Take out the “half your age plus” and you might be onto something.

They’re all boosting each others’ craziness so none of them drop the dreaded list that exposes all of them, and/or the people they owe favors to.

Not really. Most people don’t care about privacy, or their personal data being sold to the highest bidder. People still use Facebook, too.

People voted for this with their wallets.

As an iPhone guy, I know we already have it like that, and our keyboard has always sucked (and none of the third party keyboards help, they all suck compared to Gboard on Android), but while we dread the day that Apple becomes a data broker like Google… that day is not here yet.

Oh — I meant strictly for health reasons. Guess I got a bit off-topic there.

But yeah, starch breaks down to sugar and we don’t need more of that. I do love my corn (maize) tortillas for wrapping up meat and vegetables though!

AOSP and production versions of Android (what’s on the Pixel) are not the same thing.

Depends on your age to a certain extent. Older men tend to value monogamy more, but we’re also older and looking for a sure thing (if we don’t have it already). Chasing tail, bedding a different young lady every night, sounds fun, but when you need someone to take care of you, it doesn’t really make sense as opposed to a long-term relationship.

If you’re younger though, you got your whole life ahead of you… just be safe. And try to avoid the crazy ones. They deserve love too, but they also take a lot of patience.

Adopt. Don’t make new people. Take in people who have been abandoned. My father had the same idea in the 1970s — I suppose I should be fortunate my mother overruled him on that one. But he had the idea almost 50 years ago, for similar reasons.

And apply a similar philosophy to the rest of your life. We all know the word recycle. And I have been a proponent of recycling for over 30 years. I’ve heard it doesn’t help. I’ve heard some municipalities take it all to the same place. I don’t care. I still do it. But I also remember when there were three words. The original slogan went “Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.” Many people forgot the first two. You can reuse and repurpose a lot of things. But you should also reduce consumption as well. Eat less processed food. Stick to protein — plant and animal (unless you’re a vegetarian/vegan obviously). Stick to the outside of the grocery store (produce, dairy, deli, meat). Bakery is nice for an occasional treat, but find out what they make in-house and not ship in frozen.

I don’t think I’m doing enough on my own. I also don’t have illusions I’ll convince many others. I’m not really trying to. I’m not trying to save the world, just survive it.

Passed it a while ago. That doesn’t mean we can’t slow down.

Humanity will evolve to deal with the changes, maybe. Maybe not.

Is that the first game? Yes, it was great. But the publisher was scummy AF and broke the game up into four parts. Now, granted, each part came with an anime DVD which gave you some of the back story/real world issues around the back story, so they did try to make it worth it. But still, it should have been one game.

Nice — I absolutely use SponsorBlock on desktop (/laptop). Did not know it was on mobile.

It’s the other way around, it’s down to GrapheneOS to support other hardware. They simply choose to focus on Pixels.

You’re onto something with the AirTags but you haven’t got it quite right. Every Apple device participates in the Find My network, which means any Apple device marked as lost will have its location reported, anonymously, by every other Apple device it can communicate with. This is a good thing, unless you’re being stalked via an AirTag placed on your person, but Apple has taken pains to mitigate this issue. One shoe company recently released shoes with AirTag compartments so parents could track their kids, and the placement should mitigate the beeping they can emit. Honestly the AirTags and Find My network do more good than harm, the impact to devices participating in the Find My network is minimal, and if it’s your device that’s lost, you don’t want people opting out so thieves can get away with stealing your stuff.

The open source thing is largely a myth, though. AOSP is what’s open source. The version of Android on Pixel phones and Nexus before them was forked from that and bundles a lot of closed source stuff, like Google Play Services, Gmail, and more. But it’s close enough to AOSP that devs can target it and it should run on most/all Android forks.

So then Samsung and others take AOSP and they fork it and make their own OS that is based on Android. They are required per licensing to use Android branding if they want Play Store access. There are other rules, like Chrome and/or Google has to be on the main launcher page, Play Services has to be included… if they don’t play by the rules, they can still fork Android, they just can’t use the name Android… like Fire OS and Switch OS. (It’s unclear if modern Switches use any Android code. Before they were released they were rumored to have forked Android. Switches absolutely do not run Android apps, but the OS borrows several cues from Android design language.)

Yes, ironically I just read another article about how Facebook/Meta has gotten around the ATT (App Tracking thing, I forget what the other T stands for) with in-app browsers. The article’s point was that all the beef between Apple and Meta is just for show and that they need each other like Apple and Google, Apple and Samsung, et al. So yeah, with you on that.

Memo about custom firmware? No. I did see the bit about Google blocking sideloading. True, I don’t follow Google/Android news as closely as I follow Apple news due to that being what I use.

That said, I know a fair bit about Android and used to do custom firmware. I know it’s never been easy, largely due to the carriers getting involved. I thought Pixels were unlocked though, at least those bought direct. In the early days when they were Verizon exclusive, the carrier bought ones were locked (this was 2016). Custom firmware in the last 5-10 years? I know a lot less about that.

That’s true. Where I was, I didn’t have access to a physical one, but could have Googled it. Google often sources Dictionary.com which includes a thesaurus, but also gives AI answers.

That said, the AI gives several choices, so it’s not choosing anything. Still, point taken.

I read about this earlier on Ars Technica. I was expecting a paywalled link. Was not expecting to find a mention of “No Longer Human.” Ars didn’t mention that. Or the chat logs. It was a long article but didn’t go into the same depth.

So, I’ve read “No Longer Human.” A more recent translation is called “A Shameful Life” and that’s a bit more apt, I think, but doesn’t have the same ring. It’s about a guy who feels less and less like a person, like what he does and feels doesn’t matter. It’s a wild book, about a double suicide, and the author later killed himself much the same way. There have been several adaptations — none of them very good. None of them quite captured the book. I wonder if it’s just unfilmable. Anyway, it’s a shame that it’s being referenced here, because it’s good literature worth considering, and I hate to see it maligned in much the same way as the Doom game was following the Columbine massacre. Relevant or not (guns in that case, suicide in this case), it’s a shame art gets associated with tragedy simply by association.

Perhaps the same could be said of AI technology, and it has been. But certainly AI needs better safeguards. According to Ars, when the guy started asking about suicide, ChatGPT said it could not help him — unless he specified he was talking about fictional characters. So he did that (Ars constantly refers to it as a “jailbreak”) for a while, and then I guess (and they guess as well) that ChatGPT just assumed that context and stopped requiring him to specify that.

Yeah, so Musk’s argument is that even though OpenAI’s product ChatGPT has more downloads, Apple should consider letting X’s Grok take the top spot because… reasons, I guess? Grok is still listed despite its antisemitic and other disgusting actions. It might be #2 (yeah it’s definitely shit, right?), it might be #5, but it’s still on the list, and it’s still available. Musk is just mad that Apple is not featuring it.

Meanwhile, Fortnite is the top downloaded free iOS game. It sits on top of the charts. Thusly, Apple has buried the chart and they refuse to feature Fortnite, instead choosing to feature Roblox and PUBG instead. It’s petty and silly, but the rankings do show which one has more downloads. That’s it. It’s not even about quality or anything.

I tend to agree with Epic (Fortnite) over Apple, but in regards to X, I’m with Apple. I may be slightly biased in that I don’t like Musk/X, but I’m with Apple strictly on the merits here. I don’t need biases to influence my reasoning here.

Not on Android. People love to stan for Android because “it’s open source,” but Android would have gone nowhere if Google didn’t buy it, and Google wouldn’t have bought it if they weren’t convinced it would let them scrape more personal data than Gmail. (And Andy Rubin made Android because he heard Steve Jobs say the iPhone would run OS X, and he thought he could probably whip up a Linux distro to run on a phone.)

You could get an iPhone and not run any apps by Google, Meta, Microsoft, X, or any of the other privacy-opposed companies. You’d also better change the default search off of Google. DuckDuckGo is an option. Ecosia might be. Not sure. The issue is, while Apple says they’re all about privacy, that’s based on them being a computer/hardware company first (and Google being a data company first). However, Apple is heavily leaning into services now — Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple News+, and more — and there are rumors they want their own search engine. So while Apple may be privacy strong now, you don’t know what they’ll be a year from now, or three, or five.

It’s like Tim Cook (Apple CEO) said about Facebook when they introduced the tracking limiter. “You can still give Facebook permission to track you all over the web, they just gotta get your permission first.” That’s true of privacy. You can still use Google, Meta, Microsoft, X, TikTok, and other privacy-violating companies’ products, but what you share is entirely up to you. You can use some of those services in Safari and block some tracking, or you can install the apps and allow it all. It’s up to you.

Or, you can buy a Pixel and reward Google’s business model, and put GrapheneOS on it. That is probably better, privacy-wise, than using an iPhone. But you’re still rewarding Google’s business model. And if they’re making so much money off your data that opting out isn’t even an option, why does the Pixel cost the same the iPhone does (and more, considering the Pixel Fold)? You are getting more RAM, but RAM is cheap. You’re not getting a better processor — Apple has won that race for years. Camera tech is about 50/50. Screen is up in the air — I think Apple’s is better, but Google et al use higher resolutions. Apple buys from the same companies but screens are made to spec which is why Apple’s are better than those by companies they buy from. Their spec is more demanding. “Good enough” is what passes in Android — it’s like how iPhones use NVMe and Androids use UFS. NVMe is more expensive, and it’s faster on paper, but in the real world? UFS is good enough. You wouldn’t see a difference, or a significant one, in real world usage. So what are you paying for in a Pixel? The lower specs plus the privacy/data factor should make the Pixel significantly cheaper… except Google is a publicly traded company, so they can’t sell it that low.

Apple may not be the best option, but they’re advertising that they are (with regards to privacy). And I think they’re trying. I’m not saying they’re saints. They are doing better than Google though. And you have to decide if that’s worth your money. And dealing with a crappy keyboard. The keyboard sucks.

I’m not sure. There have been times where I thought, this would be the perfect place for an ad break. And lo and behold… ad break. Sometimes they get cut off mid sentence and I think, either it’s automated, or maybe you’re right and they got a say but didn’t specify enough ad breaks so one was inserted semi randomly…

Yeah, I think it was meant to. Maybe the origins are same/similar.

Fun trivia: Isekai is a Japanese genre that means “trapped in another world.” Sword Art Online made it popular but it wasn’t the first, even in Japan. The idea of being trapped in a video game goes at least back to Tron in the 1980s. SAO was itself a revamp/remake of an older anime called .hack//SIGN — not officially, but it shared way too many details with that decade-older show. (The books were written around the time it was airing, but the show would have been green-lit almost a decade later, knowing there was a very similar show already out. And the same people worked on it, made the music, made the games, so yeah, similar DNA in both.) But the first isekai may have actually been Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Isekai has western origins, Japan just gave it a simple name. And now it seems like there are dozens of isekai (word is the same singularly and plurally) coming out every year, and most of them suck. But isekai is everywhere. Stephen King has written isekai — The Dark Tower, The Talisman, 11/22/63, Fairy Tale, and probably more.