Not to mention books. I’m not sure if we’ll ever see another Harry Potter level book again, at least in our lifetimes.

Are you talking quality or popularity? Because there are many, many books that are just as good or better than Harry Potter.

Anyone buying a new iPhone still gets a USB C cable. This only applies to Airpods.

This isn’t relevant to people purchasing iPhones, as those come with a cable. This is only relevant to people purchasing the newest Airpods.

This is about Airpods. The phone still includes the cable.

I’m more concerned about them using the word “sapient.” My dog is sentient; it’s not a high bar to clear.

But what about … new users entering the Apple ecosystem?

What ecosystem do they think people are coming from where they didn’t already have a USB C cable or wireless charger?

EDIT: This refers only to the new Airpods, not to iPhones. iPhones still come with a charging cable.

Sure, but if everyone does it then it wouldn’t work (no one would be drawing excess when the solar is at peak)

If everyone did it then electric companies could prioritize investing in batteries and capacitors and further reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.

If everyone did it, then even without extra storage capacity, net metering would still work. You don’t get credits for generating energy, just for sending it to the grid. All they have to do is the same thing they already do - curtailment.

Finally, it’s impossible for everyone to be on net metering because NEM 3.0 doesn’t have net metering and NEM 1.0 and 2.0 are only available if you’re grandfathered in.

If oversupply were really a concern, then you’d think the prices during oversupply would reflect that, dropping to basically nothing. They don’t. If they did, then EVs could be charged for super cheap when solar power was flooding the grid.

that sounds a lot like what they are talking about

What they’re talking about is revoking the law that grandfathered people into NEM 1.0 and 2.0 contracts. Keep in mind, the people who purchased solar under NEM 1.0 and 2.0 did so under the presumption that they would be able to stay on it for at least 20 years (because that was codified in law).000

only getting paid some large percentage of the price for energy sent to the grid

NEM 3.0 reduces the way credits are calculated to, on average, 25% of what they were before, and that are not the same as the retail rate.

https://aurorasolar.com/blog/explaining-and-modeling-californias-net-billing-tariff-nem-3-0/ has some examples. At the same time that electricity from the grid costs $0.44/kWh, solar sent to the grid only returns a $0.05/kWh credit.

5 cents is not a large percentage of 44 cents.

If your neighbor has solar and you charge your EV in the middle of a sunny day when your neighbor is at work, you’re probably using your neighbor’s electricity to do so. That’s gonna cost you $15 and net your neighbor a $1.71 credit.

Under NEM 1.0 and 2.0, if you import from and export to the grid in the same hour, those amounts are netted, even before NBCs come into effect. But under NEM 3.0, you could get billed for importing in the same hour even if you exported far more than you used. If you imported 1 kWh from the grid, you’d need to export 9 kWh to break even.

Again, this doesn’t make sense. Someone is paying $0.44/kWh for the energy you exported, but you’re only getting $0.05 credit for it.

If your solar system has storage, you can strategically export energy to the grid when the compensation is higher. That’s something you can consider when installing your solar system… but that’s not true for the people who are grandfathered into NEM 1.0 and 2.0, who knew they were grandfathered in by law.

And from what I’ve heard, even that doesn’t actually help that much, because the credits don’t apply to the largest part of the bill - they apply to “generation,” not to “delivery.” I haven’t found a reliable source confirming that, but if true it just adds insult to injury - if you pay the added cost to install an intelligent storage system and configure it to return money to the grid when their costs are highest, you get a credit equal to the cost you helped them avoid, but then the credit’s actually only usable on a small portion of your bill. If the calculations are based on avoided cost, you should get those credits even if it means the electric company is paying you.

It doesn’t really seem like net metering is sustainable.

Not sure why you think that.

Say for example someone generates the same amount of electricity they use, in that case they pay $0 for electricity even though the grid has to take the burden of storing the electricity until they use it later in the day.

The grid isn’t storing their energy - it’s sending it to other customers, meaning that non-sustainable, polluting energy sources don’t have to be generated.

The only time that’s not true is when the net load on the grid dips below zero. According to the duck curve graph from the article, it does appear to be very briefly dipping for a very brief time period each day. At that point it could make sense to store the rest, but if the grid doesn’t have storage capacity then any excess is “wasted,” but at that point the grid engages in a process known as “curtailment,” which means it rejects the excess, meaning that nobody gets credit later for energy that isn’t used now.

Also, curtailment is often not because the grid itself is over-supplied, but because specific regions are over-supplied and the grid lacks transmission lines from them to regions where demand is higher.

in that case they pay $0 for electricity

True under NEM 1.0, but NEM 2.0 also includes “non-bypassable charges” - components of pulling from the grid that cannot be offset by what they contribute. Those charges are roughly 5% as far as I can tell, meaning that if they pulled $300 worth of energy from the grid and sent back $300 worth (or more), they’d still owe $15.

Cool, didn’t know that about Ecosia.

Qwant: looks like maybe they used to have a browser that might have been forked from Firefox, but it hasn’t been updated in a while - per the App Store listings, I think they now just have a lightweight search engine frontend.

Brave on iOS appears to have been forked from Firefox on iOS back in 2018-2019, which was news to me. (“Appears to” regards the date; it was definitely forked from Firefox).

the rest of the browser is derived from Firefox

This might be true for some, like Ecosia, but I’m guessing that Brave isn’t pulling changes from Firefox. It seems like they basically used the Firefox codebase as a starting point - and in 5 years of development, a lot can change.

I wasn’t saying that this is generally true for IOS browsers, just that a pretty large part of FOSS ones are

Gotcha, that makes more sense.

One more thing to point out is that your comment reads like they were based on Firefox and that Firefox didn’t use Webkit (but of course Firefox on iOS also uses Webkit).

more like Floorp

Meaning that they’re forks of Chromium on desktop in the same way Floorp is a fork of Firefox on desktop?

They are based off Firefox for IOS which uses WebKit, but they are still based on the browser like Edge which is based on chromium vs Flakon which uses blink but not the rest chromium

I’ve reread this like 5 times and still have no clue what you’re trying to say.

The person you replied to was technically incorrect - other browsers aren’t UIs on top of Safari, but (outside the EU) they’re all limited to the same browser rendering engine Safari uses, Webkit.

This means that other rendering engines - namely Firefox’s Gecko and Chromium’s Blink, as well as niche engines like Ladybird’s - are unavailable there (outside the EU).

They are based off Firefox for IOS

This is not generally true of browsers on iOS, and might not be true of any.

Flakon

I didn’t know what this was at first - apparently this was a typo for “Falkon.”

which uses blink

The browser rendering engine used by Chromium browsers is Blink, which was forked from Webkit over a decade ago, but I’m not aware of any non-Chromium browsers that use it… including Falkon, which appears to leverage QtWebEngine, which itself uses Chromium.

but they are still based on the browser like Edge

By “based on” do you mean “uses the same branding as and is loosely inspired by?” Because I highly doubt that the iOS codebase is based off the desktop codebase for many Chromium or Firefox-based browsers… they may share some code and assets but I doubt they get to share much more than that.

It’s a bit unclear what you mean by “Apple” - I’m assuming you mean Safari on both Mac and iOS.

The search engine I use is SearxNg. On Firefox on Mac it was pretty easy to add.

To use it in Safari, I installed the Keyword Search extension from the App Store. It has the option to set a search engine as the default if you don’t use a keyword, so I did that. This works in both Mac and on iOS / iPadOS.

There are other Safari extensions that do similar things, like Customize Search Engine (free). Kagi has an extension that can make Kagi the default search engine, for example (it doesn’t appear that there’s an equivalent for Startpage, though). I haven’t used anything other than Keyword Search for this, though.

Are you seriously asking why a commonly supported 27 year old format doesn’t need a fallback, but a 2 year old format does?

From the article:

The “$100 for 1,000 likes” that influencer Gyan Abishek mentioned in one of his videos seems to be greatly exaggerated, based on the various payment portals that I have seen.

Someone else they quoted said $3-$10 per 1000 likes, which is still quite a bit.

I haven’t dug into the test data or methodology myself but I read a discussion thread recently (on Reddit - /r/jpegxl/comments/l9ta2u/how_does_lossless_jpegxl_compared_to_png) - across a 200+ image test suite, the lossless compression of PNG generates files that are 162% the size of those losslessly compressed with JPEG XL.

However I also know that some tools have bad performance compressing PNG, and no certainty that those weren’t used

Compared to something like JPEG XL? [PNG] is hands down worse in virtually all metrics.

Until we circle back to “Jpeg XL isn’t backwards compatible with existing JPEG renderers. If it was, it’d be a winner.”

APNG, as an example, is backwards compatible with PNG.

If JPEG-XL rendered a tiny fallback JPEG (think quality 0 or even more compression) in browsers that don’t support JPEG-XL, then sites could use it without having to include a fallback option themselves.

I should’ve tried that. I ordered an Apple Watch silicone band dupe (direct from the vendor’s site) for like $5. Same band would have been $50 from Apple, except the color I wanted wasn’t even available anymore.

Band came in the wrong size, so I wrote the vendor. They apologized, might have refunded me, and sent me a pack of like 10 different colored bands. Unfortunately those were all in the same size as the first one

This product looks awful.

First, ever since they added ads to Google TV back in 2021 (even on the Nvidia Shield TV), it’s been a subpar experience. Well, it was for me, at least - maybe it’s improved, but I switched to Apple TV as a result and haven’t looked back.

Second, why would anyone get this over an Nvidia Shield TV or an Apple TV, other than ignorance or an incredibly strict budget? The Apple TV 4K is $130/$150 new and the Shield TV is $150 new. The Shield TV, which came out in 2017, is faster than this. The Apple TV 4K is 16x faster. And if you get either refurbished, get an older Apple TV,

For anyone on a strict budget, the $30-$50 Chromecasts make way more sense than this device. Yes, they’re ending production of those, but there are still competitors near that price point.

The only thing I can think of is that they’re banking on brand recognition or are hoping the segment of people without smart home hubs who are unaware of alternatives (like the $35 SmartThings Hub Dongle) and who aren’t in the Apple ecosystem is big enough.

Yes - you can set multiple daily limits (they reset at midnight and that can’t be changed), and each one can apply to one or more apps, categories, or websites. You can also select almost all the apps in a category and omit a couple, but then future apps in that category won’t be limited automatically. And you can choose specific apps to never be limited.

So you could set a 3 hour limit for Social apps, Games, a couple individually chosen other apps, and some specific websites, as well as a 5 minute limit toward the Facebook app and facebook.com, if you wanted.

If you mean the screen time tracking, then I don’t know think you can do that, but it gives you both your overall time as well as breakdowns by category (at least the top few categories), so you can do the math on your own.

You could also change the PIN to something random that you’ve written down somewhere inconvenient, or stored in a password manager.

And Apple will never just let users decide that. They consider it anti-user to force us to make choices.

Apple lets you set app, category (“Social” is a category), and website-specific limits, though, so you can absolutely make that choice.