Ah I stand corrected on the Android side. I assumed there was some licensing going on. I’ll correct that.

Yeah because I’m sure GM’s shit will be better. Idek why I’m addressing this: we all know GM doesn’t want to pay Apple or Google. That this is really about more renting and never owning. They just want more money.

GM, just say that. We know you’re a gigantic money-hungry corp. You all don’t have to lie and pretend to care about safety. We’re not a bunch of idiots. We get it, even if you all suck for doing this.

I’d say I hope GM crashes and burns again, but then the government will just bail them out again.

People, and especially teens, still use Snapchat? That’s surprising. I remember when that was super popular in the late 00s/early 20teens with my friends (I never really used it). I don’t think anyone that I know my age (mid 30s) uses it anymore. Which I suppose makes it “cool” again.

I’ve only used Evernote sparingly over the last ~12yrs. 67 notes across 5 notebooks. Think it was one of the first apps I downloaded when I bought an iPad and iPhone. Still went ahead and exported everything, even though nothing of any serious importance. Some are just funny memories.

I would like to find something similar, maybe even self-hosted so it’s free. I keep seeing Joplin anytime someone mentions notebook programs; time to look into that.

I want to replace my 2014 13" MBP. But two things are really weighing on me:

1. I have 2 Windows laptops (one that’s more for gaming and another that’s more for productivity) that do what I need them to do perfectly well; why do I need another laptop? Plus I have two gaming desktops, a couple NUCs, a few servers, some RPIs…I really don’t need more computers, seriously.
2. Terrible base options with pricey upgrades. I’m tired of having to pay Apple extra for “premium features.” I’ve done with it iPhones over the years – wtf is 64GB (and now 128GB) base storage – At least my 2010 MBP I could upgrade aftermarket and did, but for my 2014 MBP, I had to pay the premium for more storage (base was 128GB; got 256GB).

Now I’ve never used my MBPs for anything resource-intensive. Some light-gaming – Stellaris and Eve Online, rarely – is probably the heaviest thing I’ve done it. Could I get by on 8GB RAM? Yeah, probably.

But it’s the principle of the thing. This isn’t 10yrs ago anymore, where Windows laptops from various manufacturers kinda sucked. My friend and I were looking at Windows laptops just the other day; so many nice Macbook-esque, thin, lightweight, but powerful enough laptops out there. And for the same price or less of an Macbook base model, they start at 16GB RAM, 512GB SSDs, etc. Many are still upgradable aftermarket.

I’m sure Apple Silicon is worth the premium. But not this other stuff that’s considered base on so many Windows machines.

I love Apple products, I do. But I’m not gonna keep throwing money at them for things that shouldn’t be considered upgrades. Guess I’ll keep holding out.

(I know, I know, matrix)

Getting people that you want to talk to – friends, family, etc – onto is a new platform is so difficult. No one wants to have 10 different communications apps, plus associated accounts*, just so they can talk to one or two people on each. It’s the network effect. It also doesn’t help that some of these platforms just aren’t as convenient or easy to use, especially for non-tech people.

But yeah, so many of these communities make no sense on Discord (or live chat period; IRC suffered from this too). I think troubleshooting is the worst, especially in larger, active communities. You have different conversations going on, so it’s easy to miss questions or answers. Plus, Discord’s search isn’t great, IMO. Better than reddit, but that’s not saying much. So someone probably asked the same question some time ago; good luck finding it, and even if you do, you still have to sift through the adjacent chat history to see if others responded and track that conversation.

Larger Discords remind me of the chats of large Twitch streamers, where the chat is going a million miles per hour. What’s even the point?

At least with a forum, it’s much slowed down, and there are clear divisions between topics, that give people the space to discuss those topics.

Websites are so easy to make these days, too. No coding experience even needed. I’m not saying Discord is worthless; it’s not and I use it plenty everyday. But it has its place. People need to use the right tools for the job.

*In many ways, websites suffer this issue, too. I have to make an account on this standalone separate website, just for my one question, and then after it gets answered, I’ll probably never go back to it? That’s why reddit (and Lemmy to a lesser extent) is so popular.

I’ve only gotten two strikes in my life, 7-8yrs ago. And I feel like this was because my brother was downloading then recent, popular movies (which I almost never do). But before that, never did, without a VPN, and I used to pirate a lot more. Even further back, used to have a roommate who would go on movie and show torrenting sprees. We never got strikes. And that was when commercial VPNs weren’t really a thing yet, but copyright strikes were well known. I’ve known others who’ve never gotten strikes either.

So I’d say no, not 100% necessary at all. But it’s free or cheap enough to mitigate the risk. So that’s why I use one when I do pirate, which is rare these days.

Windscribe. Mainly because I scored a cheap lifetime deal many years ago. It works well enough. Got two ISP copyright strikes before using Windscribe. Have yet to get another since using Windscribe (knock on wood). But I also don’t pirate as much as I used to.

Simple selling to BBVA was shit. Simple was never my main bank, but it was a nice, simple service. That was free. Then they moved to BBVA, which almost immediately got bought up by PNC, and then PNC started charging monthly fees. Closed my account before the first fees hit.

I still have a Varo account. Surprised that hasn’t gotten vacuumed up yet by one of the traditional banks.

Do people still say this? This seems like one of those tired things that gets passed around the Internet in the name of “Boo Apple!”

I don’t think I’ve heard any Apple products users of any tech background (or none at all) say since the early 2010s. Yet non-users keep parroting it.

Gotcha, yeah that checks out. I guess I never made that connection, even though I use TOR and torrent here and there. Probably also because I’m more concerned about download speeds over privacy when torrenting. And regular web traffic over TOR is often insanely slow compared to the clearnet.

Ever since getting a copyright strike several years ago, I’ve switched to using a commercial VPN while torrenting. I don’t know if that’s the all-in-one solution for hiding from my ISP, but it seems to work. But I also rarely torrent these days, too, so not as many opportunities for them to catch me, I suppose.

I didn’t think people torrented over TOR. Aside from the security issues (which I didn’t know about in the first place), I would think it’s gotta be insanely slow. Is it not?

Discord, they will often get an answer within seconds.

That’s what IRC used to be for. I was gonna say it was annoying to get something like mIRC installed and set up, but that’s not even true since there are plenty of one click web clients. My subreddit used to have a channel on a reddit-affiliated IRC server and we provided a link to our IRC channel. Don’t even have to register a username on most servers to join a channel and idle.

Being text only, however, means no reactions emojis and preview of images and videos and all that. Which I can understand be kinda annoying these days. Plus servers didn’t necessarily talk to each other. There wasn’t/isn’t federation, or if there is, most servers are not federated. But if you’re just dropping in for a one-off question, that shouldnt’ matter.

FYI, I think Reuters sometimes wants people go login with a free account. At least free for now…

I have a Google Voice number. Completely free. I used to give out to clients instead of my actual cell number. So that when I left, I could just recycle the number. Never recycled it, but I still use it as a backup/for trash purposes.

Though some systems out there that need a phone number do block Google Voice numbers during registration.

What does “Print Support App” mean? Please don’t tell me it’s like that garbage HP Smart stuff.

I can understand the pain, though. Moving accounts to a new email is not a fun process. Especially if someone has an email for years, decades even, that’s a lot of stuff that could be registered with that email. And trying to save emails isn’t necessarily straightforward. Migration, if it’s even available, isn’t foolproof or easy, either.

While I’ve grown up with the Internet, I think I’ve only changed my main email like 3 times over ~30yrs. The last time I did it was over a decade ago, to Gmail from my family’s then ISP-based email. I think I’m way overdue to do it again, at least moving my important accounts like banking and government stuff to a new email address, but it’s just so time consuming.

And I say all this as a tech person. I work in IT. For someone who’s not particularly tech savvy, forget about it.

The weird part of that is the the amounts he’s saying it would cost/time to re-run the test – $100-500 (probably like that pay for a employee’s day) – are nothing in the context of a company. Especially one that was sold or offered $100million. My company run on like a $3million budget. A few hundred dollars is nothing to us. That’s a staff lunch or our bar tab sometimes. If the retesting costs like $5000…OK, that’s certainly something to pause and think about. But a few hundred? A day or half a day for an employee to re-do the test? That’s too much?

Maybe to the average person, the average viewer, that sounds like a lot of money. But not to a business. Certainly not one as large as LMG.

I know a little about browsers, but not tons. Do all Chromium-based browsers use the same rendering engines? If so, isn’t it an issue as these Chromium browsers proliferate? If the engine deviates from the standards and they have the market share, feel like we just end up in the IE situation back then.

This is my small company. We used to buy cheap computers (like even from Best Buy or Wal-Mart…the then CEO was super cheap), but then we (I) always had to deal with bloatware and just crappy computers that wouldn’t last a year before I started getting complaints that they were slow or just acting up all the time. When he left, I started buying business-line computers directly from the OEMs. They’re not necessarily cheap. The Dell and sometimes HP laptops we buy average about $1500. Even before the pandemic and inflation that was true.

On the other hand, I also support a handful of Apple users, mainly in the Marketing/Communications team, and all but one have M1 Macbook Airs. They cost like $800. And they’re amazing. I bought a Mac Studio for our web designer/video & graphics editor and it only cost like $2000, I think. It too is a beast.

When I worked at a small MSP, some of the C-suites and biz owners I supported wanted powerful Windows laptops. Rarely for any work-related reason; they just wanted something better than the “peons.” They sometimes paid around $2000 for them. And like you mentioned, they were often still shit.