An Idiot Abroad

Because nothing endears your platform to users like throwing ads in their face during the high points of whatever they are watching.

I listened to one recently that was using AI. It was kind of off putting because of how robotic it came off.

It wasn’t the tone really, but I find that AI tends to not get human speech inflections right most of the time during active speech. And that can be jarring to me at least.

And no one that has an option should take them up on those job offers.

They have shown what they will do again as soon as they think AI gets good enough.

lol, Jesus. It is like what a screen writer would come up with for a movie that contained a terrible company run by terrible people doing stuff so outlandishly terrible everyone watching would think “the absurdity of the terrible is how you know it is made up”.

It is not a security thing to me. It is a “I want to do what I want to do with the things I paid for” thing.

I know full well something so locked down is technically more secure, but using those platforms as my primary devices would cause a lose of device flexibility I have no interest in taking part in for the use cases of a desktop or laptop.

Those platforms have their place, just like my video game consoles. But I am not interested in making anything I consider important contingent on something that is more at the whims of the company that made it than me.

We are going to move away from Google, by basing our new future on AOSP, which is also primary maintained by Google…I smell another FireOS level product on the horizon. Still Android, but worse.

TLDR: I don’t like the philosophy behind how Android and iOS devices are created and managed by their OEMs nearly enough to give them near total control over what I can do today or in the future with my primary computing platforms.

Its not a specific thing I can’t do that I want to do that stops me from liking it.

Its that it is a specific OS image bound to a specific hardware model that is very limited in what options or upgrades or changes are available to me.

With a Framework laptop (or most other generic models) or a generic ATX desktop tower I can replace whatever internal component if need be and then put whatever base OS on it, just because I want to do that.

With a Pixel, or Galaxy, or iPhone it runs the OS it came with and is blessed by the OEM on the hardware they compiled it to run on. Unless I am willing to accept large inconveniences in functionality and usability.

If I replace my desktop/laptop with a Pixel running Debian for desktop mode, now Google has vastly more control over what my desktop experience is going to be via their control of the hardware and host OS layer than they do today. If they decide they don’t want something being done in that Debian container in the future for some reason, then they can stop me from doing it with little recourse for me as a user.

I used to think the idea of a phone that is also my desktop would be really cool. But then I got to thinking just how locked down iOS and to a lesser extent Android are compared to Linux/Windows/MacOS, and decided I wouldn’t use my Pixel as a replacement for my desktop or laptop even if the feature was there.

There are a lot of things at Apple that I, as the paying customer, would rather Cook care more about than AR/VR boondoggles.

In their defense, I’m not sure I have ever seen a major UI redesign of some piece of software that the users of that software actually liked, at least at first. Inertia and muscle memory are powerful things.

Walking my dog, anxiety, pessimism, and existential dread mostly.

Or Disney. That mouse would shank his own grandmouse for a larger slice of cheese.

Or, and hear me out, I could just carry a single device with a charging cable that weighs less than 5lbs that does all of that without all of the cables and BS associated with trying to be a tech edgelord for clicks. Hell, if that device is a Framework is will probably be way more repairable than that mini PC and probably super fragile AR glasses as well.

Lemmy as a platform speaks to me on a philosophical level when it comes to the kinds of technology I use when I have the choice. I like that it is not at the mercy of the need to turn a profit to exist.

As long as I revert to the open source driver before doing major OS upgrades I haven’t had issues either in years. Last time I tried AMD though it was a shit show.

Once a company becomes publicly traded it always gets worse. Once the shareholders are closer to the executive compensation packages than the customers/users it is all downhill. It is like clockwork.

Might take a year, might take 10, but the result is inevitable.

Did you read the article?

To be fair the only reason he actually went through with buying Twitter was because he was forced to.

It would be better to not allow Google to have a major stake in the control of the Chromium project itself. Same for Android, force them to spin AOSP off into a nonprofit or sell it to EFF or something and forbid them from having a huge stake in it.

Let them use it for their own products, but remove their financial influence over the underlying software.