• 0 Posts
  • 32 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 26th, 2023

help-circle
  • This is my bet as well. I think at some point, foldable screens will get good enough to get mass market, and then it will be about how thin/light they can make those so they get bigger screens but the device remains pocketable. Not to mention, screen tech matches/exceeds today. That’s the practical appeal of things like holos outside of just being aesthetically “future looking.”

    I’m also very interested in the idea of AR glasses that can be worn normally, but that’s pretty limited by physics right now (battery and camera tech especially.)














  • I mentioned elsewhere, but people also don’t realize that this data is often collected in ways they don’t expect. For example, if you have a club card at a retailer, your purchase data is likely being shared outside of just that retailer. So you go to the store and buy some kitty litter for the first time. Then all of a sudden one of your other services start showing you ads for cat toys. Location data is sold all of the time now, and that’s often through carriers. Oh, you started going to the gym, best show some ads for workout gear…


  • This is generally wrong. Disconnect your device from the internet, and on most (for sure Siri/Alexa) will still activate if they hear the wake word. They won’t activate it they don’t. Both companies have basically said that the wake word functionality is hardware blocked, and that’s not been disproven.

    Second, not all assistants/companies are created equal. For example, Apple has made the process of involving human review opt-in. Apple also has no incentive to use this data for anything other than improving Siri. They’re not an advertising company and if anything are fairly hostile to others using Apple customer’s data for that type of thing without explicit consent. Contrary to Alexa/Google, which has an incentive to use your Voice recordings to advertise to you, EG: you ask your VA what the symptoms of food borne illness are, they show an ad or suggest a search for pepto.

    And the reality is your phone absolutely does 110% spy on you. Just not by listening to you. It is easy to understand why so many people refuse to believe their voice assistants are not spying on them.

    This part is mostly correct. Again, in the case of Apple the phone isn’t spying on you, but all of the shit you put on it is. All of those apps are collecting data and collating it in ways that people don’t understand. So even though I have a burner Facebook account, since it’s tied to my number or email (can’t remember which) and I’m sure most of my social graph shares contacts with everything that asks, as soon as I created that account FB suggests to me a whole lot of people I actually know even though I gave it no other real data. People also don’t realize that all of this data is often brokered through lots of services, so when you slow down buying tampons or something, another shopping app starts suggesting prenatal vitamins. This is a large part of the reason lots of major retailers have club cards or whatever.


  • Scrolled too far down before a mention of Comcast. I was in charge of a handful of locations where we needed broadband. They were geographically diverse enough that we had to go with different options. Comcast was the most expensive, and by a lot. Like 30%, and the slowest in dl/ul by a large margin. Comcast was also the second worst one to deal with. The actual worst one was the faster, slightly less expensive Spectrum. They had by far the worst service. A couple of locations had small DSL companies that were a delight to deal with and reasonably priced, but slow as balls. And then one location had a municipal fiber option that was the cheapest, fastest, and easiest to deal with by far. Like, I swear to god I could call them and talk to a real network engineer that no joke actually knew more than I did. I don’t mean this to sound arrogant; I am not great with networking. I’m just saying compared to “yeah, I have that in bridge mode because I don’t need router capability I’m running my own” and being answered with something like “whoa I’m going to need to get a supervisor” vs them being like “hey can you open a terminal and…” Yes, yes I can open a terminal.



  • Bluesky just barely hit a million users is still invite only and is largely in a beta state, and though I’m not on it, everyone I know says it’s a zombie platform and they’d rather be on Mastodon for nerd shit or Threads for normie shit. Threads has over 100m users already. The numbers alone make Bluesky not really worth mentioning, and effectively Threads killed it within the first day. Dorsey has also shown a track record of having no idea what he’s doing. Probably half of the things people think about with Twitter come from the community. @mentions, rt, the term “tweet”, etc. The twitter app was developed by a third party and bought.

    As much as Zuckerberg sucks, Meta actually runs like a real company with adults at the helm. Dorsey’s already fucking up bluesky not learning anything from his time at twitter and not making moderation a priority. Brands are already embracing Threads over Twitter and Bluesky because they don’t want their ads showing up next to porn and nazis.

    Oh, and as for GDPR, Meta has already stated they plan for a later launch, and again since it’s a company of (sociopathic?) adults, they’ll actually get it done, but it’s already effectively over.