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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • There’s broad support for stopping predatory behavior by corporations that are targetting kids (and adults, but mostly kids). This is mostly the same stuff people have been complaining about for a decade or so at this point. Loot boxes, gacha mechanics, ad infested (and therefore stuffed with spyware for “marketing”), complicated multilayered digital currencies, battle passes, daily login rewards, etc. Basically all the well known dark patterns.

    However rather than addressing the bad behavior directly, politicians either through malice or incompetence (likely at the behest of corporate lobbyists) keep putting forth these ID laws that just make things worse instead of actually solving the problem people have been complaining about.












  • LG owns an advertising company. Just like Google tracks everything you do on the internet via their analytics and search products and then feeds you targeted ads, LG tracks everything you watch, all the electronics in your house, and any conversations you have nearby, then feeds you ads through their TVs.

    Just like google is an advertising company first and everything else second it’s probably a good idea to think of LG as an advertising company that happens to have a consumer electronics company bolted on. Their TVs are nothing but trojan horses these days, designed to spy on everything they can and get ads in front of your face.




  • So I bought one of these for my wife a couple months ago and she loves it. She likes that the eink screen is easier on her eyes and that it removes the temptation to open up social media and doom scroll. I do however have a few gripes about the X3.

    First, the biggest issue for me is the device isn’t backlit. For my usage pattern that’s a deal breaker. The upside is that the company just released the X4 Pro and that is backlit, although it’s also a bit pricier (not by a ton, it’s still just barely sub-$100, but it’s noticeable). My wife has a rechargeable light that attaches to the X3 magnetically which she’s happy with, but that’s not for me.

    Second rather than using something sensible like USB-C it uses a semi-proprietary magnetic charger with pogo pins. Not only is that another annoying cord to keep track of, but it’s unacceptably easy to short the charging cable and start a fire. I really hope they see reason and release a later revision of the device that uses USB-C (the slightly larger X4 does include USB-C charging, but that model is discontinued).

    Third the buttons are kind of hard to press at times. This is more of a nitpick but I’ve got larger hands/fingers and it ruins the ergonomics of the device for me.

    Fourth, these devices have an incredibly small quantity of RAM and as such they have to get clever just to open and display ebooks. They heavily cache indexes to the SD card to speed up access and those indexes take time to generate. When you first open a book and periodically while navigating you’ll be subjected to very long pauses while the firmware generates and saves that books index files.

    Overall the devices are interesting, and I can see how some people could find them useful/enjoyable, but they’re also far from perfect and there’s a lot of room to improve.