Third party apps can’t even SMS on iOS. On Apple’s platform, you use their apps or you don’t get the feature. The iOS implementation of RCS doesn’t even yet support encryption. Apple is testing encryption between Apple devices.

That Apple and Google both hold the keys to what started out as an open GSMA standard, and now have a closed-source platform screams never trust it.

Nothing will support RCS except Google Messages. Google closed the source and extensibility of the messaging framework quite a while back. Around the time Signal dropped SMS support.

Sorry, as there is so much easy access to worry these days, but then also don’t read this: https://csl.noaa.gov/news/2025/427_0428.html But actually, do at some point, but just store it in the same file as “things that suck that I can’t control, so I have knowledge and can learn, grow, respond, while realizing it just goes in the same pile of bad decisions people of power are doing to destroy our planet.” The knowledge is annoyingly necessary to build onto the next puzzle piece, despite the frustration. Although we kinda do have control if we just stop playing their game.

Incorrect, they don’t have natural de-orbit. They have to be controlled. They haven’t solved natural de-orbit, and every de-orbit puts more aluminum oxide in the upper atmosphere that will decimate the ozone layer in 15-30 years.

That paying extra to get faster service thing is a complete scam too, at least with DoorDash. But they probably didn’t bother researching anything about how these junk services work either.

Bear in mind that as they age, you have increasingly unstable lithium bombs on your wall.

Nest smoke alarms were inspired and truly the best I have ever used. So pissed Google destroyed them.

If you do a Takeout request of Nest data, you will find a hundreds of megs JSON file with every change you made to your thermostat, every time you walked by it, any data it could harvest. A breadcrumb trail of your entire home life. I switched back to old fashioned offline battery thermostats.

However Fitbit accounts had different privacy policies and terms of service, IIRC. Bringing them under the Google umbrella likely allows Google easier data harvesting/combining from a legal perspective. They did similar with Nest years back before they completely butchered it.

IIRC, Apple’s “open” browser implementation was so fundamentally broken and difficult that it made the actual implementation of a third-party browser exceedingly difficult. Kinda like how their call-blocking API is nothing more than a database loader with no feedback, so call blocking apps can’t share data back to improve through crowd-sourcing. The products all have to learn from Android phones on the same product to be able to share with iPhones.

Cheapest guarantees you will be missing some 5G bands, might as well just focus on LTE. It will be around for years to come.

That being said, Galaxy Xcover Pro series is probably the way to go, just find an older model for “cheapest.”

The entire universe could collapse and these tabs will live on. Forged by Satan himself.

Oh, yeah, you’d think, but no. Instead you have to try and bend the clips, and while doing so, they catch the two layers of the spindle-hole and either crack the disc, tear the disc, or tear the layers apart. Sometimes the disc even comes out.

I’ve seen a dozen DVDs cracked in the spindle-hole across multiple box sets from this travesty of a design. Bought replacements and exchanged them. Seems they went back to a more sane storage format and these disc-eaters were just unloaded over the holidays or something.

Additionally, automating rapid iteration and investigation isn’t necessarily “smart” - it just let’s one try permutations more quickly with the parameters adjusting automatically. Handy, useful, but not this “magic” that tech bro billionaires keep fawning over.

The tl;dr is: Control. Vendors want it, making it easy to run open software would make that control harder to keep.

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Their deluded vision is that they think the traditional user interface is going away. Rather than interact with a machine, you’ll just be walking around, sipping coffee, having thoughtful conversations with a bot laughing along with your jokes as it writes your letter and does your taxes.

I’ll go a step further, they don’t even want “civilians” to have access to any kind of general compute anymore. Just a speaker/microphone, maybe a display that you talk at. No traditional UI, no ability to own or save documents, or even have any concept of where these files live.

Now seems the perfect time to shed the cloud from one’s daily life and do the exact opposite. If one wants or needs compute, it lives in their home. Offsite backup at a friend’s or family’s home. There is not particularly a “need” for all these centralized datacenters for any human other than those that want control of everything.

So, NVIDIA CEO, shut it all down for a month and see what happens. I bet nobody will care.

I have to use a lot of LLM tech daily and wouldn’t miss it a bit, myself. Would even sleep better at night knowing all that energy use isn’t destroying the planet’s habitability.

I actually heard from an acquaintance that their employer is forcing employees to burn at least $100 of tokens a day “or else” - like, what??

Such a bubble. Can’t wait for it to pop.

Horses, and most field, work, or food animals, are so dope. They’re just a big version of a small thing one calls a pet. All intelligence, all joy. All way more real than any LLM that might exist. Had one horse that waited for his opportunity to break out and he’d run for a half a mile and always come home. It was his game. I was some very young age child and I’d be out there trying to “corral” him - he was a HORSE - he never put me in danger, he would just feint and run off, and then calm down and come back home, his mission accomplished for fun.