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Comment Re: Cue up (Score 1) 348

At least this time you presented something more nuanced than "people can't afford housing because they spend too much on other things". You could have led with that.

Also, I live about as far from California as is geographically possible within the lower 48, so I'm not assuming any blame for what happens there.

Comment It's this or GBTW (Score 1) 43

This looks like the latest escalation in the tug-o-war between employers and remote workers. The relatively few people going to extraordinary efforts just to avoid doing the job they're being paid to do is going to ruin it for everyone else. Do you want to make return-to-office mandatory? Because creating AI fakes to pretend to be on work meetings sounds like a good way to make that happen.

Comment I find it hard to get upset about this. (Score 2) 62

I think what is missed here is that the device itself still works fine. You can download books to your computer and transfer via USB cable like always. The basic e-reader functionality is still there. What Amazon is pulling support for is all the services around it that made it more convenient to use- buying a book and having it delivered over the air to the kindle, and I presume the actually very useful method of emailing a book to an email address that behinds the scenes gets it delivered to your device.

I guess one point that I could see people being upset about is that they are in some sense losing access to books they already bought. That's not really entirely true, there is a kindle app and such, but its not the same. Even so, you do have the opportunity to download them all before they shut things off.

The hardware still works though, nothing is getting bricked.

Comment Re:Samsung apps are all like this (Score 1) 81

This actually drove me back to Pixels. I felt like I was constantly fighting against all of Samsung's crap. They IMHO made the messages app look deceptively similar to the actual Google app, same with contacts. I felt for years Google and Samsung were in a low key war to own my contacts. And eventually you reach a detente- you have all the bloat in check... and then a big update comes and its alll back again. And then one time I had these random terrible games just appear- and the cause was another helpful Samsung update that somehow installed some kind of backdoor to install these games. The same went for the UI- nearly every departure they did from stock android IMHO made things worse, and I was constantly trying to tone it down- I couldn't get the clutter of notification icons to go away without having to do pretty invasive mods that again often undid themselves when updates came.

The hardware was better from the POV of a specsheet, and that's what kept me on Samsung for a bunch of years. However, when the Pixel 6 came out I decided to give it a go. And it was just a huge addition by subtraction in terms of experience. I hardly tweaked a thing- the OS just stayed out of my way. The hardware, for whatever it lacks on a spec sheet or benchmark, has never felt sluggish to me. Whatever flaws in the optics are more than made up for by the software. I feel like I own the phone again.

There was just so much underhanded crap that Samsung tried to pull, I just felt like I spent way too much time managing the phone. The tradeoff for "lesser" hardware is 1000x worth it IMHO, even if I lost a bunch of features that I rarely used (example: split screen view- which was recently-ish added to PIxels). I am long past the point where I want to mod my phone with roms, I just want it to work and stay out of my way.

Comment Pay up or wallow in the dump (Score 2) 75

Bots and other bad actors thrive in free (as in beer) environments, for reasons that should be obvious. If we want to do anything meaningful about them, sites will need a nominal but real fee to use.

It's not what anyone wanted, but "free" was always inevitably going to lead to the Internet becoming a dump. The free ride is over.

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