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.

deleted by creator

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.

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.

No worries, and no neg either. This is where this timeline sucks. Quick Share is a great upgrade to the standard Bluetooth file sharing that existed for 20+ years as it adds in WiFi, but corps are all so walled-garden-metadata-stalking vampires. These companies are so stupid. Conflict too, in that sharing files easily can “make money” for them, but they’d rather fight than have standards.

I miss standards. Plugging a POTS jack in a wall and getting a dial tone was so simple. Now, everything, even “cable TV”, is JSON shitting around the Internet, but heaven forbid it’s the same JSON.

That sounds hilariously delightful.

Requires Play Services.