This also grinds my gears, especially after so many officers die during the course of the series. So many junior officer ranks are time-defined promotions (in real life) and even if they weren’t time based, slots opened up due to all the people dying.

I paid for 1Blocker (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/1blocker-ad-blocker/id1365531024) since it runs locally on my phone to block ads as well as trackers from other installed Apps, whether on my home WiFi, other WiFi, or cellular data. There’s a whitelist feature and the filtering can be tailored. I’ve been using it for years (before I got my current phone) so I can’t comment on battery life but I’ve never noticed it to be bad.

It does break some apps if they’re not whitelisted but that just gives me more reason to decide if I really need the app. It’s also possible to temporarily disable the blocking (5 minutes, 30 minutes, etc) which helps with logging in (since so many login services involve trackers).

I was thinking that, too, but prior to the Sun becoming a white dwarf, the Sun is predicted to expand and swallow Earth (and Venus and Mercury), so the Sun’s mass will increase. Assuming the Sun’s expansion lasts long enough to result in those planets being vaporized I would think that additional mass would go back in when the Sun contracts into a white dwarf.

Additionally this will mess up the orbital mass of the solar system so I could see how more asteroids (maybe even a planet?) could get dislodged from its orbit and eventually get swallowed by a dense white dwarf.

But yeah, if the sun just instantly went to a white dwarf from its current state then orbits would probably stay pretty similar. It’s the process in between that could cause some chaos.

I think they used to wax the cardboard. Maybe they still do?

If Apple chose to use a 16-bit integer for the index, they would be limited to approximately 65,000 photos. 32-bit would be about 4 billion. Photos likely uses a 32-bit or even 64-bit integer index value to make it a non-issue.

There could be issues with having too many thumbnails loaded in memory. Maybe some other value overflows when scrolling through (or just loading) an enormous library. If Photos also creates an index for searching that could also create headaches. If Photos were a simple file explorer having a million files shouldn’t be an issue but it’s more than that, so it’s good to know it seems to be performant with even 1 million photos.