Pxtl @ Pxtl @lemmy.ca

- 🌇 #HamOnt,🍁

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2 yr. ago

As much as I prefer the open core of the Android OS, it's silly to focus on Apple on this, since Apple phones generally last much longer than their Android counterparts.

Hard, fixed, unforgiving legal requirements about length of support-patches and not breaking advertised software-based functionality on internet-connected devices you sell would solve multiple problems:

• It would prevent shitty unsecured devices from corrupting the internet
• It would discourage companies from manufacturing e-waste devices that they cannot reasonably support long-term
• It would allow end-users to keep devices far longer
• It would force software teams to focus on maintainability of their older versions and backportability of bugfixes, meaning a stronger trend towards codebase-compatibility.

Basically, clarify the legal warranty concept: Hardware has whatever crappy 1-year or 2-year warranty is mandated. But software that is tightly coupled to that hardware and bundled with it has a 10-year warranty. Why? Because software does not rot. It does not decay. It is only killed. Either by external actors hacking it, or by the owners shutting down the server side of it, or by incompatible patches being deliberately installed into it that cause it to break. Which means the normal excuses of entropy and electromechanical wear do not apply here. It breaks because it was killed.

This is the compromise approach. Mobile devices are horrible for breaking old APIs. I'm not saying that they need to release the new, upgraded versions of new software for their old devices indefinitely. I'm just saying they must keep the old software running on their old device with its advertised featureset for an extremely long period. That means keeping the lights on at the server farm and keeping security running. This is only an extreme burden if you want to make new software and abandon the old software. Which, realistically, is how software works - we want to make a new enhanced mobile client that has new features, but those new features require a new API with the server, and that means breaking the old API sometimes, which means breaking the old client. That's where supporting old software is hard.

But to be clear, that's taking something that was working, and killing it.

When that is coupled to a physical device that would become e-waste, that should not be legal. At least not within the physical lifespan of the hardware. And most electronic devices will run happily for a decade if we only let them.

Because batteries are expensive. So by default you're targeting a luxury price, whether it's luxury sports car or a luxury SUV.

Okay, but the new Twitter reinstated him, and a bunch of Nazis.

I mean, old Twitter was jokingly called "the hellsite" by its users but its new Elongated form is quite a lot worse.

About half the country lives in the Windsor to Quebec city corridor, a region with population density of Spain.

Most of the northern wilderness is unoccupied. It makes no sense to say we can't have good passenger rail just because Victoria Island exists.

Depending on employment law in his state, that may be actionable.

"fired" implies "termination with cause". That is, they believe you screwed up and so you were let go without severance, and in a pinch they're willing to go to court on that.

"Laid off" implies they did bulk downsizing and unless the company finds a way to weasel out of it, there's going to be severance and employment insurance payouts and the like.

In the Southern states this is a distinction without a difference because they just shoot you in the face and toss you into the body pit there regardless of the cause of the termination of your employment, but in the rest of the world this distinction is real.

Yes.

But here's the thing:

Reddit/Lemmy: those people have equal voice to you or me. Of course they can amplify that voice with sockpuppets, but still - one account one vote.

Old Twitter: those people have downmodded influence. Twitter knew everybody hates them and treated them like the garbage they are.

New Twitter: those people rule the roost, because they're willing to pay Elon $8/mo for a megaphone for their jackassery.

This is overstated.

In the old days, there was a hierarchy of reputability. At the top you had the bluechecks that generally represented reputable sources of information, who had premium billing in the platform. Then you had the normies. Then you had the slush-pit of soft-blocked people that were shoved into the "other replies" box because everybody hated them and they only followed their network of bots.

Now, the hierarchy is reversed. The slush-pit people are now have blue-checks, the algorithmic boost on blue-checks is even stronger, and half of the old reputable blue-checks have left.

This is like saying "Reddit/Lemmy has always been awful" if we made the upvotes/downvotes of all the worst people on the site worth 100X what a normal person's upvote/downvote was worth. Yes, there have always been problems, but they can get worse.

There are monopolistic things about the Play Store, but compared to competing platforms it's a lot better than most. Android allows you to install apps from outside of the store without any extreme hacks. Contrast that vs iPhone or game consoles.

But yes, the fact that Google doesn't want anybody else to have official stores bundled on Android/Play-services supported devices is a huge anticompetitive action. Also, the Play Store does get some premium support from the OS.

But I've used 3rd-party stores in addition to installing direct-downloaded apps and the workflow isn't bad at all. I just wish you could whitelist a domain when using the browser, so I could say "I only want to download APKs from HumbleBundle.com since their app is gone" without opening up APK installs from all domain names in the browser. Possibly some kind of store-signature system would be better for this instead of controlling by installing app.

Have you ever considered not working for a giant corporation to fix their products for them for free?

Honestly I'm wondering what Google's long term plan for securing their productivity suite is. The amount of spam I get through Google drive share requests is shocking.

No person or organization is really suitable to be the arbiter of truth

Courtrooms are arbiters of truth literally all the time. There are plenty of laws for which truth is a defence, and dishonesty is punished.

When battling misinformation, the problem is not that lying on the internet is legal - it is still actionable. Fraud is still illegal. False or misleading advertisements are still illegal. Defamation is still illegal. Perjury is illegal in the criminal law sense, not just torts. Ask Martha Stewart who the "arbiter of truth" is.

The problem is that it's functionally impossible to enforce on the scale of social media. If 50,000 people call you a pedophile because it became a meme even though it was completely untrue, and this costs you your job and you start getting death threats, what are you going to do about that? Sue them all?

So we throw up our hands and let corporations handle it through abuse policies, because the actual law is unworkable - it's "this is illegal but enforcing it is so impractical that it's legal". Twitter and Facebook don't have to deal with that crap so we let them do a vague implementation of the law but without the whole "due process" thing and all the justice they can mete out is bans.

If you disagree, then I've got a Nigerian prince who'd like to get your banking info, and also you're all cannibals.

Libertarians gonna libertarian.

Lemmy communities need to start banning domains that post clickbait garbage like this.

Is this like the previous theory that Windows 12 would be subscription based?

“The Copilot is like the Start button,” Nadella explains. “It becomes the orchestrator of all your app experiences. So for example, I just go there and express my intent and it either navigates me to an application or it brings the application to the Copilot, so it helps me learn, query and create — and completely changes, I think, the user habits.”

Saying "copilot is like the start button" is not saying "copilot will replace the start button", the article is dishonest clickbait and stupid.

This is just MS taking another kick at Cortana, this time powered by LLM generative AI.

Welp, that's going to be the new way that games raise prices. Game upfront costs have never been keeping pace with inflation, while game development costs constantly rise, so they're always inventing new ways to raise the price. Going forwards, every game will use this strategy of "oh look, our game is still under $90US, but if you want to get into the "pre-release beta" you have to pay for the $120 PreRelease Deluxe Premium Launch" which effectively will mean "game launch date is a lie, launch date is really just price-cut-to-old-price date".

Uh, you know that happens regularly in courtrooms right? Like, almost every court battle hinges on what's true and what's not. And courts are an arm of the state.

In some cases it's directly about the truth of speech. Fraud, defamation, perjury, filing a false report, etc. are all cases where a court will be deciding whether a statement made publicly is true and punishing a party if it was not. Ask a CEO involved in a merger how much "free speech" they have.

This highlights an ugly truth about climate change:

Unless you're an off-grid person who eats your own produce and generates power on-site, being rural isn't green at all. There's a reason Canada gives rural people a larger carbon-rebate and discounts the carbon taxes off of farm fuels, and still rural people scream bloody murder about carbon taxes.

Fundamentally, if you're rural for funsies and your life involves heavy interactions with the urban world (shopping, working, etc) then you're living an unustainably carbon-intensive life. But since we valorize rural people as the Salt of the Earth (and give them disproportionate representation in electoral bodies) nobody can say that out loud.

At least there used to be a time when rural towns were built around rail infrastructure. Canada was built by trains, so originally small towns were dense, one-main-street affairs abutting a train station. But now it's all about highways. And those are bad for the Earth.

Transit depends on density. That can even be tight pockets of density, like a small town with a dense low-rise street-wall and no driveways and parking-lots. But you can't feasibly run transit down rural roads, or suburban keyholes.

Then you are in a province where the carbon price is not run by the fed. The fed says every province has to have a carbon price, but has minimal opinion on where the revenue goes. If a province does not implement their own system, then they get the federal carbon tax-and-rebate system.

The federal tax-and-rebate system has no income rules. You can be broke or a billionaire you still get your cut. The amount is based on province (the ctax money does not leave the province), family size, and urban vs rural (rural folks get a bigger chunk of the pie).

If you're in a province where the carbon price is federally run, you get the rebate. The average person should break even with the rebate.