Who would’ve thought? This isn’t going to fly with the EU.

Article 5.3 of the Digital Markets Act (DMA): “The gatekeeper shall not prevent business users from offering the same products or services to end users through third-party online intermediation services or through their own direct online sales channel at prices or conditions that are different from those offered through the online intermediation services of the gatekeeper.”

Apple has an annual legal budget of approximately infinity dollars. I assure you they are aware of this and they believe they are in compliance, even if just barely.

If challenged, they will have no problem fighting it — they have nearly as much cash on hand as the entire EU budget.

I hope the EU challenges this, and I hope the EU wins, but Apple isn’t going to be surprised by whatever happens.

How regular C++ feels if English isn’t your first language

Supposedly most Gen Z now use subtitles and I don’t blame them. With the way movie sound is mixed it’s really hard to hear the dialog. Not everyone has a Dolby-certified sound system in their living room.

Even with a basic surround system that has a separate center channel (and fiddling with the settings for 5.1, Atmos, stereo) we still often have to use subtitles. It’s major failure on the part of movie studio audio engineers.

It takes Apple forever to add obvious features like this but I’m glad they have. I’ll use it a lot.

The Fisker Ocean has solar panels on its roof. It can add 4 or 5 miles a day if fully exposed to the sun.

Not enough to matter. It’s a gimmick.

If you don’t have an EV, you may think that EV owners are worried about range, and they’d welcome any increase. I have not found this to be true.

It’s more like having a car that starts every day with a full tank. You’re never going to burn through that in a single day. Pretty soon you don’t care about range, efficiency, or pay much attention to the battery meter. It only matters if you’re on a road trip, which for me is a couple times a year.

I would not want to give up a nice full-roof sunroof for a few extra miles a day.

NASA does this. Looking at the metadata from last year’s moon orbiter photos (like this one), it was shot on a GoPro HERO4 Black. Here NASA scientists talk about the cameras on that mission.

I don’t know whether Ford can make a competitive product or not but this is the right thing to do. EVs being $40K+ (most more than $50K) has left a huge price umbrella for competitors.

Inexpensive products like BYD and Vinfast are going to destroy Ford’s market share unless something is done — either Ford has a competitive product or protectionist legislation is passed.

According to this Reddit post, someone is spamming the Reddit app with fake 5-star reviews on the App Store.

Matchbooks used to have ads for sketchy (sorry) art schools on them. This implies that Leonardo never considered art until he happened to notice one of these ads.

Edit: Found the relevant Wikipedia article.

Some cars use laminated glass side windows that can’t be broken by those tools.

https://www.wtsp.com/...

I knew before checking that S3E10 would be “Fly”. That episode was clever and won critical acclaim, but I found it annoying and couldn’t wait for it to be over.

And the best episode (of any TV show ever, according to some folks), S5E14 “Ozymandias”, had the same writer and director as “Fly”.

It’s an old federated message board system. Message boards are called “newsgroups “. It predates the web so it’s usually accessed via a special client app. To use it you’d need:

• A Usenet client app, called a newsreader. See Wikipedia. Many are probably abandoned by now.
• An account with a Usenet provider. A search engine will point you to several options. There used to be some free ones. If there still are, it would be a good way to try it out. But note that the free ones often don’t carry all of the newsgroups — they omit the binary groups, which are known to carry pirated software and, let’s say, diverse video content.

The guy ate the dog food, I guess?

LK-99 is a potential room-temperature superconductor. The Wikipedia article has a good overview, including how attempts to replicate the findings have so far failed.

This is an old article. It references the Batygin and Brown paper from 2016. As of 2024, it is still considered possible, but no direct evidence has been observed, and alternative explanations have been proposed, according to Wikipedia.

And of course there have been forges launched, including SourceHut, Gitea, Gogs, Forgejo…

That’s the Consumer Price Index.

There’s also the related Producer Price Index which unfortunately does not include tariffs but will be interesting to watch.

For a complex (i.e., larger) image, I would be concerned that I didn’t exercise all of my app’s functionality and something important might be stripped out of the image.

I use Alpine instead of Ubuntu when I’m concerned about image size.

Unfortunately, Apple has the resources, both legal and financial, to tie that up in the EU courts for decades.

Cute.

So these appear to be actual Lego sets, not a game like Lego Star Wars, Lego Marvel or whatever. I’d love to see a Nintendo-platform Lego Animal Crossing game.