If I'm being really frank, are system updates not more disruptive, destructive and result in more data loss and downtime than all the attacks you'll experience in your lifetime? (unless you're a high value business target ofc, I'm talking for personal machines)
In my book, having unattended-upgrades or windows update run amok on your system is functionally worse than a rootkit.
This is why you always have a test environment and good, tested backups that are easy and quick to roll back to. Even if something makes it past test (or there is an install problem with a patch that is otherwise fine) you can just roll back.
For personal machines without those resources you are a bit of a hard place - although many OS and software these days have long term stable versions and the ability to defer auto patches by a week or two
This. Lost hours from the hours running the updates, lost hours from the occasional faulty upgrade, and every now and again it's fail spectacularly and need a restore from backup to return to productivity. No matter if it's Ubuntu LTS or non-LTS, every six months there's always something radically changed. OpenSUSE Leap has the same problem. I'm looking at Tumbleweed but a new version every week is going to break occasionally. Gentoo build-from-source is going to have weirdness every now and again, if not utter ruin. MacOS updates yearly, and brings horrors with every point zero release. Windows is Windows, and those problems are well known. I don't think there's a way around it with the current offerings.
It's a problem we have to live with for the sake of progress and for security updates. Every machine needs downtime for maintenance on a periodic, often-scheduled basis. It might cost time but avoiding updates is not a good plan.
Aside from dodgy updates that have to run as root to install, if you have passwordless sudo it's more dangerous than any broken package or local-only privilege escalation exploit. I'll wager many have it set up that way, because typing passwords is tiresome.
Whilst anecdotal, this supports the idea that I should de-index my personal site when I relaunch it. There's no value for me to get indexed by Google or Bing. The only index I care about is Wayback Machine.
In my experience, iPhone 4 was better than iPhone 8 which is better than iPhone 17. Either I got lucky, went to more interesting places and composed better, or the technology is getting worse from an aesthetic point-of-view. I definitely had more keepers, more memorable photos of a higher subjective quality. I pretty much don't bother with iPhotography now.
Similar story on Android but I won't bore with the model names and numbers. Older handsets gave better results. Pre-smartphone, king of the hill was the Sony K800, I loved the photos from that phone. No fancy software, just quality hardware and straightforward processing gave consistent results.
That said, I should try Halide app. Bringing it back to basics with less computation might be the way forward for me.
Might your impression of these pictures be colored by your life experience during that time, ie. you might have been in your early twenties with the iPhone 4, and those pictures carried the smell of that time in your life.
That's entirely possible and quite likely. The only way to find out would be to renovate the battery and take it out to go shoot stuff. I'm not sure I'm that invested to make the effort especially as the rest of the handset is basically useless at this point.
And yet I can buy a Premier League soccer shirt with a casino brand sprayed across the front. I wish it would stop, advertising gambling via sports sponsorships should be banned. It literally prevents me from buying the shirt.
This. It makes me less and less interested in the sports I have enjoyed watching for 45+ years (and played frequently in some form). Seeing an NHL player hawking NFTs a few years back really made me do a double take and wonder if I was truly done with it. Thankfully, that faded fast.
What I don't want to do is give it to services with an agenda to abuse the data, particularly those profiling individuals for profit. Frankly, I'd trust a Chinese service more than I would an Adtech based one, but that's still not much.
Firefox makes it look like HTML with pdf.js. Wouldn't it be trivial to make something that puts a PDF through that same filter and saves the results to a file? Or do you mean by default so you can just read it in a browser without PDF support?
For my use case, I use a webclipper to drop a copy of the text as Markdown into Joplin as a personal knowledge base. I can't do this with a PDF. My browser downloads the document by default as a preference for user manuals etc that I would want to keep, but for this kind of content a simple web page would be a better choice.
For other users, PDF is well known for lack of accessibility and I hear that it's a poor choice for screen readers but I have little direct knowledge on that.
I'd rather HTML with named anchors so I can link from documents/pages directly to subsections with hyperlinks. This would make it more useful professionally given it's a document that should be referenced by other works.
sigh, PDF is anything but trivial sadly. It is a horrible creature from the bowels of hell. I do wish there was a web document standard that was printable and also editable without dropping a nuclear bomb
This is the current choice developers face - build for the app-store or build for the web. Or both.
For me, I honestly don't care if Mobile Safari seems 'crippled' when everything I use works exactly the same on devices as on Firefox/Desktop. If anything I'd be more annoyed if it worked better on my fringe devices, but maybe I'm the outlier here - I only use mobile for comms/banking, tablet for light browsing, and it's more often I'll be on Desktop.
Do I think it should have less functionality in Mobile Safari - yes if I get more battery life. Conversely no, if those features could give me more battery life back through intelligent apps.
It would have been a better fit for me than the M4 Air, I literally use it only for typing and browsing, plus a could of Mac-only tools. Brilliant machine but complete overkill for me. It's almost tempting to switch just to get rid of the display notch.
I think the definition of big is smaller than that. Mine was "too big to fit on a maxed-out laptop", effectively >8TB. Our photo collection is bigger than that, it's not 'big data'.
Or one could define it as too big to fit on a single SSD/HDD, maybe >30TB. Still within the reach of a hobbyist, but too large to process in memory and needs special tools to work with. It doesn't have to be petabyte scale to need 'big data' tooling.
If you can't trust your update sources, you have bigger problems.
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