How about today’s, random complete freeze. Had to hard reboot then spend 30 minutes watching it trying to “fix the issue”. It then failed to find anything. So I had to force it to reboot to windows. Then it worked fine the rest of the day.

While it was down, I was working on my 11 year old, budget laptop running Mint.

I disabled it as soon as they were launched. I also disabled the quick reply, reactions, and to text messages etc.

Yep I did it. There is still some annoying bits of it floating around that you can’t get rid of.

The phones in the midrange are getting to be better than the top end ones in my opinion. Decent enough build quality for the phone to last 3-4 years. Expensive enough that the bloatware is reduced. If the company does do a modified launcher it’s generally pretty clean.

I am liking the OnePlus 13R I picked up. Stable UI, decent battery life, and not a bad price. The stock launcher does a pretty decent job.

For my work phone I have a Pixel 8. I really regret buying it. I had to disable 30 different bloatware apps. Plus I have 4 apps that I have rejected all updates because they can’t be disabled. I also installed a launcher because the stock pixel UI is trash. The hardware is solid and works well once you clear out the buggy bloatware

Apple made a major fuckup with IOS26. I upgraded my iPad and felt nauseous from the blur effect almost instantly. I can’t completely get rid of it, just make it less horrific. Their “new” multitasking options I am not even bothering to turn on or try to use yet. This is like their 10th edition of multitasking. Let’s see if they get it right this time. Then I will bother to learn their “simple” process that usually involves having to read a manual and remember half a dozen new commands. Fuck it still takes me 2 or 3 attempts to get the the home screen without a button.

There’s a vast difference between advertising a good product that is useful to hyping trash.

Good products at a reasonable price usually require a brief introduction but quickly snowball into customer based word-of-mouth sales.

Hype is used to push an inferior or marginally useful product at a higher price.

Remember advertising is expensive. The money to pay for it has to come from somewhere. The more they push a product the higher the margin the company/investors expect to make on its sales.

This is why if I see more than one or two ads for a product it goes on my mental checklist of shit not to buy.

I have “purchased” thousands of books from Amazon, but never given them money for a book.

They run free specials all the time. FreeReadFeed scans for them. It’s a great way to discover authors to purchase their books at another site or use the library apps.

This one is extremely difficult to fix as well. Ad companies bribe politicians with reduced price advertising for political campaigns to prevent laws being passed to regulate them.

Lol me either. Their services are not nearly as good as the unauthorized streaming sites.

As somebody who grew up with one, root cellars suck.

There is always something rotting in them that you have to throw out. So you get a nasty rotten vegetable and dirt smell going all the time.

Add that in to the brined pickles/cabbage that was fermenting and it was nasty.

Running to get some carrots in the middle of the winter when it’s -25C out is not fun either.

There are assholes in every society.

There is also cultural norms that are in conflict. Tourist commonly fail to adapt or even notice when they are violating them. Which tourist are the worst often depends on which culture clashes the most societal norms.

The cycle of megacorps- this works in most industries with a lower barrier of entry.

First the industry begins as a bunch of small competing startups that build a shit ton of absolute trash. Eventually a few companies find the right formula and start to find some medicum of success. Innovation is rapid but quality is low.

Next the industry consolidates in a feeding frenzy of mergers and aqisitions. During this time innovation is high but demands for quality is also high. New startups are constant as the forming megacorps pay high prices to control innovation or suppress competition.

Then the consolidation reaches a peak. At this point innovation almost completely ceases as megacorps refuse to pay out any more. Quality rapidly decreases as the few remaining megacorps try to maximize profits. The entire industry turns to shit products and high prices.

The only thing that can save the industry from stagnation is government anti-trust action breaking up the megacorps into smaller competing companies like in the second stage.

A cheap SSD upgradeand a PS4 plays PS4 games the same way a PS5 does.

Leave a USB drive in a drawer for a couple of years and you can prove this one at home.

That’s why my backup drive is an old spinny hard drive.

That’s why I have it uploaded to a cloud service but I have the entire collection backed up on my phone, 3 computers and a few miscellaneous SD cards.

Having a collection of music in files that I own has been my go-to for years. Currently VLC says I have 701 hours of music in files on my phone. That’s only 29.2 days worth.

By default I always turn off the location setting on the camera. I disabled it as soon as they introduced it as a “feature”. I thought it was creepy as fuck and dangerous. Without the location most of the rest of the information is pretty benign.

For example her is the full metadata from a picture I took yesterday.

Aperture: 182/100 Date: 2025-07-30 15:40:26 Date digitized: 2025-07-30 15:40:26 Original date: 2025-07-30 15:40:26 Digital zoom: 1.0 Exposure bias: 0/6 Exposure mode: Auto Exposure program: Normal Exposure time: 4.7824007651841227E-4 sec. Flash: Off Focal length: 5590/1000 35mm focal length: 24 F-number: 1.8 Image width: 2304 Image length: 4096 Lens model: OnePlus 13R back camera >5.59mm f/1.9 Light source: D65 Camera make: OnePlus Camera model: OnePlus 13R Camera maker note: {“PiFlag”:“0”,“nightFlag”:“4”,“nightMode”: “-1”,“asdOut”: [“0”],“apsAsdOut”: [“1”],“apsAsdClsOut”: [“1”, “0”],“iso”: “286”,“expTime”: “0”,“fType”:“50”,“bkMode”:“0”,“aideblur”:“0”,“aisState”:“8”,“algo”: [“65,72,16,19”],“filter”: “:-1”} Lens max aperture: 182/100 Metering mode: Center weight average Orientation: Normal Photographic sensitivity: 80 X dimension: 2304 Y dimension: 4096 Scene capture type: Standard Scene type: Directly photographed User comment: oplus_2097184 White balance: Auto

The only thing they would get is the model of phone I use. Which is essentially public information for every app maker I have installed on my phone anyways.

No that never happens /S

I used to work with a supplier that hired a former Monsanto executive as their CEO. When his first agenda came out I told their sales team he was an idiot and to have fun looking for a new job a few months.

The CEO bailed after 2 years to start his own “consulting business.”

1 year later the company lost 75% of their market share and was laying off people left and right. They are still afloat barely.

After a couple years “consulting”, the CEO went to another company in 2023. He didn’t bounce fast enough and got caught on this one. He was fired 2 weeks ago and the company shut their doors except for a handful of staff to facilitate the firesale of the companies assets.

Relatively easy to do with strawberries. Look up pictures of greenhouse cultivation of strawberries. You’ll see that the fruit all hang over the edge of the beds/trays.

All you need is a robotic pickers with a color sensor on it.

The court’s decision also introduced the concept of systemic failure, which holds providers liable when they fail to adopt preventive measures or remove illegal content. Now, platforms will be expected to establish self-regulation policies, ensure transparency in their procedures, and adopt standardized practices.

Pretty sure this would cover Lemmy and most traditional forums as long as they have a written policy and standards that are consistently enforced.

In 2025 it would be anything above 3.6 million. It’s a ton of money but here’s a list of a few people that hit it.

https://aflcio.org/paywatch/highest-paid-ceos

Now if they added in a progressive tax rate for corporate taxes as well… Say anything over 500 million in net profit is taxed at a 90+% rate. That would solve all sorts of issues. Suddenly investors of all these mega corps would be pushing hard to divide up the companies into smaller entities.

Wealth tax in the modern age could be an inheritance tax. Anything over the median life earnings of individuals could be taxed at 100%. So median earnings in my area is $65K * 45 years (20-65k) = $2.93 million.