There is a large degree of this, at least with some manufacturers. the iphone se referenced being a great example. If you’re a tech dork that wants fancy features you will overlook the se 100% of the time because even if you value a small phone many (basically all) of the bells and whistles on flagship models are gone as the se was based on the low end models from 1-3 generations back. No face id, no 5g, no magsafe, etc

Even for casual users: if you valued photography the se had the absolute worst camera of all the iphones. It was slow, it had less storage (64 gb minimum vs 128gb in the iphone 13 and newer), noticeably worse battery life, etc.

the obvious answer is that people weren’t buying them enough and that capitalistic markets will not support niche products that serve smaller demographics unless they can either financially justify themselves or earn some kind of government subsidy to sustain the effort (eg for a medical device and even then it’s shaky)

There are thousands of cool things that have died because they weren’t financially viable. That is what it is, but what’s more frustrating is that the technology behind these items and ideas is then almost always kept under lock and key forever, lost to the ages, because of the sliver of hope that some portion of it may somehow become a part of some new project. Instead of sharing the information to allow for collaboration and building on what was already established, any future projects need to now start from scratch. Otherwise they may infringe on the creators ability to secure earning potential you see, and that justifies drastically slowing the development of human progress in all fields by obfuscating research everywhere

Bga is more about skill than equipment. I’ve done it with a cheap hot air gun and a toaster oven. Though it took many failed attempts to get right

But this isn’t always about your phone being repairable by you. It’s about your phone being repairable at all. Apple, google, samsung, et al have made it clear that they have no interest in refurbishing and repairing phones. That’s fine, they have the right to do whatever I guess. And further, this creates a great opportunity for many people to create small businesses.

America has very few markets left wherein one can create a business that is not utterly dominated by some conglomerate that will eat your shit. This is one where you can do so, with honest work (eg not just buying shit from Chinese manufacturers and reselling it on amazon for a profit).

However, the tech industry is openly hostile to small business and its consumers, so every business that has worked in this sector has been either destroyed or hollowed out to barely anything by big techs greedy bullshit in the name of security.

This would enrich communities: you would have another possible route where someone local could open a business within the community, that would hire locally within the community. But apple, samsung, microsoft, etc lobby extremely hard to make sure that they never have to stop pairing parts, providing spare parts, providing schematics, etc. and of course they’re not being asked to do this for free. They’re being asked to do this for a fair and reasonable cost, but they still refuse.

Now designing phones with user replaceable wear items like batteries or even common failure points like screens is obviously a good idea as well in theory but comes with challenges. However the challenges are mixed. Batteries can be user replaceable in thin and waterproof phones. The galaxy s5 is almost as thin and almost as waterproof as the s23 and has a user replaceable battery. If more engineering effort was put forth I’m sure it could be greatly improved. The issue is design; they (especially apple) don’t want to disrupt their “beautiful”glass back phones that 99.9999% of people slap a case on. User replaceable screens are more challenging to make waterproof but I’m sure they could figure it out.

But if the above was addressed, they wouldn’t necessarily have to. We could go back to the days of going to a small store next to your grocery store and getting your phone screen changed out for $150 while you do your shopping. except much more money because an iphone 16 pro max oled is ~ $700 just for the screen, which brings up the other issue of people don’t want to repair stuff anymore because component cost is outrageous. The phone is $1200 for the base model so if the screen and labor is $800 a lot of people will (foolishly) go “well for $400 more I can just get a brand new one!” even though it’s the same damn phone. However, these screen prices fall dramatically when the phones get even a few gens older and a bunch get recycled

Because it is. A quote from the linked page on asahi linux devs leaving twitter because of rising anti trans rhetoric

““Half of us are trans,” he says. Accompanied by a call to “fight back” against an imagined “genocide”, assumedly perpetrated by those who do not fully buy into his particular sexual fetish.”

The blogs author purposely misgenders Alyssa Rosensweig and refers to being trans as a sexual fetish, which makes their politics obscenely clear. Further, Alyssa has a resume of amazing accomplishments in reverse engineering the apple m1 and m2 chips and developing graphics drivers for their gpus. Lundukes resume is basically growing up as a nerd and being a “tech blogger” from early in the game and going full qanon a few years ago

Further in the article he references hector Martin saying that people demanding to keep politics out of tech is bullshit because tech is made by humans and anti trans rhetoric is going to kill his colleagues. His response to this:

“Of course nobody is trying to kill Hector’s colleagues.

And the vast majority of major corporations – not to mention the President of the country – are continually coming out in support of the Trans fetish. So declaring that there is a genocide occuring is beyond ridiculous.”

So that didn’t age well (from less than 2 years ago)

fwiw they restored the post and blamed it on a moderator being too strict in applying a policy regarding non consensual ai porn. It’s objectively good they have policies banning such things but it was completely obvious from context that this was not meant to be pornographic at all

As such, one could easily read it with cynicism as responding to backlash as they only reviewed said moderators actions after this article came out and the associated clamor

Finamp is also on ios, making it a great solution for when you have several users across ecosystems. There are other Jellyfin music clients as well but I don’t know them

You can also point Navidrome at your music folder for web access which I prefer when using my laptop

The discovery problem is definitely the biggest challenge though. Lidarr is something but if you enable it with newsgroups you’ll generally only find more “notable” music. Anything on the more esoteric side is generally gonna be tougher.

You can integrate torrents and private trackers but if you’re anything like me you want to run all downloaded music through a mass tagging program like beets.io or picard to get stuff tagged according to musicbrainz so your library is consistent, which wrecks seeding, and private music trackers are generally pretty draconian about seeding. So then it’s either keep two copies of music, one to seed and one tagged, or hit and run everything and get banned, or just have a library with messy tags (which if you’re like me is just simply not an option). I currently do the two copies thing because it’s generally not that much space and once I hit a 2:1 ratio I get rid of it. In the instance the tags match 100% I point it at my library and permaseed. This is labor intensive though and everything else on my server is mostly automated

I have never figured out a way to integrate soulseek. This would probably be the optimal way as the library is almost as extensive as private trackers (sometimes more so), I can filter by quality (though sometimes flacs are transcodes with this way), there’s etiquette to not clog peoples queue but no real seeding rules, etc. but on my server soulseek runs in a vnc based docker and scripting that goes beyond my talent level

This is pretense to intrude on other things and more importantly remove the ability to browse pornography anonymously, which is dangerous. I would never use an account to browse a porn site because why would I ever want that data linked back to me? Look at the government right now. You watch a gay or trans porn video and in a few years that could be grounds for never being able to have certain types of jobs or worse, being deemed a “miscreant”

If this was truly about protecting children they would encourage open dialogue on sex in homes and increase inclusive sex education. This is evidence based. It would still be necessary even with this nonsense because obviously vpns exist, as well as amateur run sites, sites run from outside of the USA, torrents, etc that don’t give a shit about us laws requiring age verification and will show all kinds of obscenely hardcore videos

Collective buying and building of such a project means that there is not universal standard or regulation and the project falls apart when there is disagreement. Given the scale this is inevitable

Look at lemmy for example: most servers play nicely but occasionally you get the server like exploding heads that cause the overwhelming majority to defederate

Amazon has 300 warehouses across the US and another 175 worldwide according to a quick web search. That’s a lot of sites that have to play nice with each other. If even one of them starts having poor practices, doing something offensive, something disruptive, etc. it may cause a lot of the others to not want to work with them. If you have one that is especially shit stirring then it may cause a huge portion of the network to cut ties.

But unlike lemmy now it’s not just some social media where you jump to a new server. Now companies have their products held hostage. Now people in that region potentially have services significantly disrupted. Now your whole system is undermined and a bezos type can swoop in to prove his is much better and more trustworthy.

A state controlling it (which would inherently happen with collective ownership if done correctly, a pseudo state would be created given the scale) would introduce regulation and enforcement to ensure consistency in operation. It is then the responsibility of the constituents to hold representatives accountable to ensure regulations and enforcement are meaningful

amazons true strength is ultimately in their logistics. Amazon itself isn’t a bad idea in theory but the execution is poor because of cutthroat capitalism exploiting workers and privatization. Ultimately the idea of sellers being able to ship their goods to communal warehouses for fulfillment should be a service that is nationalized. The marketplace can be federated, sure

I wonder if this is a response to someone jailbreaking all kindles ever the other day

Fuck kindles, get a different brand of ereader that just runs stripped android

Interesting. I also wonder how it would fare across different models (eg user a uses chatgpt, user b uses gemini, user c uses deepseek, etc) as that may mimic real world use (such as what’s depicted in the comic) more closely

I remember when compression was popularized, like mp3 and jpg, people would run experiments where they would convert lossy to lossy to lossy to lossy over and over and then share the final image, which was this overcooked nightmare

I wonder if a similar dynamic applies to the scenario presented in the comic with AI summarization and expansion of topics. Start with a few bullet points have it expand that to a paragraph or so, have it summarize it back down to bullet points, repeat 4-5 times, then see how far off you get from the original point.

counselor/mental health

So you definitely can’t go there easily but Gerald Hough is who does a lot of research on the abilities of homing pigeons and is available via email if you had specific questions

https://csm.rowan.edu/departments/psychology/research/aviancognition.html

Is his bio and email

if you’re really interested in pigeon behavior Rowan university in New Jersey has a pigeon lab for studying avian communication and cognition

Short links are bullshit anyway. Don’t obfuscate where you’re sending me, that’s sketch. That’s phishing email behavior. Just because you don’t want me to erase all the tracking bullshit from url. Soon I won’t be able to anyway because most sites are starting to embed it into the url anyway. Fuck you and fuck the internet

Dumb TVs aren’t subsidized by ads

A phantom taste perception is actually a lingering bad taste in your mouth and actually caused by multiple things like schizophrenia, diabetes, bad dental hygiene, head injuries, certain cancers, medications, etc

Olfactory aphantasia is the inability to imagine smells Phantosmia is detecting smells that aren’t there

Similarly there’s gustatory aphantasia for taste and phantom taste perception

Etc

my cat rules so I just have a huge gravity feeder with dry food available to her constantly and I give her one wet food a day. I refill the gravity feeder once every two weeks or so, whenever it’s empty

She’s been 14.7 pounds for 10 years straight.

My sisters cat is greeeeeedy and has to be restricted or she will eat constantly and end up massively overweight. She was like 5-6 lbs overweight when she got her. Not sure of the specific schedule she uses

So I guess it depends?