Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)PA
Posts
1
Comments
124
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Google doesn't sell your data. They sure as hell collect it, but they sell targeted ads based on that data. Selling the data itself would undermine their ad platform.

    Your position is otherwise fair. Some people (especially on Lemmy) value privacy over everything else. That doesn't mean Apple isn't guilty of a bunch of other anti consumer bullshit though.

  • I don't understand why people are still buying Apple products.

    That's what the article and lawsuit are addressing. Apple deliberately uses tactics meant to lock users into the Apple ecosystem and create artificial barriers to switching to competing devices and services.

  • I think you're farther down that slippery slope than you think you are. We have more access to foreign voices from outside the country than we've ever had in history. A lot of that is through social media owned by US companies who are not the target of this legislation.

    Twitter has been pretty instrumental in swaying public favor to the Palestinians in Gaza despite Israel (a US ally) trying to paint a different narrative. Now imagine if Twitter was owned by an Israeli company. Would we see all those horrific pictures and videos in Gaza? Would we even know if we weren't seeing them? Would we have any legal or legislative options if we did uncover feed manipulation?

    I think maybe the reason you aren't fully on board with this is that you seem to have a strong distrust of the US government. More than our foreign adversaries. That's fair and you are entitled to that. The people on the other side of the issue trust the US government more than foreign adversaries and that changes the calculation.

  • Because China has interests that are in opposition to US interests, and they can sway US opinion any way they want by covertly manipulating the feed. They absolutely can do significant harm with this, including but not limited to selecting politicians, inciting chaos and political unrest, and even economic destabilization. I'm not sure that the US government actually has a much higher potential to do you harm than a foreign enemy of the US with a weapon like social media as you stated. You could make a strong argument that the political shitshow we are currently in is partially due to foreign interference through social media, and that is before they owned the actual platforms. The US government is not incentivized to destabilize itself at least.

  • Biden claimed in his State of the Union address that the 25 percent minimum tax on the ultra-rich will raise $500 billion over 10 years. “Imagine what that could do for America,” he said.

    Maybe I'm not good at comprehending numbers at this scale but does this seem kind of low to anyone else? I mean, that's a lot of money in absolute terms but the government spent $6.3 trillion in FY 2023 alone.

    We should still do it obviously. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good and all that.

  • We're in a weird spot. On the one hand, legitimate criticisms should always be welcome especially when directed at our elected officials. In a healthy democracy we would vote out people who disappoint or underperform. On the other hand, we don't have a healthy democracy and one side is determined to vote for a man with the most extensive list of abhorrent behavior ever documented in the nation's history. Criticizing Biden just makes it more likely that a super close race will go to Trump, who is unquestionably worse than Biden.

    Part of me wants to say "let's get the Trump threat behind us and THEN we can work on building a healthier democracy," but that isn't how a healthy democracy works! If we compromise on our values to get rid of someone we disagree with, are we the baddies? It's a frustrating and scary place to be.

  • There's a lot of focus on Windows for these types of chips, but Chromebooks are probably the best use case for them right now. ChromeOS runs great on ARM and there's no legacy software to worry about, but they feel kind of slow because the ARM chips they've used have been slow. I'd love an ARM Chromebook that actually rips.

  • My first thought when I saw this post was, "That's not a baguette, that's french bread." I never connected that the gigantic long bread at the store with the stale dry crust that they label as "french bread" is supposed to be a baguette, which is French. Like they are too ashamed to actually call it a baguette because it kind of sucks but that's definitely what it's supposed to be.

    Is french bread a regional thing in the US?

  • The screen technology is the biggest differentiator. Cheap sets use LCD. Some will have local dimming zones where parts of the backlight dim in order to increase contrast a bit, but there is light bleed which I find distracting

    There's a newer tech called mini LED which is basically an LCD with an array of much smaller led backlights behind it than a cheaper set. This allows for much more precise local dimming of pixels, creating a picture with a better contrast ratio and much less light bleed.

    The more expensive stuff is OLED which is a different technology entirely. Its main benefit is that each pixel is lit independently without the need for backlighting which provides VERY deep blacks (the pixels are off), often described as a near infinite contrast ratio, with no light bleed. The main drawbacks are low peak brightness and the possibility of burn in, though both are getting better with time.

    The newest and priciest is micro LED, which uses self illuminating LEDs as pixels so it has the same contrast advantages as OLED but it has much higher peak brightness and no burn in. This is extremely expensive and not widely available yet, but is being pitched as replacing OLED eventually.

  • There's a lot of details missing here. It sort of makes sense if you are parked on the street, but it says you can also get a charge while driving. How much battery capacity can you realistically expect to get driving down this stretch of road? Like within the limitations of physics. Maybe if the highway system had this installed but it would be outrageously expensive to replace it all. I also have major doubts that a universal standard would be agreed upon by all manufacturers and municipalities.

    Money would be better spent installing more frequent charging stations, which I understand is already the plan.

  • I know Lemmy has a hate boner for Google, but come on. What about Firefox, brave, opera, edge? It's trivially easy to get a browser without Google telemetry on every single platform, and because they are all standards compliant (unlike the Internet explorer days) websites will work just fine on all of them. Chrome isn't even preinstalled in windows, mac, iOS, or most (any?) Linux distros. People aren't being forced to use it, they are downloading it. I promise you this is not humanity's biggest problem right now.

  • I'm kinda surprised another company hasn't made something to legit compete with iMessage yet.

    There have been more iMessage competitors than I can even count. None have been able to amass enough users to challenge iMessage in the US. RCS is a different approach that has a shot, but even that would require apple to implement it in order to reach ubiquity. Apple has the US messaging market by the balls and it sucks.

  • "Then stand your butt up then," said Mullin.

    "You stand your butt up," said O'Brien.

    It's kind of funny to me that these grown men were about to have a fight in the middle of a congressional hearing over a mean tweet, but saying "ass" isn't appropriate.