New tech used to be really exciting. Engadget started as a gadget blog talking about the newest gadgets doing cool things. MP3 players, cameras, companies trying cool things. That category totally evaporated and reading about the newest smartphone or app with a subscription sucks
Yeah - if there was a villain, we could build companies without villains. But since entshittification seems to be endemic, you can’t trust anybody. That nice cool startup claiming to “don’t be evil”? Wait a few years, change out some people and it will totally be doing evil things.
Just to give you an example on how Europe is doing that: Licence plates are personal data. If you want to use them, you need the consent of users. Which you can’t get from drivers on a public street.
It is sadly becoming the standard in business settings. If your IT department is setting Edge as standard, there is not a lot that you can do
And that is correct. Headaches are different. Some people are helped by aspirin. Aspirin comes in different forms, as pill, powder, stick, in different doses. Other people maybe need Ibuprofen or Paracetamol or even harder pain medications. Those also come in different forms and doses. So every of those 20 answers is correct and you need to find out what works for you.
The world is complex and you need to find out what works for you. The idea that one OS or one distro is perfect for everyone on this planet is wrong just as the idea that one medication in one specific dose can be perfect for a complex illness like headaches for every of those 8.5 billion people on this planet. You have to be willing to find what works for you - or just keep suffering from headaches.
Yeah, I know.
We have this audiobook player for children in my country. That works by buying those little figures and if you place them on the player, the audiobook plays. I think that a system like that for “adult music” would be awesome. Buy some little figures and art pieces by your favorite band, display them on a shelf and use them to play music? Yeah, that would be awesome
And everybody who invests such money wants it back. With interest. They are currently trying to shove it everywhere, integrate it into workflows and the skillset of everybody and then they want all this money back and more.
Bitcoin. A technology trying to circumvent our highly regulated financial system? Which is mostly used to sell drugs online and evade sanctions? Where we knew at the start that it would need more energy than whole countries if it was successful? And then there are those 51% attacks? Yeah, that’s stupid. I really would have expected governments to crack down harsh on everything bitcoin and cryptocoin and would have expected that owning or using them would be as illegal as owning child porn.
There is another battle: There is a fight to open up app installation on phones. The EU recently forced Apple to allow other app stores on iOS and Apple is fighting this as hard as you would expect. Apple & Google are taking 30% of each sale in their stores and are making bank. One of the arguments they are pushing is “safety”. Only apps on their vetted app stores are safe, every other store is unsafe and so on. If they allow a child porn app in their store, all of their arguments in this debate are invalid. And that is also an important fact for that debate.
Does it? It was possible a while ago, but in the last years, we saw train tickets going to apps. There is no ticket machine at my local stop. There are areas where you can only park your car with an app. I need 2FA to get into my accounts. Restaurants have QR code menus. So going to protests or just living your life without a phone is getting harder
You can do most of that without any fancy AI or machine learning: Since you already have your own domain, setup some mail redirects and filter all mails going into them into subfolders. I have a redirect for onlineshopping where all those order confirmation and delivery informations and unwanted newsletters go. I have another I use for creating accounts - all 2FA etc. are going there. And then I have the main mail for actual communication and another redirect for all those interesting substack newsletters and so on.
No, it doesn’t. But that is totally something that should run locally on your own devices.
I kind of makes sense to produce computers that are able to run local AI. People here hate AI, but there are a lot of tasks that make a lot of sense even on a laptop. It’s great to produce tags and descriptions for your images. Google Photo has this - search for “horse” and you will get back all pictures of horses you have taken. And it totally makes sense to run stuff like this locally on your own computer without sending every picture you’ve taken to Trumpland.
But I really do not trust Microsoft to build something like that. That would totally go against everything they have been doing for the last decade and would also devalue their billions they’ve put into OpenAI
A lollipop with electronic waste. Truly a feat of engineering!
I wonder how many staff members of that hotel decided to quit suddenly
That might be your only option depending on your citizen status. You really do not want to be deported by ICE and ICE will totally deport that latin looking maid.
Yeah - people and countries are trying to get out of their dependency on the US, but they are trying to do so kind of stealthy to not get in confrontations with Trump (who is totally one to escalate stuff if he notices) and also in a way to minimize their losses.
You might not like it, but AI can totally give you a recommendation of similar bands.
I remember getting my first MP3s at a LAN party and it was revolutionary. You could just copy over music to your computer from other computers and they had quite the selection? Awesome! I totally filled my (tiny) hard disk to the brim and then listened the shit out of them with Winamp. I learned a while later that you could also rip CDs and that was also revolutionary. Then Napster, the first Discmens with MP3 support and so on - MP3s are awesome!
I like the idea, but I have two questions about using a phone here: