Hypothetically speaking, how useful would something like that be in a nuclear weapon fallout scenario? Can such a contraption detect the important isotopes and give the user an accurate idea of the level of danger they're in, does that change over time as isotope composition changes through decay?
tl;dr not useful. To make a long story short, max range is very important and these cheap tubes saturate easily, and they don't give energy-corrected dose rate. They also cannot do gamma spec (isotope identification), but that is not needed for a fallout scenario because fallout contains basically every isotope under the sun, no need to do any gamma spec. I have a very long detailed video about this topic on my youtube channel BetterGeiger
I'm sure there are dozens of people in Germany who actively prefer iMessage but I haven't met one yet. Whatsapp achieved pretty much total market capture here back when SMS still were costly and the network effects that arose from that are among the strongest I've ever seen. I'm pretty sure if someone was to do a survey, almost everyone would say Messages is for SMS only and I think most of them wouldn't know it can do more than that.
Yet i write with most of my German friends using iMessages because its automatic and i dont have Telegram or WhatsApp because nobody uses it in my european country.
That sucks, I was about to do the same (Jellyfin on the Synology, Apple TV for streaming). Seems there is no alternative to Plex that works with an Apple TV...
Actually, the Infuse app is almost perfect for Jellyfin on Apple TV. Highly recommended if you don't mind the small subscription. It takes load off of the server by playing a wide variety of codecs natively. There's also an OSS app in fast development that looks promising, but only Android/iPadOS for now.
I'd love to use a Garmin or a Suunto, but they aren't integrated very well on iOS and I like the convenience of my iPhone and Macbook too much to switch to an Android. I think there are a lot of people who're not very satisfied with Apple Watches for sports tracking or who'd just like something that lasts a week at least. There are quality options outside of Apple Watches if you don't need it to feel like a tiny iPhone. Most of the UX I need was available on a Chinese smartwatch almost ten years ago (though super buggy back then), the basics aren't that hard and seeing how a fair lot of iOS apps have dropped their WatchOS apps for lack of usage I don't seem to be so singular in that.
But I don't think it'll hurt the Apple Watch sales all that much either, they still work very well as a fashionable accessory.
I have been using an Apple Watch since 2018 (bought for the "superior" swim tracking back then) and I think they are really not that good for sports tracking.
There is 3rd party software that makes the deal much better but it's ridiculous that they aren't able to provide the same quality/usefulness natively and it's added costs/frictions in the use experience.
I don't care much for the smartwatch thing (I think they are largely useless for the most part) and I believe this is exactly why Apple is trying very hard to not open up.
For smartwatch purposes, something as expensive (and with such a small life) as an Apple Watch doesn't make a lot of sense. You are spending way too much on some basic functionality and for sports tracking Apple really needs to step up to provide value matching the price.
The Apple Watch Ultra is decent but widely overpriced for what it does, even the most ardent Apple fans will say as much (like MKBHD who basically acknowledged that the Ultra primary feature was to be able to show that you had the most expensive watch from Apple).
I have both a Garmin (Instinct solar) and an Apple Watch (S10). The Apple Watch is actually slightly more useful even if it doesn't last more than a couple of days. Actually if I'm honest the Apple Watch saved my life a couple of times. The Garmin is nice, but it's just not as useful.
Lets see how that'll go when the competition starts offering really polished LLM assistants on their devices and people see their friends use them on their 400 Euro Androids and all they get on their 1700 Euro iPhone is Siri from 2011.
If they do then they'll just lose market share to Android, because the Asian manufacturers will offer all these features and they're getting more polished each year. For me personally, all Apple really has going for their products these days is being very stable and dependable, I can always just get the newest Pro phone and have something that'll work well for me. They used to be attractive because they weren't Chinese but US tech is becoming an even bigger liability, and the Asian competition has a lot more on offer in terms of features though it's a lot more of a gamble if it'll be executed well and get maintained and I don't like to gamble on things like that. Most casual users already don't care, nor should they.
But if Apple cripple their devices further I think a lot more of their core user base will be willing to try an Android, depending on what features they axe. If they make iPhones inconvenient in addition to somewhat lagging behind the market, all they'd have left is their brand and marketing and that's about to take a beating in the looming tariff wars.
No, I think they may do a little of that for symbolics and they certainly will throw a lot of fits but ultimately they'll just comply and that will be that.
Today it's Ukraine and F35s, who and what will it be in a year? I suppose European governments are taking a long hard look at strategic dependencies on the US right now, like the whole
economy running on top of Microsoft and Google and other US-made SaaS. If all of that went dark at once, I honestly don't know how some of the larger companies I know could keep operating. They all have fallbacks for critical infrastructure obviously but those are US-made, too...
About half of the US companies over a certain size run on ERP software from an European vendor. And it is not trivial at all to change that, even if they wanted to.
I feel like this overstates the importance a bit. Sure macOS and Windows can claim to be involved in a great many things but no computer system
running Windows is that important and couldn't be replaced given you have quite a large amount of lead time before the software is inoperable.
I've worked with airgapped Windows XP machines still in operation running scientific instruments.
If you deleted Microsoft and Apple from world it world it would be a Y2K event but the world wouldn't end, it would just be a lot of work.
Aside from life-saving medicine, I was thinking that the un-availability (not 'available with tariffs' but 'we're not selling it to the US anymore') of Ozempic in the US might become a political problem, maybe more so than many other trade-war hits. Maybe it's easy to manufacture it locally but the time-gap until it's up and running might be too much to swallow...
I think having Greenland annexed might also be a problem for the Danish. Europe might subsidize Novo Nordisk's losses, switch to distributing the meds all throughout Europe. And it seems the loss of such a society-transformative drug (and having millions of people gaining back all their lost weight would be a difficult/untenable political position for this administration. Just surprised not to see this much in the current news.
Sibling in thread says there's already an US alternative, anyway.
I don't think that would end up being a political problem. It'd just get spun as the evil communist Europeans trying to destroy America with their traitor liberal collaborators and used as justification for passing the FAT IS FREEDOM Act, which subsidizes butter production and eliminates capital gains tax and the library of Congress.
I don't really use it as a (lightweight) IDE or the like anymore, but as a place to keep unstructured notes and snippets and the like because SublimeText never ever loses anything unsaved. It's pretty much indispensable at this point, whenever I compose something a bit longer or have some text to do a search-replace on or just some text I need three steps later in what I'm doing, it goes in another tab in Sublime. I have at least one tab I re-use since before Covid-19, it's absolutely fantastic how stable it is. Love it for that.
That's interesting. I use BBEdit for that purpose and VSCode for code editing. I really don't like BBEdit's layout except for log viewing and unsaved snipets/notes. I might have to try Sublime now...
Anything with Musk's name attached to it is also in danger of getting hit with bans and sanctions if Musk and the current US government keep operating as they've done since the inauguration, so I'd also see that as a risk with regard to availability of those services outside the US. Apple is pretty good at keeping their products out of political crossfire but Musk seems to pretty much be seeking trouble these days.
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