Is this a Black Mirror episode or something?

We just had a vote for government officials along the EP vote. Less than 60% turned up which means the most common vote was a vote for nothing. The average voter doesn’t care.

It’s okay. I played Borderlands 3 with voices off, only sfx/background sounds/music. I’m sure I can do the same with this. Maybe turn picture off too while I’m at it.

Let’s hope it isn’t. Even though civ 6 had multiple interesting aspects and in certain ways it was objectively better than 5, I just could not look past the ugly presentation.

S stands for slow, right?

I recently switched over my ARR stack to only use usenet. Working well now but you really need a good indexer. The public ones are just not quite good enough.

Eh, kinda. The macbooks still come with 8gb non replaceable memory and the upcharge for another 8gb is $200 (not just for the air but the $1600 pro too). These are still great laptops but the pricing feels hostile.

IPad hardware is brilliant but what’s the point? You’re stuck with a neutered OS and a handheld formfactor that is not especially suitable for work or for gaming (the fields that usually need more power).

The baseline iphones are still lacking basic features like a high refresh screen purely for product segmentation purposes. And once again a slew of hostile, anti-user and anti-developer decisions like banning sideloading or alternative browser engines mainly designed to lock down the OS so they can retain all control of what goes on on your device. Another way this control is used is to funnel you to use icloud which offers an introductory free tier of 5(?) GB of data. I don’t think I had a single relative that didn’t have the “your icloud storage is full” popup every day until we disabled photo backups or they started paying a monthly subscription.

The app store is also a disaster. Just open it and search for something, I’m not even going to say more. This is an obvious profit vs user experience tradeoff.

Airpods are more or less fine. I had a gen1 Airpods pro which were kinda category defining at the time. Competition has caught up however, also better repairability would be nice. I’m actually surprised you were allowed to use them without an iPhone.

Apple watch seems fine, still no 3rd party watchfaces. The locked down OS is somewhat more justified in this case.

I haven’t tried the vision pro but that is also locked down software wise.

Overall, as you said, the hardware is good to best-in-class but it feels to me that at every turn you are being pushed and manipulated into giving more of your cash to Apple sometimes in the form of product segmentation, sometimes via artificial software limitations.

You don’t get to be a trillion dollar company just by making good products.

I don’t think it’s going anywhere either but Warren Buffet did sell his position in Apple. The M1 for sure is/was a hit but other than that they seem more focused on extracting every penny from customers, rather than providing the best products possible. I guess we’ll see how it works out as a long term strategy.

The new stunning, groundbreaking, and bespoke iPad Pro. They are nice enough but it is safe to say I was not stunned.

Now that’s a reference

There is definitely a buzz, the SPT (single player Tarkov mod) servers have been constantly overloaded for days now

I lost faith in the verge after how they handled the whole PC build fiasco

Would you even be able to move it? You’d have to put it in neutral first so you can attempt to push it but good luck with that if it’s bricked. I know electric cars generally shouldn’t really be towed either (a few meters might be okay but I’m not sure).

There is nothing inherently wrong about food pictures but I feel like it is a symptom of the focus shifting from trying to take quality pictures to showing off a nice dinner/vacation/car you had to your “friend” group.

There is a thin line between look at this cool thing and look at how much better my life is then yours. I kinda have a distaste for the second one. (That said I take food pictures all the time but mostly of stuff I made myself, though I don’t post it to social media)

I’m still looking for something to replace my shield TV tube. I don’t believe that has AV1 support.

Homing Pigeons 🪽?

I remember Instagram when it was new. It was an actually photography app. Of course it had the edgy filters (which ~15 year old me made full use of). But the pictures people posted actually had a bit of effort behind them.

Then it started becoming another mainstream social media where most pictures were about people’s lunches. I didn’t stick around for it’s final phase of business ads and thots.

I think it lost the cool factor by the time FB bought it but maybe it would’ve taken longer to become as ad-infested as it is today

Features out the wazoo and an insane amount of customisation available to the user via Goodlock, but also some quirks.

Here are my highlights: limit charge to 80% to conserve battery health; custom shortcuts when dragging from the side of the phone based on the angle of your swipe; not sure what app just woke the screen or sent a notification that disappeared? You can get a log of all of these activities; add a dedicated 2x crop button to the camera app; send audio from different apps to different sound outputs simultaneously; a whole stack of s-pen features ranging from useful to very niche (quick lock screen note, screen crop, use pen as camera shutter); and many more.

There are some annoyances also: you can’t have an infinite scrolling app drawer, it has to have pages; using icon packs from the play store is annoying and the Samsung theme store sucks.

Overall I like one UI 6 but there is always some room for improvement.

Low key I’ve been checking in on Fallout London every now and then. I have no expectations, as these projects seem to fail most of the time before thay can even release, but if they actually manage to finish it, I’ll definitely play it. Another one in keeping on my radar is Morrowind in Skyrim, that one is in a much earlier stage though.

In a fucked up way this comment kinda made me excited for this movie.