Okay. Thanks for all but admitting that exactly none of those needs are actually solved by the feature we're talking about.

You don't have a need. You just don't want your routine to be disrupted by a company taking away a feature that works for you. And it's entirely okay to feel that way. But it's not really a good reason to have designed such an overly complex and, at least in the real world, frequently under-performing protocol in the first place.

Keep telling yourself that I'm the one who doesn't understand the tech if it helps you sleep at night.

Then neither will casting, because casting by definition requires the TV to have Internet. It's a handoff process whereby the TV itself retrieves the content from the Netflix servers, and all your phone does is handle the authentication and key delivery plus playback controls.

You can do screen mirroring with a non-Internet-capable or disconnected TV, but not you can't use the ridiculously designed feature that I'm talking about.

So everything I'm saying is useless is useless for you, too.

My latest pet peeve is when Siri violates basic privacy standards by compelling data collection that isn't necessary.

A couple of days ago, I asked it for a list of restaurants near a particular town where I would be in a couple of hours. Siri immediately told me I had to enable location services for that query. What? Why? My query didn't ask for a list of restaurants near me. I asked for a list of restaurants near a different town, and more to the point, I gave both the name of the town and the state.

I attempted probably half a dozen different variations of that query, including things like avoiding the word "near", and Siri failed in the same way every single time, so this isn't just a one-off glitch specific to how I worded the query. It's a general problem with the way Siri handles queries that involve location.

This violates the first rule of location services, which is do not ask for the user's location unless you actually need the user's location. If the user is asking for restaurants in Panama City, Florida, Siri does NOT need to know that the user is currently in Charleston, South Carolina. It's none of Siri's d**n business. And more to the point, if Siri actually tried to do literally anything with that location data, it would be pretty much guaranteed to reduce the quality of the results rather than increase it, so having the data is just an invitation for any AI that might be involved to do something utterly stupid.

And you've done nothing to explain what the use case is. As far as I can tell, the use case is "Someone who wants to use their phone to control the TV instead of the TV remote," which is a tremendous amount of technological overhead for such a negligible benefit.

It's way easier to point your camera at the screen and do an instant sign-in on the TV than it is to get your phone connected to the right Wi-Fi network and cast to the right TV, so the use case would have to be pretty compelling to make up for what a pain in the a** it is when it works, much less when it doesn't.

Major correction here: about something that I have tried to use on many, many occasions, but never used successfully. There's a difference.

You won't read or engage further because you don't actually know any compelling reason to use it. If you did, you would have said what that reason was by now.

Not really, no. If I wanted to use the TV to do all of the networking and playback, I would have just used the TV's app to do it. The number of hotels I've seen where the TV supported Chromecast or AirPlay streaming but did not have a built-in Netflix app are literally zero.

From my perspective, casting is a complete disaster by its very nature. It relies on the display device having full Internet access, which isn't a given. Literally every time I've wanted to do casting, it has been because the TV set's Netflix app wasn't working because of a network problem, and it couldn't get access to the Internet, so I was trying to use the phone's network connection. By shifting the network connectivity back to the TV set, it makes the entire system completely worthless, because the exact situations where it could be useful are the exact situations where it isn't.

The figures can be entirely correct and still the answer can be "no". Why? Because Android might use the Linux kernel, but it isn't really a Linux distro in any meaningful sense of the word. And Steam Deck and Chromebooks *can* have some reasonable facsimile of a Linux development environment, but I'd expect maybe 0.1% of users to actually turn it on.

So most of those folks are Linux "users" in much the same way that TiVo owners were linux "users", i.e. they are using a device that deep down, at a level that the user is unaware of, runs some small subset of what a Linux distro typically contains, with a bunch of stuff on top that they mostly aren't in control over.

It's like calling Mac users UNIX users. It's technically correct — the best kind of correct — but grossly misleading.

You do realize that what you're describing is all of about ten lines of Javascript with the right libraries (audioTrackList property, subtitle library, currentTime property), right?

We know it weakly interacts electromagnetically, which means one of the ways in which it is posited planets form, initially via electrostatic attraction of dust particles, isn't likely to work. This means dark matter will be less "clumpy" and more diffuse, and less likely to create denser conglomerations that could lead to stellar and planetary formation.

What this finding does suggest, if it holds true, is that some form of supersymmetry, as an extension fo the Standard Model is true. Experiments over the last 10-15 years have heavily constrained the masses and energy levels of any supersymmetry model, so it would appear that if this is the case, it's going to require returning to a model that some physicists had started to abandon.

Great opportunity for open source web services. :-)

There's no good reason to use it. Just encode your video for random-access streaming, set up Apache or nginx with a URL that you make sure isn't indexed, require a client cert on the directory if you really want to be careful, port forward to it from a port on your router, set up dynamic DNS, and use a web browser. No arbitrary restrictions, just your content on your terms.

None of it is unique to the device — I have backups of everything — but I still want the photos and videos on the new phone. :-)

Without knowing precisely how Explorer is structured, it's conceivable that there may be different dynamically-linked libraries and/or execution points for running the desktop and for the file explorer, in which case just having explorer.exe running in and of itself doesn't mean that new modules have to be loaded if explorer.exe process fires up. The solution could very well be to load the libraries involved in file browsing when the desktop opens.

Just guessing here. There was a time when there was a lot more horsepower required for GUI elements than folder browsing, but this is 2025, and explorer.exe probably uses orders of a magnitude more resources now than it did in 1995, because... well, who knows really. Probably to sell more ads and load up more data to their AI.

That, on modern hardware, they have to preload a fucking file browser so that it pops up faster is just an indication of what a steaming pile of garbage MS is. They had sweet spots with Win2k-WinXP and with Win7, but their incoherent need to be a whole bunch of contradictory things --- with AI! has led what was a rather iffy OS and UI experience to begin with to become a cluster fuck of incoherence.

I do most of my day to day work on MacOS and Gnome, and fortunately the Terminal services version I have to RDP into is Server 2016, but every time I have to work with Windows 11 I'm just stunned by just how awful it looks and how badly it behaves.

Transferring a terabyte of data from one phone to another takes the better part of an hour even at real-world USB 3 speeds.