Working your way around stupid obstacles is the Linux way…

Their phones had some of the heaviest custom Android UI back when phones were fairly low spec and budget phones

Yeah, that’s when IMHO they started to enshittify and I turned against them - the over-stuffing of their devices with impossible to remove useless junk together with pushing out ever larger OS updates was their main planned obsolescence mechanism for smartphones and tablets.

Once upon a time, maybe 2-3 decades ago, Samsung was quite a decent brand for consumer electronics such as TVs.

Their “evolution” was pretty similar to Sony’s - started as a very good electronics brand during (literally) the last century and then at some point in the 00s started enshittifying - though if I remember it correctly Samsung went down that route a bit later than Sony (who had already turned anti-consumer and started lobbying for things like the DMCA even before the Rootkit Scandal in 2005).

Anyways, I do agree with you that their memory business sinking would not be enough to take them down, though as a I see it, that’s a big enough and profitable enough slice of their business to hurt them if they loose a significant fraction of their market share plus, more in general, every little bit helps.

PS: Judging by this, their semiconductor division is the only one that showed a profit in Q2 2026.

I really hope they fuck Samsung up, who have been fucking customers up for over a decade now (namelly ever since they started enshittifying their products), not just this latest shit with memory.

I was going to say that there are a couple more companies I would like to see fall even more than Samsung but I started thinking about it and in between US tech giants, most AAA Games companies, various propaganda “Press” empires around the World and the likes of Sony, it does add up to more than “a couple”.

Still, Samsung getting fucked up is a very good thing in itself.

Don’t even care all that much about the cheaper memory, as long as they fuck Samsung up!

They probably have the hardware run in USB-Serial mode (rather than the usual USB-HID mode of controller, keyboards and mice which has no capability to upload any significant data - beyond LED status - to the device) and then just push the firmware into the Serial Device their hardware appears at in that mode.

Chrome supports letting websites remotely access Serial devices on the host PC.

So for the very kind of people who tend to not use Chrome because they’re privacy aware and actually tend to use Ad-Blockers, and who are very likely to be fine with standalone apps, they don’t make a standalone firmware updater app and instead make a Chrome only firmware updater.

I mean, I get it that in Linux accessing a USB-serial device from userspace can require an extra step (add user to “dialout” group), but it’s hardly something that takes more than 1 paragraph to fully explain and you can do the check for access denied in the app and only prompt the user to do it if that error occurs.

So substance is the position that MAGAs adopt towards Trump.

Non-native speakers tend to make mistakes with “its” vs “it’s” because they learn that in English the rule for when to after a “subject” put an apostrophe followed by an “s” is when you’re talking about something that subject has, but this case is an exception to that rule since " it " followed " 's " stands for " it is " whilst talking about something that " it " has is written " its ".

I mean, you can memorize there’s an exception to the rule for this case, but if you’re not paying enough attention when writting it’s easy to make a mistake by unthinkingly following the rule as usual even though in this case it doesn’t apply, and even if you re-read the text to check if it’s alright, it’s easy to miss it because you kinda have the right meaning in your mind so you read what you meant to write rather than what you wrote plus they’re both valid forms so neither stands out as a spelling mistake even when misused.

I have come around to accept my occasional misspellings, incorrect verb forms, not really knowing with certainty when to use “in” or “on” and even mangled or mixed expressions whenever I write something in English (which is not my native language) as a way to show that the text was not written by AI.

PS: My personal top English-language mistake for a number of years was “later” vs “latter” - I genuinely thought that when I saw the word “latter” written, that was a spelling mistake and one time I even “corrected” a native English speaker on it (who should’ve pointed out my mistake, which I would’ve gladly accepted since I would rather be corrected than keep on making such a dumb mistake - as I did for a few more years - but this person was very middle class English).

It’s a “Don’t make yourself the low hanging fruit” thing not a “If they’re trying to eavesdrop on you they won’t be able to” one and even then only if you’re not using an American OS with built-in automatic surveillance or in fact any network connected product from any large US/UK/Israel (at least) Tech company.

Even if the US Authorities don’t give a shit about you, if you’re running Windows, Android or iOS or using other products of those companies such as Chrome or their Clouds, you’re automatically caught in the bulk dragnet surveillance.

In all fairness, I was thinking mostly of European politicians and added the Americans there for completeness.

I suspect that in America the politicians are mainly just bought (via, for example AIPAC campaign contributions) and any blackmailing that’s needed is done by using the recordings made by a Mr J. Epstein.

Considering that some of the biggest companies hacking smartphones are in Israel and were founded by ex-Israeli Military, I’m sure he’s very well informed about the remote activation and use of smartphones as eavesdropping devices.

Also he probably doesn’t want other to have on them the kind of blackmail material Israel has been using against European and American politicians to make them do whatever is best for Israel even against the wishes of their own Public Opinion.

And by all indications LLMs will never be there - its speed of progression towards that has already pretty much ground to halt.

Mind you, you’re totally right that they will replace everyone if they can (i.e. if they get their hands on actual AGI), it’s just that this tech direction is a dead end and won’t get there.

7" table, 5" phone please, pretty please, pretty please with cherries on top!!!

Generally, good open world games have a lot more emergent content - situations that emerge from the interaction of agents and simple mechanics (in the style of how simple rules create complex outcomes in the “Game of Life”) - whilst good linear games have highly curated set-pieces scenarios which were created by level designers directly.

For an example of the former, imagine you’re running around the Game World looking for a special kind of plant to create a potion that you need. You come across a battle between bears and a bandit group. When they die their drops are free for the taking and both groups are too high level for you to take on your own. None of this was setup to happen when you crossed some trigger line, it literally just happened because those the entities in those groups are part of enemy “factions” and the patrol route of one group (a route which might itself be procedural rather than fixed) passed near enough the position of the encampment of the other.

This kind of thing randomly happen is just not something you get in linear games which are generally just set-pieces and even the ability to pull on group of high level enemies to another group has to be designed in (mainly by making the restricted game area big enough for it in that section and placing the groups in the right places).

This is also why in a linear game if you die and restart you get the same fights in the same places you had before up to the place were you died unless that section of the game was designed with enough alternate paths of mechanics (say, hide mechanics) that you can go around and avoid certain fights.

Emergent content is also why Multiplayer can be a lot of fun, though in this case the “agent” whose interactions can give rise to all sorts of situations are other players.

Whilst I’m not sure about contractors specifically, at least in my technical area “Software Development” having the expertise/insight in the social domain (which is not part of the expertise required for the job) to do things like that is more the exception than the rule.

But, yeah, totally agree that the wise, well-rounded and (IMHO) competent professional would at the very least do a bit of subtle “social discovery” to try and figure out who is the best person the interface with.

Gender stereotyping is a vicious cycle (multiple cycles even) and definitelly goes through both genders.

Mind you, in my experience it does have some cultural component to how far it goes, but even in the most gender-egalitarian country I lived in (The Netherlands) there were still plenty such expectations and, for example, before the remote working era the percentage of couples there with a huisman (the male version of housewife) was only 18%.

How much of this is the contractors being sexists and how much is it them being used to, far too often, having to manage the fragile ego of a male partner who thinks that “as the man of the house I’m suppose to know these things”?

Non-profit Copyright Infringement (a.k.a. Piracy) is a Moral Duty, IMHO.

Copyright nowadays is up from the original “25 years” to around “Death of author + 50 years” (a bit more in the US) which is almost always more than 100 years in total, so those “old” books are nowaday almost a century old or more.

(Well, sorta, if their copyright expired BEFORE new legislation was introduced to extend copyright length as has been regularly done for almost a century, those works didn’t got back under copyright after the extension, and as at least in the US copyright extension legislation was seeming driven by wanting to keep the first Mickey Mouse cartoon under copyright, at least in the US said “old” out of copyright books will mainly be from before 1928).