Everywhere I've lived, cops are generally utterly disinterested in property crime unless the victim is connected, the loss is huge or the media gets interested.

Less than 10% are cleared in California now, and yes, they used to be better at it.

I'd say "demand better politicians who will demand better cops", but, hey, we're speedrunning the authoritarian shithole path (we are on to political assassinations as of today), so, uh, that ship has sailed.

I *dont* understand why universities would tolerate this sort of corporate bullying from Oracle, when alternative JVMs and DBMS are *right there*.

I can take a stab at this.

First, it is surprisingly difficult to verifiably eliminate a piece of software from a large environment. We went through this exact exercise a couple years back because we didn't want to pay Oraclegeld. The first 90% is easy. But then you're dealing with Java running on weird devices that are difficult, expensive, or both to replace. And employees who for strange reasons try to keep a copy. And vended applications where swapping the JVM voids your support contract. And all sorts of other weird situations.

And second, these are universities. Schools in general are not exactly famous for having an iron grip on their computing resources. Their IT capabilities in general are different than businesses because their focus is different. And structurally, there are frequently organizational silos and redundant departments with their own budgets for historical reasons, so I imagine even trying to inventory all the computers a school "owns" is can be a challenge in some places. (This is certainly true in the US, I'm guessing English schools are subject to similar pressures.)

So it doesn't surprise me at all if they just couldn't pull it together. Even with centralized administrative control of our machines, it was a multi-month and surprisingly costly effort for us.

The answer to your question is, Microsoft structures their offering strategically as part of the sales pitch.

There are lots of different plays, but the most obvious version is, Microsoft salesdroid will ask if you're using Slack and come back with, "tell you what, Teams will cost you nothing, we'll zero that." Now $manager can either pay for Slack too, or replace it for "zero cost".

That discount probably goes away next sales cycle, but in a 20k person company, saving that $5/head/month (or whatever it is) means someone hits their bonus target this year.

Tada!

Snack size?

This is Apple's implementation, not Passkeys per se.

I was confused by this when they announced it, because I couldn't think of any reason why you'd want cloud sync for device keys. And it turns out, you don't.

Apple uses "sync passkeys", not device-bound passkeys, and uses iCloud to distribute them to your other iThingies (but of course not other platforms).

I won't use them either, for the same reason. I refuse to sync authentication creds - I will not store them on something I don't control. And even if I were to do so, Linux would need to be included for it to be useful to me.

Anyway, yeah, it Apple didn't need to require cloud nonsense, but they chose to. I understand where they're coming from, I just don't like it and won't do it.

They are taking a complete 180 on a core aspect of their interview.

I predict is will have mo measurable impact on their engineering capability.

I also predict their HR will hail this as a great success.

McMegan is a clown. A wannabe Maureen Dowd without the turn of phrase or hint of self-awareness.

I'm totally fine with people like that trashing Bluesky. By all means, enjoy Musk's blog.

And Xitter is exactly that. Open forums don't look like this.

People who are enjoying a party don't sit around trying to convince themselves that some other party sucks more.

I have this mental picture a retirement home full of demented nerds flashing printed copies of Goatse at each other.

The thing that gets me is the consistency. It feels as if there's a union foreman somewhere who has been ensuring at least one is assigned to every story since the late 90s.

Dude, you've got to update your talking points. You sound like you've been watching Fox reruns on VHS in your trailer for the past 20 years.

Everyone should block any traffic to AS32934 at their border. I do, and the internet is so much better without it.

I gambled on bit of their stock after their big drop last year, but if their senior technical folks are bailing, time to get out.

Prior to Stumpy's reign of error, the best and the brightest worldwide wanted to come here to learn, collaborate and frequently stay and continue research or start new businesses.

Now he and his xenophobic self-defeaters are being deliberate assholes, trying to scare anyone sane into going elsewhere. And it is working.

So if you're a smart, capable kid who can attend a top-tier school, do you want to go to the US school in that's in decline, or to the overseas school where all the other smart people are?

I will happily commify my numbers forever more if that comes bundled with the metric system.

Sorry, Liberia and Myanmar, it is time.

BNPL is structured a bit differently than credit cards, and the lending decision is made at purchase-time.

It is also typically more expensive than credit card transaction fees for merchants. The more it is used, the more it raises prices for everyone.

Think of it as a simple notation for a subset of HTML. The idea is it is easy to write inline as you're composing text without having to think about markup.

If you're a long-time front end developer, it probably won't do much for you. The target market is folks who want basic layout and typographic control without having to become a front end developer.

Personally I question it as an export format. There are several different implementations that all behave a bit differently, what does interop look like? But maybe it is just someone in Apple giving John Gruber a little ego boost.