whofearsthenight

Micro-usb is just about the most garbage connector in the last 30 years. I'd damn near rather Apple have actually sent me a breadboard and some leads than have that connector.

If you accidentally trip over your cable, the cable will break but the port will be fine.

Tbh this is thing I'm not excited about the USB-C future on. On paper, I would expect that Lightning be more problematic since the springy bits are on device rather than the connector. In practice, I've never seen a Lightning port fail since it's come out. Micro-USB, which is much closer to USB-C in design (obviously with improvement) for me has basically come with an expiration date. I don't have enough USB-C stuff yet to say if that's going to continue, but it's a concern for sure.

This is the amazingly, insanely stupid thing about the idea that at least for Apple's Pro line, which they'll painstakingly put together videos showing iPhones being used as actual movie cameras in big gimbal rigs and how they can capture 4k60 and put messages in the OS that shooting 20 minutes of video is going to take your entire phone storage even if you got the big one, and the options for transfer are wifi or USB 2.0. For a potential terabyte. Very Pro to sit and wait for an hour or several.

I honestly feel like it's a mistake that USB-C means almost nothing outside of "it's got this port shape." The idea was that you have one port and one cable, and you plug whatever you want into it. In practice, virtually no where is this true. Is this a data port or power only? What speed for either? Does the port support Thunderbolt or no? Video or no? Does the cable support data or just power? What speed? Video? Which HDMI spec? Thunderbolt? Grab 3 random devices with USB-C and 3 random USB-C cables and see how often you get the intended outcome.

Tbh I think the only goal that USB-C really accomplishes is that it's less shitty than micro-usb (might as well make all of those ports/connectors out of paper mache) or USB-A (let's make a port shape that there is no way for anyone living or dead to plug in correctly the first time.)

It's not the blue bubble, it's that iMessage is like any other of the big message services and has it's own things like those messaging services. I have a group chat with another iPhone user, and an Android user. Just sending texts is whatever, but when you start using the messaging features like tapbacks to like a message or replying to a specific message, it gets real fucky real fast.

Although I am glad iMessage was created (largely as a fuck you to carrier fees) these days I wish that Apple would either make an Android app or the world (US mostly) could collectively move to a good messaging app/protocol (which includes e2e encryption and isn't fucking Meta.)

I don't expect them to do that, much too easy to get slapped down on by the EU. I do expect that non-Apple/MFI chargers are USB 2.0, and I do expect are limited to slow charging and might come with a nasty-gram in the OS when using one. I lean against the nasty-gram as you can use some shit-ass lightning cables and iOS doesn't generally care, but the other two I would say are near certain. What will be real fucky is if they don't have a faster data transfer speed at all.

Ah, the ol' "here's the test here's exactly what you need to do to be successful" followed by "lol that was never the real test."

That would barely scratch the surface, I'm afraid. For quite a lot of America, not owning a car is simply not feasible. I don't have a large friend/family group, but in 4 cases now, we've had to relocate our families a town over because wages aren't keeping up with cost of living. So we all have long commutes now. There are no buses, trains, etc. We were priced out of housing market. When my landlord sold the property and forced my move 5-6 years ago, I could rent and pay 30% more for a smaller place, I could buy for what I was paying if I wanted to move my family of 5 into a two bed with no yard, etc, or I could move a town or two over pay a bit more, and get a decent size house for my family. Today if I had to buy a house, I couldn't even come close to affording the place I live in now, especially not at 7-9% interest compared to the 3.5% I got.

Now I guess you could still say fuck me I should have given up my dogs, moved my family into a shoe box and just walked to save the planet, but even then that's not really feasible. In a town of 60k I moved from, there is only bussing, and even then they don't run often enough to a wide enough range of places that you're not building in additional hours of the day to get where you're going. And they often don't run past 7pm or before 7am. And that's most of America. Even in large cities, public transportation is severely lacking compared to the rest of the civilized world.

Biking in the US should also help be a stopgap, but our whole society is so fucking car centric even that's even not really feasible. Aside from the fact that most of infrastructure rarely has bike lanes or even places to store bikes, its still lacking severely from "I'm just going a few blocks over to the bodega" every few days and is more like "just 5-10 miles to the grocery store." And this is just looking at my tiny little town where I live that is nowhere near as bad as somewhere like Houston, which is far more populous and also even less dense and less traversable by anything that's not a car.

In 2023, saying people shouldn't own cars is either ignorant of the issues around it or just classist. The Rivian CEO saying shit like this, with a starting price of $73k, is just more classist CEO bullshit. We don't even have the charging infrastructure at the moment to support everyone buying electric, not to mention I'd be willing to bet that 50% or more of this country can't even afford the starting price on whatever the cheapest electric is.

Probably should have posted a pic with a good wheel.

Firestick's are just re-skinned android, which itself is a linux distro very basically. It's not extremely difficult to get a working terminal that can install languages and packages like a normal linux distro. I think they even have OOTB support for keyboards/mice. That said, it's a lot funnier to picture them sitting there with the remote like it's super smash.

This is a bit of a crossover ep between the movie Hackers and the DS9 ep where Julian basically got introduced to a group of obviously coded autistic anarchists.

I think this is the real takeaway from this post. Someone bought this thing.