Apple has stopped offering its end-to-end encrypted iCloud storage, Advanced Data Protection (ADP), to new users in the UK, and will require existing users to disable the feature at some point in the future. The move comes following reports earlier this month that UK security services requested Apple grant them backdoor access to worldwide users’ encrypted backups.

What the shit?!?!?

The most effective and broadly-understand articulation of this idea is the phrase, “the purpose of a system is what it does”, often abbreviated as POSIWID. The term comes to us from the field of cybernetics, and the work of Stafford Beer, but this is one of those wonderful areas where you really don’t have to read a lot of theory or study a lot of the literature to immediately get value out of the concept. (Though if you have time, do dig into the decades of research here; you’ll enjoy it!)

The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as it was designed to. What to change to the system. Change its desired outcome, its incentives to be successful. That where the correction is needed.

What we have right now in America is a society that is increasingly marrying European levels of stasis to American levels of social welfare policy, and that is the worst of both worlds. We’re not helping people go where the opportunities are and we don’t help them where they’re living either. And that strikes me as dangerous and unsustainable and also inhumane. And so it’s a real choice that America faces at this moment to decide which of those two models it wants to pursue.

AAA’s study also points out how difficult it will be to fix some of the contributors to this problem. In many places, the built environment needs to be changed, but it’s expensive, and American society is just too accepting of traffic deaths to demand it happen. There are clashes between local and state governments—the latter often owns the arterial roads where these deaths are happening, leaving the cities powerless to take action themselves.

It’s a long slow path back from the car centric cities we’ve built. The time to start is now.

There’s absolutely nothing fundamental in the App Store concept that requires it to be the only pathway for software on the iPhone. But limiting things to the App Store gave Apple complete control of its new software platform, which in those early days was very much still under construction. I understand why Apple had that impulse, why it wanted to protect what it was building, and why it didn’t want the iPhone to be defined by software in any way that Apple didn’t agree with.

But over time, the inevitable happened: Apple used the exclusivity of the App Store and its total control over the platform to extract money through rent-seeking and to bar businesses from admitting that the web existed outside their apps. Perhaps worst of all, the App Store’s exclusivity allowed Apple to essentially treat app developers as Apple employees, forcing them to follow Apple’s guidelines and please Apple’s approval apparatus before their apps would be allowed to be seen by the public. Whole classes of apps were banned entirely, some publicly, some silently.

Enough said.

We then handle user requests by using the embedding model to create an embedding for the query. We use that embedding with a ANN similarity search on the vector store to retrieve matching fragments. Next we use the RAG prompt template to combine the results with the original query, and send the complete input to the LLM.

A nice quick rundown of RAG implementation.

Transportation. I don’t think individuals should plan and build their own highways. I’d like a government to do that. I also think every American owning their own car that sits parked 95% of the time is a waste of money and space, even if it does make the GDP chart go up. You need a big extra room to store cars at home and a downtown filled with concrete ramps to store cars at work. Or an enormous parking lot to store cars at the store. Is this not a form waste? There’s no way a train makes money and is a profitable business… but more trains equals less traffic. We know adding new ten million dollar a mile lanes to an already impossibly wide interstate creates more traffic, more road rage, and more traffic deaths. That is folly and an inefficiency governments can step in and solve.

100% agree with every word.

Technically, Dell had already required its sales, manufacturing, and lab engineers to return to office. The email cites the “new speed, energy, and passion” from those teams as a reason for implementing it company-wide globally. For previously remote workers who don’t live near an office, Dell says they can continue to work remotely.

Image living an hour away from the office, and now spending 2 hours each day in the car simply traveling to and from the office. Doesn’t sound more productive.

If you want to stop spaghetti code, you’re better served investing in good documentation and developer discipline.

Nailed it.

“The truth is that we’re gonna have to upgrade people’s Hardware 3 computer for those who have bought Full Self Driving, and that is the honest answer,“ Musk said during yesterday’s earnings call, adding that it will be “absolutely painful and difficult.”

Ouch 🤕

This guide is a living document, which means I’ll be updating it regularly with new content and examples. I’m here to help you learn and answer any questions you might have. So, let’s get started!

Marked for the future. A great resource.

When contacted for a statement, an Apple spokesperson told Ars:

Apple Intelligence is designed to help users get everyday tasks done faster and more easily. This includes optional notification summaries, which provide users who choose to opt in a way to briefly view information from apps and tap into the full details whenever they choose. These are identified by a summarization icon, and the original content is a quick tap away. Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback. A software update in the coming weeks will further clarify when the text being displayed is summarization provided by Apple Intelligence. We encourage users to report a concern if they view an unexpected notification summary.

Gonna need a lot more than a subtle icon change to clean up this mess.

I have been very productive with my side projects, quickly building the tools or projects I need and deploying them for others to use—in other words, finishing the v1 of each project.

I’ve been using Cursor for several weeks now and can say I’ve been pretty productive.

Disable Docker x86_64/amd64 emulation

As a last step, try disabling the x86_64/amd64 emulation using Rosetta on Apple Silicon in your Docker Desktop General settings.

For three years, its proposal would block Google from signing deals that link licenses for Chrome, Search, and its Android app store, Google Play, with placement or preinstallation of its other apps, including Chrome, Google Assistant, or the Gemini AI assistant.

It would also still allow Google to pay for default search placement in browsers but allow for multiple deals across different platforms or browsing modes and require the ability to revisit the deals at least once a year.

Not even the bare minimum.

Here we are. The ships have turned around. React 19 can now play in a world where not all of your components are built with React, and Tailwind 4 can now play in a world where not all of your HTML markup is riddled with utility classes. This is unequivocally a good thing,

A path forward indeed.

“We cannot associate a product serial number with a customer unless that customer has voluntarily registered their product on our site.” The statement goes on to say that the serial numbers on the V1 of the Everyday backpack “were not unique or identifying … We did not implement unique serial numbers until V2 iterations of our Everyday Backpack.”

I’m sorry. What? How on earth did we get here. 🤨

if you read the new Redis license, sure, it’s not BSD, but basically as long as you don’t sell Redis as a service, you can use it in very similar ways and with similar freedoms as before (what I mean is that you can still modify Redis, redistribute it, use Redis commercially, in your for-profit company, for free, and so forth). You can even still sell Redis as a service if you want, as long as you release all the orchestration systems under the same license (something that nobody would likely do, but this shows the copyleft approach of the license). The license language is almost the same as the AGPL, with changes regarding the SAAS stuff. So, not OSI approved? Yes, but I have issues calling the SSPL a closed license.

Totally fine. Never was quite sure why the community was so upset. Only businesses that sell Redis as a service should really care. 🤷‍♂️

Heretofore unimagined levels of operational preplanning! A pistol, a bicycle, and the wherewithal and intent to use them: Your high-end professional contract killer might possess any two of these, but all three? Now we are in the realm of speculation. Of fantasy. We are talking about some type of Ernst Stavro Blofeld type of guy. The hardest of hard targets.

Brilliant from start to finish.

React falls behind in terms of performance (and here I mean both bundle size and execution speed) by factors of 2 or more in many cases. (The bundle itself can be by 10x or more.) The latest run of the JS web frameworks benchmark places React’s performance, on average, at almost 50% slower than Solid, 25% slower than Vue, 40% slower than Svelte, and 35% slower than Preact. (Other frameworks weren’t available in this particular test.)

Woof. That’s slow. 🐢

Here are some of the news stories, surveys, and studies we discussed in this episode, if you’d like to learn more:

A great list of articles and resources at the bottom of the article.

He argued that human beings always have agency, even when we’re facing a horrible reality that it’s too late to undo. “When we are no longer able to change a situation,” he wrote, “we are challenged to change ourselves.”

Starting today, as an early developer preview, you can use OpenNext to deploy Next.js apps to Cloudflare Workers via @opennextjs/cloudflare, a new npm package that lets you use the Node.js “runtime” in Next.js on Workers.

That’s excellent. An alternative to having Next.js deployed on Vercel is great for everyone.

Ruby on Rails is a full-stack framework. It has a lot of built-in features, such as ActiveRecord, ActionMailer, ActionCable, and SolidQueue. You don’t need to make a lot of decisions when you start a new project. You can just follow the conventions and get things done.

Years of the JS community and there’s a real feeling of fatigue with each and every decision you gotta make, over and over.

Officially “Turbo is a collection of techniques for creating fast, progressively enhanced web applications without using much JavaScript. All the logic lives on the server, and the browser deals just with the final HTML.”