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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I think you give the idiots in charge of the corps that can’t see beyond a 3 month window of time too much credit. It is just the natural progression of unchecked and unregulated Capitalism that will always lead to this place, regardless of the industry or technology.

    Don’t get me wrong, I want to blame them too for their evil plot, but they’re too dumb to have contrived the whole narrative.

    Example with the cloud:

    • Look over past decades, storing your data in servers has been a thing for decades. Companies have tried time and again to get the concept to stick in various forms, and it always waxed and waned. (Reverse-example right now is AI, since people barely want it, and having it in the cloud is even creepier, manufacturers are trying to make people comfortable with cloud-executed AI queries, and otherwise releasing limited subsets of compute that run locally on the phone.)
    • Voice recognition tech like Voice Command (predecessor to Siri for those super young) started on phone-only. Then Siri used to run on the cloud until phones became powerful enough to run more commands locally and they moved more commands to the phone.
    • Apple used to synchronize SMS messages between iPhones and other Apple devices in a secure local method on your local WiFI network. Then, as they sold more types of devices, it made it evolutionarily (made up word) necessary to move that logic to the cloud. They probably didn’t pre-think that all this would be clouded, they just got there out of need to sell a new toy, and suddenly screw the alleged privacy they purport to worship.

    The reality is, a lot of these cloud techs have been held up by:

    • Lack of fast enough Internet bandwidth to make it doable, nobody is going to spend 4 hours a day uploading photos somewhere
    • Lack of fast local compute, hilariously, local compute can do most things now, but in the past, the local compute wasn’t fast enough to be able to parse/process the data to send to the cloud
    • Lack of local storage, again, prepping data for cloud transport and having local caching be performant requires enough throwaway space on the local machine that users don’t become frustrated with the latency of remote disks in a datacenter
    • Lack of metadata for trust verification like FaceID, fingerprint, GPS geolocation, and other security functions so the company could avoid fraud
    • Lack of quality mobile cameras and recording devices making the input content garbage

    Once these problems ended up being solved, it wasn’t some visionary with a big plan executing. It was just another Business Weenie being paid 9 figures having the same idea 300 other people had, and it just sticking this time because the technological environment is different.

    (Replace Apple examples with Google, Microsoft, Cisco whoever as necessary.)






  • Honestly, it wouldn’t have been a bad place to be if they hadn’t destroyed it from the inside. Windows on ARM is super stable. You can still build your own computer, or at least buy one with user-swappable parts. Linux has become much easier and wasn’t too bad to use even a decade ago, but it was nice being able to have a non-Apple computer running programs and getting work done that was just there to do the business. I’m speaking as one that attempted to use the kool-aid for a few years after Apple stopped using user-swappable batteries, memory, disk, their hardware upcharges are pure asshole insanity. I’m fully capable of using Linux, compiling my kernel, modifying driver source to work around problems, but, I don’t want to when I’m just trying to pay my bills. Streaming media services come and go with Linux support, hardware support is often lacking until the work is done to make the hardware work correctly. Windows, for all it’s … windowsness … worked. Until the last 8 months when they decided to put a molotov cocktail under the hood and see what happens.

    Apple is headed this way too, now that they don’t have SJ to errantly blow up the current tech to try something new and random (although, had he survived his cancer, he’d have just gone Musky with age like a lot of that generation has, mmmm leaded gas!) Apple will hold on just a bit longer because iOS gave them one new platform reboot (ish) to live off of, while Microsoft is still kicking around technical debt until the end of time.

    Oh, edit though, I’ve been migrating my machines to Linux one by one now. Not going to bother sticking around to see that Windows train wreck continue.





  • Hahaha! I’ve been dabbling in live USB thumbdrive copies of various flavors of Linux to see which one I want to go to for a while. Did a few years back and thought, “you know, my time is worth something to me, maybe I’ll give Windows a go, 10 seems pretty stable.”

    Booted up Debian Cinnamon, couldn’t get two-finger right click to work on the Synaptics config out of box, it had a few arbitrary prefs for whatever the devs decided people would probably use. Tried Debian Gnome. It had trackpad settings that were more in line with what I expected… Not giving up, but it did make me pause, because I know one can reconfigure the trackpad driver under the hood, but did I really want to jump down the rabbit hole of bespoke shellscripts again just so my audio driver correctly wakes from sleep (if it can even successfully sleep)?

    Other funny to figure out, the computer has iGPU and dGPU, both were active and the battery life was maybe 2 hours. Another thing to figure out with bespoke configurations.

    So it’s like, Windows and Linux (and lesser, MacOS) pain is definitely there, it is just kinda what kind of pain do you want to subscribe to? Linux pain will probably only occur during initial setup and maybe every few years when a major OS release comes out. MacOS pain is even more rare, unless a major OS release comes out with something you don’t like and you have to find where in the OS frameworks the feature is to disable it, if they have hooks in which to do. Windows pain is…every Tuesday.

    “Oh here’s a new lock screen weather widget”

    “Oh cool, I can get on board with that!”

    Next week:

    “Oh, here’s a new stocks and news widget to go along with the weather.”

    “Hold on there buddy, I didn’t sign up for the first and you’ve pushed two more? Time to shut those two off. Oh, it’s all or nothing, thanks! Nothing it is.”

    “Don’t worry, we’ll reinstall Dev Home next week and flag it a system app so you can’t uninstall it, and then we’ll force Copilot to be present, and then we’re going to screw with the start menu, and then we’re going to delete WordPad, and reinstall all those Office/cloud 365 shim apps and and and.” That was like, last month.



  • So you’ve obviously never had to use defaults write com.apple.stupidpreference.fix bool true

    Apple has a lot less nonsense than Microsoft, but the amount of nonsense is greater than zero. What’s really annoying (on their mobile platform specifically) is when certain problems occur on iOS that would have been completely solvable on MacOS with a command line tool, but you have to erase the phone because Apple doesn’t give you access to the OS.

    MacOS is already deprecating the Keychain access tool, which will obfuscate more of the OS security from the user and make it more iOS-like in trying to fix failures.

    Apple is enshittifying in absence of Jobs, they’re just behind Microsoft by one or two decades.




  • It depends on the proximity of metal to skin mostly. If you use giant cans with huge ear pads, you’re fine. If you use in-ear reference headphones, the metal mesh over the speaker is close enough to the earhole to jump the gap. It also depends if the headphones are plugged into a device on your person versus say, a desktop DAC. And if you use a chair with wheels that roll across plastic, etc. etc. A lot of variables. I still enjoy using wired for audio quality, I just have to make sure I don’t plan on moving and/or discharging my bodily static periodically on a grounded surface.

    ESD is such an hilarious annoying thing, I once touched a cell phone and the entire display oozed to black starting from the point I touched and then oozed back to picture. Another time, I ESD’d a wall thermostat so hard that it reset back to factory defaults. I may actually be a Van De Graaff generator.

    Edit: Just remembered a third, touched a light switch screw one day and static snapped me with enough juice that 200 nearby LED lights blinked on for a split second, and then back off.