Oh yeah I absolutely agree with monopoly abuse being a bad thing with a huge caveat that it’s so much worse for essential services and not quite as bad for extras, like youtube. I personally can’t see any competition to youtube being able to provide a better service - it’s in a similar niche to Netflix where they were great until they got competition at which point the userbase and content fragmented, which meant they had to provide a worse service to make money as the content rights agreements made it into several small monopolies and so they were literally unable to compete, which is frankly worse

Ok, but equally any competition would need to be profitable earlier, you can’t complain you got a service operating at a loss which is now operating at a profit when that’s exactly what any alternative you’d feasibly switch to would do

It’s normal for most afaik but that’s because manufacturers make a trimmed down phone to go on your wrist which means you have to charge it daily, without realising it’s on your wrist so it doesn’t need to be super slim with huge cuts to battery size to go in your pocket.

My garmin has an always on display, heart rate, steps, blood oxygen, thermometer, barometer and whatever else and yet still manages a 4 week battery life, 3 weeks with normal use (1h gps per day, using the touchscreen and higher brightness) or even around 50-60h of GPS/more frequent heart rate/active maps activity tracking

It’s on 7% now and is giving me an estimated battery life of >2 days, which just shows how abysmal many smart watch battery lives are

I mean there does have to be something there and while I prefer charities, fake companies or promoting your own products, if they’re not targeted and realistic so you see eg. Ethiad ads while playing as City I don’t think that’s too bad… But on loading screens, menu screens or as popups gtfo, even if it’s your own product

Wikipedia’s job isn’t free to be anti- or pro- anything, it’s to show facts free from bias, even if you and most other readers agree with that bias.

Of course the facts can clearly show something to be almost objectively evil to anyone capable of understanding them, but it’s not for Wikipedia to perform any analysis of those facts - saying “Israel has killed X civilians in attacks which many of their allies claimed were completely avoidable [citation]” in an article featured on the front page is perfectly valid, however a big banner with a Palestinian flag is not as it’s a (fair) interpretation of the facts and not simply a presentation of them.

I’m not sure, if you’re racing me in a 100m sprint and you do it in 15 seconds, that’s pretty useless information depending on whether I’m at the 90m mark or beyond the finish at that point, so it’s primarily a race against the speed I travelled at

I believe none except colonising space… The others are so far off that we don’t even know for sure if they’re even possible, what’s going to go wrong or whether we’re looking in the complete wrong direction, meanwhile you’re dismissing the only realistic one in the next 250 years because we’re close enough that we actually know how hard it is.

There’s something to be said about chasing after things that are impossible as the possible seems too hard, but I’m not enough of a philosopher for that.

"Baby are you ok? You’ve barely touched your plate of beige

Why not both?

Mains power with battery backup, live streaming via wires with wifi then flash storage backup

I think Baidu, Qwant, Mojeek & Brave all use fully independent indices, but there are likely more. This is excliding eg. Kagi who use a combination of their own and other indices.

Qwant actually have their own indexer, but even then I feel like Microsoft can push their own products as they want given you are free to ignore it… It’s not like there’s no alternative browsers, search engine indices or operating systems, and loads of other products are built off shared technology without it being an issue that it’s closed off generally

Ah yes, so all the houses people rarely visit are located close together and the farms they have to visit multiple times a day are even further away?

Deranged thinking by someone who has never considered that their food is grown in a field rather than some factory

I mean that situation describes almost any student in higher education, along with people in long term relationships who are yet to move in together - frankly those two cases more than likely make up the majority of people with two homes

I mean Booths aren’t that small, they’re just exclusively north-western & fill the same niche as Waitrose, who have virtually no stores in the north west as a result

That means their customer base is pretty much a perfect intersection of people who won’t want to use a self-checkout - older people & people who are friendlier to strangers

Solid in the same way the designers heads are solid bone I guess…

A 3.5mm adapter is not an answer as it causes wear on the USB C port in ways it’s not designed for (but 3.5mm is as it’s circular so the cable rotates and breaks before the port), and it’s hard to get a good dac that isolates the power noise when using a multiple charging/listening adapter that’s also that small

On Fairphone, they flat out refuse to even discuss adding a headphone jack (check the posts in their forums - it’s a “hands over ears” no) so I’m sticking with Sony/ASUS (the latter atm as they’ve been slightly less anticompetitive recently but I’d much rather go to a decent company) until they do… It’s not like you notice a phone being 1mm thicker when you have a 3mm case on it anyway

Yeah nah

It looks just as similar to pretty much any desktop interface of the past 40 years, and openwindows isn’t even the first thing with that design

I mean “[local town] grandma discovers 10 foods you never knew you should avoid” or even downright scams when I say low quality advertising

Also “negative consequences” is a bit overdramatic and I’d love you to elaborate… Really it’s down to the person’s own opinion, eg you don’t like it so you’ll reject that sort of thing, meanwhile I don’t mind it especially as a way of paying for decent quality media so I’ll allow it on some sites but not others

The EU is primarily pro-business, but that also means being against anti-competitive and underhanded business practices

The browser thing sounds like a good solution (although there must be a reason why DNT headers weren’t made legally binding, potentially as they wanted to allow people to pick and choose what cookies they allow based on what they thought was “too far” or something but that’s conjecture), however disallowing all user data will likely lead to companies not being able to advertise to people who are interested in their products, something which the EU will see as a negative and would also cause an uptick in scams and misinformation as you see in low quality advertising space at the moment

I mean it depends on where… In London the taxis, although expensive and often not the politest to other road users, are nearly universally great service for the customer (and mathematically it very rarely makes sense to run up the meter due to how demand and the fare system works) and also pay the drivers a decent wage as they generally don’t have a middleman to pay other than the government for their licence

That said, in the US (specifically New York) my experience was that ubers are generally nicer than taxis, but it’s definitely not universal