I love these niceties with C/C++ integration recently. It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t necessarily increase the complexity of the syntax for those not using these features.

Surely they will never stop trying, and the challenge will get certain people really worked up to be creative in how to do it.

Remember iOS used to have a huge community on hacking the phone. The interest slowed down after Apple sort of implemented the features people used that for. iOS is certainly more secure nowadays, but there’s no shortage of vulnerabilities being constantly discovered, and with vibe coding apparently being integrated even large companies, I suspect more and more dumb vulnerabilities will be looming just waiting to be exploited.

There was a time Google were orders of magnitude better than anyone else. Now with Google basically just pushing ads at the top and SEO articles taking over, the other search engines aren’t worse.

In any case, I find that DuckDuckGo is already enough for 90% of my searches and hence it’s my default. This simple fact made my dependency on Google very low nowadays, basically Gmail and Google Maps are the main thing I still use.

I only fall back to Google Search when I want something more tailored to my country news, something in my language or when I’m searching for something around me (like a store, business etc. which are all on Google Maps). These other search engines seem to be good mostly for English content and struggle to filter for things like “This search should be about country Y”.

I’m a practical person, so I don’t resort to extremist views like “100% free of Google”, but I guess these little gestures compound over time. Recently I’ve been also changing some services to use a different email (a private one) other than my Gmail address, just to avoid centralizing everything on Google, and so I’ve been effectively diversifying the services I depend on, which is good.

Yeah, the current versions of Android and iOS already mitigate this by allowing you to select just a few photos to give permission.

But if you think about it, most users don’t really understand this permission thing. They think it is an app thing, not an OS thing. Many times I’ve seen people online ask “what prevents the app from saying X and doing Y?”.

I think apps should never get permission to the whole user library, and any permissions given should be temporary.

That says you’re already way beyond the non tech savvy user.

I’ve been thinking about this and I wonder if Linux can have more success if we have pocket computers that gradually add phone functions instead of trying to have phone hardware work with a system that isn’t made for phone-like experience in general.

These men are more than powerful enough to go against Trump

I wouldn’t say that, remember a CEO is just a position. If any of them goes against Trump, they can easily be replaced. Except maybe Zuck.

“I want to thank you for setting the tone such that we could make a major investment in the United States,” said Cook, referring to Apple’s pledge to put $600 billion into US manufacturing. Given that Apple made that commitment under threat of crippling tariffs on smartphones

Also interesting to see that this has created a political divide:

Former White House strategist Steve Bannon had a conniption over the dinner earlier in the day. He dedicated a significant portion of his speech Thursday at the far-right National Conservatism Conference to attacking Big Tech “oligarchs,” and during an episode of his podcast he claimed the person who arranged the dinner should be “perp-walked” out of the White House. article

I think none of these people are happy to be shown in public as weak and submissive, but they must have been told to play the game.

When the scene is open to the public, you can already know it's all a theater.

Non paywalled article: https://archive.is/2BltD

Best thing is that it works flawlessly on the mobile apps as well, and Wikipedia also has a 1 million most relevant articles or so, which is just a few gigabytes.

That was an interesting read.