like if youre in the UK and upgraded to iOS 26.4, safe search was locked on, and if you tried to access any website that was in their parental controls blacklist you'd get a popup for age verification

and the reason i say arbitrary because this popup is a bold faced lie. it is literally lying to the user about the content of UK law. UK law does require _website operators_ to verify visitors age before seeing adult content, but Apple, the browser vendor is not required to.

and if you dont believe me

> Ofcom added new rules to the Online Safety Act in 2025 which forced tech firms to strengthen child safety protections, however that **does not currently cover bringing in age checks at a device level.**
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20qwz9xzr9o

it was like 4 months ago but i am still kinda pissed that i didn't see any pushback to apple deciding to arbitrarily decide to block certain types of websites from Safari in iOS 26.4

what happened to getting angry about net neutrality? and like, the freedom to visit whatever fucking website you want on the device you paid for

also, a common business model that was popular before the app store, which is you purchase an app, and when the next version came out, you could continue to use the old version, or upgrade for a (usually reduced from full price) fee.

this is not possible on the app store. when you release an upgrade to an app, you can either release it as a update to an existing app (where people who already purchased the old version get it for free), or as an entirely separate app where everyone, (even those who already purchased the app) have to pay full price again.

its crazy how much of the design of Apple's App Store (and also Google Play Store too I assume, but i dont use that) is designed to encourage actively user hostile applications:

- you have to pay $99/yr continuously to even have your apps exist on people's phones, making it uneconomical for people to release free, or even one time purchase, useful apps, encouraging developers to extract reoccurring rent from users even when there's no actual new value being provided

- applications are always automatically updated with no downgrade options, so if an app goes from being a free, useful tool, to a mandatory, £4.99 a _week_ subscription, you are SOL

- one time purchase apps are discouraged compared to subscription apps as the up front cost is presented immediately on the store, side by side with many 'free' apps, which are permitted to do nothing but show a subscription wall, at which point sunk cost fallacy because the user has already downloaded the app (or even been given the chance to use it for a bit)

i hope the agents will consider PRODUCTION.env 'something that would benefit other agents'

finally, `curl | bash` for the ✨ Agentic AI Era ✨

they don't call me ethernet zero fox for nothing

the only platform where i can see this living on is the web - probably a large part of why I like it so much even though people keep telling me to use the right tool for the job instead of writing everything as a web app.

writing websites is easy. you just open a html file in a text editor.

modifying existing websites is easier. you don't need to pull up ghidra & learn assembly. you don't need to fire up an IDE. you just hit F12 and start typing into the JS console, or even better, install ublock and right click > 'block element'

few days ago i wanted to delete everything from a Google Photos account. There is no easy way to do this, as there is no 'select all' button but because it's a website, I can write a script in the JS console that finds all unchecked checkboxes and checks them.

if this was a native app i would have been fucked.

i think the thing im realising about technology is that the thing i care about more than anything else is:

i want to be able to hack (as in easily tinker, bodge, customise, not bypass security) on my own computer.

programs used to have plugin & scripting functionality, macOS still has AppleScript, but more apps are dropping support or never had support in the first place

programming languages become more strict & built for massive programs where stability is required. Objective-C was massively dynamic and let you 'swizzle' things but it's replaced with languages like Swift where runtime patching becomes impossible, and WinForms or Storyboards get depreciated because there are Better™ options. I don't want better. I want 'just stick a few text fields & buttons on a window' and be done with it in 5 minutes.

and no, being open source DOES NOT account for this. (an often times makes the situation worse)

ok, it appears i can work around the signal issue: there's a fork of the signal app called molly which flips the feature flag to 'being able to be a secondary device' to just, always be on

RE: https://tech.lgbt/@tay/116284872470093680

on an entirely unrelated note: trying to set up a device (OnePlus 6) with de-Googled Android: not going to go into the setup process, despite mainly using an iPhone for the past 8 years, i've still `fastboot flash boot.img boot` and `adb sideload lineage-*.zip` more times than i've had hot dinners (even if this time it was a bit more involved as most of the phone's storage was consumed with a NTFS partition)

but i'm pleasantly surprised by just how many apps just work (even without microG).
discord, 1password, even my bank app worked without complaint.

however, issues:
- notifications are really fucking broken (pretty important).
- autofill from password manager is really fucking broken
- my yubikey doesn't work
- the stock keyboard is arse
- i am going to really miss apple pay, and not just for the convenience, having it anonymise my details (especially when paying online) is also nice

and also, it still annoys me that Signal only lets you sign into one device that they classify as 'phone' at a time.

hm. apple is now allowed to decide what websites i'm allowed to access (as of iOS 26.4)

this definately will not have any consequences

Hi #fediverse. We need to talk about something.

While talking to a colleague about how I recently learned most people have never , it came up that she has never . Like, not even once during childhood.

Another colleague admitted they also have never .

My hypothesis is that most people have at one point in their life .

‌ ‌ ‌

Have you ever ?

Please boost for scientific accuracy

the macbook neo is weird because, it has an A18 Pro SoC. the same SoC that is in my phone.

so you're telling me, this SoC when in a MacBook can run RPCS3 and Minecraft, but gets brought to its knees when I try to use the Telegram messaging app

computers aren't real man i tell you

oh i went to bed a little late WAH WAH WAH

you're not my mum

niche app ideas that would only be useful to me: app that brings windows from a mac over the network and presents them a OpenVR overlay

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@samhenrigold/116116185332872854

seeing this made me think, and while it is an entirely different idea & ballpark, how cool it would be for someone to figure out how to hack iphone mirroring

because sometimes i want to use my phone while in a vr headset, which currently involves firing up parsec on my macbook and then going SteamVR desktop overlay on Windows -> Parsec to my Mac -> iPhone Mirroring to my phone

and like, going through 3 remote desktop layers means things like the keyboard doesn't work most of the time and sometimes clicking doesn't either

regarding recent events: which of the following would you be happy to use if someone asked to message you, like right now

as in: you have an account & client(s) set up, and wouldn't be wishing you were using a different platform due to a lacking feature set, subpar client, unreliability, problematic notifications etc