As someone who just upgraded from an intel to M4, I feel this. But I do wish I had known about OpenCore [0]. Ironically, I learned about it while on a bit of YouTube binge of Mac videos in preparation for my new one arriving. As much as the ecosystem has moved on from Intel, I think I'll be able to keep using my old MBP for a while longer if I can keep it on the latest version of MacOS.
The microphone also can't be covered with a $1 plastic camera cover off Amazon. It's so easy to solve the camera issue if you care about it, but there's really nothing you can do about the mic.
You can do it even cheaper with some painter's tape!
For the mic, perhaps you could disable it by plugging in an unconnected trrs plug into the audio jack. I'm not sure how low level the switching of the microphone source is when you do this, so maybe it's not a good method.
i tried that with some sugru on an old phone (samsung s10e) and it does a really good job of blocking the microphone.
if you have a case on your phone its a lot less destructive too since you can just stuff the sugru into the microphone hole in the case. the case i was using was soft rubber so it was easy enough to pop out the corner of the case to be able to use the microphone for a call.
that wasnt my daily phone at the time though so im not sure how well it would work in reality. i could see myself forgetting to pop out the case when i get a call and the other person just handing up before i realised what was going on.
it also doesnt work on every phone. i tried the same thing on a pixel 5 but blocking the mic hole did nothing, but that phone uses an under screen speaker so maybe there is something similar going on with the mic
The key to this implementing this sort of policy without hurting poor people is to introduce a corresponding tax credit or stimulus payment (potentially means tested) such that driving a normal vehicle a normal amount comes out even and poor people can actually come out ahead if they make more responsible choices. You want people to feel it at the pump so it affects their decision making without having it be punitive.
Sounds like it’d hurt poor people unless they make what you call more responsible choices. A difficult part about being poor is you often don’t have as many options. There is a lot of reasons why that turns up, but it’s there all the same.
The ability to buy a car with a loan is very widespread. It's easier than cash if you're poor, isn't it? And with a loan you can balance vehicle cost against gas cost easily.
The key to an inefficient government is taking money and redistributing it.
How much does it cost to execute this whole plan? You end up taking a large percentage just to run the program with little to show for. It does make for great political campaigns.
Meanwhile, I rented a Model S from Turo (essentially Airbnb for cars) and had a great experience.
The car was clean, well maintained, fully charged and already parked in my hotel’s parking lot. Charging was free at any Tesla charger over the three days I had the car…I just had to plug it in and tell the car how much charge I wanted. When I was done with the car, I just had to snap a few photos and leave it in the same lot. And because the pickup/drop off point was at my hotel, I avoided paying for the car for the day I flew in and out since the hotel provided a shuttle to/from the airport.
It’s amazing that some guy named Marco who bought 6 used Teslas can do a more competent job of renting EVs than a multibillion dollar rental agency with huge economies of scale.
This is missing a few things from the trainings I’ve had on giving feedback, though it has a lot of the good stuff.
For one, it mentions to give positive feedback, but it fails to mention that you should not give that positive feedback at the same time that you’re giving constructive feedback. This gets called the “feedback sandwich” where, to ease the awkwardness of giving constructive feedback, we tend to sandwich it between complimentary feedback. The problem is that people often focus on the stuff that feels good and fail to really hear the constructive part.
Secondly, while it mentions to include the impact, it doesn’t mention the first two parts of good feedback. The model I learned goes by the initialism SBI, for situation, behavior and impact. In X situation, you did Y and it caused Z. You don’t have to format it exactly this way, but having all three components of the feedback is key to making the feedback actionable.
The other thing that’s necessary for great feedback culture is to really understand the concept that “feedback is a gift.” It’s really easy to be defensive or disagree with feedback you hear. But you need to understand that feedback doesn’t represent objective truth, it represents a perspective that you didn’t have before hearing it. As such, it is always a positive to hear, even when it’s critical. You may not agree with the perspective you’re hearing, but simply knowing that the other person feels that way is more information than you had prior to getting the feedback. And having more information is almost always better.
The endowments of the Ivy League schools are nearing a combined $200b and schools like Stanford and MIT not far behind. These “schools” have become investment funds with a side hustle educating students to maintain their tax status and solicit alumni donations. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be taxed, especially with many of them charging upwards of $50k/yr in tuition, much of which gets paid with grants and loans guaranteed by the government.
The “someone else” also needs to be vetted to ensure that their first update won’t include crypto mining malware.
We should remember that an unmaintained dependency isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a supply chain. There are far worse nightmare scenarios that involve exfiltrated keys, ransomewared files and such.
I’ll bet that if someone with a track record of contributing to the Rust community steps up, he’ll happily transfer control of the crate. But he’s not just going to assign it to some random internet user and put the whole ecosystem at risk.
> I suffered through Quickbooks because I just assumed that was the Only Way
Suffering through QuickBooks is literally a product feature. Like, when they were porting it to the online version, bookkeepers got upset that the web version didn’t have many of the frustrating quirks of the desktop version that they’d spent decades learning to deal with. They see their having learned the bizarre ins and outs of the software as a moat that keeps their clients from doing their books themselves, so many/most require their clients to use it. And Intuit is far more responsive to the interests of CPAs/bookkeepers than it is to the end users who pay for it.
Source: I worked in Intuit’s SBG and was really surprised when I heard that from some of the product people. I’m so used to being user-focused and searching out ways to be more user friendly that it never occurred to me that, in a 3-sided market, making the software hostile to the user could be a selling point.
AVP is a V1 product, but it’s already clear that Apple understands this and is interested in solving it. It has the best pass through of any VR headset, with reviewers able to do real-time tasks like playing ping pong or playing catch. And it has a screen on the outside that displays some weird virtualized version of your eyes to try to pass through in the opposite direction. And, lastly, in has a “persona” which it can use to make you seem like your not using AVP in FaceTime as much as is possible.
These are, mostly, janky attempts to solve the problem, but it’s easy to imagine them getting more refined over time. It’s easy to imagine that someone walking down the street wearing future versions will be able to make eye contact with other people and will appear as their persona to other AVP wearers rather than someone wearing a headset, though likely with some green aura that’s only blue for wearers of other copycat headsets (there’s no way that Apple isn’t carrying their green bubble social stigma into the spatial computing market). All the building blocks are there for that physical barrier to feel a lot less physical, they’re just really, really raw and don’t quite work yet.
[0] https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/