Pleased that I'm not alone. The comments here suggest that I should just bin my Mac and buy a Linux-capable machine instead since MacOS is now "unusable", "heinous", "diabolical", "worst OS EVER".

I updated, carried on enjoying the best desktop experience (IMHO). It's not perfect, but was and remains better than the alternatives for me. Very little "struggle".

As someone from 1969, but with an excellent circulatory system, I just roll my eyes and look forward to the sound of bubbles bursting whilst billionaires weep.

When bubbles burst, is it really the billionaires who are hit the hardest? I'm skeptical.

Tell you what, let’s make sure this time it is!

Convince them to sink their fortunes in, and then we just make sure it pops.

What could possibly go wrong? Lame, I know, but seriously can we have some good, not sinister news for a week or two? With no AI or evil tech-bro, or senile despot overtones if possible.

What’s with the negativity? Deepmind is one of the lesser evil companies. Remember Alphafold? If there’s someone that can do something useful for humanity, it’s Demis.

As I said, I was being lame. But I get real Terminator vibes when a very good robotics company joins forces with a company that might make those robots autonomous. Terminator and Asimov robot stories make me pessimistic.

It was a knee-jerk reaction as opposed to detailed analysis.

Simplistic analysis of whether CSS sucks: this definitive guide is 1,126 pages long. On the Amazon page it also suggests the "Definitive guide to JavaScript" - it's 704 pages long.

If you can fully explain JS (an inexplicable bodge built on a tower of inexplicable bodges) in less pages then CSS almost definitely sucks.

It's a long book because of the copious visual examples.

I said it was simplistic :). Point taken.

Indeed - it’s like the last hundred years of detergent marketing: “the whitest whites ever, the gentlest wash you’ve ever experienced”. Then six months later another advance from the boffins in their lab coats. All the time it’s just soap.

Messages, select user, click the user icon to get to the info page, click Photos, Edit, Select, Download -> photos are in the Photos app and you can do what you want with them.

Not the easiest operation, but hardly jealously prevented.

Self-reply addendum - individual photos can be dealt with with a simple long-press, no need for delving into the info page for the user.

And do that individually for each of the thousands of photos? There’s no select All. Yikes.

yes, photos/camera roll is ok... if you mount an iphone as a usb device you get the DCIM/IMG_0000.jpg kind of thing.

But text messages are jealously guarded and not exportable. Apple does this for itself, not its users.

With respect, every single search query in the App Store displays advertisements by-default, and you know that.

You know you’re moving the goalposts, don’t you? I’ll grant you that the App Store and Music show ads. But that’s not what you claimed originally, is it?

Since the dawn of the current "AI" I've continued to buy and read books at the same pace. Likewise downloading interesting human-created PDFs. I know I'm not the only human who takes zero interest in the output of word-sausage extruders.

Thank you for remembering and sharing this - I knew I'd seen it before, I just couldn't recall where. Mr Scott is and was (and maybe will be?) the obligatory xkcd of nerd experiments.