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That’s for the model with the M4 Pro chip.

Mac mini with M4 starts at $599 (U.S.) and $499 (U.S.) for education.

Mac mini with M4 Pro starts at $1,399 (U.S.) and $1,299 (U.S.) for education.

plushpuffinon Beeper vs. Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation

They absolutely did. AOL in particular used a buffer overflow bug in AIM to execute arbitrary code to determine if the client was actually AIM or a third-party client pretending to be AIM.

MSN Messenger and Yahoo IM both cried foul about this and called out for interoperability, but then turned around and denied third-party clients access to their own networks once they got big enough.

plushpuffinon Tweak New Twitter

Blocking accounts still prevents them from showing you promoted tweets. I think the only thing that stopped working was the ability to share and subscribe to block lists.

plushpuffinon Twitter's API is down?

Well, your behavior differs from mine, then.

When I quit and reopen the app, or choose one of my custom lists and then tap home, it switches to For You.

plushpuffinon Twitter's API is down?

It happens whenever the app reloads. If you swipe up (on iOS) to quit the app and then re-open it, you'll see it start off on For You.

plushpuffinon FTC seeks to block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard

Yeah, I was aware of the different armor types in SC1, but I thought they turned it up to 11 in SC2. Maybe they brought it down to the first 2 tiers of units? It didn't feel like armor types really came into play as early in the game. The impression I got was that you could get away with massing a single type of unit much more easily in SC1.

plushpuffinon FTC seeks to block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard

Yeah I've felt the same way at times, especially when the armor/weapon types make it very rock paper scissors. It wasn't as blatant in the original StarCraft, but WarCraft 3 and StarCraft 2 seemed to go hard into counters against certain types of units, so someone who either scouts a bit better than you do or picks an army composition that happens to perfectly counter yours will mop the floor with you.

My partner and I had way more fun in those early games when we could stretch it out to 30-60 minutes sometimes. Once you're playing against ranked people who are there to win it's just a mad rush to the first or second tech tier.

plushpuffinon FTC seeks to block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard

Back when I played it, there was a 50 game skill test for new players which determined which of the major rank pools you were placed in.

Those first 50 games were crazy because you were matched randomly with other new and established players, so sometimes you would play someone really good who would steamroll you in the first 5 minutes, and sometimes you got someone who had at most played the scripted campaigns against the AI and thought they could sit there for the first 30 minutes slowly building up an army.

It was actually pretty fun not knowing which way it would go, and whenever we matched with newbies my partner and I got to experiment with a bunch of different strategies that would never work in a real game.

plushpuffinon The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2022/10/20/tik...

> A China-based team at TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, planned to use the TikTok app to monitor the personal location of some specific American citizens, according to materials reviewed by Forbes.

plushpuffinon Eli Lilly pulls millions in Twitter advertising after fake account debacle

Somebody on Twitter estimated that based on how much banks are trying to resell their loans for, it’s worth about $8 billion right now.

Disclaimer: I have no idea what this guy is talking about.

https://twitter.com/bamabonds/status/1590801975339540480

plushpuffinon Apple’s Next Change for Siri: Dropping ‘Hey’ from ‘Hey Siri’ Trigger

Agreed, Siri is already a little too sensitive. I was raking leaves the other day and Siri muted my music temporarily because the swish swish sound of the leaves somehow activated her!

plushpuffinon U.S. pushes Japan and other allies to join China chip curbs

Biden was saying "we'll make sure Nord Stream 2 never opens" while you were using that statement to insinuate that he was threatening both pipelines. Yes, both pipelines were damaged, but he was not threatening an attack with that statement and he was not threatening Nord Stream 1, either.

It's actually in the US's interest for the Nord Stream 1 to remain operational for at least a few more months so that Europe can fill its reserves. The extra money Russia/Gazprom pulls in from that is not going to make much of a difference to the war effort, while the extra gas will help ensure that Europe's resolve doesn't break this winter. Next winter hopefully they'll have further transitioned to green energy and LNG. So just looking it at that way, the US should not attack the pipeline at this time. Maybe next string, but not now!

I presented numerous possible motives for Russia to damage its own pipelines at this time, as well as a record of similar past behavior. I think I made a compelling case. I can see where you are coming from, but I disagree with your conclusions. If you don't agree with any of my points and won't budge on this at all then that's fine, but there's nothing more to debate here.

plushpuffinon U.S. pushes Japan and other allies to join China chip curbs

You are correct that the issue is not yet resolved. However, throughout the course of Russia's illegal war, US credibility has improved and Russia's has plummeted. They lied about the fact that they were preparing for war, they lied about their reasons for launching the war, they've pillaged and looted like medieval barbarians, and they've committed innumerable war crimes against both civilians and Ukrainian POWs.

In the absence of evidence and with only finger-pointing at this stage, I am inclined to believe that Russia is responsible since they have damaged their own pipelines several times in the past and lied about those instances, too. If Russia had any credibility before, they have essentially none now, and they do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.

As for their motives, there are several: to avoid paying the "force majeure" penalty, to give an unambiguous signal that no more gas is forthcoming in the immediate future, to threaten Europe's own energy infrastructure with a demonstration, to weaken the alliance by making some EU countries suspect the US, and for Putin to warn Russia's oligarchs that they can't just depose him and resume gas shipments - Russia is now all-in and can't go back to normal anytime soon even after a regime change.

As for Biden saying he would "stop" the pipeline earlier this year, he was talking about a different pipeline, Nord Stream 2 (which had not yet started operation at the time he made that remark), not Nord Stream 1. He was threatening to work with US allies to block it from opening in the first place.

The US has forbidden Ukraine from attacking Russian territory with US weapons, why would we take the escalatory step of attacking Russian infrastructure ourselves? We could have just let Ukraine do whatever they wanted with US weapons and denied responsibility, but the US was careful to avoid provoking Russia too much. It makes no sense that after all that tip-toeing around we would say "to hell with it" and launch a direct attack.

plushpuffinon U.S. pushes Japan and other allies to join China chip curbs

Russia did that. They've damaged/destroyed their own pipelines before in order to avoid penalty clauses in contracts or to get out of a bad deal after the price changed out of their favor, and that's why they did it this time, too.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2022/09/29/russian-s...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-turkmenistan-gas-s...

plushpuffinon ‘The Rings of Power’ has inexplicably terrible writing

Was that Discovery? I thought that was the 2009 reboot movie.

plushpuffinon ‘The Rings of Power’ has inexplicably terrible writing

One thing which I thought was hilarious was a scene with an elf walking toward a village. He knows the village is there; it’s his destination. He’s been walking toward it for the better part of a day. Then he crests a hill and is like “oh shit the village is on fire what happened here?”

Contrast this with Legolas who would often peer into the distance and then announce how many orcs there were in a raiding party far enough away that the others couldn’t even see them.

That’s actually one of my biggest problems with this show. I don’t get the sense that the elves are a different species with different abilities and a different type of soul. Especially in the opening scene of episode one, when you see a bunch of elf children acting like stereotypical human bullies.

I also really, really hate that halflings seem like they’re going to play a major role in world events. The shock value to the mythology of LotR was that the hobbits up until that point in history had been completely inconsequential. It kind of ruins the stories of Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry if this is actually the second time that hobbits have shaped history.

It just feels like they are relying on the names and visual effects and the set dressing to carry the show, while they cram in a generic fantasy plot.

plushpuffinon Show HN: I may have created a new type of puzzle

This is pretty cool! Conceptually it's pretty similar to a classic Mac game I remember from the 90s called The Tinies. The goal is to get each "Tiny" creature to a bed of the same color.

Where it gets complicated is that each creature will in a straight line move up, down, left, or right as far as they can until they hit a wall. You can't stop in the middle of the floor and turn, although there are arrows on the floor that will redirect them, and even teleport pads. Each tiny also acts as an obstacle to other tinies, so you can place them in a particular location to force another tiny to stop short so they can be moved in a different direction some distance from a wall (similar to your conditional graph edges).

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/3493-the-tinies

plushpuffinon Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

I had the opposite experience watching a vampire film called 30 Days of Night! For whatever reason my DVD player didn’t show any subtitles, even the translation from the Aramaic spoken by the vampires. So, I got to watch a bunch of undead growl unintelligibly at each other throughout the movie. It actually improved the experience because not knowing what they were saying made it so much creeper!

plushpuffinon European natural gas imports and storage reserves

I wonder what this war is going to do to Russia's exports of military hardware. Not only can they not defend or re-supply themselves, but who is going to want their stripped down, even less capable export versions of their weapons now, after seeing it destroyed by a handful of pieces of 20-30 year old western tech?

plushpuffinon European natural gas imports and storage reserves

edit: Oh, I think I may have misread what you wrote. You were being sarcastic and saying that the US proposed not to expand early on but no agreement was reached, and Russia is trying to hold NATO to that anyway. Sorry!

Could you provide any proof of this? I don't see any evidence of this, are you referring to a verbal agreement?

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_111767.htm#c203

Claim: NATO promised Russia it would not expand after the Cold War

Fact: Such an agreement was never made. NATO’s door has been open to new members since it was founded in 1949 – and that has never changed. This “Open Door Policy” is enshrined in Article 10 of NATO’s founding treaty, which says “any other European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic” can apply for membership. Decisions on membership are taken by consensus among all Allies. No treaty signed by the United States, Europe and Russia included provisions on NATO membership.

The idea of NATO expansion beyond a united Germany was not on the agenda in 1989, particularly as the Warsaw Pact still existed. This was confirmed by Mikhail Gorbachev in an interview in 2014: "The topic of 'NATO expansion' was not discussed at all, and it wasn't brought up in those years. I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn't bring it up, either."

Declassified White House transcripts also reveal that, in 1997, Bill Clinton consistently refused Boris Yeltsin's offer of a 'gentlemen's agreement' that no former Soviet Republics would enter NATO: "I can't make commitments on behalf of NATO, and I'm not going to be in the position myself of vetoing NATO expansion with respect to any country, much less letting you or anyone else do so…NATO operates by consensus."

plushpuffinon It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

Spigot/Paper servers can disable chat reporting with plugins, clients can disable sending signatures with forge mods, and servers can be configured to allow clients which don’t sign their messages with the setting enforce-secure-profile.

plushpuffinon The Twitter whistleblower story is worse than you think

As you noted, the greater prevalence of right-wing violence, hate speech, and disinformation/misinformation causes the appearance of a moderation bias against conservatives. However, there has been an actual measured bias in favor of conservative voices (circa late 2021, the home timeline algorithm may have changed since then).

In other words, conservatives do more stuff to run afoul of the terms of service, and they also receive better treatment. GP is wrong/misinformed.

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/18/fascinating-new-study-su...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...

plushpuffinon Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient?

In Alastair Reynold's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation_Space_universe there is a genetically and cybernetically engineered subspecies of humans called Conjoiners who do just that. They take it to such an extreme that they eventually need to engineer their skulls to grow heat-dissipating fins, because otherwise their brains would cook from the waste heat.

plushpuffinon Nova Launcher has been acquired by Branch

It hasn’t been good for a while even before the acquisition. I pinned it at version 6 because 7 was a massive downgrade in terms of features, stability, and performance.

plushpuffinon Supreme Court Overturns Roe vs. Wade

It literally is not. The ability of the court to strike down laws is something the court came up with for itself. It's not literally in the Constitution, it's an inferred authority.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_review_in_the_United_...

plushpuffinon Sex is going out of fashion?

I'm sure these articles have been linked here before, but they're relevant to your concerns:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex...

plushpuffinon Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

I haven't bought a TV in about ten years and I've started shopping recently, knowing I'll probably have to get one soon. What I'm interested in, knowing I'll probably have to do this (smart TV with no internet), is what the out-of-box experience is without internet.

Will it have preloaded ads that will never change because it can't download new ones? Will there be huge gray boxes where the ads should be in the UI? Will it try to connect to open WiFi or use HDMI to share my streaming box's internet connection? Will it nag me with an alert box in the middle of the screen asking me to connect it? Will it disable features if I don't give it internet access? Will there be bugs and performance problems requiring me to update the firmware, and if I do, will that firmware update introduce any of the above?

plushpuffinon SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking Elon Musk

You mean, a company where the workers have more power? A unionized company?

plushpuffinon How to stop junk mail

Anything sent to "Current Resident" can't be blocked by a Form 1500. I've tried. They say that since it doesn't have my name on it, it's not actually meant for me specifically so any prohibitory order I try to file will be rejected.