Steve Jobs invented the smartphone, Bill Gates invented the internet, and Google has been there from the beginning.

/s

Free People’s Village by Sim Kern is on my shelf, haven’t read it yet. The premise is that history went differently in 1990s and US is now a solarpunk utopia… For the rich.

To be cringe is to be free. Posting opinions and feeding trolls online is generally a losing game though.

IIRC term “Social Media” was coined at the time of MySpace-Facebook, where a person mostly interacted with real people they knew, just online. Now it is mostly strangers in the same niche/community/subreddit.

I have a complementary opinion - no one likes jerks, but IRL people are often too “polite” to call others out on their bullshit. So that one coworker who says terrible things thinks he is right because no one confronts him. And your relative believes that online armchair expert. And some asshole does not pick up after their dog at a public park.

it also runs an onboard vpn, which has the side effect of blocking ad tracking requests.

I like the adblock VPN and the browser UI, however, in the browser itself, I was surprised to see what third-party requests are “loaded to prevent site breakage”, Google and Facebook usually amongst them.

Makes perfect sense. This comment just made me realize English does not have a distinction between order and request. While, for example, in Russian, orders are said in indefinite tense (?). So when you order a dog to sit, you would say “to sit!” (сидеть!), or to order someone to stop, “to stand!” (стоять!). Another less formal way to order (usually a group) is to use “we” as the subject, for example, “[we are] not sitting, [we are] working” (не сидим, работаем)

Free, sure. There is only one app that does it, with huge dependency on Google and/or carrier (whoever runs the servers), which could just… stop working one day, like it did for me.

This looks so much better and easier than half-assing LACK tables and plywood/plexiglass together.

Just to add to the fun confusing acronyms, in 3D printing circles, IPA is isopropyl alcohol, not beer (india pale ale)

What specifically do you mean? If you are asking about you = u, to = 2, OK = k, and such, it’s text speak - faster to type and can fit more in 140 characters (SMS character limit IIRC)

But I agree that there is no reason to use those, especially on non-mobile devices.

I have been following https://linmob.net/ for news and developments. They do a good job aggregating from conferences, boards, HN, and reddit.

Absolutely loved Annihilation. I expected Roadside Picnic, but got Lovecraftian incomprehensible horrors, government conspiracies, and main character coming to terms with themselves and events in their life.

Authority is a bit different, but the feeling of dread and being lost is still present throughout the book.

But think of the jobs these datacenters create! A datacenter in Columbus, Ohio that got $4.5 million tax break will provide a whopping 10 (ten) jobs!

WTF. Would be easier to give 10 random people $450,000, but what do I know.

Yes

Artemis is set in a colony on the Moon. Cool science and economy about running the colony, but writing was meh (if I have to read “head full of steam” for the third time…) and MC swears a lot in a juvenile and cringe way.

Here is one of iPad reuse projects

And here is a crazier and thorough project on replacing internals

TBF I considered using my old iPad2 as in-car navigation or just as permanently-on weather display or picture frame. (If battery doesn’t swell from being on all the time)

IOC is just bending over for bigots.

In these winter olympics the IOC forbade a Ukrainian athlete to wear a plain grey helmet with 12 portraits on them. There was no text or symbols, but it was deemed “too political”. (The helmet was to honor athletes killed in war)

If that doesn’t sound idiotic enough, Ukrainian paralympic athletes were not allowed to wear the outline of Ukraine on their gear. Again, “too political”.

The feedback loops that local funding creates are vicious too:

desirable neighborhood -> higher prices -> more taxes -> better funded school -> desirable neighborhood (for families)

undesirable neighborhood -> low prices and no population increase -> worse funded school -> undesirable for families

As you said, next to one another. By sheer luck I happened to live in an apartment building that somehow belonged to a rich school district. Next building over was in the poor school district.

Apps like Google Messages

Samsung Messages, and… ???

Smartphones and tablets manufactured circa 2015 were powerful enough to run many apps and software, and not yet locked down as much as they are now. So there were a lot of custom ROMs and kernels being made for Android and jailbreaking tools for iDevices, allowing you to customize much much more than the manufacturer intended.

And it’s just fun to make something that most people consider “obsolete” perform well, or well enough to be usable.

Not sure what role gender plays into that though.

So when you receive a call from a friend or family member, you’re greeted by something more visually interesting than the generic incoming call screen.

??? Displaying caller’s photo (from your contact list) has been standard functionality since… a long time ago. What is this trying to achieve?