Some of these bugs are more well known but for some like AirDrop not working or hotspot not connecting I always thought “well it’s probably because some power setting / DNS config / ad blocker / whatever” that I accidentally changed from the default years ago.
Nostalgia is real but I do remember a not so distant past (around iPhone 4S or so) where AirDrop worked, autocorrect worked, text selection was flawed but predictable, WiFi connected and stayed connected etc.
> Nostalgia is real but I do remember a not so distant past (around iPhone 4S or so) where AirDrop worked, autocorrect worked, text selection was flawed but predictable, WiFi connected and stayed connected etc.
The funny thing is all of those features are fine for me.
Man you got me on readability. Just yesterday I had to input a random string WiFi password in a printer with only arrow keys to select each character. The password had an upper-case I in it but the moronic designers of the little password label that came with the router selected a font where “I” and “l” are indistinguishable. Took me like ten minutes to get the damn thing connected.
I only got it right because I looked up the password on my Mac, whose keychain app displays them in gloriously readable monospaced font. FFS
Except as a kid back then, the screensaver was trivial to install and neat to look at, and BOINC was a pain. I dropped it when they switched. I imagine some less-technical adults who were interested did as well.
The fact that all SETI endeavors haven’t really found anything is actually a very valuable result, because it constrains “they’re everywhere, we just haven’t been looking” arguments quite a bit.
Even humanity’s (weak) radio emissions would be detectable from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from much further. So the idea that intelligent life is absolutely everywhere that was liberally tossed around a few decades ago is pretty much on life support now.
>Even humanity’s (weak) radio emissions would be detectable from tens of light years away, and stronger emissions from much further.
That's not true. Non-directional radio transmissions (e.g. TV, broadcast radio) would not be distinguishable from cosmic background radiation at more than a light year or two away [0]. Highly directional radio emissions (e.g. Arecibo message) an order of magnitude more powerful than the strongest transmitters on Earth would only be visible at approximately 1000 light years away [1], and would only be perceptible if the detector were perfectly aligned with the transmission at the exact time it arrived.
This is my biggest issues with all of the messages we keep sending out to space. By the time it gets to its destination, it will basically be indistinguishable from noise
That depends. If there is "someone" within 20 light years advanced enough to detect our signals we can establish communication and learn from each other - the 40 year round trip time means we can only ask long term questions, but just sending all of human knowledge, and them returning with their knowledge can be a big leg up for both (though sorting through all the things we already know will be a big effort). They may have solved fusion, while we are still 50 years away, meanwhile we have solved something else they are interested in but haven't solved yet.
20 light years is about the farthest useful communication can be established. The farther out things are the longer the round trip and thus the more likely we have already figured things out by the time we get their answer. It would still be interesting to get a response, but our (and we assume their) civilization is moving too fast for much knowledge sharing. Eventually with knowledge sharing you assume something is obvious that isn't and so you get another round trip. Watching an alien movie no matter who far away they are will be interesting (even if it is more a smell based or something that we don't think of)
There is no reason to think we will ever visit them, but we can do other things when they are close.
There are not many stars within 20 light years though. The Femi paradox doesn't exist at that distance, there just not enough stars to expect to find life that close.
Is there a reason we would need to coordinate on what to exchange rather than, say, beginning with encyclopedias and textbooks then moving to a constant stream of notable papers, news, discoveries, etc? What kind of bandwidth can you hit with a cooperating neighbour where improvements become civilisationally important? How many bytes (megabytes? Terabytes?) of meaningful new data does humanity produce per second? I suspect it's reasonably low.
Good question. My thought is similar to yours, but there is a lot of room for debate on what to send. They probably don't care about the roman empire like we do - but there are enough references in modern science that we need to send a summary just so they understand some things. We produce a lot of data, but most of it isn't meaningful.
if this is a real situation I wouldn't be asked. So use salt
When you say perfectly aligned, what kind of precision are we talking about? If we aimed a receiver at a nearby star, would we be able to achieve this kind of precision?
That's pretty dismissive outright; consider uh. All forms of distributed computing, from cloud computers to bittorrent to bitcoin / cryptocurrency. Seti@home was one of, if not the first distributed projects, the predecessor of cloud computing and spreading a workload over many computers, years before Hadoop and map/reduce became popular (which at least in my head was the start of "big data" and cloud computing).
I won't claim it was "the" most important or it was critical in that, but it's not to be dismissed.
I have slowly but steadily made myself not rely on Apple anymore: files moved to NextCloud, mail and calendars moved to Fastmail, etc.
Platform agnostic choices, because clearly Apple is not to be trusted anymore as the guardian of good taste, and also not anymore as the guardian of acceptable morals (i.e. the insane sucking up to the Great Orange leader).
There are still some services I need to move (mainly, music and reminders) but once achieved I am ready to jump to another platform without it impacting my daily life.
I am curious how big of a chance they have. I could imagine many enterprises that are already (almost by default) Microsoft customers (Windows, Office, Entra etc.) will just default to Copilot (and maybe Azure) to keep everything neatly integrated.
So an enterprise would need to be very dedicated to use everything Microsoft, but then go through the trouble use Claude as their AI just because it is slightly better for coding.
I have a feeling I am missing something here though, I would be happy for anyone to educate me!
I think at the current price point the capability of office copilot (which I don't use, only read reviews) is that it's basically email writer/summarizer/meeting notes.
Can't light a candle to Opus 4.5 who can now create and modify financial models from PDFs and augmented with websearch and the Excel skill (gpt-5.2 can do this too). That said the market IS smaller
I initially found his channel when he build a working calculator from roller coasters in RCT2.[1] It's been fun since then learning about how guests decide to enter a toilet or why guests will always get stuck in certain maze designs etc.
For reference: A RAM 1500 would pay 383 Euro in Utrecht as a person and 183 as a business (quarterly). And as a bonus you pay no BPM (aquisition tax) as a business, which is in the 12000-15000 (15k) range. The BPM hole has been fixed as of 2025 but there are enough already on the road.
I personally like the wanktank since it's more internationial.
You cannot use a "grijs" plate as a personal vehicle unless you pay "bijtelling" which starts at 500km yearly for private usage, but I guess the milage administration will be on the same order as the driving style.
Nostalgia is real but I do remember a not so distant past (around iPhone 4S or so) where AirDrop worked, autocorrect worked, text selection was flawed but predictable, WiFi connected and stayed connected etc.
What happened?
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