The way I see it is either you trust Apple or you don’t. To be clear, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to arrive at either conclusion, as it relates to your own needs and security posture.
Personally I choose to trust them. My trust is not blind, and they could lose my trust very quickly. But as it stands right now, they have my trust.
If you say that you don’t trust Apple, I don’t see how you could tolerate running any of their software. Relying on an operating system made by a company I don’t trust seems wildly irresponsible to me.
I am of the same mind. In simpler cases, it would make sense to "resist", like buying a smart TV for its screen, and just never connecting it to the internet, because the software is shit. But in a case of an auto updating operating system? Forget the idea of controlling it. It will be whatever the vendor wants. Or rather, it's either drastic measures, like installing it from a local source and keeping it offline, or whatever the vendor wants. We can have achievements like blocking the IP for the news and weather, and then those widgets won't load, great. But we gained nothing.
I arrived on the same conclusion as you, that you cannot really selectively accept a service provider. Because of the nature of the ongoing relationship, posture evaluation would need to happen on every interaction, which is improbable. I don't think we can evaluate every update. So really, it's either trust, or no trust. No sense to lull ourselves into anything else.
I personally solve this for myself with compartmentalization. For example, I loathe Windows, but I use an LTSC edition of it for gaming, and only gaming. I don't trust them with my "life", so it doesn't get access to my data, just games.
That’s what you disagree with? If anything, I was expecting someone to insist that it’s not unreasonable to run software from a company you don’t trust. That’s an easy argument to steel-man, because there are many ways to run untrusted software safely.
But if you think that trust itself is a false dichotomy, I’d love to hear what that sounds like. I’m struggling to think of a good faith steel-man of this assertion.
> But if you think that trust itself is a false dichotomy, I’d love to hear what that sounds like. I’m struggling to think of a good faith steel-man of this assertion.
There are obviously levels of trust. I'm truly baffled that you're struggling with this.
Your trust in a person, or a company, can increase or decrease over time. You can trust someone with some tasks but not with other tasks. Again, this is so incredibly obvious, I'm not sure why I have to point it out.
One might also view the large number of Apple-owned domains here as evidence that Apple's infrastructure is a sprawling mess, and reduce trust accordingly.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the scale of our solar system minuscule compared to the distance between stars? Presumably if another star gets close enough to affect Jupiter, it’s going to affect everything to varying degrees.
Yes you're correct! It's about a factor of 50,000 between the orbit of Jupiter and the distance to the nearest star.
But the orbit of Jupiter is still a lot bigger than the size of the Sun. To give numbers: The radius of the Sun is 700km, the radius of the orbit of Jupiter is 7*10^8 km (approx, it varies a bit), and the distance to the nearest star is 4*10^13 km.
Related to the OP’s hypothetical, if we did cross paths with Andromeda, for how long would that intersection last? Or to put it another way, how long could Earth be within both galaxies, assuming a hypothetical perfect aim?
One potential outcome would be that the galaxies merge, but by the time the collision is well underway our sun will have aged to a point where Earth will already be quite crispy.
I still use CFML / MySQL (more specifically Lucee / MariaDB). Aside from not being one of the cool kids, I haven’t seen anything sufficiently compelling to justify changing my stack.
The main reason for preferring a newer version of Windows has generally been hardware compatibility. But when virtualising (or emulating), this is far less important as compatibility is usually scaffolded by emulated hardware and/or backported drivers.
When your requirements call for an old version of Windows, generally you have a specific piece of software you want to run, so start by choosing the version most widely used at the time, which sometimes isn't the latest version. And you should always experiment, because there are thousands of things which contribute to stability. Newer (or older) version of Windows could be better or worse, depending on your specific case.
Regardless which version you pick, treat them as a security risk and (if you're in a serious production environment) avoid giving them unrestricted access to your local network or unrestricted access to the wider internet.
NT 4.0 was way different from XP or 2000, and it wasn't just a matter of hardware support. It wasn't as "Plug and Play" as XP, but somehow it worked much more stably. I think back to the days when we had an NT server that ran for years without a reboot, and that's not something you could expect from XP or 2000.
Actually, if I ever decide to dive into old Windows, NT 4.0 will be the only version I have personal sentiments for.
2000 was rock solid stable once it was up and running. It took a lot of one off patches to get my k7 system to that point, but iirc I never had the os crash.
> Newer (or older) version of Windows could be better or worse, depending on your specific case.
This only applies since Windows 8 when Microsoft started bundling new features with patches. For older Windows versions, you usually want the latest service pack. Except, of course, when your programs depends on a specific bug being present.
If the terms were so great and the value to developers so high, it should definitely have been able to succeed in a competitive market, and need not have been forced on people.
I think most of the praise was because before the App Store, you quite literally could not install software on iOS. If the Mac worked the same way, people would absent-mindedly praise Apple for it too.
Right now I treat AI as a tool to speed up boilerplate code, or to help me when writing in an unfamiliar language.
In areas of high complexity, I want to write the code myself — even if AI was capable of doing it. Often I don’t just want code, I want the understanding which comes from thoughtfully considering the problem and carefully solving it.
Perhaps one day, I could task an AI with writing an API, and it would be able to not just write the API, but also write a bunch of clients in other languages, and automatically integrate lessons learned writing clients into revisions of the API. Then it could task a bunch of other AI models with writing exploits, and patch the API appropriately. Then integrate any lessons learned when revising the API so that the code is more maintainable.
Personally I choose to trust them. My trust is not blind, and they could lose my trust very quickly. But as it stands right now, they have my trust.
If you say that you don’t trust Apple, I don’t see how you could tolerate running any of their software. Relying on an operating system made by a company I don’t trust seems wildly irresponsible to me.
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