Not to mention books. I’m not sure if we’ll ever see another Harry Potter level book again, at least in our lifetimes.

Are you talking quality or popularity? Because there are many, many books that are just as good or better than Harry Potter.

They’re focused entirely on the shitty practices those other manufacturers engaged in. In that regard, Valve didn’t do much (and that’s a good thing).

Anyone buying a new iPhone still gets a USB C cable. This only applies to Airpods.

Always has been

This isn’t relevant to people purchasing iPhones, as those come with a cable. This is only relevant to people purchasing the newest Airpods.

Which system(s) are you playing on?

This is about Airpods. The phone still includes the cable.

I’m more concerned about them using the word “sapient.” My dog is sentient; it’s not a high bar to clear.

But what about … new users entering the Apple ecosystem?

What ecosystem do they think people are coming from where they didn’t already have a USB C cable or wireless charger?

EDIT: This refers only to the new Airpods, not to iPhones. iPhones still come with a charging cable.

Good to know! I saw that mentioned on some (apparently outdated) Comodo marketing copy as a benefit over LE

EV certs give you an extra green bar or something along those lines. If your customers care about it, then you have to. If they don’t - and they probably don’t - it’s a waste.

Ethical

AI tools aren’t inherently unethical, and even the ones that use models with data provenance concerns (e.g., a tool that uses Stable Diffusion models) aren’t any less ethical than many other things that we never think twice about. They certainly aren’t any less ethical than tools that use Google services (Google Analytics, Firebase, etc).

There are ethical concerns with many AI tools and with the creation of AI models. More importantly, there are ethical concerns with certain uses of AI tools. For example, I think that it is unethical for a company to reduce the number of artists they hire / commission because of AI. It’s unethical to create nonconsensual deepfakes, whether for pornography, propaganda, or fraud.

Environmentally sustainable

At least people are making efforts to improve sustainability. https://hbr.org/2024/07/the-uneven-distribution-of-ais-environmental-impacts

That said, while AI does have energy a lot of the comments I’ve read about AI’s energy usage are flat out wrong.

Great things

Depends on whom you ask, but “Great” is such a subjective adjective here that it doesn’t make sense to consider it one way or the other.

things that people want

Obviously people want the things that AI tools create. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t use them.

well-meaning

Excuse me, Sam Altman is a stand-up guy and I will not have you besmirching his name /s

Honestly my main complaint with this line is the implication that the people behind non-AI tools are any more well-meaning. I’m sure some are, but I can say the same with regard to AI. And in either case, the engineers and testers and project managers and everyone actually implementing the technology and trying to earn a paycheck? They’re well-meaning, for the most part.

What exactly are you trusting a cert provider with and what are the security implications?

End users trust the cert provider. The cert provider has a process that they use to determine if they can trust you.

What attack vectors do you open yourself up to when trusting a certificate authority with your websites’ certificates?

You’re not really trusting them with your certificates. You don’t give them your private key or anything like that, and the certs are visible to anyone navigating to your website.

Your new vulnerabilities are basically limited to what you do for them - any changes you make to your domain’s DNS config, or anything you host, etc. - and depend on that introducing a vulnerability of its own. You also open a new phishing attack vector, where someone might contact you, posing as the certificate authority, and ask you to make a change that would introduce a vulnerability.

In what way could it benefit security and/or privacy to utilize a paid service?

For most use cases, as far as I know, it doesn’t.

LetsEncrypt doesn’t offer EV or OV certificates, which you may need for your use case. However, these are mostly relevant at the enterprise level. Maybe you have a storefront and want an EV cert?

LetsEncrypt also only offers community support, and if you set something up wrong you could be less secure.

Other CAs may offer services that enhance privacy and security, as well, like scanning your site to confirm your config is sound… but the core offering isn’t really going to be different (aside from LE having intentionally short renewal periods), and theoretically you could get those same services from a different vendor.

You can get wildcard certs with LetsEncrypt (since 2018): https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/acme-v2-production-environment-wildcards/55578

Sure, but if everyone does it then it wouldn’t work (no one would be drawing excess when the solar is at peak)

If everyone did it then electric companies could prioritize investing in batteries and capacitors and further reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.

If everyone did it, then even without extra storage capacity, net metering would still work. You don’t get credits for generating energy, just for sending it to the grid. All they have to do is the same thing they already do - curtailment.

Finally, it’s impossible for everyone to be on net metering because NEM 3.0 doesn’t have net metering and NEM 1.0 and 2.0 are only available if you’re grandfathered in.

If oversupply were really a concern, then you’d think the prices during oversupply would reflect that, dropping to basically nothing. They don’t. If they did, then EVs could be charged for super cheap when solar power was flooding the grid.

that sounds a lot like what they are talking about

What they’re talking about is revoking the law that grandfathered people into NEM 1.0 and 2.0 contracts. Keep in mind, the people who purchased solar under NEM 1.0 and 2.0 did so under the presumption that they would be able to stay on it for at least 20 years (because that was codified in law).000

only getting paid some large percentage of the price for energy sent to the grid

NEM 3.0 reduces the way credits are calculated to, on average, 25% of what they were before, and that are not the same as the retail rate.

https://aurorasolar.com/blog/explaining-and-modeling-californias-net-billing-tariff-nem-3-0/ has some examples. At the same time that electricity from the grid costs $0.44/kWh, solar sent to the grid only returns a $0.05/kWh credit.

5 cents is not a large percentage of 44 cents.

If your neighbor has solar and you charge your EV in the middle of a sunny day when your neighbor is at work, you’re probably using your neighbor’s electricity to do so. That’s gonna cost you $15 and net your neighbor a $1.71 credit.

Under NEM 1.0 and 2.0, if you import from and export to the grid in the same hour, those amounts are netted, even before NBCs come into effect. But under NEM 3.0, you could get billed for importing in the same hour even if you exported far more than you used. If you imported 1 kWh from the grid, you’d need to export 9 kWh to break even.

Again, this doesn’t make sense. Someone is paying $0.44/kWh for the energy you exported, but you’re only getting $0.05 credit for it.

If your solar system has storage, you can strategically export energy to the grid when the compensation is higher. That’s something you can consider when installing your solar system… but that’s not true for the people who are grandfathered into NEM 1.0 and 2.0, who knew they were grandfathered in by law.

And from what I’ve heard, even that doesn’t actually help that much, because the credits don’t apply to the largest part of the bill - they apply to “generation,” not to “delivery.” I haven’t found a reliable source confirming that, but if true it just adds insult to injury - if you pay the added cost to install an intelligent storage system and configure it to return money to the grid when their costs are highest, you get a credit equal to the cost you helped them avoid, but then the credit’s actually only usable on a small portion of your bill. If the calculations are based on avoided cost, you should get those credits even if it means the electric company is paying you.

It doesn’t really seem like net metering is sustainable.

Not sure why you think that.

Say for example someone generates the same amount of electricity they use, in that case they pay $0 for electricity even though the grid has to take the burden of storing the electricity until they use it later in the day.

The grid isn’t storing their energy - it’s sending it to other customers, meaning that non-sustainable, polluting energy sources don’t have to be generated.

The only time that’s not true is when the net load on the grid dips below zero. According to the duck curve graph from the article, it does appear to be very briefly dipping for a very brief time period each day. At that point it could make sense to store the rest, but if the grid doesn’t have storage capacity then any excess is “wasted,” but at that point the grid engages in a process known as “curtailment,” which means it rejects the excess, meaning that nobody gets credit later for energy that isn’t used now.

Also, curtailment is often not because the grid itself is over-supplied, but because specific regions are over-supplied and the grid lacks transmission lines from them to regions where demand is higher.

in that case they pay $0 for electricity

True under NEM 1.0, but NEM 2.0 also includes “non-bypassable charges” - components of pulling from the grid that cannot be offset by what they contribute. Those charges are roughly 5% as far as I can tell, meaning that if they pulled $300 worth of energy from the grid and sent back $300 worth (or more), they’d still owe $15.

Cool, didn’t know that about Ecosia.

Qwant: looks like maybe they used to have a browser that might have been forked from Firefox, but it hasn’t been updated in a while - per the App Store listings, I think they now just have a lightweight search engine frontend.

Brave on iOS appears to have been forked from Firefox on iOS back in 2018-2019, which was news to me. (“Appears to” regards the date; it was definitely forked from Firefox).

the rest of the browser is derived from Firefox

This might be true for some, like Ecosia, but I’m guessing that Brave isn’t pulling changes from Firefox. It seems like they basically used the Firefox codebase as a starting point - and in 5 years of development, a lot can change.

I wasn’t saying that this is generally true for IOS browsers, just that a pretty large part of FOSS ones are

Gotcha, that makes more sense.

One more thing to point out is that your comment reads like they were based on Firefox and that Firefox didn’t use Webkit (but of course Firefox on iOS also uses Webkit).

more like Floorp

Meaning that they’re forks of Chromium on desktop in the same way Floorp is a fork of Firefox on desktop?

They are based off Firefox for IOS which uses WebKit, but they are still based on the browser like Edge which is based on chromium vs Flakon which uses blink but not the rest chromium

I’ve reread this like 5 times and still have no clue what you’re trying to say.

The person you replied to was technically incorrect - other browsers aren’t UIs on top of Safari, but (outside the EU) they’re all limited to the same browser rendering engine Safari uses, Webkit.

This means that other rendering engines - namely Firefox’s Gecko and Chromium’s Blink, as well as niche engines like Ladybird’s - are unavailable there (outside the EU).

They are based off Firefox for IOS

This is not generally true of browsers on iOS, and might not be true of any.

Flakon

I didn’t know what this was at first - apparently this was a typo for “Falkon.”

which uses blink

The browser rendering engine used by Chromium browsers is Blink, which was forked from Webkit over a decade ago, but I’m not aware of any non-Chromium browsers that use it… including Falkon, which appears to leverage QtWebEngine, which itself uses Chromium.

but they are still based on the browser like Edge

By “based on” do you mean “uses the same branding as and is loosely inspired by?” Because I highly doubt that the iOS codebase is based off the desktop codebase for many Chromium or Firefox-based browsers… they may share some code and assets but I doubt they get to share much more than that.

It’s a bit unclear what you mean by “Apple” - I’m assuming you mean Safari on both Mac and iOS.

The search engine I use is SearxNg. On Firefox on Mac it was pretty easy to add.

To use it in Safari, I installed the Keyword Search extension from the App Store. It has the option to set a search engine as the default if you don’t use a keyword, so I did that. This works in both Mac and on iOS / iPadOS.

There are other Safari extensions that do similar things, like Customize Search Engine (free). Kagi has an extension that can make Kagi the default search engine, for example (it doesn’t appear that there’s an equivalent for Startpage, though). I haven’t used anything other than Keyword Search for this, though.

Eligible libraries, archives, and museums have a few exemptions to the DMCA’s anti-circumvention clauses that aren’t available to ordinary citizens, but these aren’t unique to the Internet Archive. For example:

Literary works, excluding computer programs and compilations that were compiled specifically for text and data mining purposes, distributed electronically where:

(A) The circumvention is undertaken by a researcher affiliated with a nonprofit institution of higher education, or by a student or information technology staff member of the institution at the direction of such researcher, solely to deploy text and data mining techniques on a corpus of literary works for the purpose of scholarly research and teaching;

(B) The copy of each literary work is lawfully acquired and owned by the institution, or licensed to the institution without a time limitation on access;

© The person undertaking the circumvention views the contents of the literary works in the corpus solely for the purpose of verification of the research findings; and

(D) The institution uses effective security measures to prevent further dissemination or downloading of literary works in the corpus, and to limit access to only the persons identified in paragraph (b)(5)(i)(A) of this section or to researchers or to researchers affiliated with other institutions of higher education solely for purposes of collaboration or replication of the research.

This exemption doesn’t allow them to publish the content, though, nor would it provide them immunity to takedown requests, if it did.

These exemptions change every three years and previously granted exemptions have to be renewed. The next cycle begins in October and they started accepting comments on renewals + proposals for expanded or new exemptions in April, so that’s why we’re hearing about companies lobbying against them now.