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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 12th, 2023

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  • Many telecom operators have a special code that is used for recording. When you’re making a call, you or the other party may press the record button. This will save both the input via microphone and the output via the speakers as one audio file for future use. When you press this button a special code is sent back to the telecom.

    Until recently most places in the USA did not do anything with this code. But now it’s catching up to the rest of the world. Once this is pressed, a voice will tell both parties that they are being recorded in the recording. This is so that you can’t later say “I didn’t know they were recording me!” and if you have every-party consent laws, then that recording is illegal so it cannot be used as evidence and the person recording could actually be charged with a crime.

    You can start the recording with an accidental face press, pocket press, keypad entry, or a malicious app. If either of you accidentally started it, then there’s your answer. If neither of you did, then most likely one of you is infected or one of you were connected to a relay tower decrypting your calls and then passing them through to a real tower. Whoever was operating this relay station was a n00b idiot though. Both are concerning.






  • Road trip? Usually week or night of.

    Airline travel within 4 hours, domestic or international is usually 2 days before hand.

    Airline travel across the world is usually planned as a time block a month or two ahead of time. The actual destination and activities being planned as the dates get closer.

    Exceptions are scheduled events. If I have an event to attend in a location, I’ll make a hotel reservation and book tickets for the thing. Then checkup options for travel there. Sometimes it’s part of a multileg journey.

    Often I don’t know where in the world I will even be the week leading up to the thing. So I tend to either not purchase travel tickets, or buy a few different ones from hubs globally that are cheap and easy to get to.







  • I like the idea of Reddit and it works much better than Lemmy. But the moderation and AI scraping make it a no-go site for me anymore which is a shame.

    I love internet forums and have been a mod at some and very high poster at other. But the snowball effect gets them. If there’s no traffic, there’s no posts, so there’s no traffic. You need to have a good community to make it work. One area reddit really shines, small communities exist on a huge platform. Great idea before the enshittification.

    I hate discord and the fact that anyone replaces customer support or fan support pages with it, is just fundamentally broken. The idea of a forum is that the question is asked and archived. 20 years later someone else googles the question and sees the answer and all the replies that lead up to it. That’s what forums are for. In discord you ask a question and 30 seconds later it’s gone forever eaten by useless drivel. Never to be searched or found again. Idiotic.



  • The GPU on my laptop is also upgradeable. And when I want to upgrade it, it’ll be time for a new CPU too.

    As it is now, very few GPUs in a laptop that can pull almost 200W and have 16GB of RAM. Mine is slower than the newest generations for speed but its quicker for long processing and large memory. When a 24GB GPU based on the 5x architecture comes out, I’ll be ready with a new CPU too.


  • 😂

    Freedumb!

    Require licensing, registration, live gps tracking, and geofencing with a proprietary app because Freedumb people ruled that’s what the free market needs.

    They then rule, nah. Actually just ban em all.

    And now even if you bought them, buy them elsewhere, or just try to use them on a US device you won’t be able to. Selling them is illegal both from a company and on third party resale if it passes. Even police departments that are using them as spies and have the DJI alerting system installed all over town to track and log everybody in the sky, will need to get rid of it. But I doubt they will, of course it will be exempted for the pigs in blue.

    If you can’t beat em, or even match their capabilities, ban em or implement 100%+ tarrifs. New American motto of the “free” market.


  • Their hardware is just poor. They can charge whatever they like, I’m fortunate enough to not look at prices for that type of kit. Objectively, their hardware sucks compared to many other brands, especially at the same price point.

    Their OS sucks for 90% of my use cases. If your “work” involves you just using a browser then yes you can use a big phone to get your work done. Slap an arm in a big case with a keyboard as a “pc” or a big screened arm for a tablet, or a small screen for a phone. But if you do anything where you use a computer, you need an x86 architecture and you need certain hardware capabilities. Over the time, they have all been lacking in performance even at the highest tier, and the price has been high end. Overall makes zero sense. The locked down *nix systems hide everything useful to make it pretty. Isn’t compatible with real software. And isn’t backwards compatible. I can install windows and my software from the mid 90s or 2000s or today and it just f’cking works. That’s why Windows is king. Bloated absolutely. But it just works.

    That doesn’t make me hate the company. That just makes me sad for the uninformed people that get fooled into spending their hard earned money on sub optimal pieces of kit.

    What makes me hate them is this game of “we just invented this new feature from 10 years ago!” and then all their fan bois go apeshit over it like they just stepped into the future. And they’re too stupid to know they’re being lied to and manipulated for profits. But they are also vocal and arrogant about their stupidity and ignorance, so I don’t like them either.

    My phone has more RAM, more storage, better screen, better camera, faster charging by an order of magnitude (120W wired, 50W wireless…), more radio transceivers for global connectivity, better battery life, and honestly looks better. There is not a single thing I prefer about an iPhone and there is not a single qualitative metric an iPhone beats my phone on.

    My laptop has more RAM, more storage, better screen, better camera, faster and more charging, more ports, upgradability, and is a BEAST that will eat even mid range desktop computers. There is no equivalent Apple product. Not even close. And when you factor in the best and beefiest new macs can’t even run my software, it’s not even an option. Now my battery life sucks and it looks like a zombie movie prop, but it is actually functional. I can run a simulation or a LLM/ML algo that stresses the CPU at 100%, the Quadro RTX5000 at 100%, and gobbles up 120GB of system RAM plus the 16GB of VRAM writing TBs of data to the 5 internal M2 drives. And I can do so indefinitely with the temps peaking to 100C and limiting to about 300W of power draw. It blasts air out of 3 sides that I could probably cook an egg in. But it doesn’t thermal limit after 5 mins of web browsing like the Macbooks or the Airs. It’s a beast that is made to beast and it does. Apple can’t even compete in the class.

    For a tablet, I don’t have a need. My phone gives me a giant screen and my tiny auxiliary laptop does everything I need. My aux laptop is beefier than most, but it would be slower than a top of the line mac doing basic tablet things of web browsing. If I did need a tablet I’d just get a Xiaomi Pad. But in general I feel that the entire tablet market is a solution looking for a problem that only exists because Apple and fan bois are idiots again. I’ve been taking notes on TabletPCs for 20 years now. Seriously, Windows XP had a tablet mode. As did every one after. My laptops have touch input. My laptops in university the screen swiveled and then laid flat on the keyboard with a stylus to write on the screen. All of those fancy new Apple pen features? I had them in 2005. Pressure sensitive, gyro enabled for brush strokes/widths. Eraser on the other end. It was capacitive and needed a proprietary pen which was evil to say then. Now that’s Apple motto and they stole the idea and people are believing it’s new.

    If they release a good product, I’ll try it. I’m not brand loyal. If they keep releasing shit, I’m going to keep calling them out.