It’s absolutely insane that anyone pretends Google Play and the App Store are fine though.

Has anyone scrolled through any search and not seen a sea of heavily marketed scam apps?

1.7% is still a HUGE drop in that context. This is a sector, at a time, that does not like subscriber losses.

Yes, stuff like this works. It’s why they worry about MAGA controversy too, unfortunately.

Thing is, Play Store is already filled with malware or near-malware from seemingly verified developers. I ran into several scam clone apps just today. It’s even snuck in through OEM apps.

Same on iOS, which supposedly verifies devs.

If ‘verification’ and curation is their idea of security, well… It appears their system is already overloaded, yet they want to expand it?

Does the reality even matter anymore?

Pop quiz: can you guys remember the last 20 major US shootings?

I can’t. I certainly don’t know their outcomes.

Folks will internalize the first wild rumor they heard (indirectly) from Twitter or CNN or whatever before attention moves to the next shooting, and that’s the impression that lasts.

A lot of the engagement was absolutely manufactured and bot driven, kinda like the Cracker Barrel thing.

What did that guy on the bike pick up?

Late reply, but you… may not be wrong.

However, I think this is a ‘nuclear power’ like situation.

Even if the failure modes are generally technically safe, they’re so spectacular that it’s going to freak people (and authorities) out to the point of being problematic. Hence, dirigible development basically died from that one incident, heh.

My friend: this is what wolfram alpha is for.

It was for math long before LLMs were a thing.

attempt to force people to pay for more storage

Also, can we acknowledge how absurd this is?

And before we go into “Apple uses fast storage”, a 256GB PCIe SSD, with the controller and interface and everything, is $30 retail for OEMs.

128Gb 16Gx8 of raw MLC NAND is $3.4.

https://www.trendforce.com/price/flash/flash_contract

https://www.dramexchange.com/#pc-client-oem-price

And Apple charges $200 for 512GB instead of 256GB.

This is past “upcharging” and into robbery. That’s literally getting into DDR $/GB territory.

…I mean, it’s not a deal breaker (I can just work around it with plex and usb storage), but making stuff inconvenient is not very Apple.

I’d recommend Cromite. For desktop and Android, it’s awesome.

DDG browser if you want multi device sync.

I find that Chromium derivates do perform much better as long as a Wayland+Nvidia combo isn’t freaking them out.

It’s usually not a huge deal on fast desktops though.

Their browser, I mean.

You can still use Google search in DDG browser. TBH I feel much safer with that than the other way around.

What I meant is there are tons of alternatives to Google-branded Chrome, that are basically Chrome underneath but at least stripped out. Including ones with browser sync across devices.

I am using DuckDuckGo for mobile/desktop sync at the moment. But mostly Cromite (or Firefox) on desktop, and only because Cromite sadly isnt available on iOS.

It’s not a wash anymore though, it’s not even close. Plain Chrome tracks you so much it definitely eats CPU doing so, no matter how many extensions you install.

I mean, if the alternative is vanilla Chrome, it hardly matters at this point. They’re both so loaded with tracking your computer will dent the floor, and they have basically the same capabilities.

Obviously FF is better, but what I’m saying is, statistically, for the vast majority, this is only pulling folks off of Chrome.

Bingo. At least not beyond the tragedy of a young person dying.

To steal the term: ‘virtue signaling’

I don’t understand:

• What is ‘AI in video monitoring?’

• The article mentions literally nothing about this, so where did that come from?

Super cool!

…But helium, so not super scalable, right?

They could make it hydrogen, for extra fun when one fails around all that electricity…

But I think we all have a responsibility to make these ethical decisions. If you are adding to the AI user base, feeding it your data and training it and pumping its figures, there are a variety of legit reasons to do so, from curiosity to convenience to FOMO. And if you don’t care about the environment or wider impact of your actions, alright, rock on. We can’t all care about everything all the time.

AI doesn’t have to be a corporate nightmare. It can be self-hosted, or hosted by a third party that doesn’t log or train on anything (which is extremely common).

And if you’re concerned with the relatively marginal energy use of inference; use Cerebras or Groq (not Grok) or Huawei, to get away from Nvidia and the crazy clocks they run chips at. Or even just something like GLM or Deepseek that’s deployed with quite reasonable efficiency, on peanuts for hardware.

The fundamental issue is corporate enshittification, basically. And that the vast majority of folks, unfortunately, do take the shitty Big Tech options because they’re the loudest, and no-one knows there are better, cheaper, and nicer options.

At least Reddit is structured to be public and searchable (or at least it used to be).

Discord is annoying for a bazillion reasons, but a big one is it’s ostensibly a ‘close friends gamer chat’ platform, yet its taken the role of project support chat, niche topic forums, ‘influencer’ chat rooms, and things that should absolutely be public facing.

…Another, I guess, is political discourse.

In other words, Discord the company is having their cake and eating it; pretending they’re an innocent ‘between friends’ private chat platform while absolutely structuring it to encourage scams, mega communities with notification spam, patreon-like benefit tiers, and weird stuff that absolutely seeds recruitment for, and engagement on, extremist channels.

The message I am getting is:

Brendan Carr is our scapegoat for this backfire.