The best method for dealing with honeybee stings is to use a credit card (or your finger nail, knife, &c) to "shave" the stinger flush with the skin. This separates the two barbsaws (from the poison-pumping motor action) reducing chemical embedding of poison (and physical barbs).
1) By default, every word (each character, actually) you input into Spotlight/Siri gets time-stamped and sent to `smoot.apple.com`
2) Even with a Pi-Hole blocking *.apple.com (i.e. using MacOS >> Networking >> DNS Server), on boot all modern Apple Silicon reaches out to security.apple.com (i.e. bypassing the user's manual-input DNS setting), using the DHCP-issued DNS IP [0]
pro-tip: use your router's DHCP to auto-issue your local Pi-Hole's IP address [as DNS] with your IP-leases; then you'll actually be able to block all *.apple.com traffic (using the PiHole which your DHCP issues to, by default)
[0] this is for security chip "lockout" detection (e.g.) and it is pervasive across NICs (i.e. it REALLY seeks any attempt for DNS resolution to security.apple.com)
> 1) By default, every word (each character, actually) you input into Spotlight/Siri gets time-stamped and sent to `smoot.apple.com`
Huh? How do you expect Apple to show live search results if they don't send what you're typing to their servers?
> 2) Even with a Pi-Hole blocking *.apple.com (i.e. using MacOS >> Networking >> DNS Server), on boot all modern Apple Silicon reaches out to security.apple.com (i.e. bypassing the user's manual-input DNS setting), using the DHCP-issued DNS IP [0]
From a quick google search, it seems to be if you enable "Find my" or pass word recovery with an Apple account. I think that's reasonable to expect if you enable these features.
>I think that's reasonable to expect if you enable these features.
This is the default behavior, without enabling anything (you cannot disable the T2 chip reaching out to security.apple.com), whether or not you have Find My™ enabled. You cannot disable this "feature."
If you take a brand new Apple computer and turn it on, literally the first DNS query it makes (before MacOS even begins to load) is to `security.apple.com` – with zero configuration – and you can never disable this behavior (it is embedded into Apple's T2 SoC).
Every boot thereafter, the Apple product attempts to re-query this host; if connected (and black-listed) the computer is immediately disabled.
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Similarly, Microsoft has OS-level phone-homing which contacts host `spynet2.microsoft.com`, which is certainly an interesting naming scheme (at least they're open about it). This also ignores the user-supplied DNS (in Settings >> Networking >> NIC >> DNS ).
Settings -> Spotlight -> Turn off everything you don't want. The first few times you open it it even tells you this.
Admittedly I haven't confirmed that this results in no API calls in the latest few macOS releases but it definitely used to stop them, at least a few years ago.
>does this seem user-friendly? seems deliberately hostile to me (though par for the course nowadays)
I recently set up my old 2009 iMac [0], and it tickled-me-pink that even the Microsoft Office installer was opt-in by default (i.e. the telemetry option was OFF by default, with the installer asking if you wanted to opt-in).
[0] this was about a month ago, right before the ArtCraft's reverse-engineering of Adobe's products; I restored this iMac simply to run my legally-purchased copy of Photoshop CS4 (a non-subscription edition circa 2006)
I use it sometimes to quickly do currency conversion, I am assuming it does an online request to a currency exchange API. If that counts, then count me as a person who does want to see online results. But I did disable the web search results in Spotlight settings, that's just annoying
Yes, your example "counts" (as somebody desiring the online features of Spotlight).
But macOS makes it extremely difficult to search your local files (without using Spotlight) so you effectively cannot search your offline APFS without revealing your local queries (to Apple, at a minimum).
This seems wrong.
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I've met several $100k+ tech geniuses who absolutely refuse to believe this behavior is normal/default – but a local PiHole (or simple internet searches) reveal this Truth (capital t, with respects to DFW).
While providing over-the-shoulder IT support, I saw a hardware designer for a tech company enter proprietary company information into his "local" Spotlight search (to find a CAD file he had recently designed, demonstrating that the computer was "working"); when I told him about smoot.apple.com (e.g: Spotlight local queries offloading) his face turned white – fortunately that company only has a few thousand customers (very niche hardware designs for BMS/power delivery management), and no "real" competition... but he still refuses to fully believe the levels of telemetry in 2026.
(I think the LG TV story last month "woke him up"; the Bitcoin Ledger embedded SoC SIM key-thefts via man in the middle attacks should bring out the last remaining tinfoil hats). Stay frosty.
LittleSnitch resolves DNS queries (i.e. it determines the IP address) before you have clicked ALLOW/DENY; so even if you DENY the host['s IP] connection, your DNS resolver has already seen the query.
Also, LittleSnitch does not block `security.apple.com` queries, which occur before this software has even loaded.
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>Did you catch LG spying posts?
After last month's GamersNexus exposé, I went back and watched Citizen Four [0]: Ed says it plain and simply in this 2014 documentary, "you don't even need to be a high value target, anything that can listen WILL."
>>"Saying [if you have nothing to hide, then...] is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say!" –Edward Snowden
[0] documentary about Snowden revelations; also see his book Permanent Record [1]
side note: I worked in data centers during the Snowden leaks, and the cover stories were always incredible ("the tech just doesn't exist to do that yet" is agency legalese, folks)...
>Residential master electrician makes 5K - 10K per day.
No.
Perhaps: the electrical contractor of a very large MSA would be having an indredible day if they made $5-10k per day
No resi sparky is making that, regularly, not even weekly (do your math, you estimate $1MM+?!).
Src: IBEW electrician, with decades of residential "side work" (including as a licensed electrical contractor)
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>The supply of electricians is limited by gatekeeping.
Yes and no.
Just show up. Then show up again. This is in such limited supply that if you can make yourself look presentable, on a regular basis, you can walk into many smaller shops (union and not, I've done both) and just ask for a job (it still works).
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For me, one of the best advantages of the jobsites is essentially no females on-site, which gives work the comeradery that my initial career into medicine was lacking (heavily female dominated). Perhaps an oft-dreampt "third place," albeit while at work.
I only share this gendered thought because being a tradesmen would be much more difficult for ANY woman (e.g. hazing, upper body strength)... the one female bricklayer I know (and respect, she is a haus!) agrees with me that "she wasn't built for good ole boys club, but it's all she knows how to do that isn't minimum wage" so she keeps slinging brick with her 99%+ male co-workers.
If you are a young single male, willing to travel around the country: get your union ticket (either indoor or outdoor) and follow storm season restorations for half the year, and make six figures "playing hero."
The best advice (a good) spackler ever gave me, started with his question "why do you make all your wiring holes so small?"
In my apprenticed ignornance, I figured I was "doing the gypsum guys a favor" (by not cutting large holes everywhere) but it turns out cutting larger holes made both trades' lives easier.
Making a large cut-out "disappear" is actually much easier to conceal than a smaller opening.
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That, and wet sanding (it's incredible how many people dry sand - all the dust!).
I hope you had a speech you gave to the drywall crew on each new project, something like:
“This is my hammer, it would do you well to remember it. If you don’t bury my boxes, you will not see my hammer again. If you bury my boxes, I guarantee you will see and feel my hammer. The decision is yours.”
I used to tutor "difficult kids" – years later, I myself became a difficult student (mostly: I just stopped caring). But tutoring used to always be something I could "fall back on" when my blue collar renovations were "slow."
But if today a parent came to me asking for help, I'd just show them (over a few lessons, not the normal dozen) how to talk with an LLM (admittedly: it's better, and cares more than I do).
I began noticing (right before their acceptance of AI, c2024) that grammarly (and translation sites) were offering (what seemed like at the time) "lifetime subscriptions to soon-to-be obsolete tech" – the writing was already so-obviously written upon walls that ChatGPT was an industry re-writer.
Exactly; when I first got my RTX 5070 Ti (16gb, to game with!!!, upgrading from VEGA56), I loaded then-latest Qwen3.6 (~30B, cannot remember exactly). My only prior LLM experience was with models <8gb, primarily llama3.1.
My technical-expert twin played around with these LLMs, for about an hour, and then correctly reasoned "it's able to be WRONG, faster."
This seems apt. My next LLM machine will be closer to 96gb+ vRAM.
IIRC the guy who blew up his Tesla truck (in front of Trump Tower) was a drone pilot involved in this (or a similar) mass-casualty bombing. Perhaps he was leadership – but the released parts of his manifesto... were revealing about his opinion on US-motives.
–retired hobbyist beekeeper
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