Buying a basic, no-frills USB-C cable from a reputable tech manufacturer all but guarantees that it’ll work for essentially any purpose. Of course the shoddy pack-in cables included with a cheap device purchase won’t work well.

I replaced every USB-C-to-C or -A-to-C cable and brick in my house and carry bag with a very low cost Anker cable (except the ones that came with my Google products, those are fine), and now anything charges on any cable.

You wouldn’t say that a razor sucked just because the cheap replacement blades you bought at the dollar store nicked your face, or that a pan was too confusing because the dog food you cooked in it didn’t taste good. So too it is not the fault of USB-C that poorly manufactured charging bricks and cables exist. The standard still works; in fact, it works so well that unethical companies are flooding the market with crap.

We will never solve the Scunthorpe Problem.

I’m torn between “…and nothing of value was lost” and “…but of course those fears never materialized.” But I guess por que no los dos?

Oh, these are very interesting numbers.

Total COVID-19 CICP claims filed: 12,700

Out of about 700M doses administered? That’s 0.0018% of people who actually thought they had been harmed enough to actually file a complaint.

Decisions: 1,837

Claims found eligible for compensation: 38

And 2% of the people who thought they had something actually did.

That means that, of the 700 million doses of COVID vaccine that have been administered since 2020, 0.0000054% have resulted in an adverse reaction significant enough to merit financial compensation.

Thank you, Bill, for providing the information needed to prove your own point spurious.

I also read about how they can correlate data between users and devices, too; maybe you don’t have location on, but your app can correlate accelerometer data from your device with matching data from the same time from another device on the bus that does have location on. Boom, now they know you ride that bus. Or: everyone connecting from a particular IP address visits a particular restaurant’s menu site from a QR code. Pretty good chance, then, that that IP address is the restaurant’s wifi. Now they can correlate all that data and find out who your friend group is. Even something as simple as knowing that you were near your friends for an extended period of time while they were in an Uber to a venue before a show can help them build a profile about you and your cohort’s interests and behaviors.

For a year or two that answer has been “Google, but append site:reddit.com” to the end. Now, who knows. We should go back to webrings.

Does he think this will convince anyone to change their decision?

Trump will be like “Ok, but you gotta change your name to Vince Ramaswamadingdong. I can’t pronounce the other one.”

DDG is great for privacy, but their results are mostly just Bing results. Which is usually fine, but rarely excellent.

They don’t owe me anything, no. But I don’t owe them anything either. If they aren’t serving my needs anymore (and they often aren’t), I’ll be taking my “business” (that is, my product) elsewhere.

But then how would they RETAIN YOUR ATTENTION?

Facts do have a well-known LIB’RUL bias.

A president can’t pardon state crimes. He’ll still be serving sentences in Georgia and New York.

If you use Firefox, get the Redirector extension and add a rule that automatically redirects reddit.com/* to old.reddit.com/$1.

This is kind of a bad example because the value proposition is different but still very clear - the default version of the app provides a regular income stream to the developers.

No, I was quite intentional about that example. My assertion remains: if they’re not providing regular value, then I don’t feel obliged to provide them with regular income.

I don’t hope that they go hungry or anything. I just don’t think it’s my responsibility to subsidize them forever just because they made an app for me once. I’ve got bills to pay too.

Software as a Service is only a value when the service offers you something that the software on its own cannot do; otherwise it’s just rent seeking.

Paying for cloud storage, for continuous content updates (especially news), or a server to process or generate content that can’t be done on my device, all fine. Paying for a messaging service to pass my messages to others, or for a game to maintain servers for multiplayer play? No problem.

But a subscription to remove ads? Your app doesn’t need an external server to do that. That’s rent-seeking. Same with a subscription to unlock widgets or some third-party connection.

A subscription for regular software updates are right on the line for me. In a sane world, the software package you purchase would be provided with some amount of security updates, but you wouldn’t have to pay any extra until you decided to purchase the next version for new features. You know, like it was until Adobe decided to upend the industry. (Incidentally, it’s weird that Adobe has gone from being the poster child for rent seeking in software to one of the more reasonable companies that’s doing software as a service. I still hate that there’s no way to get their software without a subscription, but at least they are providing some form of continuous value in the form of continuous updates, as well as fonts and stock images and such.)

On the other end of the spectrum you have something like Minecraft, where my ($20? I don’t remember) purchase from over a decade ago is still receiving regular content updates for free, multiple times a year, with no subscription needed. I can pay a subscription fee to get an online realm for myself and my family, but I don’t have to because I can also just set up and operate a server myself. More than reasonable.

Pocket Casts has a server component that makes sense you have to pay for, and for the most part the only things you don’t get with the free version are the server stuff and a little bit of cosmetic stuff. $40/year for 20GB is a little steep, but the fact that they charge for it doesn’t bother me.

With the exception of the folders; that doesn’t make sense to me being a Plus-only thing.

All that being said, I bought the app before it went free, so I am grandfathered in to a lifetime Plus plan; but if that hadn’t been the case I would not be paying for a subscription today.

Dang. That’s a major UX flaw in BMV and police systems.

Yeah, I hope so too. I mean, it’s hard to make any commitments without knowing what the needs would be; the need can be anything on a spectrum from “just money” to “more maintainers,” to “new products” or “bigger ecosystem,” all the way up to “help with governance” or “a forked codebase.” It could also be anything in between or any combination. Committing your whole organization to it before you know what the commitment is feels unwise, so I get it. But I agree, I want them to say more and do more soon.

I’ve been on it for a few months now. It’s basically just Mastodon with the Elk skin, but using Mozilla Accounts for authentication. I think there are a couple more bells and whistles added as well. But overall, I think it’s just a starting point from which they’ll develop something more custom.