Maybe my pockets are not deep enough, but I completely fail to understand the value proposition of iPad Air vs the regular iPad. If you want something powerful or big - go with Pro, if not - choose the "regular", much cheaper.
Better chip (A series vs M series), better screen (sRGB vs antireflective fully laminated P3), more options available (1TB, 13”), little qol things like a better WiFi chip.
It’s just a nicer device for a bit more money ($349 to $599). Not everyone wants to jump all the way to $999 for the Pro.
Another dimension to this is native vs 2nd language speakers.
For those of us who had to learn English, we put a lot of effort into grammar, while native speakers whip out half-baked sentences without a second thought.
I admit I have not properly read a single book in a couple of years.
These days when it comes to technical stuff I much more prefer to fill in gaps by reading articles or documentation. Technical books are so long it feels like authors are paid by words.
And when it comes to fiction I have really leaned into audiobooks. My eyes are too tired from computer work, and I can combine audio with other activities like jogging or cooking.
There are some "technical" audiobooks as well, but only a small category of technical books makes sense in the audio format.
my parents live in Russia and my grandma has alzheimer's, so as a present "for her" I bought an airtag - so in case my mom loses grandma in a crowd she can be found.
Little did I know, GPS jammers around the city make my grandma appear 50km away.
AirTag itself doesn't have GPS, of course. It depends on the devices that communicate with the AirTag having precise location. IF you have a phone in Russia, are your maps apps off by 50km these days?
I would assume the inaccuracy is due to the various phones that pick up the airtag pings GPS being jammed, reporting AirTags nowhere near where they actually are.
Makes sense. Would be pretty cool if Apple could find a way to correct GPS jamming using accelerometers and some logic. If your GPS location jump 50 kilometers in 2 minutes, ignore GPS and use cell tower + accelerometer. Maybe create some sort of mesh network, using other phones and nearby SSIDs to get a makeshift location positioning.
That does come with the risk of Tim Cook falling out of a window.
Most current phones already use these techniques (and more) just simply to account for poor signals, which have long been an issue with GPS because signal strength and SNR are inherently very low.
The AirTag does not have a GPS receiver. When anyone's iPhone discovers the tag, it sends their device's location to Apple servers with "by the way, this AirTag is in range." If cellular location is inaccurate then good luck.
Russia does pretty widespread GPS jamming and spoofing both in their country as well as across the Baltics and Nordics (and others). If a phone is receiving bad GPS data when it reports sensing the tag, the tag location will reflect that bad GPS data and not reality.
> Or is it cheapo Android Phones picking up the tag and then sending GPS coords into cloud?
AirTags have no integration with Android devices. There's a shitty app from Apple you can install that allows you to scan for AirTags nearby, one shot. It's supposedly against stalkers, but it's practically useless. There a bunch of other community apps with varying features like finding and notifying you there's an AirTag nearby. But you can't even track your own AirTags from an Android device, because Apple have decided you must do it from an iDevice. No browser, no Android app. You can check your iPhone's location via the browser, but not the AirTag.
The Android ecosystem has an alternative thing, but depending on the phone manufacturer you have to opt in to your device being used to track trackers around you.
When I travel to places with low iPhone market share, I always have one tracker of each ecosystem, just in case.
The United States (who created and operates GPS) also has the ability to make civilian GPS receivers in a specific area or region area less accurate, in case of war. I would assume that other countries' systems (Russia, China, maybe not EU) also have this ability.
GPS was primarily developed as a military technology. It was intentionally inaccurate for all civilians up until the year 2000.
Most of the time people say “GPS” they really mean any of the several GNSS systems, which also include: GLONASS, GALILEO, QZSS, and BeiDou
While they’re all susceptible to jamming, one system getting shutdown by its operator means most modern devices can shift to the others for most applications. Not unusual for consumer devices to support multiple (but dunno how they handle disagreements)
my runner friends hate it, suddenly your Garmin can't show your pace and distance properly.
(I am very much aware it's a 1st world problem to have in times of war)
I am not very well educated when it comes to alternative stores landscape.
But I do know that in Russia there's now Rustore: https://www.rustore.ru/en
which functions by automatically downloading and updating APKs for you.
During the APK install, however, you do see the ugly Android prompt about how this app may be dangerous.
Rustore has its own app payment system, which obviously circumvents Google Play fees.
This works on regular Android phones.
Are there other examples of such stores? Perhaps it's Google's answer to that.
I was expecting Google has stopped doing most of the business in Russia due to sanctions. Do you still see Russian-company ads in Google Search results or Youtube? Similarly, I thought they were not selling apps or ads in Google Play store in Russia either (they might be showing ads from non-Russian companies because, well, that just increases the show-count and absolute number of clicks).
I no longer reside in Russia, so I am not being targeted by these.
But I think that it mostly comes down to companies being able to pay for these ads. Mastercard / Visa payments no longer work in Russia. If a company has a way to pay (by having another business entity in another country), then it probably works.
Unfortunately both Russia and Ukraine are slacking in losing the war so it doesn't seem that making payments to Russia will be easy soon. Now of course if they were Uzbeki or Kazakhstani stores it would be completely different.
Wow, thank you so much for sharing this. It’s fascinating and deeply moving to see how similar our childhood memories are, despite being thousands of miles apart.
Interesting. Though I had heard that in vety cold climate (Siberia in that case) replacing the road asphalt every year is common because of the inevitable cracks caused the the temperature variation anyway.
in the ideal situation - yes, but since Russia is big and the climate is cold almost everywhere the government usually does not do it except in big cities.
OpenAI structured outputs are pretty stable for me. Gemini sometimes responds with a completely different structure.
Gemini 3 flash with grounding sometimes returns json inside ```json...``` causing parsing errors.
Personally, I like Amnezia VPN, it has some ways to work around blocks: https://amnezia.org/en
You can very easily self-host it, their installer automatically works on major cloud platforms.
Though if Indonesia has blocked VPNs only now, possibly they only block major providers and don't try to detect the VPN protocol itself, which would make self-hosting any VPN possible.
What am I missing?