kemayo

It's probably the same as the 2x zoom in the iPhone 16 line. The 1x pictures are a 48MP sensor that does some pixel-combining to output a 12MP image. The 2x pictures are a crop of 12MP in the center of the sensor, that doesn't do any combining. So it's still "optical", but it's lower-quality than the 1x.

You can turn it off, still. (For now?)

It's probably the same as the 2x zoom in the iPhone 16 line. The 1x pictures are a 48MP sensor that does some pixel-combining to output a 12MP image. The 2x pictures are a crop of 12MP in the center of the sensor, that doesn't do any combining. So it's still "optical", but it's lower-quality.

Yeah, they took the SE off their website at the same time as they announced this.

Let's see... it's replacing the SE, which is no longer on Apple's website. It's more expensive than the SE, at $599 vs $429. It's a pretty substantial hardware upgrade over the SE, including something like 75% more battery life by Apple's numbers, but it's also noticeably bigger.

Apple's own comparison tool is useful: https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-16e,i...

That's a good idea -- it'd preserve the intent of the meme, which is to always be conveying "it has not been as long as it feels like based on events".

As-is, if I visit and see "what a day / it's Friday", that's kinda missing the point.

No, but that's not what this system is about. It's literally just "are you going to tell anyone else about what I'm doing?"

Yeah, but then it describes what's clearly third-party tracking. It's The Register, you can't rely on them getting technical things right.

> As one programmatic ad news outlet pointed out, Facebook was actually hit the hardest by the 2022 first-party rules because its software development kit (SDK) "plugged into so many outside apps and ... its attribution pixels [were] littered liberally across the web."

The article they link to there about the 2022 rules is from 2021, incidentally, and is just talking about other apps embedding Facebook tracking -- i.e. third-party stuff. There's a lot of talking about how "first-party data is valuable to Facebook", but it's all referring to how Facebook wants to use the data from other people.

> The Federal Cartel Office claims that Apple's ATTF defines "tracking" in a way that only covers data processing for advertising purposes across companies – but that these "strict ... rules do not cover Apple's own practice of combining user data across its ecosystem – from its App Store, Apple ID and connected devices – and using them for advertising purposes."

...yes. Apple defines "tracking" here as sharing your data with other companies, and then doesn't do that itself. Because that's the opaque and objectionable thing.

If you launch an Apple app then you probably expect Apple to know what you're doing. If you launch a Meta app, similarly you expect Meta to know what you're doing. But you might not expect Meta to immediately go and tell, say, some random company called Cambridge Analytica everything you're doing.

Meta absolutely could do exactly what Apple's doing without needing to warn users -- collect user data across its various apps, and use it to advertise its own products.

I do agree that Apple has carefully chosen a thing to object to that aligns well with their own business model. But I also think the thing they're objecting to is worth disclosing to users, so: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Your argument about what Chesterton means remains built on deliberately misunderstanding what other sayings mean, so I'm skeptical.

"It's very inefficient to devote all those resources to auditing billionaires, so we've decided to refocus those people on clawing back $15 from people earning under $20k who made minor mistakes on their taxes."

Yes, I wasn't trying to imply that it was a good approach to apply to the US government. ;_;

..."can't put the clock back" doesn't literally mean that you can't change the time on a clock. It's referring to not being able to go back and change things that already happened.

This is true. There are things that, once done, cannot be undone. You can try to fix their consequences. You can change what you do going forward, so that the thing would not be done that way again. But you can't, say, un-kill an executed innocent.

The most charitable interpretation is that Musk's doing what he did at Twitter -- wildly cutting back, and then backing off and repairing when he finds that something he threw away was actually necessary.

I'm not convinced that this is a good strategy when dealing with something with higher stakes than "posting dank memes", though. "Oops, that broke for a few days" matters a lot more when the thing that breaks is, say, paying out money for social security.

That is, as you said, sometimes the fence-that-is-inefficient-processes exists for a reason.

EDIT TO BE LESS SUBTLE BASED ON REPLIES: I think this is bad. Even in the most-charitable interpretation, it is bad. Particularly for the government, but even at Twitter it succeeded at making it smaller but approximately-nobody thinks Twitter is better now.

I'm sympathetic to the simplicity argument. I've recently had to help someone who's new to coding with some getting-started-with-git issues, and it's definitely reminding me of the appeal of a system that you can't screw up in various interesting manners and then need someone who understands its inner workings to fix.

I believe apps can choose to hook into "sensitive content warnings" (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sensitivecontentan...) but I don't know whether any of the major social-networks-with-a-lot-of-porn apps actually do so.

Mostly, they're in the App Store with age ratings of 17+, so parental controls will block them out. No idea how that system interacts with third party app stores, either -- but if it doesn't work there, that was very much Apple's implementation-choice.

Apple's stance that this is a shocking development, and previously the iPhone was some sort of porn-free zone is... strange.

Obviously, there's a web browser, but let's ignore that for now. More notably in this "we make you safe from porn inside apps" framing, there's incredibly prominent apps like Reddit or X, both of which are lousy with porn. If Apple thinks that porn is bad and worthy of being blocked from its store, they should take a look at that. This is just wildly hypocritical otherwise.

Second paragraph of the article:

> US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer issued a preliminary injunction on Saturday to prohibit access, ordering Musk and his team to immediately destroy any copies of records.

Trump seems to be somewhat anti-EV (or, at least, doesn't want to push them in the same way Biden did), so it wouldn't surprise me if Republicans took their cues from him and stayed away.

e.g. https://www.npr.org/2025/01/30/nx-s1-5272749/donald-trump-ev...

I'd assume it's people who haven't done any research yet -- they said they want an EV, and then they got asked "do you like the idea of buying an EV from Brand X?". It's a pure gut feeling about the brand.

I think that "the government buys things that it uses" isn't inherently corruptive.

In this specific case, Politico is apparently worth over a billion dollars based on its sale in 2021, so I think that the US government giving it $8M would be a shit bribe and insufficient to hurt its independence. Based on its subscriber number boasts, it's getting at least $350M in annual subscription revenue. (Probably more, since I'm assuming the cheapest subscription there.) Would they care about a 2% drop in subscription revenue? Likely not enough for it to affect their coverage.

You can certainly disagree with whether we should be doing it, but the fact remains that Congress made a law saying that we are doing it. The vehicle for changing that is to change the law, not for the President to decide to break the law.

On a separate note, assuming that "it's good to help people if you can" doesn't move you, the cynical reason for USAID's existence is marketing and soft power projection. For a tiny fraction of the US budget, we get to look good for how nice we're being to people, and get other countries to want us to come in and get our hands all over their infrastructure until it'd be painful for them to oppose us and lose that aid.

(Also, HIV specifically? That's something where lowering the levels of it in foreign countries will directly help the US, because it makes it less likely that US citizens will get exposed to it when people travel.)

It's a dagger symbol! Which... I guess doesn't entirely avert that implication.

(But really, it's the traditional second tier footnote symbol after an asterisk, which I couldn't use here because it triggers italics.)

Originally, yes. These days a "talking filibuster" like that is almost never used, apart from occasionally when someone wants to be dramatic about it.

There's a thing called a vote for cloture, meaning a vote you take about whether to stop debate and vote on the issue. In the US Senate, a cloture vote requires 60 votes (out of 100) to pass. So there's a "procedural filibuster", whereby one side will announce that they're not going to vote for cloture, but the other side won't force them to actually keep talking so the chamber can move on and do other things.

This used to be quite uncommon, and things would regularly become law with a bare 50%+1 majority, but nowadays -- basically since ~2008 -- there's a de-facto "nothing that can't get 60% support in the Senate can become law" rule in effect. With a specific carve-out for a few things that're not allowed to be filibustered, mostly around passing a budget, that are just barely keeping the government functioning.

Personally, I intensely dislike this, and feel like the shift to default-filibuster-everything is a major cause of the growing dissatisfaction with the system that ultimately gave us Trump.

I imagine the legality of that depends on the exact details of the law that created the organization. If it specifies that it be an independent organization, then that's probably not allowed either. If it's just "these things must be done" then State could probably handle it.

(Either way, the exact approach they've taken so far with the total freeze and shutdown, then later saying they'll totally start doing the job again somewhere else later on, seems sketchy.)

They could†, but they haven't.

†: They actually couldn't, without stripping the filibuster from the Senate.

USAID gave Politico $24k, not $8M.

The entire US govt did pay Politico about $8.2M, presumably in the form of buying their subscription products. Politico really does do deep-dive analysis behind a paywall, and I can see why government people might want access. (I have no idea how justified this is, honestly, but I wouldn't immediately dismiss it.)

This seems like a fair enough summary: https://www.axios.com/2025/02/05/politico-trump-musk-governm...

Or dig through https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/fa0cefae-7cfb-881d-29c... yourself if you want, I guess. That site is super-overloaded at the moment, unfortunately.

President doesn't have authority to shut them down by EO either. Congress does, yes.

(It's one of those "power of the purse" things. If Congress has created an organization and funded it, the executive is required to spend that money on it.)

Impeachment, followed by conviction and removal-from-office, in theory.

In practice this is extremely unlikely because the threshold for the vote in the Senate is high enough that you'd need bipartisan consensus, and the US Constitution wasn't really written expecting the party system to exist.

Particularly not for the last reason mentioned -- declining an offered position because it's not in a place you want to live.