Every model has done this. And sometimes the makers go the other way to compensate, and then you get Opus 5 who answered like it was possessed by the ghost of stack overflow.
Every MacBook Pro I've owned in the last decade ends up with a keyboard-shaped outline of finger oils on the screen from the lack of clearance between the screen and keyboard when closed, so I guess they're just leaning into that now.
The cost is just literally not higher in any significant way and the complexity is also not higher in any significant way. Framework even lets you install their new touch screen part on any of their old non-touch screen mainboards with the same connector. It’s just a drop-in replacement even with old hardware that never had a touch screen.
Doesn’t the $450 iPad debunk that idea completely? Or the $230 Apple Watch? Or the $699 iPhone 17e? The cheapest computers Apple sells have a touch screen.
A computer that survives being banged around on your wrist and swimming underwater has a touchscreen.
Fucking up the UI is not an inevitability. KDE didn’t fuck up the UI, works great on my touch screen. Windows 11 for all its faults handles touch screens very well, as well as non-touch environments.
I use a macOS for work daily. My last laptop was an M2 MacBook Pro and I’ve now moved over to Linux on Framework 13 then the 13 Pro when that came out.
I switched because didn’t like Liquid Glass, I didn’t like the Photos app redesign for macOS 26, and I liked what Framework was doing. I also wanted more storage and of course that means I was going laptop shopping with the soldered storage of the Mac.
Now I’d say Apple fixed most of their sins for those pain points but I still like Linux better and really like being able to play more games on Steam.
My desktop was a Windows 11 gaming system, and I switched that to Linux due to GPU issues with my AMD card that Linux solved.
My overarching feeling is that all 3 operating systems are relatively competent and that I think none of this touch screen issue is a big deal. macOS isn’t going to go to shit just because it has a touch screen.
I’ve really ended up on Linux because Linux is so good now, not because macOS or Windows are intolerably bad.
Cloud equals not your computer, folks. Any cloud company can be legally subpoenaed and required to hand over any data they have, and they can also be legally gagged from telling anyone about it. Doesn't matter if they support it or not, they are a corporation subject to the laws of their jurisdiction and disobeying can expose the directors personally to civil or criminal penalties. Every corp will comply with a legal subpoena, and those are often easier to get than warrants.
For you they at least require a warrant. Usually. Unless you're crossing the border or are undocumented or something.
Well, and what are you concretely suggesting here? Having my own door kicked down and my dog shot so they can get at my personal home server? Buying hardware and colocating it then getting permanently blacklisted from every datacenter when they get raided?
The problem here is the cops not where the computer sits.
Your own property/server has 4th amendment protections, especially if it's in your house. Your use of someone else's machine doesn't, especially when they voluntarily give up your info.
You can also use proxys and/or tor to create external accounts/upload stuff.
> your own property/server has 4th amendment protections, especially if it's in your house.
Yeah that’s gonna be super helpful, try to keep chanting “fourth amendment!” while pinned to the ground and the heavily armed swat team that just blew your door away is searching through the house.
Again : “HEY MY DUDES WHERES YOUR WARRANT AND YOU CAN ONLY SEARCH FOR STUFF IN IT” going to be hard to yell when you have a trooper’s boot smashing your neck against the ground and they’re ransacking your home after having blown the door off its hinges.
Fifteen years ago, yes, maybe your movie ingestion would have given you unrealistic expectations.
However, today, every segment in the pipeline of judice -- LEO to PA/DA[1] to judiciary to BoPs -- is utterly subverted ideologically. What happens in this pipeline -- especially regarding a 4A case -- will have little to do with justice, but rather who you are, who is trying you, and what court they manage to pick. And of course the hands and eyes of the whole system is the Executive Branch, now in lockstep[2] at the Federal Level.
Reactionaries will insist to their dying day that the opposing ideology did this first, so today they have the right to do it back harder.
What this means is that it doesn't matter what your rights are, or who has what paper. Because who's taking your case? Where will it go? How long will it take?
In one sense, the reactionaries are right: an opposing ideology HAS been doing this, for a long time. But it's not hollywood or the academy or the commmunists or the legions of wokedom. It's your boss, and your boss' boss. Using their cushion of money to avoid any kind of criminal and civil responsibilities by simply waiting out everyone else in court. They're the ones who broke the ground here, and the post-GWoT security state drove a bus through it, as if Keanu Reeves was at the wheel.
Anyway at this late hour in our accursed year of 2026 . . none of it matters. Doesn't matter who started it, doesn't matter what side you happen to like or not like. Same result: the laws on paper will not protect you. Don't make the possibly fatal mistake of thinking they will. Think like a guerilla, think like Snowden.
[1] But not quite with every SAO, a hairline fracture in the cathedral of oppression we've voted to have built all around us.
[2] Or at least as much "lockstep" as can be bought with the current executive's level of competence. The Dominionists and the Dark Enlightenment sorts are the beating heart of intelligence in the reactionary wing today, and they are still mostly staying in the background, waiting for the collapse.
If you want to ignore legality, then you need to keep a rifle for every man, woman, and child in your home strong enough to shoulder one, and enough black-tips to ensure the cops bring a chaplain along for the raid.
>Well, and what are you concretely suggesting here?
Having your own server and infra, at least in part.
>Having my own door kicked down and my dog shot so they can get at my personal home server?
The government doesn't have infinite resources, nor is it immune to political considerations (obviously, that's the problem here!). There is an enormous, qualitative and quantitative difference between:
1) we must get an actual warrant in a lot of different physical jurisdictions across the country all with different judges and then spend the money and availability to send physical meat agents to said locations, often rural and remote, across the country to an unknown physical situation with at least some areas where people might shoot at us, and all equipment needed for that, and will by definition have to disclose everything to our targets
vs
2) an agent can comfortably from their central office chair use a preexisting automated system to a central cloud portal to demand info secretly from companies that will just comply without any question
Scale is inherent in the topic here. It's not just "why", "HOW" is "ICE running one of the largest anti-left surveillance ops"? Well, in part because they can do so so cheaply, efficiently, and stealthily via purely electronic means. They aren't kicking down ten million doors and shooting ten million dogs, and indeed they CAN'T do that, not because they wouldn't like to but because it's physically impossible with their resources and would provoke furious (undoubtedly including some lethal) pushback.
And again, even if absolutely nothing else, it means something to know they're after you. Nothing stops you from immediately surrendering your server when asked, but you can then also instantly get a lawyer/support and push back right then and there. You can't adapt to what you either never even realize happened or only realized too late.
Yeah these are pretty good points I can't really dispute.
I think it is a threat model thing primarily, which I should have been more clear about. I'm more worried about being lawfully murdered in front of my family than I am going to jail because my ssh sessions were read. But the ssh thing is a totally valid concern for someone doing different activities than I am and I shouldn't have dismissed it.
Thanks for the reply, and I'm definitely all in favor of assessing things in light of threat model! That said:
>I'm more worried about being lawfully murdered in front of my family than I am going to jail because my ssh sessions were read
I guess I'd ask if you're really sure about that as a threat model? The fact is that such things are really really rare, particularly for anything white collar-ish. They get press precisely because they're unicorns. The "lawful" bit as well, one of the whole things here is that it's, at best, very dubiously lawful at all; they've been able to skirt that question so far via keeping it all secret and trying to hide from individual suit. Can't do that if a warrant from a local magistrate judge is needed and a private residence is raided though.
In contrast "you can beat the rap but not the ride" seems less dramatic but a lot more common, and in particular more than actual jail all the little ways the government has tried to fuck with people (like putting them on travel lists) that are opaque and much more difficult to even prove are the result of an organized scheme. I'm personally more worried in the near future about "chilling effects at a scale", not hundreds of activists in gulags but millions of people who get pressure in terms of financials or tax investigations or pressure on employers or always getting pulled in the security lines and on and on, and then some sizable fraction change their behavior as a result. It feels more concretely productive and practical to focus on making sure the government would have trouble both scaling and hiding unconstitutional behavior.
If that is your worry, people who do a lot more dangerous things than web hosting have written and talked about how to act during a raid so that you don't get murdered. Mainly just let them do what they want, don't immediately push back with violence against infringements of your rights, push back in court later.
This happens sometimes, but rarely, and if it does happen, chances are you'll be fine, apart from downtime and having to buy a new server, as long as your disks are encrypted.
You're treating this as if the worst thing that can happen will happen, when it's more of a numbers game. They do these raids occasionally on one or two people in order to scare tens of thousands of other people away from participating.
DCs also get bullshit raids sometimes and have processes that don't involve an immediate permanent blacklist.
You have to realise it's a move of desperation by the attackers. If they are seizing a server, it means they don't have anything and they're hoping beyond hope they can get something, anything, from that server.
For those with the resources to do so, perhaps. But those well-resourced people fleeing the country are then leaving those who are not well-resourced to fend for themselves, and letting it further devolve.
The US is currently, probably, still a Democracy with a semi-functioning independent Judiciary and public pressure can still have an impact.
Although it may still be possible that some jurisdictions will emerge, even within the US, that have the capacity to preserve basic civil liberties for their residents, whether via tacit agreement or overt paramilitary enforcement.
I wouldn't bet my kids' childhoods on that happening, though.
It's not an option for everyone, and just being American will result in difficulties in getting bank accounts and access financial rails overseas thanks to FACTA. Countries that do not have a history of compliance/cooperation are generally countries you don't want to go to and also, likely can't actually stay in. For the past 100 years or so there's no terra nullis one can simply escape to and be allowed to live with any degree of comfort and acceptance. Realistically though, even the places that offered the illusion of safety are not really safe now. Not to mention that the fact that any part of the pipes is even visible is in a meta sense part of the safeguards actually working. If you go to Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, etc., they've simply had time to learn how to run authoritarianism as normal. The reaction to such a scheme indicates that in the US this is still aberrant. Elsewhere this is quotidian and assumed to exist even when it doesn't really because of the inability for any individual person not in a privileged position to even begin to understand what state capacity actually exists, or doesn't exist.
There is at least still the ability to recognize tyranny when it arrives that exists in the culture here. People have the option of playing jurisdictional arbitrage with their data. ICE isn't part of the actual judiciary and even the DOJ loses cases - routinely, now, under this admin, a mindblowing change from the gears that exercised discretion to keep its reputation under all circumstances.
The case that revealed all this abuse of authority is a relatively minor and poorly chosen set of facts that the government has a real possibility of taking to trial and lose on. What ICE is doing is authoritarian drag compared to pretty much everywhere else that has the capacity to have such agencies in the first place. ICE is genuinely incompetent because all this is new to them, because it's both unlawful and culturally unacceptable, and running a surveillance state is not reflexively easy to most people. They don't know how to prioritize, how to cover things up whether the authority exists or not, and how to even properly police themselves. They don't know how to passively let information reach them and instead everything is loud and noisy and leaves paper trails and frequently ineffectual. What's important is maintaining that reflex about how all this is fundamentally unacceptable in every sense.
It's a realistic goal, for now. There's probably still time, a year or two. If things go really bad, there may be a sudden outflux of refugees or whatever you want to call and it could get really difficult to get a job and a visa abroad.
History suggests this is a short-term solution, not even a medium-term solution.
A critical mass of people pushing back against fascism leave a country, and that country tends to devolve into the kind of place that starts wars with its neighbors.
This is why I always turn my head and squint at Americans fleeing to Canada, as if an America that fully embraced everything they see it doing wouldn't come right after Canada next.
Look at Trump and even Vance “joking” about Canada being a state. They wouldn’t hesitate to take Canada by force if America ever got to the point where fleeing to Canada was forcibly prevented.
The important data being handed over was the IP address of the admin. If you self-host the server, that skips the first step to discover who is running the server, your own IP address is in the web site's DNS entry.
On the other hand if it's on a hosted server that you have control over, they know whose server it is but they don't know what it's doing, and without a wiretap they don't even know who's connecting, and they can't see any encryption keys or content if encryption is used well.
Imagine a world where we all use Gmail, and one where we all host email on our own servers the host can't get into. In the latter world, a wiretap can identify who's sending mail to who, but not read the email, nor identify the IP address that downloaded any individual email. That's a severe handicap for them over just being able to read your mail. If you have 10 people on each server, they get even less info (but the server owner gets more).
Also SSH isn't a perfectly opaque protocol. There's stuff you can use to fingerprint e.g. client/server versions and often narrow it to architecture, OS, even OS version. That helps.
“Plot based media” you actually heard someone say this? Like it was a bad thing?
GenZ is culturally destitute. It’s shocking and sad. Every time I think no I must just be old and I don’t know, I go and dig and… very little. There’s just not much there except brain rot and blather and music that’s absolutely derivative of previous music at best. At worst it’s musical brainrot, like “phonk” inspired stuff.
I fear GenA will largely be in the same boat.
It’s scrolling and algorithms. People blast weapons companies and stuff like Palantir or Flock or whatever here, and for rational reasons, but infinite scroll plus engagement algorithms has done more harm to humanity at scale than any of those.
What's GenZ doing that is comparable to what any previous generation was doing in their 18-30 age bracket years artistically, musically, culturally, etc.?
I don't think it's their fault BTW. I think it's previous generations fault for creating the system that stole their attention. Every previous generation passed to the next generation a vocabulary and a set of tools to build new culture... until GenX and Millennials (my own cohorts) passed tools to stare at small rectangles and scroll.
Could it be that the traditional avenues are closed off to them? Just like everything in our gerontocratic society, studios are still led by old white men who act as gatekeepers. I would expect young voices to be heard in channels where they actually have a chance of being heard (which is also where I personally will never hear them because I don't frequent those channels). Incidentally, when a young artist does get a chance in "legacy media" the result is surprisingly successful (Backrooms and Obsession surpassed all expectations).
That’s what led me back to books. Character, plot, ideas, coherence. I also love great prose.
You occasionally see thoughtful movies. Many of them are unsurprisingly based on books. The horror genre has become this weird eddy of creativity too with interesting characters and plots and some surprisingly good acting. Of course you’ve historically had innovation in that genre, often ignored because it’s horror and thus low brow by definition.
My take on horror being creative is that it’s like old school punk, pulp novels, zines, underground music. The key there is that these are genres and styles that give you permission to suck, and therefore permission to try stuff.
If it must be high art or it must gross nine figures, you can’t suck. So you can’t innovate.
I think that's a good take about horror and punk and pulp fiction.
"Permission to suck" made me think of something even more fundamental that's relevant to the AI art conversation, and often forgotten; that the best art, the most creative work, comes when you're working around constraints. Those could be the constraints of a medium, if you're chiseling in stone and need to make certain trade-offs; or they could be monetary constraints (you can't afford a cast of 40,000 extras for a war movie, so you turn your focus on the intense local experience of a few characters). In a "necessity is the mother of invention" kind of way, having limitations forces you to think more carefully about every move, and that kind of thought is what can make something a small masterpiece instead of a large sloppy shitshow.
Given an unlimited budget, most directors will lose their heads and do terrible things, even with a good script. Having no limits brings out the worst impulses in any creative endeavor. If "AI filmmaking" comes to stand in for "unlimited budget", then I think the trend in the future will be toward smaller, more human-scale art, because artists will find constraints to work within as a means to focus.
This is a general trend with technology, and is why the industrial revolution never gave us an age of leisure. First people are worried it's gonna take all the jobs, then they realize no it's actually going to create a ton more jobs and more work by expanding the overall economy and creating dozens of new niches for new stuff that didn't exist before. Some old professions vanish but new ones either get created or get expanded a lot.
The right's opposition to it is mostly rooted in the fact that historically the fossil fuel industry has been a major funding cornerstone of the right.
The pamphlet from which we get the term "fundamentalism" was published by an oil industry tycoon.
So the right is incentivized to protect this industry even if it becomes obsolescent and is no longer the most economical or practical way to generate at least much of our energy needs (electricity).
While the right has often sounded pro-nuclear, in practice they tend not to be that enthusiastic about it when they actually get into office. Obama supported the first new nuclear plant in decades.
Fossil fuel interests seem to support "the enemy of my enemy". 25 years ago the best alternative was nuclear so they supported alternatives to nuclear. Now they support nuclear and hydrogen.
> So the right is incentivized to protect this industry even if it becomes obsolescent and is no longer the most economical or practical way to generate at least much of our energy needs (electricity).
I think in that case industries that will became most economical or practical way to generate electricity simply will start funding the right.
"historically the fossil fuel industry has been a major funding cornerstone of the right."
The Eastern Bloc in the Cold War was extremely keen on fossil fuels (and nuclear power) and very poor at dealing with pollution. As is the PRC.
In Western Europe, coal miners were the backbone of the far left in places like Germany and the UK including Communist parties. The British Labour Party's vote was traditionally strongest in coal mining areas.
I don't know so much about the US situation, but I am aware that some American coal miners were involved in socialist movements there many decades ago.
I'm not convinced. If the fossil fuel industry has such a grip on the right, how did these things make it into the 2008 Republican Party Platform [1]?
Climate change:
> By increasing our American energy supply and decreasing the long term demand for oil, we will be well positioned to address the challenge of climate change and continue our longstanding responsibility for stewardship over the environment.
...
> As part of a global climate change strategy, Republicans support technology-driven, market-based solutions that will decrease emissions, reduce excess greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, increase energy efficiency, mitigate the impact of climate change where it occurs, and maximize any ancillary benefits climate change might offer for the economy.
...
> Because Republicans believe that solutions to the risk of global climate change will be found in the ingenuity of the American people, we propose a Climate Prize for scientists who solve the challenges of climate change. Honoraria of many millions of dollars would be a small price for technological developments that eliminate our need for gas-powered cars or abate atmospheric carbon.
Clean energy:
> Alternate power sources must enter the mainstream. The technology behind solar energy has improved significantly in recent years, and the commercial development of wind power promises major benefits both in costs and in environmental protection. Republicans support these and other alternative energy sources, including geothermal and hydropower, and anticipate technological developments that will increase their economic viability. We therefore advocate a long-term energy tax credit equally applicable to all renewable power sources.
Reducing demand for fossil fuels:
> Conservation does not mean deprivation; it means efficiency and achieving more with less. Most Americans today endeavor to conserve fossil fuels, whether in their cars or in their home heating, but we can do better. We can construct better and smarter buildings, use smarter thermostats and transmission grids, increase recycling, and make energy-efficient consumer purchases. Wireless communications, for example, can increase telecommuting options and cut back on business travel. The Republican goal is to ensure that Americans have more conservation options that will enable them to make the best choices for their families.
...
> We must also produce more vehicles that operate on electricity and natural gas, both to reduce demand for oil and to cut CO2 emissions.
> Given that fully 97 percent of our current transportation vehicles rely on oil, we will aggressively support technological advances to reduce our petroleum dependence. For example, lightweight composites could halve the weight and double the gas mileage of cars and trucks, and together with flex-fuel and electric vehicles, could usher in a renaissance in the American auto industry.
They no longer say anything like that, which supports my point.
The argument that the fossil fuel industry historically being a major source of their funding is why they currently oppose renewables is weak because that has been a major continuing source of their funding for many decades.
Hence to explain why the renewable support in the 2008 party platform went away we need to look for an explanation other than simply the fossil fuel industry wanted it.
It still may be due to the fossil fuel industry, but to make that argument one needs to explain why they didn't have enough power before to stop it from going into the platform in 2008 but they did have enough later to get rid of it.
The oil and gas industry loves solar and wind. You need baseload generation capacity in those outlier days where there is cloud cover and the wind doesn’t blow.
That baseload capacity comes from natural gas power plants. By building solar and wind you are guaranteeing a market for their products in the future.
Not sure what religious fundamentalism has to do with any of this.
He accumulates vast amounts of money and AFAIK isn't very into charity or helping the poor, which directly contradicts Christian teaching. By the most direct interpretation of the Christian gospels he should be giving most of it away, but even a more moderate interpretation says he should be doing a whole lot more philanthropy.
He openly supports and funds elitist ideologies like neoreaction that propose that all human life is not of equal moral value and that some are "just better" than others and more or less that might makes right, which is very contrary to Christian teaching.
Those are two that come to mind instantly. There's many more.
He's pretty clearly a political reactionary who believes in religion as a tool to organize a society. That's a secular belief. Belief in religion as a political tool does not require belief in God. (And on the flip side it's entirely possible to believe in God but not to like or trust religion, which is a secular human institution.)
Not sure where your getting that Christians can't be wealthy or accumulate wealth. Theres nothing is Christen teachings that says you must give away your wealth. Historically and currently there are many Christians that have vast amounts of wealth.
I'm not sure about the elitist funding or the human grading. Please give a source on this along with the exact biblical text that contradicts his actions.
I agree that "you must give away all your wealth" is not a command binding on all Christians (based on other passages in the New Testament), but generosity is commanded pretty often IIRC: Matt. 6:19–21 and 6:24, 1 Tim. 6:17–19, James 2:15–16, etc.
>> No seriously, where's the leeway in interpretation? I truly don't see it.
The point is I can grab any verse and sell it for whatever my narrative is. The fact is the OP wants it interpreted the way they read it. I don't see any connection forcing someone to dispose of wealth to be part of a religion.
Extreme wealth has nothing to do beliefs or your religion. What the theme here is that to be a devote X you need to follow every rule and belief to claim yourself an X. Thats nonsense and anyone who did would carry the label of religious fanatic. 99 percent of all religious people do not follow or believe 100 percent of whatever their following.
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