Partner!? I don't see where you get that from the article, and Apple & Facebook have traditionally not been best of friends (see everything iOS implemented to limit Facebook's overreach).
I'm guessing they chose Muse because 1. It's not Chinese so it'll look good for Trump's AI cronies (Apple is in the administration's spotlight) and 2. It's fairly recent and thus on people's mind.
Eh, Apple spent years suing Samsung while also buying parts from them for their products. You can be a partner and an enemy at the same time at the high levels of the game.
I mean that they're doing joint marketing on this particular thing. Muse Spark marketing features Mac Studios quite prominently, and Apple's material spotlights Muse Spark.
> the TOR mission was to allow spies to access the network and hide among all the other non-spy users
Tor is pretty clear about what their mission is, it's at the bottom of the Tor Project homepage https://www.torproject.org: "To advance human rights and freedoms by creating and deploying free and open source anonymity and privacy technologies, supporting their unrestricted availability and use, and furthering their scientific and popular understanding."
Claiming anything else is useless conspiracy thinking without evidence.
> It was and still is funded mostly by the US Naval Research Laboratory
The original idea came from the US Naval Research Laboratory, yes (as a way to mask the origin of messages to hide the command boat in a fleet), but the funding statement is patently false. In 2024, the majority of their government funding ($2.1M out of $2.5) came from the U.S. State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, with the rest of the government money coming from even more innocuous sources. You can find this information on p41 of their IRS form: https://www.torproject.org/static/findoc/2023-2024-TheTorPro... also accessible from their Reports page at https://www.torproject.org/about/reports/
Certainly, you can speculate about the motivations of the U.S. State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and whether that's a front for more undercover objectives, but that front lines up pretty well with the US's (former?) foreign policy of undermining (unfriendly) dictatorial regimes, and Occam's Razor applies.
Ultimately though, the tools that Tor provides can absolutely be abused by bad actors, and ever since Silk Road, I've become convinced that the Tor network is overrun by a wretched hive of scum and villainy, where those morally defensible activities are utterly outnumbered by the criminal ones.
"Claiming anything else is useless conspiracy thinking without evidence."
Using the word "conspiracy" in this conversation about TOR is wild to me.
In a post-Snowden world, it surprises me how anyone wouldn't give reasonable doubt to the THE most interesting and juicy tool linked to the US military post-2001. The tool that people think hides what they are doing and hides who they are.
If there's one thing I know, it's that the US would never in a million years leave a data source untapped or a new NIST crypto standard untampered. Their fingers are in every pie.
The most [1] annoying difference to me is the Alt/Cmd vs Win/Alt key swaps. In this case, Mac has precedence, and Microsoft decided they would place their new Windows key to the left of Alt.
Also, 10 whippings for whomever at Apple decided to put the Fn/Globe key to the bottom left of laptop keyboards, and move Ctrl over. It's the first thing I swap on a Mac (used to use Karabiner, until macOS finally, years later, decided to implement the setting), and I always trip when using a colleague's laptop. These kids don't respect no traditions!
.. that rant over, I must recognize that Ctrl isn't used as much in GUI apps which prefer Cmd, and only us relatively few terminal junkies care.
[1] second most, perhaps, after swapping Delete & Backspace.
I haven't any issues with them, and I've had them for years. In fact, they were the foundation of my smart home setup, and continue to be central.
They worked fine with the ConBee 2, and work fine with the ZBT-1 that replaced it.
That said, they're used within a relatively small area, and have direct connection to the coordinator. My one (major) annoyance with them is how hard it is to open the battery compartment, the plastic is too soft.
I've since added some Sonoff T+H sensors which are fine, though twice as big.
My one disappointment is the Arre (Thread) sensor, which has low resolution and bad battery life.
Yeah, Nvidia cares a lot if you are using compute (aka CUDA). If you are using their pure compute offerings, they are really top of the line on performance and tooling.
Though only with commercial distros. If you're using a fixed version of RedHat, SUSE or Ubuntu (which Canonical offers a commercial version), you're fine. Just hope that their support is long enough and NEVER EVER change kernel versions except patches!
If your GPU is older than 5 years, then you're in danger zone and you should have completely replaced your hardware 3 years ago and bought new Nvidia equipment now 10x more expensive!
The biggest issue was Nvidia's insistence on buffer management with EGLStreams instead of GBM, which broke a lot of desktops. But they forfeit that fight ~4 years ago.
EGLStreams actually was(is) a pretty good API, and I think most compositors would've had a much better time if they decided to implement that on top of GBM.
To summarize the difference between the two, with EGLStreams, you just request a buffer to draw into from a pool, then once you're done, you just submit it, thereby relinquishing control of it.
With GBM, you explicitly need to manage the lifetime and access of your buffers, making sure you don't leak or accidentally write it when the GPU/driver tries to, there's no clear ownership, and you have to handle surfaces for double/triple buffering.
It's a much lower level API, and much harder for drivers and app developers to get right, which was no doubt responsible for many years of buggy Wayland compositors - in fact, basically there wasn't a single correct implementation until Valve built Gamescope/their wlroots-based KWin fork and did a bunch of driver work.
The total 2026 US Defense budget is 1.06 Trillion dollars, or ~1,060 Billion dollars. NASA's 2026 budget is 24.5 Billion dollars, or 2% as much as the defense budget.
You chose to single out the Space Force, which has the smallest budget of the 5 branches of the US military. For contrast, the Navy's budget alone is 235 Billion $, close to 10x NASA.
For further comparison, the R&D budget of a single private company, Apple, was $34B in 2025.
It's hard to say specifically that the exact figure of the Space Force budget is the entirety of what the US military spends on "space" annually. Additional large amounts of funds will be committed through programs which are under the umbrella of the NRO or NSA or NGA (aka NGIA) agency budgets.
For one thing, because the parent you were responding to did not make that distinction, and it wasn't clear why you chose to make it. For another thing, limiting US defense space activity spending to just the Space Force budget is naive. All departments of the military operate space activities, and have not and will not hand all of that over to the Space Force (see also: military intelligence vs CIA). We can't know the exact budgetary amounts of each department, and then there's the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office, managing space-based spying), infamous for donating [1] its obsolete telescopes to NASA, which were of comparable performance to Hubble.
Partner!? I don't see where you get that from the article, and Apple & Facebook have traditionally not been best of friends (see everything iOS implemented to limit Facebook's overreach).
I'm guessing they chose Muse because 1. It's not Chinese so it'll look good for Trump's AI cronies (Apple is in the administration's spotlight) and 2. It's fairly recent and thus on people's mind.
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