Sidetrack: I loved it so much I bought a preorder for Spore: Galactic Adventures, yet my attention span hadn’t grown enough and I forgot to ever redeem it 😔

Man I loved Spore!! Some of the later parts are not as detailed as I’d hope for, but the space segment nearly makes up for it!! Never fully finished space though as a kid… Need to go back and finally do it haha.

I don’t read many books, but I’ve read both “Little Brother” and “Homeland” quite some time back and they were honestly some of my favourites. Though in my opinion it can suffer slightly from the main character being too technically capable than most people today. I believe at one point in one book they go through their computers entire kernel to find some backdoor or rootkit, which I found to be probably the most unbelievable part of it all.

Other than that minor gripe, I actually really appreciate the stories for how engaged I was and their warnings of what could quite easily happen. Also I appreciate the technical level that Cory engages the stories with. I’m a developer, so I appreciate those technical explanations a little more than just ‘hackerman does a hacker on the keyboard to gain access’ type dialogue.

I don’t really follow specific authors but with Cory’s “enshittification” article combined with his recent publicity, some of his stories and messages are quite relevant still today with the implementation of our primitive AI.

I’m quite tempted to get a copy of this bundle because I didn’t know there was a third/related book but I am honestly a little sad they are not physical copies.

I always love the last panel and imagine a cute lil’ toot ❤️

Hey, Image Toolbox seems quite useful. I was initially scared when I didn’t see much other than the previews on the play store page, but after finding it’s GitHub repo I calmed down. Hopefully I don’t forget it’s installed since some of these features seem great!

Because we’re too busy categorizing this stupid shit into bins of “good” and “bad” when reality is a greyscale between these two. These are fairly reasonable points and should be viewed as a more centrist POV, but since we (read: primarily North America) have a tribal “us vs. them” animosity about it we lump many reasonable ideas together on each end of the spectrum. Things like not having to go bankrupt when you or a loved one needs an emergency hospital visit somehow automatically gets lumped in with the other extreme “socialist” ideas just to solely argue against it and not budge from their end of the extreme.

Daily reminder to leave NFC off and only turn it on when needed since Google Pay and other apps seem to have no concept of only being used when the app is explicitly open.

I’ve had it twice now where I was standing a little too close to the tap-to-pay terminal on the bus since it was nearly full, and it counted that I “tapped” in again. This is while I was still a full nearly 5 inches away, browsing a completely different app.

Not to mention, how is this not a setting in google pay or the quick menu??? Google removed NFC toggle from the quick menu so you need to turn it off, otherwise it feels like someone could just “tap” to steal money from your unlocked phone from 6+ inches away. Baffling to me.