Man, that person really needs more friends. Not a diss either. I have friends spanning countries, cities, life, I have friends that have died. I have friends that still live. Why the fuck not talk to people and be friends?

Also, am adult.

Absolutely blows my mind at how much up their own asses they are to smell those farts.

They keep creating tools to create images, video, text, content. They’re replacing people with machines. Sure, this can have tangible benefits in some roles, especially dangerous ones, but they aren’t doing that. What in satan’s fuck is left in life if we don’t get to create, to build, to have purpose? Did they all collectively watch Wall-E and get the wrong message?

I always come back to that one scene in Star Trek: Insurrection:

Sojef: Our technological abilities are not apparent because we have chosen not to employ them in our daily lives. We believe that when you create a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man.

While in that context, they took it a bit to the extreme, it is still poignant.

It seems the timeline right now is Office Space -> Wall-E -> Idiocracy -> Mad Max.

Companies want that sweet, sweet live telemetry.

That sounds hilariously delightful.

Allegedly, I heard that they have to list any side effect that came up in placebo trials, even if the drug didn’t cause them. Still just wish drug commercials would be banned again like they used to be, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Telekom

The German government owns 31.9% of Telekom.

Pretty hilarious that Deutsche Telekom spent buckets of money to integrate Google’s cloud into their network core. Never understood why they’d be so stupid, but here we are.

Duh, and/or hello. But also, CodeRabbit is pretty terrible itself at times.

Samsung’s tablets aren’t bad. After you do a healthy round of debloating. Buy a top of the line Galaxy Tab from 2 years ago on clearance to avoid high prices, too.

The mobile companies are slowly hiding all radio controls to guarantee the user is too inconvenienced to keep turning them off. Guarantees more enriched telemetry gathering.

Happens at the app level too, although it may be less malicious and more crappy coding. Watch Duty on Android, for example, is really a pain of an app in that regard. You can disable android’s WiFi/Bluetooth scanning, but their app uses that Google service specifically instead of raw GPS, so you lose the ability to get location-based wildfire alerts. If you don’t consent to Google stalking.

What a trade-off, if you don’t give away your location Metadata, you can’t be kept safe from fires?

They used to run on a model of “we know best” which is arrogant, but passable in a developing industry like earlier mobile where things needed work. Unfortunately, they still think they know best, and that closed-minded approach only works so long until you lose sync with the tolerance of the general public. Honestly surprised it took them this long. iOS and MacOS have both rotted terribly.

Take the UI aspects alone. Samsung “leaked” hints about a glass UI, saw user feedback, and pivoted. Apple released a glass UI because they would have never checked what users actually wanted, nor even bothered to see the user feedback from Samsung users and realize it’d apply to them as well.

Yeah, amazingly dumb. I have a ThinkPad x201 tablet from 2010 that still works to this day. I upgraded it and added a cellular modem. It still has a dial-up modem. It has gigabit Ethernet. I upgraded the RAM to the eventual maximum 8GB. I replaced the hard drive several times and it now has a 1TB SSD. I replaced the battery once, and only once, because it is so old, I found a surplusser with old OEM batteries, that will eventually fail and I’ll probably have to crack it open and rebuild. It has a CardBus slot that had various things including PCMCIA camera readers, an ExpressCard/34 memory card that had an entire Linux OS on it at one time.

It has a dock with a slot for an optical drive I never ended up purchasing. It has tunnels designed in the keyboard tray so if you spill a drink, the liquid is routed through safe holes, and the dock even has secondary safe holes. You could pour a gallon of milk on the keyboard and it’d end up on your desk, bypassing all of the computer and dock circuits. Oh it also has a VGA port on it, DisplayPort on the dock, it basically has every computer interface spanning 30 years. It even has a USB port that has BIOS settings for iPhone or BlackBerry charging when the computer is off, (they both had different USB charging protocols back then) and it’s marked in yellow plastic in the port so you can charge your phone off your computer.

Oh, and it has a headphone jack, a microphone jack, a camera on the screen, stereo mics on the screen for video calls, trackpad, TouchPoint, I can’t even remember all the things it has. A similar-sized modern MacBook has 1/10 of what that old computer can do. It’s currently running Debian and still used on my workbench to this day.

I didn’t have to build it, I actually bought it on a “black friday” deal when the model was being discontinued.

Oh, and the tablet part, the display spins around and you can eject a stylus from the body of the computer. Wacom tablet surface overlayed on the screen. With eraser accessory on the other side. Screen lays flat on the keyboard backwards. Dedicated buttons in that mode. Whole thing can be services with Phillips screwdrivers, even field-stripping the hard drive or RAM.

Also has fingerprint scanner to boot with TPM. 15 years old, it still knows my fingerprint. Not even sure I have the software to reprogram the TPM anymore.

Probably only released it now to help ICE disappear people.

There are podcast aggregators out there that aren’t just Apple-ify, although now that I’m doing a cursory search, maybe a use for Google’s silly search engine to waste Google’s servers for good.

Search:

"podcast name" filetype:rss

"podcast name" filetype:xml

And yet, annoyingly, these podcast platforms hide the podcasts’ URLs as hard as they can, even though these providers don’t host the podcast or files, and a “podcast” is just an XML file pointing to mp3 or m4a file URLs. (Not disputing you, just that the increasing non-openness of something they don’t even have to pay storage or bandwidth for is pretty ridiculous. They are nothing but a man-in-the-middle attempting to extract profit.)

Yeah, I agree, but it also makes a weird kind of sense. Properly regulated stock markets exist to ground the crazy people. Without them, they’d be doing things like building slave cities on nuclear waste for profit.

Look at fancy pants Germany over here with more than one brand of banana in a store.

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See, to preserve the image for posterity, you have to put it on a thumb drive in a nitrogen-sealed UV-filtered case. Otherwise all is for naught.

And much like going from phone call to answering machine to voicemail to visual voicemail (and even for a while being able to text a verbal reply on I believe Sprint back in the day for a bit) we now have phones being able to OCR images, then you can select the text on the image. (Also so the creepsters can harvest metadata on all your images.)