I don’t know what’s up with the algorithm pushing these lately. If it’s a video with 4 views from a channel with no subscribers I’m probably not interested in it. Sometimes they have a good thumbnail/title so I give them a chance but 9/10 times it’s terrible. Also often extremely right wing for whatever reason.

I thought that without blocking cookies the tracking is still active, even if you’re not being served ads from them. In those same LinkedIn privacy settings you’re automatically opted into having your data used to train AI models.

LinkedIn has some of the most obfuscated and complex ad targeting settings I’ve encountered. There needs to be a retirement to have a one click solution to disable ad personalization.

I miss the old topic specific internet forums so badly, but having tons of different accounts made the barrier to entry high so I understand why they died out.

Honestly the sacrifices they make are pretty reasonable for every day use too. I used ultra cheap Umidigi smartphones for four years as a student and they held up quite well with a huge upside being shockingly good repairability. The biggest downside is the rear camera usually, I wish I had better photos from those times.

You can get the Umidigi G9 5G for just $99 shipped on aliexpress. Even budget phones under $100 get 8gb RAM, 128GB storage , and 90hz displays now. There really aren’t as many sacrifices as you’d expect, and by the time you spend $200 you even get plenty respectable cameras that would be flagship quality just a few years ago.

He’s far too busy with X, Trump, and his relationship drama to have any time to do anything close to being involved. Of the company’s he’s bought or been involved in creating SpaceX is toward the bottom of his priorities from what I hear.

Not a Tesla fan and I absolutely despise the cult around Elon. SpaceX is a bit different though. Luckily with Elon’s many, many side project misadventures he’s pretty hands-off with SpaceX. Ultimately it comes down to being largely engineer driven and given sufficient (but yes, still government) funding to try new things without the scrutiny of direct government agencies. The hours are usually terrible from what I hear, but this varies team to team.

My biggest complaint is that they do lowball engineers using the stock as reasoning for why it’s worth accepting. FWIW historically that has been the case, and many engineers there do effectively have golden handcuffs. But expecting infinite golden handcuff level growth forever is unrealistic.

At the same time those Republicans who they’d hope to gain support from by allowing to vote by mail now believe that voting by mail will lead to fraud.

Honestly early voting isn’t too much of a pain. I already know I’ll be out of town for work on election day but because of early voting I’ll be able to get it done before then. It’s silly how complicated a process they make registration and how most of the polling locations are churches, but allowing voting by mail won’t fix the main issue here, registration.

I have purchased both. I prefer Tasker but not as many things work as in Macrodroid in Android 14. So a big +1 for Macrodroid from me.

Offsite backup is not optional for anything important. It’s worth paying for AWS or literally any other online storage solution for that copy. You don’t want a natural disaster to lead to the loss of all your life’s photos for example.

I also personally don’t recommend doing your own software for anything related to backups, you can’t test edge cases easily and it could easily lead to loss of data. I once used an app that attempted to manage its own backups delete it’s online backup when it lost its local data as it attempted to back up the blank local data.

Web browsers don’t integrate to a single account and payment system, nor do they preemptively load entire websites before you start browsing. So you’re always waiting for actions to complete or for images to load which feels slower. Mobile websites also tend to be very bloated slowing things down further than if the same functions were done natively in an app. There’s also no consistency between websites so you never know when something will/won’t work nor how far away you are from checkout. And then to top it all off there’s browser compatibility, which is typically pretty poor for anything that isn’t Chrome/Safari.

If a web browsers could really do the same thing all these companies wouldn’t feel the need to make their own device specific apps.

Even the best websites don’t feel as smooth as native UI elements, and somehow browser compatibility is still a very common issue. Signing in with Google and using gpay for checkout is kind of close, but each website has different design elements complicating the experience while giving up the same amount of your personal data as if using an everything app.

This is why everything apps are so popular in many parts of the world. Using a mini-app from the internet running within another app is far preferable to downloading a whole app you may never need to use again. The way they do it in China is so seamless even if you’ve never visited the business before. There’s never any special account creation or entering of payment information.

Obviously it’s pretty terrible in terms of user privacy since the everything app has basically unchecked access to all of your personal information and habits, but the convenience is incredible and feels decades ahead of how apps work in the US.

The ads on over the air programming are so so terrible. And even with a great antenna the many channels aren’t exactly the highest quality content even if they didn’t have ads.

YouTube has taken the place of over the air TV and for good reason.

If they had an actual plan or history of preserving games I’d not care about emulator development. But with the industry track record being so poor we need emulators if for nothing else for preservation.

So much culturally interesting data has already been lost to time which I bet future historians would absolutely love to have access to. The internet archive is missing much of the early internet, while old iPhone and Android apps are largely unable to be run even if you have the APK/IPA required,

WMATA busses need serious work and there aren’t enough bike lanes for last mile connectivity, but by US standards it’s about as good as it gets outside of NYC.

The busses are the main differentiation between European and US cities in my experience. Only Seattle and SF get close to running a decent bus service.

The generics I’ve tried all work but noticably worse. The quality of the bristles is different and it doesn’t leave the same clean feeling. The price of the genuine replacements is stupid and they keep increasing it, but I’ve given up on finding a good quality generic one and just pay the price. They don’t need replacing that often anyway.

If anyone does know of a good quality C2 compatible replacement please do let me know though.

Dental and vision are never included in US health insurance and operate on a totally different confusing insurance framework. They’re only available through separate plans and have their own deductables and terms. But unlike health insurance the premiums are generally orders of magnitude lower for both vision and dental.

The problem I’ve had is that the maximum benefit is typically in the range of $2k-$3k/yr for dental which is quickly hit if you have any oral surgery needs. Unlike with healthcare I don’t feel ripped off when paying for dental/vision since the few hundred dollars per year covers preventative care visits too.

As an outsider I’m just amazed that with Brexit there wasn’t a large push to unify with Ireland. They never wanted to leave the EU and the border issues it has created have caused so many headaches.

Without a distro to rally behind I’m personally somewhat skeptical. Ubuntu was the best shot we had but since switching everything over to SNAPs it’s on the slow side. With the number of Windows ads and early end of support for Windows 10 there’s a real opportunity for desktop Linux, but until there’s a well supported distro that genuinely doesn’t require using the terminal I can’t see there being mass adoption.