All hardware sucks.
All software sucks.
Some of it sucks different.

For at least five years now, I've seen scammers leaving fake customer service numbers for major brands all over the web. Q&A sites, open comments, wherever. The usual tip-off is that they list the SAME number as customer support for Microsoft, Apple, and Google. Or for CoinBase, PayPal, and whoever else. Obviously, call that number and you're getting scammed.

I had thought they were just trying to game search results -- put a number enough places and some non-zero number of people will find it. But in a world where AI bots are scraping the web, this approach is even more effective, because the AI bots aren't going to think critically about what they're sucking up.

Wonderful, just wonderful.

A few years back, I wrote in these very pages that Microsoft didn't want you so much to buy Windows as subscribe to its cloud services and keep your data on its servers. If you wanted a real desktop operating system, Linux would be almost your only choice.

Almost. Like, there's only one "real desktop operating system" that's not Windows, is Unix-based, focused on the desktop and userspace, and has about 15% of worldwide desktop OS market share, compared to 6% for Linux.

But pay no attention to that, this is clearly a binary choice between Windows and Linux. Carry on.

Enshittification

Apple hasn't made a laptop with a VGA port since 2012, it looks like... but Dell PowerEdge and Precision rackmounts intended for datacenter use still have 'em. Gotta connect your stuff to KVMs somehow.

Uh, back in the 80s, BITnet ran on IBM mainframes and VAXen.

...by having every frame of video relayed through Beijing?

Yeah, but it still feels kinda low-hanging fruit.
Might as well be the Brown Screen of Death.
Why not go beyond the 8-colors box of crayons?
Beige Screen of Death.
Burgundy Screen of Death.

Jets?

In early 1953, the government convened a meeting of researchers in Los Angeles to discuss the possibility of inertial navigation.
"Doc" Draper and his MIT team stuck their prototype INS unit in a B-29, but had no time to test it before flying non-stop from outside Boston.
After 2,500 miles of flying with no input from the pilots, it was only 10 miles off.
Draper went to the meeting and said that yeah, it was possible, since he'd just done it.
I feel sorry for whatever presentater followed him.

I saw this headline before any comments and thought "wait, didn't Walmart just recently announce plans to outright buy one of the brands whose TVs they sell?" So I checked and they did, but that was Vizio, not TCL, so I decided to let it lie rather than being the first commenter. But yes, certainly, TCL is a brand I associate with Walmart.

Yeah, John Hanke spent a few years in the foreign service, then after B-school founded a company that visualized geospatial data, "Keyhole," which had the CIA's venture arm In-Q-Tel as a funder. Google bought it, and it turned into Google Earth and Google Maps.

And it's not just data on where phones go (and don't - "holes" in traffic patterns can indicate restricted areas) -- there's also databases with a ton of coordinates for various places and things, and more recently with 3-d data on them from players "scanning" them.

Subaru is among the companies that wailed and gnashed their teeth when Massachusetts (and perhaps other states) passed laws saying that yes, right-to-repair does extend to cars, even cars with fancy computerized gewgaws, and manufacturers need to make those features accessible to independent shops to the point that they can repair them.

Subaru's solution was to simply disable those features on cars it sold in/around Massachusetts, if I recall. It and other manufacturers complained loudly that making things accessible to repair shops would also make them vulnerable to hackers and so on.

This article sure sounds like they were vulnerable enough to begin with.

I'm glad my Subaru is too old to have any of this stuff.

Part of the problem is rich folks who own one site and make a killing off it buying up other sites, launching features to compete with other rich folks' sites, etc.

Did Facebook buying WhatsApp and Instagram actually make things better for consumers? Probably not. Did launching Threads to compete with Twitter? Not as much as BlueSky did. Does people who own rocket companies buying media companies make the world better? Probably not.

I get more value from reading Slashdot, Fark and Quora than I do from all Meta sites combined.

In an era where all my devices will cheerily generate unique strong passwords for every site, there's just not that much upside to having 3 or 4 social media services owned by the same company.

The one sale of a social media site that I'm not sure made things measurably worse would be Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn. I mean, sure, maybe they'll eventually embrace, extend and extinguish it, but they haven't found the time yet, and although it "aligns" with their image of making products for professionals, it's not integrated with or bound to any of those products, and has its own differentiated niche.

I just read about the company whose AI "companion" chatbots for kids were telling them to harm themselves and kill adults, so maybe that company could buy this companion-robot company and combine their technologies, creating a companion robot that will help you kill the adults.

Quite possible.

I know after the Supreme Court ruling on Affirmative Action that came out of that lawsuit against Harvard, this year's incoming class at MIT had a 9% drop in students identifying as Black, Hispanic, Native American or Pacific Islander compared to last year's, and MIT felt that ruling was to blame. This could certainly be the new way of getting more people from underrepresented groups.