the prosecutor got to see the case and tell them there was zero evidence.

After searching, back six months for the right color of car near the accident, in the flock database, they were able to locate another suspect.

Flock has location data for every car and have months of knowing when and where image recognition has seen a similar enough car. I hope they don’t get into tracking people. This is already horrifying.

And sometimes security can’t be a high priority.

When it comes to building things: fire, building codes, inspectors, public, utilities, lenders, and insurance all go before security.

All those dictate whether or not you can build in the first place.

Real world constraints are everywhere. :)

Genuinely curious, does the telephone system have enough scope to make it dangerous?

Elevators are extremely hackable all over the world. It’s generally not considered a problem because it requires physical access, specific knowledge, and defeating cameras to exploit successfully.

What can you do with the telephone system?

This is how you get a callsign like “Jumper” or “Rocket”.
Re:Ask HN: We just had an actual UUID v4 collision... on Friday May 08, 2026 @12:38PM (#48065493)
UUID 7 does not hash the date. It uses 48 bits to store a millisecond resolution timestamp. This allows you to sort uuids by time.
Re:Nobody Got Fired for Uber's $8M Ledger Mistake? on Wednesday April 22, 2026 @10:18AM (#47864049)
Who exactly is supposed to be fired for this?

If you don’t have price controls, it’s easy to run up a bill.

If no single person had the responsibility to check the cost, then no one actually failed at their assigned job. So you either fix the system or fire everyone involved in the decision.

What you’re doing now is looking a scapegoat to beat up. You’re angry and you’re going to make someone pay for pissing you off.

> Linux may break more often, but you can almost always fix it with a quick google search.

And that’s where the problem is: a quick google search. Laughably trivial for technical users. Non-trivial for the majority of the population.

I love Linux and it is completely viable as a desktop operating system, but it’s far from ready for mainstream without better support.

For a rough analogy, I’d compare it to an old car before electronics. An old car is easy to work on and reliable if you do the maintenance. But an old car wouldn’t be reliable for somebody who doesn’t do any work on a car and outsources the maintenance.

Linux excels when things go right. The failure modes are substantially worse and far more likely to occur. It doesn’t matter if they’re rare. They’re not rare enough. And there isn’t support when things go wrong.

For example: It’s difficult to make the macOS UI fail to start through configuration. You never need to directly touch configuration. (And you can’t modify or delete macOS system files.)

With Linux, some normal problems just have to be solved in the terminal. This allows you to put the system into a configuration where the GUI does not start.

Re:Claude mixes up who said what and that's not OK on Thursday April 09, 2026 @08:40PM (#47712168)
I’ve seen the raw json before. I didn’t realize that was an actual failure mode.

I’ve also had it fail to respond in long chats but I thought it was a network error despite having no error messages.

Re:Claude mixes up who said what and that's not OK on Thursday April 09, 2026 @10:35AM (#47704329)
I’ve done long conversations with ChatGPT and it really does start losing context fast. You have to keep correcting it and refeeding instructions.

It seems to degenerate into the same patterns. It’s like context blurs and it begins to value training data more than context.

Yup. There’s the concept of “mission kill”. It’s very difficult to sink a battleship with 5” guns. Use them to blast off all the range finders, radars, and secondary battery and that ship will be headed home after the battle.

The difference is strategic. A mission kill is a repairable loss. It is an order of magnitude easier to fix a battleship than to build a new one.

I 100% believe this was done by somebody inside our administration. It’s totally in character for them. Look at what they do to immigrants and our own citizens. They intentionally target children.

But if you wanna look externally, you can’t rule out Israel. They have intentionally bombed a school to kill children in the past, well before Gaza.

Before you take out your pitch fork, remember what the US did in Vietnam. Ugly stuff happens in ideological wars. It is not controversial to say Israel has done similar things.

Also, someone in our very pro-Israel administration claimed they got us into this war. Israel manipulating an ally is completely unsurprising.

But it doesn’t stop at Israel. I think every single ally we have in the Middle East would do the same thing. Everyone they’re fighting already does.

I was thinking of doctors offices and pharmacies when I asked. My doctor has a physical fax machine in the back of the office.

I was hoping things might be a little bit more advanced elsewhere. It hurts my soul to see people print a document to fax it before throwing it away.

I was going to say it would be nice if you would just choose a fax machine from the print dialogue. You can… if it’s set up. Sigh.

How many fax lines still go to a physical machine that prints on paper?

It’s a lot less paper to have a pdf of the fax emailed.

Re:Apple Just Lost Me on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @10:41AM (#47517964)
I think it’s a lot simpler than that. Verifying a credit card is probably the easiest and cheapest reliable method to verify identity.

If you look at it this way: they’re trying to identify somebody, and they don’t want to do a massive amount of work in house. Do you go to a company that verifies identity? Or… you can use credit cards as a proxy for identity. Most of your users already have them.

Credit cards require no additional infrastructure, no additional corporate approval, no additional expenses, and no additional auditing. It’s good enough for the company and who cares if it’s good enough for the users.

Corporate greed is a massive problem, but you’re giving people too much credit to assume they have some kind of grand conspiracy for every decision. That requires far too much intelligence.

Corporate laziness is a far better explanation for this one.

United aircraft did a high speed abort (80+ knots) and afterwards, fumes from hot brakes were entering the back of the cabin. (Not uncommon.)

Source: Mentour Pilot. https://www.youtube.com/live/Bb4CcoK0KLM

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