The mobile companies are slowly hiding all radio controls to guarantee the user is too inconvenienced to keep turning them off. Guarantees more enriched telemetry gathering.

Happens at the app level too, although it may be less malicious and more crappy coding. Watch Duty on Android, for example, is really a pain of an app in that regard. You can disable android’s WiFi/Bluetooth scanning, but their app uses that Google service specifically instead of raw GPS, so you lose the ability to get location-based wildfire alerts. If you don’t consent to Google stalking.

What a trade-off, if you don’t give away your location Metadata, you can’t be kept safe from fires?

They used to run on a model of “we know best” which is arrogant, but passable in a developing industry like earlier mobile where things needed work. Unfortunately, they still think they know best, and that closed-minded approach only works so long until you lose sync with the tolerance of the general public. Honestly surprised it took them this long. iOS and MacOS have both rotted terribly.

Take the UI aspects alone. Samsung “leaked” hints about a glass UI, saw user feedback, and pivoted. Apple released a glass UI because they would have never checked what users actually wanted, nor even bothered to see the user feedback from Samsung users and realize it’d apply to them as well.

Yeah, amazingly dumb. I have a ThinkPad x201 tablet from 2010 that still works to this day. I upgraded it and added a cellular modem. It still has a dial-up modem. It has gigabit Ethernet. I upgraded the RAM to the eventual maximum 8GB. I replaced the hard drive several times and it now has a 1TB SSD. I replaced the battery once, and only once, because it is so old, I found a surplusser with old OEM batteries, that will eventually fail and I’ll probably have to crack it open and rebuild. It has a CardBus slot that had various things including PCMCIA camera readers, an ExpressCard/34 memory card that had an entire Linux OS on it at one time.

It has a dock with a slot for an optical drive I never ended up purchasing. It has tunnels designed in the keyboard tray so if you spill a drink, the liquid is routed through safe holes, and the dock even has secondary safe holes. You could pour a gallon of milk on the keyboard and it’d end up on your desk, bypassing all of the computer and dock circuits. Oh it also has a VGA port on it, DisplayPort on the dock, it basically has every computer interface spanning 30 years. It even has a USB port that has BIOS settings for iPhone or BlackBerry charging when the computer is off, (they both had different USB charging protocols back then) and it’s marked in yellow plastic in the port so you can charge your phone off your computer.

Oh, and it has a headphone jack, a microphone jack, a camera on the screen, stereo mics on the screen for video calls, trackpad, TouchPoint, I can’t even remember all the things it has. A similar-sized modern MacBook has 1/10 of what that old computer can do. It’s currently running Debian and still used on my workbench to this day.

I didn’t have to build it, I actually bought it on a “black friday” deal when the model was being discontinued.

Oh, and the tablet part, the display spins around and you can eject a stylus from the body of the computer. Wacom tablet surface overlayed on the screen. With eraser accessory on the other side. Screen lays flat on the keyboard backwards. Dedicated buttons in that mode. Whole thing can be services with Phillips screwdrivers, even field-stripping the hard drive or RAM.

Also has fingerprint scanner to boot with TPM. 15 years old, it still knows my fingerprint. Not even sure I have the software to reprogram the TPM anymore.

Probably only released it now to help ICE disappear people.

There are podcast aggregators out there that aren’t just Apple-ify, although now that I’m doing a cursory search, maybe a use for Google’s silly search engine to waste Google’s servers for good.

Search:

"podcast name" filetype:rss

"podcast name" filetype:xml

And yet, annoyingly, these podcast platforms hide the podcasts’ URLs as hard as they can, even though these providers don’t host the podcast or files, and a “podcast” is just an XML file pointing to mp3 or m4a file URLs. (Not disputing you, just that the increasing non-openness of something they don’t even have to pay storage or bandwidth for is pretty ridiculous. They are nothing but a man-in-the-middle attempting to extract profit.)

Yeah, I agree, but it also makes a weird kind of sense. Properly regulated stock markets exist to ground the crazy people. Without them, they’d be doing things like building slave cities on nuclear waste for profit.

Look at fancy pants Germany over here with more than one brand of banana in a store.

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And much like going from phone call to answering machine to voicemail to visual voicemail (and even for a while being able to text a verbal reply on I believe Sprint back in the day for a bit) we now have phones being able to OCR images, then you can select the text on the image. (Also so the creepsters can harvest metadata on all your images.)

Samsung’s emoji/GIF injector is neat, but Futo Keyboard may be a viable alternative. It seems to be progressing little by little. As long as the vendor doesn’t go “evil” in a future release.

Also Samsung’s autocorrect is an abomination. So often it doesn’t correct a wrong word, or over-corrects a real word. There’s no appeasing that drunk algorithm. Sure, you can un-teach wrong words by hitting “…” next to the suggestions and deleting the suggestion, or periodically resetting the learning dictionary, but how is that keyboard such a needy little shit? Love the alt keys and number pad overlay.

Futo seems very promising once you change the UI settings enough to fit your fingers well.

I’m really surprised “shareholders” with any intelligence don’t start calling out their investments as liars during earnings calls. Tech companies have done this shit for years. Force features into the “on” position by default, force it back on frequently, force not having an off switch to disable the feature. Then they can tell shareholders that user adoption of new shiny widget F is so popular, millions of users are “using” it. Even though the tech company just has NewThing turned on by force and users are completely unaware it is even on, if they even ever use it.

Same crap is done with streaming services partnering with cell carriers and cable providers. Falsify user numbers even if the person just gets it for free and never uses it.

These companies only do this to falsify metrics to make their quarters look good… What if they actually made features users wanted and the user numbers became real?

Or, here’s crazy talk: what if it was illegal to use such tactics to falsify numbers? Gasp.

Antitrust Google. Fork YouTube as part of it. All existing content must be preserved. Remove YouTube’s ability to sell licensed content (cable TV channels, music, on demand). YouTube can then be purchased or spun off as a “YOU Tube” again - content made by people for people. Brand saved, community focused. Monetization heavily regulated (governance or internal governance, but just make it a requirement.)

Or just let it burn and replace it with something else. Video’s just super-expensive to host and provide, probably by design to keep others out of the market.

LLMs are basically read-only Mr. Meseeks, except rather than being present for the whole conversation like Mr. Meseeks, each new question in the conversation is a new Mr. Meseeks that has to context the previous convo and answer. It’s no surprise they hallucinate.

Captive audience on the contracts side, so they can do whatever they want as crappy as they want and the contracts still generate revenue.

You wanted a usable product? Stay away from Big Tech anymore.

This is in every way superior.

They used to have very comprehensive automated testing processes to exercise all sorts of things. Unfortunately, like many tech companies these days like Apple, Google, etc., they’re all punting QA as a concept because they just don’t care - what are you going to do, go use another oligopoly platform?

The American version of those are fun. Two months before the expiration date, stored in a dark space around 50F or less, they separate into globs. Not spoiled, just separated. Globs settle in the bottom of coffee. Once you get enough air in there, you can shake the everloving shit out of it, and the globs break apart into a delightful foam that floats on top.

All these brainwashed AI-obsessed people should be required to watch I, Robot on loop for a month or two.