Em Adespoton

The big issue is when older communication standards stop being supported and you lose access to 3G, 802.11n, TLS1.2, etc. at that point, the device becomes an offline-only device.

That said, I have an iPad 2 I picked up in 2011 that still functions perfectly except for web browsing. Works great as a jailbroken emulator, an eBook reader, running all the same offline apps I used in 2011, and the original battery still lasts for 8 hours on a charge.

Seems like it should theoretically be possible to have AI subscribe to all the news feeds (AP, Reuters, NewsWire, public reporting databases, legal and police feeds, websites of all registered non-profits, etc.) and generate hyper-localized page content linked to an ad network.

As long as you pull in more in ad revenue than you pay in tokens and infrastructure costs, it’s a win — once someone sets up such a system, they just need to fix things when they break; most of the process would be automated and self-healing.

I’m surprised we haven’t seen more attempts at this. Would it be slop? Definitely. But it would be profitable slop.

For 12 hours out of every day? :D

No, because Apple and Google aren’t providing third parties access to the Internet through your devices.

Well, it was inevitable.

Yes. Yes, they are.

I’m a computer scientist and got into it before it became popular.

I suck at programming and have never labeled myself as a programmer. I write software to solve problems and know my way around the SDLC, but there’s a LOT of CS work out there that isn’t being a code monkey.

The shame was the number of people who went to college specifically to learn how to write software that can now be generated by AI, at the quality level generated by AI. Those jobs are now gone. Being a software analyst, integrator, architect, security engineer, information systems analyst, data scientist, etc? Thise are still in high demand, as are programmers who are subject matter experts or can lead a team.

AI didn’t decide anything. The humans failed to properly define the rules, and their translation model took the path most likely to succeed.

If it had been told not to use human created bots to win, it would probably have reverse engineered the game, found an exploit, and leveraged that instead. Because using the human interface to play/win the game is not the most efficient or dependable or easy to figure out method.

Well… the existing source is still open. Has anyone forked the repo?

This actually sounds like he might be trying to turn Apple back into a hardware company— trimming the service portfolio while strengthening hardware options.

Of course, the last time we were there was under Gil Amelio, and THAT required bailouts from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs because the software side of things imploded.

Devices that only do what YOU want are now premium devices.

First Mac OS I learned was System 4; back then, you’d be learning new ways of doing things multiple times a year.

And it’s between people who we already know are morally compromised.

I prefer to call it Ontario Intelligence.

El Capitan was a half decent OS too — it just had the downside that it had already been App Stored / signature locked / iPhoneized.

Worth noting that 10.6.7 was the last good OS; 10.6.8 contained the App Store update and was signature locked.

I noticed before updating that the update seemed hyper focused on the 18 series phones. It did make me wonder: why am I installing a 5.3GB update to my iPhone 13 that fixes issues with the iPhone 18? And are there similar issues with my phone that they’ve just never bothered to fix because they’re no longer focusing on 5 year old hardware? And does that mean that they could actually be making my phone worse with this update due to lack of thorough testing?

I wouldn’t call it pretty in any state.

Maybe one where the users can host their own federated instances?

Any semi-recent desktop or laptop has no need of a lightweight Linux. That’s for embedded solutions, rPis, and other resource constrained systems.

Having said that, in 2026 and going forward, we may have need of lightweight desktop distributions again. 64GB storage, 4GB RAM style.

Any Linux distribution based on KDE or GNOME is not going to be lightweight. It did have the LXDE option for stripping it back somewhat, but the repos were still mostly filled with software that requires KDE or GNOME.

Mint is kind of like LxUbuntu back in the early days; still no lightweight, not even by desktop standards, but it’ll bloat up quickly if you want to get anything done with it.

I mean, Puppy Linux and DSL are still around. Anything based on Debian could claim to be stable or enterprise ready, but not lightweight.