This is a patently absurd comparision

I don’t even like Apple, but when you talk about their mobile ecosystem (mainly looking at phones/watches) here, Android is laughably behind at this point.

• Apple devices last stupid long.
• First one here counts for both batteries and vendor support. This is for the worst reason, the walled garden, but it works. There have been a few times I realized my magsafe charger was unplugged… for three days in a row. But my battery was rolled into about 5% at the end of the third day and dozens of hours of SoT.
• The 2021 OS release supported 2015 phones. Current OS is to 2017 phones. Point out any major Android vendor still supporting their 2017 phones until at least mid 2024.
• I was a devout Android worshipper. I twrp’d, greenified, rooted, removed any social media apps, etc and everything else. And then I realized I hated having to do that to make it with a device that would have over 50% battery by lunch.
• I grew up. I went from loving to tweak with my phone all the time, to just wanting it to reliably work.
• One of my most important pieces of tech is my watch. I use it for payments, travel, access, and everything else. And the Apple watch versus ANY OTHER ANDROID offering is the reason I will never use Android again. Shit just works. Mindlessly. And never has downtime.

I use linux on my desktop and laptop, but iPhone is the only phone that matters.

Yes

This is REALLY not the case everywhere.

Toss in like 3 streaming services, which is pretty typical coverage for what most people want to watch, you are at cable costs.

And I dunno if you’ve been in an Uber lately in a larger city in the US, but literally in the last year we’ve gone from people driving nice clean modern cars, to people driving late 90s/early 00s hoopties that are dirty, stained, and don’t have AC, smell like whatever thing was in there before, etc.

feels like a bit of a strawman.

arguing that you can’t use the client without the license for the server… on the same machine, is silly. There’s tons of utility with the client even if you don’t have the server license locally, especially if you ever use the Remote Desktop Client remotely.

I don’t know how fair it is to use Cisco as an example for a GUI.

who hurt you?

lol… jesus.

Ultimately if they aren’t completely “yes people”, then they are long gone.

If you are required to give them information that they can use to figure out who you are, it’s not anonymous.

So if you are on normal post-paid cell phones, where you have given them your real info, or use a credit to pay for it with your name on it, etc. that means you aren’t anonymous.

So when super secret drug lord is caught, they can figure you were talking to this drug lord and charge you, because they have his end of the communications and can verify with your cell provider who YOU are.

Privacy just means they don’t know what you are saying. They may know you are communicating with drug lord but not what you are saying.

You can have neither, one or the other, or both

If you are required to give them information that they can use to figure out who you are, it’s not anonymous.

So if you are on normal post-paid cell phones, where you have given them your real info, or use a credit to pay for it with your name on it, etc. that means you aren’t anonymous.

So when super secret drug lord is caught, they can figure you were talking to this drug lord and charge you, because they have his end of the communications and can verify with your cell provider who YOU are.

Privacy just means they don’t know what you are saying. They may know you are communicating with drug lord but not what you are saying.

You can have neither, one or the other, or both

The line will come far far FAR before that

As far as paywalls go, that’s one of the nicest ones. One click and I was able to fully read the article without signing up or anything.

Sure. But you can install a plug-in if you aren’t tech savvy. You can also run something with ad blocking turned on by default.

Ad-blocking on the browser level is enough for most people to never see an ad again.

Who actually sees ads? Between NextDNS or PiHole and ublock origin, I haven’t seen an ad in years.

While I wholly support this bit of righteous outage… most of the comments here are going to be about the grid and the Republicans.

I’m happy to discuss it, as I’ve written articles about it.

I live high level routing and firewalling in VMs (60 Gbps+), and there are a couple of realities you need to accept, especially when you involved a *BSD in the mix.

1. *BSD’s networking drivers and, to a lesser degree, the whole stack SUUUCK. This becomes extra poignant when you involve *pf, which is incredible for hand editing, but also horrible for performance because it’s a straight top-to-bottom list.
2. We could argue about the whole networking stack sucking all day, but in reality, it’s the driver situtation that really brings it down. That’s why “You must buy Intel” is such a mantra on *BSD. Because they are about the only drivers which don’t make for a completely horrible experience. You can meme about how terrible Realtek is, but really it’s only terrible on *BSD. It’s a first-class linux citizen, and often supports better hardware features than the ancient X520, pre-Connect-4, etc people circle-jerk about. And if you often losing out on cool new features/offloads/abilities.
3. The virtio drivers are usually more efficient and performant than most physical hardware drivers (on *BSD)
4. You asked “why would anyone ever need to do that?”. It’s simple. High availability. You can run two router/firewall VMs on two different hosts and have zero downtime. Or, if you only want one, you can migrate the VM either manually or automagically, and only suffer the downtime for a reboot as the VM moves to a different host. You can share the same physical NIC between multiple VMs with SR-IOV for maximum low-latency networking, aka storage. It’s a waste throwing 10Gb at just pfSense when it’ll be idle most of the time, and with older hardware pfSense isn’t going to even be able to hit half of that.
5. Your VM just works if you ever have to move it to another host. Your main routing and firewall VM is now tied to a single specific host. In a disaster recovery situation, this is going to make you hate yourself as you basically end up needing to either physically pull a card and re-setup passthrough, or setup passthrough on a new card, make sure the VM is bound to those MACs. When it’s fully virtualized, it’s hardware agnostic. Your VM may think it’s 10Gb on a single link, but underneath the links are high availability (aka vSphere vDS), on different VLANs, etc. My example here is a few years ago where I swapped in a Z8350 WYSE 3040 when my main router died with 40Gb uplinks. Sure, I was limping for a few days, but as far as my router is concerned, there is no difference.
6. NUMA becomes an issue. Even single processors have NUMA nodes now, and it wouldn’t be difficult for someone not knowing was a NUMA node is to create a NUMA issue, where you incur huge penalties going from CPU/Chipset to RAM to NIC and back again, depending on where the items are physically arranged in the system. This is doubly poignant in the *BSD world.
7. If a 1Gb interface is your bottleneck, your network design is broken. There is no reason for most people in a homelab to try and route >1Gbps on your edge. Don’t packet inspect it, and internally you are up to 10Gbps and beyond. Sure, a >1Gbps link might be a reason in 2023, but what’s your 95th percentile, like 25Mbps if you are lucky. It’s only “hawt” for your speedtest numbers, and an occasional download. And you can do 10Gbps pretty easily with virtio on basically any semi-modern system especially with the large files that most people would want 10Gb for, and not dedicate a PCIe slot to it and make it portable.

I mean, you do you. But I’d much rather to just be able to change the uplink on a vSwitch or bridge to get my router going again instead of having to reboot, passthrough, insert grub cli options, swap cards, etc.

Passing through a NIC just adds complexity, not lessens it. And is a bad idea for a plethora or reasons

While I’m the same and agree, I’m certainly loving the drama and downfall of that toolbag.

Firefox. The slowest browser, the least compatible browser, the most annoying when it comes to bugs and issues (Firefox snap anyone?)

I just cannot disagree more. You seriously have to gaslight yourself into liking it.

Firefox would like a word….

Forced snap+Firefox is hell