tiramichu @ tiramichu @lemm.ee

Posts

0

Comments

545

Joined

2 yr. ago

Those few days between jobs are moments of pure joy.

You're finished with all the bullshit of the previous job, and are blissfully unaware of whatever fresh bullshit is waiting for you at the new one.

Oh no!

Anyway...

10 years isn't the worst run, but it still proves the point that anything which needs an app or connected web service to function will inevitably become e-waste, and maybe sooner than you'd like.

Earlier today, I was looking at reviews of portable Bluetooth speakers. One had a bullet point "No equalizer app, with only basic EQ functions available on the speaker itself."

The review intended that to be a negative, but I was like "Hell yeah that's what I want!"

Functionality in pure hardware means it will keep on working as long as the hardware works. It means that I myself get to be the one who decides when I need an upgrade, not when the company forces my hand.

Every single tech purchasing decision I make these days, having freedom from apps, cloud, or any other ticking time bomb is top of my feature list.

Yes it matters. Loads of manufacturers are doing soldered wifi on some of their models. Delll, HP, they are all at it.

And even if your wifi wasn't soldered, wouldn't it be better to know you were buying a machine where it would just work out the box rather than needing replacement?

There plenty of other things to consider too, though, especially for laptops.

WiFi chipset, trackpad hardware, webcam, all can lead to a sad time with the wrong manufacturers and driver support

So, could be any time then?

This problem has become more prevalent with AI, but deceptive item listings have been part of the online shopping minefield for a long time.

The same rule applies now as it always has - if it seems too good to be true, then it is.

I'm gonna flip this around and answer "what's the longest I ever slept?" - which was about 21 hours

I was living with my parents then and crashed out super early at 9PM. My dad came home from work the next day at 6PM to find I was still asleep and woke me. No idea how much longer I'd have kept on sleeping if he hadn't.

The evening hours are the best because it's the time of day where the world doesn't want anything from you.

"72% of that group say real-world rewards are 'important' when selecting a new mobile game to download" - says report commissioned by company whose business model is putting real world rewards in mobile games and apps.

Piss off.

I play games to escape the real world a bit and forget it exists, not to slave away doing meaningless tasks for pennies.

I may not have realised I was using a British English specific term :)

"High Street" does etymologically derive from the main shopping street(s) in a town where most shops would have premises, as you suggest.

In a contemporary usage it means physical retail (versus online) and also connotes city centre, versus places that have enormous out of town "big box" stores.

So economists might say "The high street saw the best Christmas profits in five years" and they mean all retail in that sector of business.

So when I said CVS were a "high-street pharmacy" what I really meant to imply by that was "they are a brick-and-mortar chain with physical stores on streets in towns and cities all over the place"

CVS is a high street pharmacy chain.

So the "CVS guy" is the cashier on checkout at the store.

A lot of the reviews that are for the "wrong item" are there because of the seller repurposing the listing.

The seller will list some item that is easy to get good reviews on, like a hammer or something. Then after they rack up several hundred 5* reviews saying "Works great, seems high quality!" they edit the listing to change the item title, description, everything to a new product but keep the reviews.

Then the new product gets a big boost from the high review count and star rating of the previous product.

Very scummy.

It's a disaster out there right now when it comes to decent review sites.

Google is absolutely complicit in this, if not entirely to blame. Their search ranking has over the years pushed to the top all the low effort listicles that are full of sponsored Amazon links and no actual reviews, and a lot of the real reviews have disappeared due to traffic starvation.

And now those top sites are often just AI nonsense that steal content from whatever few other sites actually exist. Nonsense "reviews" just spouting the product specs, from people who have never even put their hands on the product for real.

My personal go to these days (although I wish it wasn't) is youtube.

There's still a load of nonsense listicles on youtube, but with a bit of searching you can usually find some actual person who is genuinely knowledgeable about the product category, and has a bunch of different ones actually in their possession for real, that they can compare and give honest opinions on.

Personally, I don't feel that analogy is a fair comparison.

Begging a dev for new features for free would definitely be entitlement, because it's demanding more, but what OP is upset about is reduction in the service they already had.

I don't think any free tier user of any service could have any right to be upset if new features were added only for paying customers, but changing the free tier level is different.

In my opinion, even if you aren't paying for it, the free tier is a service level like any other. People make decisions about whether or not to use a service based on if the free tier covers their needs or not. Companies will absolutely try to upsell you to a higher tier and that's cool, that's business after all, but they shouldn't mess around with what they already offered you.

When companies offer a really great free tier but then suddenly reduce what is on it, then in my opinion that's a baiting strategy. They used a compelling offering to intentionally draw in a huge userbase (from which they benefit) and build up the popularity and market share of the service, and then chopped it to force users - who at this point may be embedded and find it difficult to switch - to pay.

So yeah, it doesn't matter in my opinion that the tier is free. It's still a change in what you were promised after the fact, and that's not cool regardless of whether there is money involved or not.

Ohh yeah. I remember the tech news coverage of the cars being so easy to steal, just didn't realise there was a "challenge" about it. Unbelievable Hyundai and Kia got away without immobilisers for so long. Really cheeky of them to cut that corner, and it backfired.

What the heck is that?

A small animal anethetiser which can fit a variety of small animals, not just one :)

For sure right!

What really changed though wasn't the size of the computer, but how the computer produced value.

Initially, a lot of what people wanted computers for was to get their "document stuff" done, and that was what took up all the room, because of the printer, and scanner, and paper, and filing drawers, and so-on. And soooo many CDs for software you needed to get that all done.

Back when I was a kid, my babysitter used our Windows 95 machine to write up and print off a cover letter for job applications, and it was 9 year old me who taught her how to do it, lol. And that was the value.

I bet even when your friend set up their shiny new all-in-one, they still had the old computer and all its attached devices hiding away shamefully in the 'office' there somewhere....

So it wasn't really miniaturisation that killed the computer room as much as it was every aspect of life going online. No physical disks anymore because software comes over the Internet. No need to print because 99% of our life and business can be done online. So all the things that filled up the computer room just ceased to be needed, and so did the room that held them.

There was a brief and remarkable period in history from the mid 90s to the late 2000s where homes all across the land had a room that was referred to as "The Computer Room"

Not "The Office" no; for this room was not so pedestrian. It was a room whose entire function was to house the great monolith of The Computer.

A corner desk in veneered pine-effect plywood, atop which sat the great beige tower and CRT. A printer and a scanner straddling the desk like sentinels. Racks of CD holders built right into the fake pine, and a lidded box for floppy disks in a smoky translucent plastic, that for some reason came with lock and key as if the disks were precious jewels.

These days we have no need for such things, and the home office is once again simply an office. But for a while we had The Computer Room, and some part of me misses you.