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I agree. At the beginning I thought this was a conservation effort.

Turns out to be the modern equivalent of colonisers stealing local artefacts.

Why export this at all!?


Today I learned that carefully preserving an artefact that neither its owner nor anyone else in its origin country wanted = “colonizers stealing.”

This is the same for a lot of supposed “theft” by museums. Lots of “priceless” objects now were at the time junk, so they were thrown away.

> This is the same for a lot of supposed “theft” by museums.

Not to mention that in many countries art pieces predating a certain era are simply destroyed (on the ground that they're older than a particular religion).

And most of the pharaohs' tombs were pillaged and unique pieces were melt by actual thiefs for their gold.

These evil, evil, museums displaying these around the world for any visitor to see when you think these could have been melt for gold by thieves or simply destroyed because they were impure!

Evil western civilization. That western civilization is so evil it must be replaced!


Alternate theory, both are true.

Western societies took advantage of multiple other societies to plunder their treasures. Those same societies didn't have the infrastructure and/or care to preserve these things themselves.

Sometimes two things can be true.


If they do not care about them, they are not "treasures" by the standards of those cultures but rather "waste."

Not necessarily true- the majority of people don't know about 3-2-1 backup strategy and I've seen hundreds of "help! my { phone | SD card | computer } died and I lost all my family photos" posts

Conservation or not, that TV has been given out by its owner so there is no theft involved. Neither has it been moved out of the country by colons or illegaly.

And it is a damn TV. A big one for sure but it isn't Moctezuma II headdress nor are those Devatas carved from Banteay Srei cambodian temple.


This example is what makes much of the "stealing" claim bogus, both for this and many artifacts. The Japanese owner wanted it gone and considered it trash. It wasn't some beloved item. Even Sony didn't care.

And so much of what is considered "stolen" was given away by someone in that culture as trash.


That's the standard excuse of a thief. "I'm not stealing it, I'm saving it". Better stop the excusing.

Except that the owner is the one giving it away. The current owner doesn't claim theft.

The only people claiming theft are a third party that never owned the property in question or at the time gave it away freely.


Why do we even need a microblogging platform? Twitter turned into a dumpster fire. Why will these other alternatives not have the same fate?

We don't. If anything just using HTTP and HTML the way it was designed is fine. See https://indieweb.org

I’m inclined to agree. These post platforms are a race to the bottom

These things are good or bad because of the community of people who use them, not the technology per se. And that community is shaped by both culture and moderators.

I disagree. The shape of the instrument makes some sounds easier to make than others. Pianos are inherently polyphonic while trumpets play one note at a time. Anything made in the shape of twitter will result in twitter like behavior.

The medium is the message. Any microcblogging platform that tracks and displays engagement inherently optimizes for short form swipes and "rebuttals" and outright lies. The "real time feed" nature optimizes for taking zero time or effort to confirm anything that anyone says. Nearly everything that "breaks" on twitter and doesn't make it to actual reports was an outright lie.

You can't put a necessary amount of nuance in 140 characters.


The original Web was the work of genious, but everything since is either adtech enshittification or cumbersome hacks.

The "simplest" requirement - decentralized discovery of what is out there, is essentially still unsolved. That is one of the main reasons we have centralized platforms of all types instead of some RSS on steroids design.

The second (and more difficult in sociopolitical terms) requirement that is still unsolved is the "active" web, decentralized POST-in on somebody else's server. Here you have social challenges (identity, spam, moderation, fake news etc).

We really need a good society adapted Web 3 evolution, because Web 2 has been a disaster that keeps on giving. But it will require genious at least commensurate with the original.


How do you know what’s happening elsewhere? Other than having relations, it falls under reporters to propagate news. How do you meet new people? You go to special events and gatherings. The web is already linked, but we have special nodes like search engines, directories, and forums that are information hubs.

Creating a website was always easy. The minimum html you need is very small, and all you have to do is copy the files with an ftp client. Then tools like wordpress came and it became even easier.

What social medias have done was to put everyone in the same space. First there were walls and you just have to build your own information hub. Now, the platform is providing you its own like a private television service (including ads) whether you like it or not.

No need to invent a new version of the web, we can always go back to what was working and is still working.


Twitter is precisely the reason we need these decentralized, niche platforms. It's a return to the norm prior to social media centralizing everything.

They won't avoid the same fate, because decay and entropy are inevitable. But they will last longer simply because fewer people know about them and use them.


> Why do we even need a microblogging platform?

Diversity of options is great.

> Twitter turned into a dumpster fire

I disagree. I love the new Twitter.


You must like it for political reasons, because from a technical standpoint the new Twitter is a catastrophe. It doesn’t even work properly. The other day I typed in the URL of an account I wanted to check, from a browser where I wasn’t logged in, and I got an endless loop of redirects. Watching Musk tear down Twitter infrastructure over the last two years has been like watching the Notre Dame fire, except if it was set on purpose. It was a miracle of human accomplishment and now it’s a shell of its old self.

> It was a miracle of human accomplishment and now it’s a shell of its old self.

You must dislike him for political reasons, because from an accomplishment standpoint he is still a miracle.


That was the case long before Musk took over. Twitter has always been an observer-hostile site, that's the whole reason why nitter and co exist.

What do you like about it?

Community notes is really great. It's the best system for fact-checking anyone's ever come up with.

Tell me about it. First time I was “very” ill from the flu, the doc was nonchalant. He was all, “yeah, this isn’t uncommon”. I was bed ridden for 2 weeks and wasn’t really 100% for almost 3months after.

Yep, the flu kills tens of thousands every year. CDC says about 36,000.

and it makes sense when you think about it. doctors in a hospital see the whole gamut, from people with an ear infection to someone in a fatal car accident. “bleeding eyes” isn’t severe at all lol.

Severe means “i’m going to die unless i get medical attention very soon”.


Popularised by Adobe?

Don’t you just learn transformation matrices in algebra?


You learn matrix multiplication in algebra, not its application to do affine transforms in 2D graphics.

I started learning rotations, translations, scaling, shears using matrices in high school.

Affine transforms are apparently attributed to Mobius and Gauss. That’s like the 1700s.

What is vector based 2D graphics if not a direct application of geometry? Were we not using well known maths results when 2D graphics was first implemented on a computer?


> What is vector based 2D graphics if not a direct application of geometry? Were we not using well known maths results when 2D graphics was first implemented on a computer?

We were, but in high school, they aren't teaching you computer graphics, they're teaching you how to apply weirdly specific rules to transform some scribbles into more scribbles, for no good reason - hence the common student question, "what will I ever need that for?".

FWIW, I actually got into gamedev as a hobby as a kid, and it saved my life prospects, because it gave me a reason to be interested in trigonometry and algebra - all those random scribble transformation rules were directly applicable to problems relevant to me, such as "how do I rotate the bitmaps that are spaceships and rockets and turrets?", and such.


Nearly all modern 2D graphics systems are modeled after PostScript, including PDF, SVG, Java's Graphics2D, etc. In fact, Adobe employees contributed to the specifications of those technologies. Based on that I'd say PostScript popularized it. Other 2D graphics libs such as X-Windows, AWT, Windows GDI, Apple QuickDraw etc. didn't support transformation matrices. Maybe they never heard about Mobius and Gauss?

Most political systems/tribal groups punish science minded people.

To gain power and influence you need to state your position and stick to it. New evidence to the contrary? Reiterate and double down on your position. Attempt to discredit the evidence. Having people die doesn’t matter as long as you stick it out.

The last thing you should do is incorporate new evidence and change your mind as a result.


While establishment politics in academica sucks the original comment was so poorly thought out as to be farce.

The (people who want science funding in the US) manipulated (another country's health authority) so that (Donald Trump and RFK would give them science funding), because both are known particularly to be influenced by the CDC equivalent of the Congo.


Agricola is pretty old. Many of the older euros that were translated to English are shocking. And the way information is conveyed is noticeably worse than a good modern euro.


Ultimately the fun of a heavy board game comes in having interesting decisions to make and executing your strategy.

So the nuances can really matter. Even if you get the rules right, you don’t realise the importances of something until you play once or twice.


It's iterative.

You're not going to learn a full complex ruleset in one sitting.Having a one page quick start of the game structure, allows you to get a feel for it before coming back for a deep dive.

Your brain has a foundation to build on when you read the ful complex rules - it wont feel like your brain is maxing out at 100%.


I can already print human scale objects domestically on a belt printer. But only on a single axis. Something like this would have the advantage of being able to print at human scale on all axes. But you’d need a human sized printer on at least one axis. At which point, you have to question what you’re doing.


It would be a fun project to figure out how to optimize the support material necessary for this printer to raise itself up and move itself around a print that is far larger than itself.

Sort of like scaffolding for commercial construction.


you mean for the printer to print its own scaffolding?

Any scenario where the printer itself moves but continues to print an in-progress object requires the equivalent of auto-bed-leveling. But rather than checking the location of a fixed bed with known parameters, it would probably be checking the unfinished face of the printed object. Sounds challenging...


Yes, exactly, print it's own scaffolding. Sounds very challenging.

Imagine this robot printing a human sized David statue and the necessary scaffolding to raise itself to every position necessary to do so.

The next level would be to design the scaffolding in such a way that it's easy for the robot to disassemble and either directly reprocess into filament or to store for later reprocessing.

The next level would be coordinating a swarm of these robots.


Maybe they realised what they were really doing after the fact and changed their minds. They can’t really do anything about it so they are doing what they can.

It a bit silly to think people won’t learn new information and change their minds.


There must be millions of Intel Macs still around. Why wouldn’t they update it?


The parent comment said that Apple is rushing iOS updates. iOS is the operating system for iPhones which use Apple Silicon rather than Intel processors.


Well for starters, they stopped providing any updates for many perfectly functional Intel Macs years ago for no other reason than planned obsolescence. A side effect of the "they make both the hardware and software that's why it's better" paradigm.

Things like OpenCore Legacy Patcher prove it's possible; they just don't want to.

I don't think anyone feels entitled to new features in perpetuity. Security updates only would be fine thank you.

Don't tell me the richest company in the world can't pay for a couple of developers who just want to rest and vest to take care of and test the legacy platforms. A cushy job and you keep the customers happy.

Ironically the best way to stay safe on these computers is to install Windows or Linux.


Software needs longer support life cycles in general. I find it frustrating that organizations do not support operating systems, hardware, and applications for at least 10 years. Note Apple is one of the better organizations on this. Consumer router companies are notorious for shipping unpatched software. Here is what I would like to see:

1. All hardware and software should come with a highly visible end of support date.

2. All hardware and software should notify people when it is no longer receiving security patches. It should also explain to users why running unpatched software or hardware is dangerous.


Which is why having cybersecurity laws and liability in computing is so relevant.


To my knowledge Apple has never published EOL or support dates in the future. Someone correct me if something has changed in the last few years.


https://support.apple.com/en-us/102772 outlines "vintage" and "obsolete" status for hardware products, with a few exceptions. I'm not aware of a similarly straightforward criteria or comprehensive list for software support periods.


Samsung nowadays tells you ahead of time how long a phone will get major updates and security updates. I think it's the same with Google Pixel. And they have a list of models and their release schedules:

https://security.samsungmobile.com/workScope.smsb

My qualm with them is though that not all devices are updated at the same time (like iOS/iPadOS/macOS). One phone may get an update the 10th of the month, while another only gets it the 30th. As a result, there is often quite a large window where vulnerabilities are known, but not yet patched (it's even worse with the cheap models that only get quarterly updates).


That list relates strictly to hardware repairs. Vintage macs have often been fully supported software-wise.


Yes, I'm fully aware that the support article I linked to is specifically about hardware support—that's why I mentioned that there isn't a similar list for software support.


The issue with passing off a list of vintage products as some kind of past tense support schedule is by definition products become vintage when they are added to the list at some arbitrary date.

My expectation is a table of OS versions and EOL dates published in advance. Like nearly every other responsible OS vendor in existence. Apple continuing to get a pass on this in 2024 is abhorrent.


> The issue with passing off a list of vintage products as some kind of past tense support schedule is by definition products become vintage when they are added to the list at some arbitrary date.

If you read some of the text above the product list, you'll see that Apple does publish guidelines about when products can be expected to be added to the list:

> Products are considered vintage when Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 5 and less than 7 years ago.

> Products are considered obsolete when Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 7 years ago. Monster-branded Beats products are considered obsolete regardless of when they were purchased.

> Apple discontinues all hardware service for obsolete products, and service providers cannot order parts for obsolete products. Mac laptops may be eligible for an extended battery-only repair period for up to 10 years from when the product was last distributed for sale, subject to parts availability.

So as you can see, it's not arbitrary or unpredictable when a product is going to show up on the vintage product list. The only unpredictable or obscure part of this process is finding out how long an outdated product was still being sold after its successor launched.


Ok, but this is an Apples vs oranges comparison. (Carlos!)

We are talking about software support here.

The vintage products list is specifically targeting hardware support; e.g. how long Apple will keep spare parts in stock. After a set number of years they purge stock and you are SOL going to Chinese third party vendors and places like iFixit for batteries etc.


Not really; vintage macs turning obsolete are being dropped from the macOS support very reliably. I.e. the 2015 mbp was dropped from 2022 macos release like on the clock.


Sequoia is supported on most Intel Macs going back to 2018.

And it's far more than just a "couple of developers" to support older operating systems.


Agreed. It takes more than a few developers to support older operating systems.

At my old job we supported only two versions of our software product, Tanzu Operations Manager versions 2.10.x and 3.0.y), and we cut new patch releases every few weeks (similar to Apple's cadence). Bumping dependencies was a pain. Well, usually it went fine, but sometimes you'd hit a gnarly incompatibility and you'd either pin a Ruby package to a known version or try to modify the code just enough to make it work without making a major change.

If I had to put a number to it, I'd say it cost us 2 developers to keep our older product line consistently patched, and our product was a modest Ruby app, much less complicated than an entire OS.


> new patch releases every few weeks (similar to Apple's cadence)

Is Apply really releasing new patched OS updates every few weeks?


You act as if we should be thankful for 6 years of support when the hardware and sane support cycles easily exceed 10 years. And those aren't 6 years of security updates; they are 6 years of forced yearly feature upgrades and breaking things along the way.


What software are you talking about?

Who is forcing you to upgrade?

For that matter, what hardware?

I run an old Intel Mac and it’s perfectly reasonable for casual work. I’m not paying for stuff like Adobe leases though.


What exactly is an old Intel mac and what is a casual work?

For example, I have 2015 macbook pro. The last macos release for it is Monterey. Even brew has problems with that, erroring out when installing packages like libpng and complaining, that I should upgrade xcode cli tools. Which I can't.


my favorite Intel MacBook is from 2015


Not on Macbook Airs that are only 3-5 years old though. We have a number that we plan on replacing after EOY, but we are still using for now. Can't get Sequoia.


> Macbook Airs that are only 3-5 years old

MacBook Airs from 2020 support Sequoia - so just the very upper limit of your range is relevant.


Absolutely not. Apple was still selling non-Retina Intel MacBook Airs until 2019. Those are now completely unsupported with no security updates having topped out at Monterrey. 5 years of updates on a new laptop is borderline criminal.


I see the Mac fanboys aren't happy with my factual statement. I love Macs (won't use anything else) but I also live in reality.


Not really suitable for a corporate environment but in case you weren't aware:

https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher

macOS Big Sur and newer on machines as old as 2007

macOS Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma and Sequoia


Nice. Yeah, never going to fly here :( pity


> Don't tell me the richest company in the world can't pay for a couple of developers who just want to rest and vest to take care of and test the legacy platforms.

Why would they shoot themselves in the foot ? If the new MacOS does not run on older HW and they don't release patches (no development team) it is a win-win situation: user must buy a new Mac and no money is wasted supporting old HW.


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