skibble

All of them? Hmmm.

I'm not from the U.S. but as my country's elections work the same way, I feel compelled to weigh in on this. Here in the UK, you go to your local polling station, you give your name, they check it against the list, then cross you out and hand you a ballot. (This was tweaked in the last few years to require government ID, but the process remains the same. More on that later).

While it's true you could in theory say you were anyone on the list, you'd have to first know you were picking a name that wasn't going to be used, or hadn't already. This is already something of a reach. If someone uses a name that had already been used, or someone turns up later to vote and finds their name crossed out, it's going to set off alarm bells.

On top of the logistical challenges, this is a high-effort endeavour. A single person going to multiple polling stations repeatedly doesn't scale super well. Obviously you can try and do this en masse but the more people are involved the harder it would be to keep secret. If you're trying to rig a local council election with low turnout, it might make a meaningful difference. Does it work if you're trying to swing a congressional race or higher? I see the mentions of carousel voting, and am aware of the likes of Tammany Hall, but these are more of an open secret. What the likes of the GOP are alleging is that there's an invisible epidemic of voter fraud to engineer distrust of the system generally.

Sadly in the UK our long-established voting system was tampered with by the government of the time, who took a leaf from GOP voter intimidation and suppression tactics and mandated government-issued ID at the polls to solve a an almost non-existent issue, leading to tens of thousands of eligible voters being turned away at the polls. Thankfully this moronic and clear abuse of process is likely to be reverse before our next major election, however.

I have set up Time Machine backups for literally hundreds, if not thousands of people in a support role over many years and have hardly ever witnessed this happening. It's one thing to say you may have had to do this once or twice in a decade or the like, but every few months is ridiculous and speaks to some other underlying issue with your setup, like a quietly failing drive or bad cable, etc.

I'm not one of these 'it hasn't happened to me, ergo it's impossible people'. I completely think that many of the design elements of Tahoe are a horrendous regression versus even Sequoia, but I think asserting that Time Machine is completely broken in the shipping version of macOS is a bold statement that deserves a bit of pushback, even among the fire raging in a lot of other places in macOS!

This is incorrect. Mac minis (starting with the M4 model) and Mac Studios simply need to be restored via DFU mode following physical installation of another SSD (be it a larger one or simply a replacement) to function. There are third parties who have reverse engineered the design of the PCB and paired it with the same Hynix and Sandisk NAND chips Apple use.

I can never understand this tired line. Do you and all the people who bleat the same thing also post the same thing about Nintendo and PlayStation bloggers? He’s an Apple commentator. Doesn’t it stand to reason that he does that full time because he’s fundamentally a fan of the company, rather than because he’s suborned his integrity in service of… getting to play with new Apple hardware a week before it goes on sale?

I’m not validating the automatic anti-China sentiment you can sometimes get in these discussions, but there is a major difference between the two. If you live in any mainstream European, or for simplicity’s sake, ‘Western’ country, regardless of your feelings towards U.S. intelligence gathering, these are political allies who share intelligence as a matter of course anyway. China is an actively hostile power who just recently penetrated the domestic U.S. phone network.

Obviously skepticism on this topic is a generally good thing, but I think nihilism to the point that one thinks the U.S. is no different to China, Russia or North Korea is neither accurate nor particularly helpful.

If you still have one, I’d love to finally get in! Been on the waitlist for months with no luck.

Edit: thank you SO much!

Yep, in macOS Sonoma (14.0) and iOS/iPadOS 17.0).

Fire up the built-in Screen Sharing app, type their Apple ID email address in and hit connect. It should bring up a prompt their end that they can accept and you can then observe/control their screen!

I use this all the time for tech support (for family and work).

The premium version is needed for codec support (basically anything above basic Dolby, so all the lossless codecs and possibly Dolby digital+). It’s well worth the annual cost, been using it for a few years now and it’s a bulletproof setup for me. I use it with a local SMB share as I’ve no need for multi user support or remote access.

What kind of taxi? Do you mean black cabs?

That is very cool! Without utterly derailing this thread I'd love one too, I've been on the waitlist for a little while too but no luck yet. Eager to reserve my handle and kick the tyres early on.

I will say to be on topic that I am enjoying Mastodon, but the network effect isn't there yet. It's a pretty small minority of users from my feed that have either switched or are dabbling in both, so tech stack aside, I feel if Bluesky gets momentum it has the best chance of being a drop-in replacement for Twitter in the near-to-medium term, given the relative simplicity (this isn't a knock against Mastodon, more an acknowledgement of simplicity's factor in mass appeal).