These Mavicas could become popular again now as retro tech. There’s a lo-fi aesthetic growing in photo and video that’s all about compression artefacts and old image sensors. Physical media and its inconveniences is also having a moment as a novelty and maybe even a broader movement.

In the general population it does. Most people are not using an academic definition of AI, they are using a definition formed from popular science fiction.

The platform owners don’t consider engagement to me be participation in meaningful discourse. Engagement to them just means staying on the platform while seeing ads.

If bots keep people doing that those platforms will keep letting them in.

Also works on the GameCube, albeit with much more limited IO due to the lack of USB.

The GameCube Can Now Run Windows

I’m not sure there’s much fun software compiled for PowerPC Windows NT to run on it though (yet).

Back in the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era the SNES and Megadrive seemed to be retro while the PS1 and N64 were just “old”. So maybe 2 generations ago is the start of retro.

I think it’s definitely a lot blurrier now though. The differences between consoles and the leaps between generations are less pronounced, and there are so many y rereleases and remasters now keeping older games fresh.

They were still making MiniDiscs and MiniDV tapes? That seems more of a surprise than the Blu-ray discontinuation.

I’m also using iOS in the UK. I just tried searching for Pixelfed in the App Store and the ad was for some sort of golf tutoring app.

The top search result was the Pixelfed app and the others all other Fediverse apps.

The N-Gage had a bunch of bizarre design decisions.

The game cartridge slot was behind the battery - swapping games required disassembling the phone.

The revised QD version fixed a lot of the mistakes but it was too little too late by then.

Throwing money at AI seems a big gamble for productivity.

I’d rather see the UK invest in its human workers instead, with better education and training. IT skills for example as still lacking in the country. PCs have now existed for 30+ years yet so many still struggle with task like making simple spreadsheets.

If there is going be insistence on platforms being open there shouldn’t be these distinctions.

All of these devices are capable of general purpose computing at a hardware level, phones, tablets, PCs, headsets are now very similar and generalised in that regard. I don’t see why a phone platform should be forced to be open while a games console gets to remain closed, when there is now only a hair’s breadth separating an Xbox from a Windows PC.

Considering the latest changes at Meta, it seems their latest innovation is to transform social media into antisocial media.

USB-C has been a blessing and curse. One port that does everything, except when it doesn’t. Even charging is now complicated by the “guess the cable that supports the right PD type” game.

Not that the old days were much better. I don’t miss faffing around with the myriad of serial and parallel port modes and settings.

Take the AI crap out and give it an open display API and it would be a fun desk toy.

A rotating phone screen in a cylinder creating a hologram-like effect to display notifications/metrics/whatever else.

So the plaintiff’s are claiming Siri was recording them without consent, and that Apple were sharing those recordings with third parties including advertisers.

Apple claims they were sometimes wrongly keeping recordings for internal quality control/analytics but hasn’t admitted to sharing them, and have agreed to the $95m settlement.

The sharing with third parties is the most egregious part here, but it doesn’t seem to be addressed any further.

For TVs now, by buying used. Help yourself and the environment by buying an unwanted “dumb” TV that’s free of this sort of crap.

Or if budget allows, look at industrial displays.

Supply answers demand, is we stop buying junk smart stuff and take our money elsewhere the market will eventually follow.

A while ago a company patented a method using eye tracking to monitor whether TV watchers were paying attention to ads.

It can always get worse.

Zuck bending his own knee in the vain hope he won’t get bent over Trump’s.

Maybe he should have spent a little less attention on Caesar and tried to learn a few other lessons from history.

That’s a gross assumption that people care about any of this.

For any form of federated community to be sustainable, its users have to care about that. Otherwise those communities will eventually be consumed by whichever instance gains the critical mass to close itself off and become another Twitter or Reddit.

To achieve the benefits of federation, users must be educated on principles of federation, not be obfuscated from them. The question is how the Fediverse can do that.

Functionally it’s harder to accidentally press on the bottom.

Although it’s also now harder to intentionally press too. It looks like a finger can fit under there, otherwise you’ll be flipping it over to power on.

I don’t think it’s the first time for Amazon either.