IIRC (from others, never installed it) McDonald’s app is also obnoxious, requiring permissions and refusing to run on custom ROMs and rooted devices. It was once used alongside some common banking apps as a metric of “how close to Google Android is this ROM”.
Satan’s Accounting Program? Stop All Production?
EVE Online (applies to MMOs in general I think). I played it a long time ago with a few friends, but that is it. If I could describe it, it’s opposite of interesting. You can sort of play it solo, but it gets boring and/or grindy fast. Unless you buy in-game money for real money. Dying means losing a ship and all implants, all of which cost money (time).
For “full experience”, apparently you gotta join a corp, and participate in space turf wars. Then it could turn into a second job. And I have a job already. And TBH I am not a very social person.
Loved Outer Wilds, but I completely understand why someone would not. There is almost zero direction, and that is not for everyone. Plus the time limit gets in the way sometimes.
Using tap water for cooling is such an idiotic engineering decision it feels like it was suggested by an LLM chatbot.
Power plants use water too, but they draw it from the nearby river or lake, recycle it through cooling towers, and/or dump it back out into the river or lake. Or course that has its own effects, but at least it’s not depriving a nearby town of drinking water by existing.
AFAIK Librem claims they use separate verified suppliers and builders (compared to more common Android manufacturers, for example). Kind of a zealot thing too though.
And PinePhone (original) at $200 is not that expensive if you think of it as a compact version of a Linux platform like Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi + charger + battery + touch display + 4G modem + GPS unit + microphone + speaker will probably run close to $200 too.
“Software-defined vehicles”? Dafuq?
This reminds me of a story my graph theory professor told me (long before LLMs). One of their grad students discovered that a subset of graphs that are of type A and B at once has fantastic properties, such as fast searching, and a few others, useful in communication networks etc.
Excited about their potential thesis, student asked the professor to take a look. After calculating which graphs actually are types A and B at the same time, professor found that the intersection of such graph types is a null set. So the theoretically nice graphs the student “discovered” simply do not exist.
I did not get why people liked Midsommar.
Same idea of folk/cult horror, old The Wicker Man (1973) was more coherent, and had a point.
Free People’s Village by Sim Kern is on my shelf, haven’t read it yet. The premise is that history went differently in 1990s and US is now a solarpunk utopia… For the rich.
Makes perfect sense. This comment just made me realize English does not have a distinction between order and request. While, for example, in Russian, orders are said in indefinite tense (?). So when you order a dog to sit, you would say “to sit!” (сидеть!), or to order someone to stop, “to stand!” (стоять!). Another less formal way to order (usually a group) is to use “we” as the subject, for example, “[we are] not sitting, [we are] working” (не сидим, работаем)
I have been following https://linmob.net/ for news and developments. They do a good job aggregating from conferences, boards, HN, and reddit.
Who are these smooth-talking scammers that can guide a regular-ass user to jump through hoops in settings to install a malicious app?
Maybe I should ask them how they do it, because I cannot convince my family to download and use Signal. You know, the legit app from the official app store.
That is fair, and I appreciate the explanation.
Edit: Author says GenAI was not used for code, see below.
Original comment, observing signs of GenAI project:
What’s up with these brand-new “Discord alternatives” being cranked out en masse? Would be easier to contribute to XMPP or Matrix IMO.
Initial commit 14,203 files changed +2872320
AI? Or “i worked on this for 10 years and uploaded just now”? /s
Overabundance of emojis in description. Probably AI.
Would be cool to see if anyone manages to get it running.
Were you able to run it yourself? What.
There is a recent book/report called Scam, about these scam compounds. Despite being illegal prisons / forced labor, they create a lot of economic opportunity in nearby towns and villages providing supplies and (paid) labor. Also, scam compound victims often get little sympathy, with notions such as “they are gamblers”, “they want easy money”, or plain old discrimination because they are foreigners.
Allegedly, VoLTE works on Ubuntu Touch for OnePlus Nord N100, N10, Volla Phone 22, and Fairphone 4.
Windows Phone was around in mid-2010s, at least 7 years after iPhone release. But it was not hyped enough: companies did not care to develop apps for it, customers didn’t want a smartphone without X Y Z apps (same argument i see now about mobile linux or even custom ROMs). The phones had nice and fast UI though, and some had very good cameras.
Is your iPad on iOS 9.3.5? It is infamously slow.
It is possible to downgrade it to 8.4.1 (faster, partially more broken) or even 6.1.3 (fast and old school, many apps don’t work, but there are apps in Cydia to fix stuff).
Biggest issue I encountered is sites requiring TLSv1.3 for HTTPS encryption, and browsers simply do not support that.
XMPP/Jabber protocol has been used by WhatsApp, and then closed off from the rest of the network. Theoretically, it could be inter-operable.