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Imagine a major city in America that were politically dominated y China for 50+ years and it is hard to imagine this type of blowback not occuring eventually.


Is this that easy for humans?

I promise I could give this to 10 people and get at least 7 wrong drawings.

Of the remaining 3, there would be erasor marks on 2. And the last one would technically hit the right numbers and linkages, but it would be a hand drawn sketch on a notepad.

Point is, these AI gotchas are always missing reality.


Why was t true before but false now?

I suspect it's been the false reason the whole time.

No one is investigating anything, only wiping hard drives and tying up loose ends


IMO the most egregious reason is the July 2025 memo from DOJ/FBI saying there was nobody else to investigate, after months of public interest and official statements they were working on it. If they now flop back to claiming they can’t release because of investigations, then that’s unequivocally a false reason.


I live by this. It is one of the least controversial 4chan takes.

There is nothing wrong with citing 4chans shopping cart theory.

It is truly a marker of good vs bad people as far as it comes to participating in a high trust society.


    It is truly a marker of good vs bad people as 
    far as it comes to participating in a high trust 
    society.
Here's an even better test, if you ask me.

Do you ever grab one of those "stranded" shopping carts on the way in to the store?

A lot of societal issues can't be cured merely by doing the right thing ourselves. Littering can't be solved merely by not littering - somebody has to pick up litter. (A lot of litter is the result of wind blowing over trashcans and such, so even in a society where nobody intentionally litters, there will be litter)

Murder can't be solved merely by not murdering people - if you witness a murder, you need to do something about it, not just think "well, at least I don't murder people" and continue with your day.

Shopping cart logistics are obviously many orders of magnitude less serious than murder, but I think it's a similar class of problem/solution.


I try to grab an outside shopping cart to leave the world slightly less chaotic than when I entered; which is all we can do in life, perhaps.

But now and then I find one of the electric ride-a-carts and that’s the reward for all my work; riding the scootypuff jr in to the glorious chords of … the Walmart theme song.


> I try to grab an outside shopping cart to leave the world slightly less chaotic than when I entered; which is all we can do in life, perhaps

I lived in several European countries for many years. I then moved to the US a few years ago.

The US strikes me as a less civilised country, in the sense that people, on average don't return the shopping cart. In the first year after I moved, I kept returning the shopping cart, but, after seeing many others not do it, I stopped. I stopped even though I agree it is the right thing to do because I felt like a fool every time I did it. Other people decided their time is too important to return the cart, so why should I be the sucker who does it?

This isn't the only example of uncivilised behaviour I've noticed in the US. Here are other examples: bypassing a long queue of cars only to merge into the lane at the last possible second, skipping red lights if no cars are around, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk and forcing other to walk around me, not saying "you're welcome", not giving up my seat on public transportation to e.g. old people, littering.

Every time I see someone break these markers of civilised society, makes me less likely to abide by them next time.


> bypassing a long queue of cars only to merge into the lane at the last possible second,

If everyone did this the jams would flow faster, according to WSDOT.


This is true, but with a few caveats:

* The time spent adjacent to the traffic lane should be used calibrating your speed with the speed of traffic, once you're at the front you should then be able to merge into an open spot without causing any change to the speed of the cars behind you. So many times I see people zip quickly to the front then merge in and slam on their brakes, causing an extra delay to ripple back through traffic. Some people do this at the beginning of the merge lane which is even worse.

* Once you get there you should endeavor to zipper merge so multiple cars aren't trying to squeeze into one spot. As a corollary, if you're already in the lane that's being merged into you should leave an open space big enough for one vehicle to enter at this point, or better yet consider leaving the lane entirely.

* And by that I mean leave the lane to move deeper into the highway, don't exit into the merging lane just to zip ahead and cut back in, this decidedly does not improve traffic flows.


From what I can see, it's not about higher throughput (which stays the same)

It's about reducing queue length (you use 2 lanes instead of one, so the queue length is halved) and smaller speed differences between cars on adjacent lanes.

I can't find a good WSDOT source, but here's Minesotta: https://www.dot.state.mn.us/trafficeng/workzone/doc/When-lat...

Anyway, I'm not talking about cases where one lane is closed (which is what WSDOT and the Minesotta doc talk about). I'm talking about cases where there is a one lane offroad from the highway, with a queue of cars waiting to take it. Plenty of people will skip the entire queue and try to merge right at the end, blocking half of their own lane while waiting for a gap in the queue.


If there is a right turn only lane, and a straight lane, and the right turn only lane is backed up with people queuing, you are not making traffic go faster by merging in at the last second. You are slowing down a bunch of people trying to turn, and blocking the people trying to go straight.

You can change straight/right/left here and it all holds. Zipper merges are for merges, when 2 lanes of traffic become one, and everyone merging early is a little bit worse. Above is just selfish.


You should not do jams with opposite direction lanes. I assume op talked about that.


> so why should I be the sucker who does it?

Because it's the right thing to do.


Yeah, as someone living in Germany, returning shopping carts sounds like a non-issue. The only case where people don't return shopping carts are homeless people, who use it to store there personal belongings. So it's deliberate and they do not litter the world with shopping carts, but actively use them.


So, I see 2-5 carts in the lot, and a few hundred people in the store.

You maybe are making yourself part of the 1% who don't return their cart (or my locale is better than average at returning it)


> I stopped even though I agree it is the right thing to do because I felt like a fool every time I did it... why should I be the sucker who does it?

You really are a fool. Who willingly gives up the chance to get some free exercise and feel morally superior? I'm over here happily returning others' shopping carts, not just my own, and basking in the knowledge of how I'm a better human being than you maest.


    people, on average don't return the shopping cart
Perhaps I'm reading this too literally, but "on average?" This is a very flawed society, but I don't think I've ever seen the rando stranded carts equalling or outnumbering the returned ones.

I'm nearly 50 and have been to many, many parking lots including some truly forsaken ones. The parking lot at the Walmart near me is a travesty. People dump trash on the ground there, and I don't mean simple littering. It's so gross. It makes you feel like society is crumbling and that civilization was perhaps a mistake in the first place.

And yet...

I just returned from a quick trip there several minutes ago. I naturally thought of this thread (because I'm insane) while traversing the parking lot. I counted four unreturned carts, and several dozen properly corralled carts. The ratio was at least 10:1, possibly more.

This isn't "my" Walmart, but here's one near me that's notorious for being a bit of a Mad Max situation. If you switch to satellite view, you can see that even here the coralled carts seem to greatly outnumber the stranded ones.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/uWE4wfydda7KtT2W8

    bypassing a long queue of cars only to merge into the lane 
    at the last possible second
While again not doubting that US is worse than many other countries, I wonder if some amount of this is due to our uh, organically sprawling road system. Because I have definitely been one of the people doing this at times, but it was always due to quite honestly misunderstanding what lane I needed to be in.

Anecdotally I've heard that our drivers are nowhere near the worst, but I don't have firsthand experience.


Does it have anything to do with US parking lots being huge? I usually ship at Lidl, so the parking lot can hold maybe 50 cars. It takes 1 minute to return the cart, and there's usually a car parked next to me, so there isn't actually space to leave it (unless I'm an asshole and leave it in front of another car).


When there are large parking lots, there are multiple cart return areas scattered throughout the lot. Otherwise things would be really inefficient, to an even more nightmarish (and money-costing) degree.

Not sure if you're from the US, but the problem is objectively not as bad here as people say. If you look at various Walmarts (usually these are reliably some of the worst parking lots in any given area) in Google Maps (switch to satellite view) the reality is that the vast majority of people here actually do return their carts properly.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/uWE4wfydda7KtT2W8

https://maps.app.goo.gl/rCBrJKebU33rMq8J6

https://maps.app.goo.gl/5o4GksqTGahBkU816

The last one is by far the worst one I found.


America is very big and diverse, and local culture varies wildly. You can go to a Whole Foods store in one part of a city and almost everyone returns their carts there, and then you can go to a Walmart in another part of the city and it looks like something out of a zombie movie, with carts and trash littering the parking lot.


> Do you ever grab one of those "stranded" shopping carts on the way in to the store?

Of course. They're typically more convenient than the carts that have been properly returned.


They taught this to us in the Scouts- "always leave your campsite cleaner than you found it".


>Do you ever grab one of those "stranded" shopping carts on the way in to the store?

Nope.

..but that's because I have my own cart I bring to the store.


It's derived from the "how do you treat the waiter" test in first dates, so it's not like this came from nowhere. Your small actions where "it doesn't matter" can have surprising revelations on your overall disposition in life. e.g., if you're reaction to being asked about a shopping cart is violence, that says a lot about how you treat many confrontations in your life.


I think they test distinct things.

Being nice to a waiter doesn't require additional work. Also, being a jerk to the waiter hurts another human being directly and is a strategic error because it is more likely to cause them to spit in your food than it is to get you better service.

In contrast, leaving your shopping cart saves you work and doesn't really hurt anybody directly. It just makes a supermarket run slightly less efficiently.

This could theoretically raise prices by increasing labor requirements, but it's not a linear relationship. Failing to return a cart would only increase prices if enough people do it to cross the threshold at which they would need to have an additional cart-collecting employee.

It's still an anti-social behavior, but the impact is more nebulous.


> leaving your shopping cart saves you work and doesn't really hurt anybody directly.

Found a cart leaver. :)


You stole their username :D


Gotta get ahead of the game !


> it is more likely to cause them to spit in your food than it is to get you better service.

I would count on the waiter not being a jerk, and trying to hurt people just because they are a jerk.

> In contrast, leaving your shopping cart saves you work and doesn't really hurt anybody directly. It just makes a supermarket run slightly less efficiently.

What? It is hardly any extra work, you also have walked the same way when taking the cart. And it annoys people after you, including yourself, when you come in the next day and find a shopping cart standing on your parking lot.

> Being nice to a waiter doesn't require additional work.

Maintaining a social interaction is intellectual more work, than pushing a cart around. This very much depends on your personal preference, to some people social interactions are a lot of work.

> Failing to return a cart would only increase prices if enough people do it to cross the threshold at which they would need to have an additional cart-collecting employee.

So you rely on all the other people not taking liberties, you should be allowed to do? What do you think you are?


>What? It is hardly any extra work, you also have walked the same way when taking the cart.

It depends on the store. If it's a very large parking lot, and you're parked at the far end of it, it can be a long walk to get back to your car. If the store didn't bother putting any designated cart-return locations in the lot (which happens a lot), then returning the cart means doubling your walking time. So it really is a lot of extra work, or at least time, so it is understandable why some people would avoid this extra work/time and take the easy way out.

>And it annoys people after you

Yes, but you don't ever see these people; they come after you've left. It's not like being rude to the waiter's face.


This whole category of decision making basically consists of taking observable things and then using them to infer other things despite the correlations often only being barely better than a coin toss. It's the same logic by which the police harass you more if you check more bad demographic checkboxes.

You can make an argument that it's different because the stuff being measured is at the other end of the "how easily can they change it" spectrum but that doesn't change the fundamental accuracy of the correlation. Something like this shouldn't be used for anything serious.


I worked at a grocery store for a while in my teens and early twenties. It is really a surprise to me that this has become an internet topic and even more surprising how strongly people feel like it is a litmus test for good vs bad. I just do not think it is a good litmus test. People are busy, some people have kids. Who is really being inconvenienced?

One thing I want to point out is that everyone I worked with at a grocery store loved going out and getting the carts. The employees saw it as a mini-break from the drudgery of the day.

From having to go get carts many times, I will say, that if someone leaves their cart in a parking spot... well that is bad behavior. But if they just push it into the grass, or out of the way, who cares if it is tucked away there, or tucked away at cart corral. Someone has to go out and get the carts anyway, and it broke up the day, got you outside.


> People are busy, some people have kids

Unless you're "having kids" in the sense that you're about to give birth to one, saving 30-60 seconds isn't going to make a difference in your day. It's like trying to optimize your travel timing so you can stop at fewer red lights. Maybe it gives someone the illusion of efficiency, but no one is really saving any time.

Most people who leave carts don't mind them blocking others' paths. If you're going out of your way to push one over the curb and into the muddy grass, you might as well have parked it in the designated spot by now.

Where I am, large enough stores have dedicated "outside" employees, most of whose time is be spent pushing carts. For them it's not a fun change of pace, it's just their job. If everyone put their carts back in an orderly fashion, they would need to do less weaving in parking lot traffic and trudging through horrible weather than they otherwise have to. Sure, "it's their job", but I don't want to make it even harder, especially considering how much they tend to be paid.


Remember to put lots of dumb stuff in PRs, because it's "someone's job" to peer review your code. ;)

Funny how peoples' attitude toward retail employees probably wouldn't extend to more work being created for them in their work.


There's a pretty fundamental difference between additional low priority but necessary busy work for a salaried employee and one of the better tasks you get to do as a min-wage retail employee.


Back when I worked in retail, my car was dented multiple times from people not putting carts in the designated areas.

Sometimes you can't park without getting out of the car to clean up after other people, because carts are littering the parking spaces. (Including being pushed from adjacent spots into handicap spaces.)

I've parked near corrals and had people half-ass push them next to it, effectively double parking me until I removed several carts.

I've had to jump out of the way of carts being whipped down an aisle by a strong wind in a storm.

Nobody's talking about bringing carts back to the building, but doing the bare minimum of putting them in the corrals. Failing to do so is saying you value your minor convenience over other peoples' time, property and health. Tucking them on a curb is saying you know you're doing a bad thing but don't really care.


Same re: grocery work and liking getting carts as a teen.

That said

> But if they just push it into the grass, or out of the way,

One marker of whether something is acceptable in society(or having a functioning brain, at times) is to ask oneself "what would happen if everyone did what I'm doing." This applies to most things...littering, talking on speakerphone or blasting music in public, etc. I think this example would similarly fail this test, imagining hundreds of carts piled up somewhere 'out of the way.'


If everyone did it then you'd probably have a dedicated person to fetch the carts doing that basically throughout their shift. The store still needs the carts for more shoppers and with everyone putting them in the grass that process ends up taking longer.

Except for particularly busy times, I don't think you'd see major pile ups.

But I generally agree with what you are saying. It's a valuable question to ask "what if everyone did this".


Yeah and if everyone was littering all the time, the city might employ more dustmen. Or they would say screw it, why waste money and time, when the citizens obviously don't want to live in a clean city.


Maybe everyone should just start murdering people that bothered them ;P. That way we'd have less annoying people and more police.


Then it just becomes an informal cart corral.


Ah yes. It's pouring rain, blowing cold wind in your face, kids are screaming and hitting each other, you stubbed your toe into cart and generally just having bad day. What would jesus do?


Is the standard to return the cart or not? Where do you draw the line? What if it’s only raining? How hard does it need to be raining to sacrifice your principles?

On days with a strong wind it is more important to rerun the cart, because leaving it loose will mean it’s likely to hit someone’s car. This is when the golden rule comes into play.


It just doesn't matter. It's a cart, not clubbing baby seals.

Only thing that's more insufferable is the keyboard warriors loosing sleep over tiny things like that.


I've had bad days. I still managed not to be a net negative on my environment. Why can't you? Why can't other people? From my perspective, how you behave when you're having a bad day is the real litmus test. If you're still a decent person then, then you actually have values you care about, that you don't just follow when convenient.


Show me a person and I'll point their flaws.


Theoretically, in this case, the agonizing "It's pouring rain, blowing cold wind in your face, kids are screaming and hitting each other, you stubbed your toe into cart and generally just having bad day" scenario making any man unable to manage the extra-harrowing effort of directing a cart a few meters into a designated space.


He wouldn’t be at the store; or perhaps flipping tables.

He got two fishes and five loaves delivered in a clear door dash advertisement.


I feel like the recent and strange habit of people telling me, unprompted, all about their assorted minor medical maladies, syndromes, and treatments -- is a form of "I don't always do the right thing because of these tribulations that I suffer"

Like it's pre-loading being an asshole. I hate it. Have your bad day in a way that doesn't continue the dominoes falling and causing other bad days, however much misery loves company.


Did you think we'd find this string of excuses basically lifted from the article convincing?


He'd tip the cart over so it doesn't blow around in the wind.


I worked at a grocery store as well and we didn’t even have a place to return carts. Even after I got moved up to doing stock, I told the manager I’d be happy to go get carts, especially in the winter when no one else wanted to do it. I thought it was fun to go out there and slide around on them.

We had some woods and a little stream next to the parking lot. Some people would chuck the carts into the woods. That’s probably considered bad behavior, but for me, that was just more time I could spend outside and a little adventure to fetch the cart and get it back up the hill through the trees.

I could see working at a big store where you’re expected to bring in 50 carts at a time to be annoying. I was at a smaller places and would only bring in 5 or 6 at a time. Some of the managers would get annoyed at that, but I was getting minimum wage and was the only person who didn’t complain about the cold and snow, so they could just deal with my pace. I wanted to make sure I could control what I was pushing, so I didn’t hurt anyone or break anything. We don’t even have a rope, like I see most places have now.


I talked to a guy who used to run a grocery store. There were low-income housing apartment buildings nearby. People would walk to the store, buy groceries, and then just roll the damn carts back to their buildings down the street.

Sounds terrible but the owner didn't mind, or at least didn't discourage it. Those people didn't have cars and if they had to carry groceries home by hand they'd just buy less groceries or perhaps not shop there at all. He would just drive a pickup truck to the apartment building at the end of the day to collect carts.

When he began the story I thought it was about to be a racist story about "low-income" people (bit of a barely-disguised dog whistle there) but it wound up being pretty cool. An ad-hoc system that worked to everybody's benefit.


As a fellow former grocery store employee, I can agree about the “break up the monotony” concept from the narrow POV of the bored worker.

It is an inconvenience though, even if as insignificant as an eyesore for others, or the landscaper who may need to remove shopping carts from the planter to do their work.

You could apply similar logic to people who carelessly throw trash in the recycling bin or on a sidewalk where it’s someone else’s job to clean up after them. I’ve seen people go as far as to say they are graciously “providing a job” for someone else when they throw their refuse in the recycling bin.

The fact that the shopping carts are such an inconsequential thing to shrug off is what makes them a great litmus test — will you do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing to do, even when there is so little at stake


> I’ve seen people go as far as to say they are graciously “providing a job” for someone else when they throw their refuse in the recycling bin.

The great thing about the “job creation” theory of antisocial behavior is that it justifies all kinds of things, from graffiti to dumping to stealing decorative plants from the local park. Why bother following implicit (or even explicit) rules if there is no consequence? Surely it won’t have any consequences in the long run!


I avoid the automated checkouts in part because it takes jobs away from robots. Am I a bad person for creating jobs for humans?

I confess I am a hypocrite though, as I'm one of those job-stealing people that return the cart to the corral.


Murder and incarceration create jobs too. At what point does job creation change from an excuse to an obligation?


Making war, creates an awful lot of jobs in the construction industry!


I am busy. I am a principal engineer on call working 60 hour weeks with an active social life and 2 kids under 4yo...

I always return my cart.

The theory holds and you are making excuses for bad behaviors


Anyone saying they’re too busy to return the cart but not busy enough to use grocery pickup or delivery must have a very calibrated life.


I second this and relate heavily


> People are busy, some people have kids.

It takes 30 seconds to return a cart. Nobody is so busy or has so many kids as to not be able to wheel the cart into the cart stall. If you have that many kids, then you probably can't really safely grocery shop in the first place.

The reason it gets brought up is exactly because it's a small thing to do that is generally accepted as being the right thing to do. You basically won't find someone defending not wheeling back the cart as being the right thing to do (outside of maybe a true emergency).


kid seats with straps are a thing for a reason, put the rugrat into the seat and then take the cart back.

as the parent said, it's a 30 second walk and if you can't trust kiddo not to die for 30 seconds you shouldn't be shopping w/ them in the first place.


If you have kids, you let them return the cart, because it is fun for them and already start to move the car out of the parking lot. That way you save even more time.


>Who is really being inconvenienced?

The workers, drivers, and potentially future shoppers.

>I worked with at a grocery store loved going out and getting the carts.

You're getting the carts either way. I won't speak to if it helps to give you more time to yourself when collecting wayward carts, but there is some built in time for collections even with "good shoppers".

> if someone leaves their cart in a parking spot... well that is bad behavior

Yes, hence the shopping cart theory.

I'm not a perfect person but try to keep it out of parking those times I am tired. But I recognize that carts can still roll into the lot or that it increases risks of a future car who comes in.


This isn't exclusively about whether it inconveniences employees or not. I was also a grocery store worker and I would also enjoy cart getting in certain weather but I wouldn't want to do it at, for example, walmart. That's practically a contact sport.

No, this is simply about can people do small things to make the system better. Things that cost them essentially nothing but make the world work.


I hold a strong but unproven belief that a minority of people who are naturally more conscientious than ordinary are basically holding the world together at the seams.


I have the inverted belief that most people are actually doing all right most of the time, but it's the squeaky wheels that stand out from the crowd and draw my attention all day long. There's just too many man-hours elapsed per day for a true minority to keep it stumbling along as gracefully as it does. We all have our bad days.

I've spent a lot of time cleaning up and observing a small strip of sidewalk in front of a retail establishment in a city and I've come to believe in a variation of the broken windows theory. If I let the sidewalk become too messy, or if I remove the trash but not the dead leaves in the fall then more trash will appear at a seemingly exponential rate. If I do a thorough job cleaning the entire area and removing all debris, however, it stays tidy for many hours, sometimes even days. I don't believe for one second that keeping the area tidy prevents people from littering there. I think the people who would drop their candy wrapper are going to do it anyway, but I think there are many people who, while walking through my tidy section of sidewalk, bend over and pick up the candy wrapper when they see it. I just think they don't bother when there's two or three candy wrappers, thus causing the observed effect.


The tragedy of the commons isn’t that most people take such good care of the commons. I bet people see your tidy walk and feel guilty about messing it up.


I've observed people picking up trash there, so I know it happens. I have a trash can right by my entrance so it's easy to throw stuff away properly.

Sometimes people do feel guilty dropping stuff, but usually only if they notice me watching them do it.


Somebody's got to, and I've got a little extra time, so I guess I will.

Burns off the karma from being a trouble maker on IRC (sorry Undernet). Although doing things to burn karma just generates karma for doing good things for the wrong reasons.


Only those who return the cart for upright and pure reasons (disorder makes my skin crawl) will escape samsara


Grass might hold the cart in place, but most abandoned carts get dropped off in places where the wind can catch them and blow them into cars.


Fair point.

I did not usually see a free roaming cart though. Maybe times have changed. Usually, people would prop them up against a curb, or ditch them into a grassy spot, or they would put them by a low spot in the parking lot next to a drain, or put them next to a column on the sidewalk.

Just my anecdotal experience, it seemed like people would put their cart back if there was a cart corral in the center of every parking row.


Walmarts around me seem to have a corral every ten or so cars, hordes of them. I still encounter strays and that’s with them seeming having a dedicated cart cowboy (with his little train).

I once calculated the number of carts Walmart has worldwide and it was mind-boggling.


Are kids really the excuse? I was putting away the cart basically as early as I remember. It was extremely fun to do that as a kid. Ride the cart like a kick scooter then BANG slam it into the rack with the others.

I’ve noticed very few kids doing little chores like this these days. Maybe I just don’t notice it. Maybe it’s a sign of a wider rot regarding parenting. Maybe it’s nothing.


It's extremely sketchy to let your kid return the cart in the parking lot when the average vehicle's hood is at twice their standing height.


Actually glad to hear that. I always wondered if it was pure entitlement and laziness to walk past a loaded corral and then take a car at the entrance.

I also feel many feel (irrationally) that they are being ripped off by the store and thus won’t bother to return the cart out of spite.


Imagine, if you will, a society where it had become commonplace and normal for people to throw their trash on the ground, and there were people who were expected as part of their working duties to pick up this trash and put it in a wastebin. It wouldn’t really matter whether the worker minded this duty, or whether it was commonly accepted behavior, or whether it was a bit inconvenient to dispose of the trash properly, or whether the person was a bit busy. Some people, probably those raised a certain way, would automatically intuit that there is something wrong with this and throw out their own garbage. They might even pick up one or two pieces others had left behind, too. But who is really being inconvenienced?


When employees are forced to spend time collecting carts prices at the store go up . Customers are the ones being inconvenienced by higher prices when people abandon their carts.


Speaking of memes, you just did one:

> Who is really being inconvenienced?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/smugjak-but-how-does-this-aff...


> One thing I want to point out is that everyone I worked with at a grocery store loved going out and getting the carts

You must've lived someplace with good weather. I can't imagine it being fun in a snowstorm.


> some people have kids.

I remember my brothers and I liked doing it because we'd ride on the sides of the cart while putting it away.


"...for their home countries to prosecute"

Does not imply a belief of innocence.


GMAFB. The US is famous for using 'extraordinary rendition' to take custody of people it deems terrorists and either try them or hold them in isolation at military camps. Do you really buy the line that they're being 'sent home to be prosecuted' by the same countries that are condemning these strikes? It seems far more likely that they're being sent home because they don't want to put them in front of a judge.


Is vague enough to mean either thing which in and of itself is a red flag. "To face justice" is both a phrase this administration would use and is more concrete.


That’s a meaningless claim and statement unless they somehow compel their home countries to prosecute them


Unverified Bluesky posts by people with conflicting interests


Who has a conflicting interest with fishermen getting blasted?


People who want to kill random people and claim they were bad drug terrorists.


That's not a conflicting interest, that's just an interest.


is there any proof that they are fishermen?


Maybe the rest of the world should stop doing their manufacturing in china.


It's called China, not china.


If we're going to pick nits, I'm fairly sure most of the Chinese population don't speak English, making it neither China nor china but 中华人民共和国

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...


Yes thats right.


I don't see it said enough, but liquid glass slowed my M3 noticably.

Odd I got the update 2 weeks before M5 launch.

Software as a means to obsolete hardware.

Trillion dollar company


You may want to check if you have one of the app listed here[1] on your system.

Electron based apps cause a huge system wide lag on macOS 26 due to the use of a private macOS API[2]. This bug has been fixed in Electron but not all Electron-based apps have been updated yet.

[1] - https://avarayr.github.io/shamelectron/

[2] - https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/48311


I don't think that's the UI, it's some other bug. My M1 is still running at full speed after Tahoe. Some people have said there is a broken version of Electron which causes slowdowns on Tahoe currently, most but not all apps have updated to a newer fixed version of Electron.


The M3 can run modern 3D games at high frame rates, surely it was something else about the update than the glass effect in the UI causing slowness??

It's a more appreciable burden on older iPhones though.


The glass transparency effect is just very computationally expensive.


The glass UI renders on my Apple Watch 6 just fine and that thing has probably 0.5% the GPU power as the Macbooks.


There's visible lag & stutters opening the control center on my Series 10.

Likewise, while it performs "fine," interacting with the UI still feels sluggish on Tahoe on my M4 Pro compared to Sequoia. I still have another M4 Pro with sequoia on it and it's a night and day difference, in favor of Sequoia.

There may not be any real performance loss but there is definitely UI latency and it's very noticable.


Like others have said, check whether you have any Electron apps that weren’t updated with the latest Electron framework. Both my M1 Pro and my work M3 Pro don’t feel any slower (unless I open an offending Electron app). I was updating a Mac that uses Sequoia yesterday and it didn’t feel any faster.


Your watch also has a screen resolution of (3024 * 1964) / (368 * 448) = 36 times less than a Macbook, so it's all a wash. Except the wasted coulombs.


It also renders on my M1 Macbook just fine as well for what it's worth. If it's running slow, it's because something is bugged out rather than the UI inherently being too heavy.


I just don't understand how if Visa could render its transparency efects smoothly on Intel 920 grade GPUs with 128mb of ram.


That's not how I remember it. Back in the day the first thing you did was disable the Aero stuff to claw back some performance on Vista.

That said, who knows how efficient the implementation is compared to other changes in iOS 26. I turned liquid glass off with "reduced transparency" because even 1% extra battery usage for it would be too much even though I kinda appreciated the new look.


>>That's not how I remember it. Back in the day the first thing you did was disable the Aero stuff to claw back some performance on Vista.

I remember it being kinda like placebo - you did, you marvelled at how much faster it's working, but in reality nothing changed. I really liked the look, and it did run smooth unless you had something below the minimum spec(which a lot of people did at the time).


Vista problems were largely nvidia driver crashes and low spec machines. Otherwise vista was fine.


Yes, though I think it worth noting that at that point "low spec machines" was like 80% of laptops and maybe 50% of desktops. It also really hurt when you went from XP which ran great to Vista which noticeably dragged on your machine.

My friend had an Alienware laptop which absolutely screamed with Vista


I mostly disliked Vista for a number of reasons, but the looks were incredible. I was actually blown away at the beauty


I liked aero too, XP was too fisher price.


XP Media Center Edition had a pretty slick theme, not at all toy-like. To say nothing of the Metro interface in its titular app, though it seems Metro was kind of a dud when they tried to apply it to other apps.


Vista did translucency and a statically positioned reflection mask, whereas this glass effect involves refraction/tinting that samples from surrounding surfaces.


It barely handles that, and even the M5 still cannot cope with 8khz mouse input coupled to a high refresh rate (>240) screen. I laugh every time they try and sell us on these things being able to play games


Even looking at pro CS players, a single 8 KHz entry is found in the table at https://liquipedia.net/counterstrike/List_of_player_mouse_se..., so it's a really odd hill to try to die on.

They really are great gaming machines from a hardware perspective. I wouldn't bother with an x86 laptop for gaming if it weren't for the software (mostly DRM) side.


That is wildly outdated, everyone is using 8khz input now. Keyboards too. This also completely ignores the 600-640hz monitors they are playing on.

Even 1khz mkb input on an apple silicon mac connected to a 500hz screen has insane utilization just doing shit in the OS. They are also struggling with variable refresh rate, improperly dropping down to the minimum (as low as 24hz) with jarring, jagged jumps up to the maximum after a few seconds of use.

This is a solved problem on both windows and linux. Even Asahi does a better job.


No, not "everyone" is using 8 KHz polling now... it breaks a lot of game engines for no benefit (even 4 KHz) but is heavily marketed because higher numbers. Worse yet, 8 KHz eats the kernel with interrupts (even on my 9800X3D) instead of letting the game run as fast as possible.

High refresh rate monitors are great, yes, but those are still sub KHz - you're talking about polling a mouse at 13x the rate of the highest end esports monitors as some minimum bar for when a machine can be for gaming - get out of here with that kind of artificial gatekeeping.

No complaints about Asahi though :).


Not "everyone". The G Pro Wireless is one of the most popular mouses and polls at 1KHz, and it works just fine. Polling a keyboard beyond 1KHz is utterly useless. The only time you're gonna want more fidelity is with stuff like Snap Tap, which is considered cheating and is banned.

In a similar vein, >120Hz screens are of doubtful utility. The performance gain is insignificant, considering top human reaction time to visual stimuli is ~150ms and the jump from 120Hz to 240Hz is -4.17ms, 1/36th or 2.77% improvement.

Even then, most pro FPS players also still play on 200-800 DPI when 1600 DPI and preferably even 3200 DPI is much better. Those low DPIs are purely cargo culted from the 2000s era CS Pros their .cfg, when sensors were still pretty crappy, and those players are effectively running lowgrade mouse smoothing.

Uneducated gamers are kin to uneducated audiophiles. Stop drinking the snake oil.


?? isn't it objectively the fastest ST core out there, topping MT benchmarks as well? Depending on the variant the M4 plays cyberpunk at 50-120fps so what are you saying?


Benchmarks are one thing. Real world usage and I/O are another.

There is no world where 50fps is acceptable in any game in 2025. Flagship GPUs on high end systems running Windows manage 4k @ max settings north of 60, nearly double that with RT off. To achieve anything close on a mac, you're dropping down to 1440p, at lower settings, with frame generation.


Lol ok buddy you’re not accounting for the 50W vs 500W difference. Gotta compare to windows laptops on battery.

They’re about the level of a 4060 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LWfM7Ktsal0


The problem is the edge cases where people use hardware capable of absolutely ridiculous things that nonetheless are common-ish on Windows and expect macOS to be capable of dealing with as well.

(Don't get me started on macOS and the un-disableable mouse acceleration override coupled together with Steam Link...)


LinearMouse is a bandaid for the latter problem.


Wasn't Windows 7 doing this same stuff back in like 2009?


If we follow the same pattern, iOS 27 and corresponding releases will be completely flat and look like Mac OS System 7. Chicago font wants to live another day.

Windows 8 got some serious hate back in the day, it had some sound ideas that were implemented poorly, but no one could deny it was lightweight. It had the smallest memory footprint of all the modern Windowses IIRC.


Unironically Mac OS 7/8/9 felt the best IMHO. Even though there were some missteps (the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_Strip was awful) and 9.x got a bit overloaded towards the end.

Mac OS X (and macOS still) never felt as good.


Apple's classic human interface guidelines were well thought out. They should consider (re)reading them sometime.


Tiger was fine :D


A lot of people argue it peaked with snow leopard; that was consistent, performant, and feature complete, not yet overly influenced by mobile.


Tiger still had that weird thing where half the apps were brushed metal for no apparent reason.


Nah liquid glass isn't just transparency and gaussion blur, it refracts/bends light around the rims as well as a kind of sub pixel colour splitting on some elements like when you have a water droplet magnifying your screen.


That sounds like maybe a few more multiplies and applying slightly different constants to different colour channels. There is no complex simulation happening.


Even an iGPU from a decade ago could handle that easily. There is some other problem with the new UI’s performance.


Sounds like some computationally expensive, unnecessary bullshit.


I think the liquid glass transparency is more complex than Aero - with curved glass objects distorting what's behind them significantly in some cases. Don't know how much more computationally intensive that is.


I think LG made the finder windows buggy as they have issues focusing when I click on them. Didn't have this issue before Tahoe


I have an M3 max and see literally no difference in performance. YMMV I guess!

I do have performance issues on my iPhone 13 mini, but I expected it.


I migrated from a 13 Mini to a 17 Pro last week. Updated the Mini to 26 beforehand to mitigate any potential 18->26 issues with data transfers/backups.

I'm still getting accustomed to the device size, the Mini was such a perfect device. If only app and web developers would actually preview their work on its dimensions, I probably would have just replaced the battery (76%).

Reduced Transparency is a hard requirement for iOS 26.


I just replaced the battery on my 13 mini (actually I got a brand new one since I still have Apple Care+ on mine and I did an express replacement). I’m good for an other 2 years.


Yeah, I'm keeping mine around and not trading it in. I might get the battery replaced at some point anyways and continue using it as a secondary device for some workloads.


Missing my Mini too


I mean your M3 Max has a 3-5x bigger GPU than OPs base M3, you'd certainly hope it could rip through those new shaders.


The shaders are nothing. I’m kind of appalled by everybody telling “oh shaders, it’s expensive!”

OP probably has been hit by the electron bug, which does indeed kill the performance of the whole OS…


I haven’t noticed any performance issues on my M3 Air, other than the Ghostty / Zed scrolling lag issues that were fixed in a software update.


Four trillion


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