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> Weber told me it considered open-sourcing the technology for someone else to keep it alive, but decided against it, citing the fact June’s IP is part of its Weber Connect platform.

Ah, so they can't allow others to support it because they already have a platform where they explicitly chose not to support it. It's like someone saying they considered calling 911 to save a gunshot victim but decided against it since the bullet came from their gun. What a way to try to look like you care about your customers.

99% of smart kitchen appliances end up costing 4 times as much just for the "smartness" which in reality isn't only their weak point, it's also the cheapest part of the whole ensemble. Your washing machine or fridge double in price because the manufacturer slapped on an ESP32 and a vibe coded insecure cloud backend. Even devices that could last decades end up betrayed by the dependency on that super-expensive crap you though is a selling feature.

If you need to, buy cheap IoT, the kind that you can work with locally (HA, HomeKit, etc.) with no internet access, the kind you set and forget and when it stops working you can genuinely treat them as consumables. Don't pay thousands for something that will be quickly dragged down by their marquee feature.

The “for profit” isn’t even the entire story. The scale of the theft is unprecedented. It’s the combination between stealing everything and only for their profit that makes this impossible to defend.

Other stores are a different topic or concern for Google. They want to retain control over anything that runs on the Android platform. Google thus ensures everyone must comply with rules that benefit Google. Anything that Google doesn’t like for whatever reason gets booted or screwed with.

Having the “valuable” apps like Maps only in their store is just another way to cement that authority.

You don’t get Maps “for free”, you pay with your data (your searches, your preferences, etc.). For Google maps is the bait to reel you in, you are the product they sell to their real customers: businesses. Google can shape your preferences by showing you what their paying customers want you to see.

I thought it’s self evident that products like Gmail, Search, Maps and others aren’t free because Google is aiming to do charity but because your personal data allows them to build a digital model of you and charge other businesses for access to that knowledge.

Around me I can’t think of a bank that allows any remote operation without a TAN only available on iOS or Android. That’s the root of a lot of future problems, not the least of which being that the bank charges you more for in person operations.

Now you can cram some seriously powerful hardware inside your keyboard (to go back to a form factor really popular some decades ago), or even a larger mouse with enough skill and determination. Stick PCs and tiny PCs made everything so accessible because they're already in a super compact form factor, ready to be crammed into any enclosure with minimal modding.

Hard to be impressed with small builds today considering what a flagship phone is capable of in that tiny package.

The unknown model here [1] looks a lot like the Nokia E6 to the point it might be a prototype. The date on the screen suggests it's from ~8 months before the E6's launch. AFAIK only the mic hole is places slightly off from the E6.

[1] https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html?node=A0383

Back then this was quite a bit of effort and engineering (especially the bootloader auto detection) to achieve and probably got a lot of wowed faces. Today nobody would bat an eye, you can cram anywhere a tiny PC or even stick PC, and maybe have a single USB-C cable sticking out.

I'd consider power generation (solar, wind, nuclear) as strategically important and accept that it may need subsidies long term. If this allows the country a degree of independence from external shocks, it would be worth it.

> Notice the no response, they know what they’re doing and they don’t care.

I was with you in principle until this part. You gave them ~30 minutes before claiming "no answer".

> just expensive and inconvenient

You mean something is theoretically possible, but in practice only works at small scale and is otherwise effectively impossible. You only have so many resources for all those big topics.

And after you spent all the world's resources on the "perfect", formally bug-free software, you get hacked via social engineering or malicious insider.

That doesn't save you from failure, just automates it :D.

This is an underestimated part of operating IT infrastructure at home. Something a lot of homelab builders miss. They have a homelab that mixes in the same environment and same equipment the role of delivering standard services for the house and family, with the role of experimenting and toying around.

Everyone who builds this should really have "homeprod" and "homelab". And when the experiments and tests inevitably lead to an outage, the movie streaming or photo storage or home control parts don't die with it.

I'm running Linux on a UGREEN NAS without a problem from the OS perspective. On AOOSTAR even Windows 11 ran fine after digging for appropriate drivers.

Where most of these machines suffer is the default UEFI config and the cooling. The UGREEN luckily gives the option to dig into the advanced UEFI settings (they just left the entire setup open in "engineering" mode so every option the firmware gives is there to tweak) and optimize what the manufacturer defaults, change the power saving options, turbo and power limits, etc. This makes a huge difference.

But the CPU cooling is still sub-par and there's no off the shelf replacement. Most of these smaller Chinese NAS brands I tried have this issue, they take very decent hardware and slap on them the crappiest accessories like cooling. You get a hobbled CPU, always pegged at low clocks because the temperature spiked to 99C. Sometimes the disk cooling isn't too well conceived either and the disks bake at 45C idle but these can usually be compensated if you're willing to take the noise.

Other way around.

These days the inheritance will include mostly junk. Old, worn out, low quality items, clothes, furniture, appliances, etc. Nobody says no to the one thing they need but can't afford, they say no to having yet another item they have no need for and its only value could be sentimental but otherwise it's a burden, one other thing among many to store somewhere, or throw out/donate/sell.

Do you need and can afford to keep somewhere another 6 creaky chairs, a big worn out dining table, bags of old clothes that don't fit anyone, outdated and broken electronics that probably don't work anymore, and so on? Even memories like pictures and videos are sometimes too much. They used to be a couple of photo albums, half with people you wouldn't even recognize, now there are TB of digital ones.

> She figures that they’ve spent at least fifty thousand dollars in rental fees so far—more than they could get from selling the furniture.

That probably doesn't even consider inflation, $1 in 2006 was worth $1.60 in today's money. People are really bad at long term financial planning but also get really attached to objects with some sentimental value. So this is a market where it's even easier to exploit that poor financial education.

> US President Donald Trump earlier called the idea "laughable" and threatened "very serious tariffs" on Europe if he considered it a "hostile act".

There's a lawsuit [1] on the way related to the Epstein files so this Canada-EU topic gives Trump the perfect opportunity to divert the attention.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/lawsuit-trump-do...

I have the paid OD, and think I know what I'm doing, and still got burned on occasions, luckily with little consequence due to other mechanisms in place. But when I really didn't want to deal with OD's crap, I went all nuclear on it. Uninstall. When MS insisted to reinstall it, I replaced the executable and went for file system permissions. I twisted them so hard that even MS couldn't (or at least didn't try to) overwrite my fake OD executable.

I stopped running Windows wherever I can not because the tools or OS are that bad but because a machine should come with sane defaults but should respect my wishes if I want to go against those defaults. When it starts to override me, it's not my machine anymore and whoever "owns" it (MS in this case) can shove it.

On power tools, appliances, etc. the safety features are at the user's latitude to bypass. They are usually a hint (don't microwave your dog), not a hard barrier ("I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that"). A spinning blade is covered by a grill you can trivially remove without permission from anyone.

I agree that the defaults should be secure, but you can't force security on people without creating parallel issues which are maybe worse. Centralizing this power in a single point can have orders of magnitude bigger blast radius than a security failure on an app.

At some point users have to take responsibility and be accountable for their actions. We can't just infantilize them forever as if a magical hand will always be over them protecting and having their best interest in mind. And we certainly shouldn't punish every user for the sake of some of them.

The worst part is that Google gets the benefit of putting itself as the central point of control over the ecosystem based on a promise to keep users safe, but without any of the liability from failing to keep that promise. When the app store is chock full of malware I'm really starting to suspect that their goal is actually only the control. And all those people defending it with "but people don't know better, they need a hand to guide them" were equally misled. What do you think?

It's not the IP law alone that's the problem, it's the way the legislative and justice systems work. There will always be a law and an interpretation that favor people who can afford to buy them at the cost of those who can't.

No gameplay footage and a release date in the next decade. Blizzard is just testing the waters to see if there’s any interest in yet another shooter. Or rather if the StarCraft franchise still has clout.

20-25 years ago I’d be certain Blizzard has some aces up their sleeves. Today not so much. They probably do this to respond to pressure from corporate overlords.

In the EU and UK the weight of the vehicle is on the signs too [0], or the weight per axle [1].

[0] https://hgvlgvtraining.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/weig...

[1] https://freesvg.org/img/B13a.png

> Apple seldom talks about their security issues

I didn't find about OEMpocalypse from Google talking about their security issues, I found from calif.io. Security researchers don't wait for companies to "talk about their security".

> but the reality may be different because Android is more scrutinised.

This is famously why Linux appears to be less secure than Windows, right? Because Microsoft doesn't talk about their security while Linux is more scrutinized?

For a blog/site ostensibly focused on words, this seems like a big oversight:

> the resulting fiber is called “sliver,” pronounced “sly-ver”.

It's pronounced sli-vər, more like "slee" not "sly".

Looking around me I was convinced that most of Nike's and Adidas' sales were coming from the "fashion" side of things. People buying everyday shoes from a famous brand. The "professional" shoe was for professional athletes, football players, etc. I'd hear that a player signed with Adidas, or a runner was wearing Nike for a race, but regular people didn't go in stores for the specs, they went for the brand.

Like you say, until recently almost nobody had running shoes because running as a sport for regular people wasn't a thing. People would have some trainers that fit every sporty activity. Just because people buy more running shoes doesn't mean they buy less of the day too day shoes. Fashion and sports shoes don't replace each other. The sales of sport shoes just created a new market, they didn't cannibalize the rest of the sales. That must have been self-inflicted.

Too bad somehow the face that ends up out there as the face of surveillance isn’t the CEO of Flock, not their coders, not the YC people who gave them money to do exactly what they’re doing. It’s the lowest of the low in the chain, the guy sitting in the sun to install the cameras on a post.

The advantage of the gym is that machines usually (but not always) force or at least guide the correct form. Free weights and free exercise leave so much room for a wrong form and building up to injuries.

I can't say whether it was or wasn't true for you. But I can say your certainty is misplaced.

Most of your memories and everything you think of now about early childhood were formed long after it. They were created from bits and pieces of real memories, stories, backsplanations for things that happened later, retrospective, etc. Even if you had now an accurate debug dump of your child brain, you'd still not be able to process that the way you processed it back then.

Your kid brain was a black box, a CPU with a different architecture running code that you've never before or since. You later tried to recreate that code for the CPU you have now, based on input from others who've also never seen that original code or have access to that type of CPU. And you are certain you recreated it accurately?

I said that on the assumption that they want control and guarantees that Google's needs get serviced. Otherwise they can partner with any manufacturer to incorporate the tech, like they do on the software side. But they could be dropped at any time.

> because they know it is wrong

Or they know they'll be told it was wrong. Children start knowing nothing then they slowly absorb what they're told again and again, and what they see around them until they feel it. They go from knowing nothing, to knowing what the adults told them, to internalizing that and feeling it rather than just knowing it (maybe these 2 concepts fully overlap in other people's minds).

But until they do get all of that, they'll spend a lot of time plucking wings off of insects, burning ants with a magnifying glass, pulling the cat by the tail, or throwing rocks at dogs and frogs.