The openclaw crowd were just former cryptobros onto their next grift: performative posts about AI that would generate enough views/engagement/ad revenue to pay for the hardware… assuming they were even telling the truth about having it at all.
None shipped anything of value. Same with anyone claiming to be running dozens or hundreds of agents 24/4.
Nonsense. Before the advent of those first “you’re the 1000th visitor” banners or relatively harmless “worms” spready by literal .exe files sent by email in the early 2000s… most of the internet could be trusted by default.
And at that point the blast radius was so hilariously small, some rando compromising your computer was a nuisance versus a threat to your financial wellbeing.
Viruses were common on FTP sites and BBSs. They weren't all benign. DOS in particular had zero protections against damaging code. Bot armies hadn't been developed yet so malicious destruction was just as likely an outcome.
Yes, and what did the damaging code and viruses actually do in that era?
Software, OSs, and the internet at large were comically unsafe from a safety perspective. There was also a very high barrier of entry in terms of the skills required to take advantage of that, and very little incentive to do so compared to today or even 20 years ago.
My absolute favorite bug is the one where the “cancel your Amazon Music subscription” is seemingly the only one of what must be tens of thousands of UI elements in the Amazon app that simply loads a blank white screen no matter what.
If a website won't let you cancel, call your bank to force them to block the payment. This will cost the website $20 and a ding on their credit report. Be aware the website will ban you, so you'll need to make a new account.
Which is exactly why Amazon can get away with it. I’m not going to get permabanned from what is essentially a utility in the western world in 2026 by going nuclear with a credit card chargeback.
Sounds like credit card sites. Most everything is pretty creaky; “redeem rewards” is broken or offline for maintenance; “pay bill” is greased lightning all the way through.
I've noticed exactly the opposite with other kinds of lenders. Refinancing and renegotiation is optimized to the hilt, but the payments system seems to have an SLA of zero 9s.
Their “sorry this hardware is too old to run the latest macOS” seems entirely based on KPIs versus capabilities.
There’s absolutely no reason a maxed out MacBook Pro from 10 years ago shouldn’t be able to run something like the ChatGPT or Claude app, because those seem to think they need a newer version of the OS and Apple has decided that a 8 core 3.8ghz i7 with 32gb of ram is obsolete
The reason why the apps won't run is the weird SDK thing. As a Mac or iOS developer you can only run certain versions of XCode and each version of XCode supports only the most recent couple of OS SDKs. If you freeze everything in amber, like, keep a Mac on the 2016 Mac OS release, you can keep shipping compatible builds forever, but at some point just by virtue of one of your developers buying a new computer suddenly locks a minimum Mac OS, which has a minimum XCode, which means a certain minimum SDK version, which dictates a minimum Mac OS target. And besides that, to use just one new feature you pretty much have to jump to the very latest SDK, and from there, supporting even one version back means forking your codebase and backporting, so it doesn't take long for 90% of software to abandon old versions.
I know that in some ways Apple is better than their hardware-making peers in terms of supporting current OS on hardware made a few years back. But compared to other software vendors, say, Microsoft, they are terrible.
Golden Gate runs on 2020 and newer macs.
Windows 11 runs on 2017 8th-gen Intel CPUs and better.
Windows 10 is supported even on PCs from 2006 with 4GB of RAM - and importantly, a ton of modern software (e.g. Chrome) is still compatible with Windows 10.
The comparison may be relevant since it seems Apple is incentivized primarily to move hardware, whereas Microsoft seems like they want to promote Windows as a stable, non-fragmented platform you can trust, both as a consumer and as a developer. One of their worst-received OSs was the one that basically forced most users to buy a new PC -- Vista. (And to a lesser degree, the TPM 2.0 requirement in Win11.)
I run a 2012 MacBook Air 11” for Zoom meetings. It’s stuck on Catalina, but it runs fine. If I really wanted (which I don’t), I could probably hack it to run newer operating systems. I know there’s a few ways to do that.
On an x86 laptop you run linux. Too easy. xfce if it's 4G ram.
Can you do that with an M{1..4} ?
You sure can't do it with an iphone. I own one an iphone 15. Was beautiful when new. Even now it has started on the path of suck. Apple have "upgraded" it to have a more frustrating touchscreen because they clearly think I should give them more money to keep the experience I bought. They are not cheap.
Apple are the absolute kings of planned obsolescence.
Zealots going for silent downvotws because there is no case they can make to the contrary. Not what downvotes are for, says HN but we're all used to HN being used like this by now.
It's not the same as running on an x86 Mac, though. Asahi's efforts are herculean, but it will always be an uphill battle. Many things are still unsupported, even on M1.
The latency is not an illusion and yes Apple absolutely did that. It isn't plausible that they don't know they are doing it.
It is ridiculous to suggest otherwise. Go pick up an iphone 6 and try to do anything with it and then tell me that is how awful the ui was when it was released to apple orchestrated media fanfare. Or any older ipad. Imagine if that ui extreme sluggishness, random delay and the button moving just as you hit it is what they were showing off at launch. The laughter would have haunted them all the way to the accountants telling them their options were now worthless.
Apple latency degradation is not worth discussing with anyone who says it isn't happening. You can't solve whatever issues they have.
There are iirc some good write ups from years ago by employees at Blizzard about these things and why “spinning up more servers” wouldn’t suddenly let millions of people login to games simultaneously on launch days.
You email the RNA strand (a text file) to a lab along with some money. The lab converts that information into a physical object (read: virus) and sends it back to you in the mail.
Distance from mailbox to live virus is a few days of bench work from a semi-competent biochemist.
And yes, this service claims to have safeguards. Does every service? Does every future analogous service? Are those safeguards guaranteed to be robust against totally novel pathogens?
Really? mRNA? What kind of meme nonsense is this? You really don't know anything about these protocols do you.
Still, even though your estimates are silly, they aren't silly enough to change the conclusion that this isn't a comforting security barrier, so I suppose we agree on that much.
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