Exactly my point!

Well, it is technically “piracy” but it’s amateur piracy. No need to get fancy with torrents and VPNs or whatnot. Just download the software and… not pay.

Well at least it didn’t save us -10^100% and just post the text equivalent of a ZIP bomb

A “couple hundred peers” is a lot easier said than done. That being said, it does happen and you are correct that having a lot of seeders doesn’t guarantee a safe download.

All of the three conditions I mentioned are neither sufficient nor necessary for a safe download, but there is a strong correlation. Unless the torrent is official (e.g. official Linux distro torrents), there is always some chance of a bad download. The chance can be low but is never zero.

Software is software. You’re downloading shady software off the Internet anyway, but there’s one key difference:

• Torrent sites (such as The Pirate Bay) usually have systems of trusted uploaders. These are marked with a green/purple skull next to the file in search results.
• A torrent with a large number of seeders (think: hundreds or thousands) is less likely to contain a virus because nobody honest would seed a malware torrent and it’d cost a lot to fake that many seeders across the world.
• Torrenting software verifies the integrity of downloaded data. It uses a cryptographic hash function for this so it’s impossible for a seeder to send you a tampered file (that is different from the file you intended to download). When you use a torrent file or magnet link, it contains the hash of the file so if what you receive does not match the hash then the torrenting software will discard it.

I think that’s because of Chinese people’s travelling habits. Popular domestic travel destinations include Hainan for a tropical experience, Sichuan for pandas, Beijing for landmarks, Hong Kong for fake Britain, Macau for gambling, and Taiwan because it seems foreign enough without being actually too foreign (to Chinese people).

Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan require travel permits to enter, despite the Chinese government considering them “domestic”. They kinda straddle the line between actual domestic and international. Regardless, it’s not common for Chinese people to have phone plans that work in Hong Kong, Macau, or Taiwan, so they’ll buy the disposable SIM cards I talked about earlier. That’s why phones typically have two SIM slots.

Getting visas to travel internationally is a pain for Chinese people because they have to visit a consulate or embassy, apply, and then be subject to high scrutiny. After all, it seems everyone’s scared of Chinese spies nowadays. It’s also very expensive by Chinese standards compared to applying for a cheap HK/MO/TW travel permit. The People’s Republic of China passport is pretty weak compared to European or American passports. Chinese people can get visa-on-arrival or visa-free access in South Asian countries, Central Asia, or Africa, but these destinations are not popular with Chinese tourists.

Yes, it’s called torrenting software. If you are just downloading regular things using a “download” button, that’s amateur piracy.

It’s probably one of those crank letters you can send to someone. A real organisation would probably have used Presorted First Class (no postmark) instead of an actual stamp. The organisation is supposedly located in Washington but the postmark says Boston.

This isn’t exclusively an American thing. I went to China and it’s extremely common to see SIM cards being hawked on the street and sold to tourists. They’re disposable and quite convenient. You buy them on the street, pop the SIM card in, get an activation text, and then you get data for a week before it stops working and you throw it away. They come with different data amounts and durations. But eSIMs do exist as well there, although it’s not nearly as convenient. You need to register your identity (surveillance purposes) and sign up for a regular phone contract. I haven’t seen any disposable eSIM plans there yet.

I’m confused by what you’re trying to do with this comment. What does “the[y] absolutely are” refer to?

I don’t think investors are idiots. They will look at whether the development community will accept whatever those changes end up being, or see whether Unity will just quietly let this thing die and pretend it never happened.

It’s harder to be stupid when it’s your money on the line.

You can try some free Linux antivirus software programs like ClamAV but realistically, as long as you mainly install software through your distro’s package management software or graphical app store, you’re probably fine.

Although not all open-source software is safe, it’s a hundred times less likely to be malicious for the sole reason that it’s out in the open for someone to verify, and they’d get busted immediately if they tried something untoward.

Getting a C/C++ compiler on Windows is a menace. To my knowledge, there are two ways to do it. Either install Visual Studio which will also install the MSVC compiler, or wrangle with MinGW to get GCC.

In the first-year CS classes I attended, the instructions were usually to either get WSL and install the gcc package or to connect using SSH to the engineering server (CentOS 7) which has it pre-installed.

This is like saying every lock is pickable so don’t lock the door at all.

This is what crypto wallets recommend you do. I don’t see why that’s a bad solution for backing up.

Off on a tangent here, but I think now is the proper time to say that people, when it comes to security, have no idea what’s good for them.

Before Google implemented this cloud sync feature, people were constantly complaining online about how they really wanted their TOTP codes to sync when they got a new phone. Nobody stops to consider the security implications of chasing convenience, but if you stop to warn them, suddenly you’re the bad guy for creating problems or “opposing their solution”.

Apple could fix this by making the phone a few millimetres thicker but I think we both know why they don’t

Again, I want to remind you that a $1,000 phone winning against a $150 phone is not a victory at all. The iPhone should have absolutely kerb-stomped mine. The fact that it is even competitive is the point I am trying to make.

You can visualise a sort of bell curve of battery life. My phone is probably somewhere around the 30-40th percentile (and note that a 90th percentile phone is not 2× better, it’s probably only 50% better). A bit worse than average but not terrible. It’s a cheap phone, after all.

But the issue is that (new) Apple phones I presume are placing consistently around the 60th percentile, which is good and better than average. The issue is that you’re paying 80th-percentile prices for 60th-percentile performance. That is the point I’m trying to make. It’s relative performance to price, not absolute performance. These numbers are made up but illustrate the point I’m trying to make.

If the iPhone were priced at $400-500, it’d be an excellent value and I would recommend it to a lot more people. That’s what I feel a comparable Android would cost. Maybe it could go up to $550 since Apple products do have better build quality and the Apple ecosystem, but at $700 for the latest base model iPhone 14, I think it’s just not delivering the value for money compared to Android phones. Of course, that’s my opinion. I make decisions based on hardware. Others may make decisions based on the fact that they like the iOS experience and the ecosystem it provides, or even because they just like using Apple products. And yes, the fact that Apple products are of consistently above-average quality does count for something.

I’m not attacking you if you own an iPhone and like it, and I don’t judge you for it. I will criticise Apple though, because I feel that Apple is short-changing their customers on the technical side by providing mediocre hardware for not-mediocre prices.

The context of my original comment is the base iPhone model. Nonetheless, it’s still to be noted that the default charger that came with your iPhone 11 (18 W, not 20 W) still delivers 45% less power than the default 33 W charger that came with my OnePlus Nord N20 5G.

From what I can read online, it takes one hour to go from 0 to 80% on an iPhone 11 Pro using the default charger. It takes my phone a bit over half an hour.

Remember, I am comparing an iPhone with an MSRP of $999 to a phone that I bought for $150. Refurbished iPhone 11 Pros still sell for $300.

I believe that my point that iPhones have comparatively poor chargers for their price point stands. Charging technology has not changed significantly from then to now. The effect of Apple’s recalcitrance is that even the cheapest Android phones can run circles around iPhones when it comes to charging. I hope Apple with take this opportunity to deliver a better product for their users rather than making only incremental improvements to old technology.

Apple users really just didn’t notice the limitations. Whether you consider that “working” is up to you.

Apple users are used to their phones taking ninety minutes to charge and not lasting the whole day. They consider that “normal” and are unlikely to consider that for Android devices, even cheap ones, sub-1 hour fast charging and all-day battery life are standard, not exceptions.

Apple’s (previously) bundled charger is a measly 5 W whereas my cheap $150 OnePlus comes with a 33 W charger, delivering over six times as much power. Granted, Apple devices tend to be more power-efficient than others, but not six times less.