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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I think what’s really sad about Trumpism and similar surges of right wing support in other countries is that I get where it’s coming from — many of these people were already thoroughly fucked over by things they had no choice over. And then they’re so desperate for change that they vote for things that fuck them over even harder. We need more politicians like Mamdani

    Edit: typo




  • "The fact that Google has that locked down surely violates some EU laws. But I’m sure they wave away the laws because of “financial security” or some other bullshit. "

    I don’t know as much as I’d like to about the regulatory side of this, but I know that Google and other big tech have done a masterful job of proactively building themselves into systems such that taking action against them is difficult.

    I think that’s part of why the US antitrust case against Microsoft a few decades ago fizzled out into nothing — even though Microsoft was deemed to have been a monopolist, the big question was how do we remedy that in a way that isn’t going to be harmful? The consensus on this amongst people who I respect is that the results of the Microsoft case was woefully insufficient and something that helped to lay the foundations of the big tech dominance that we see today.


  • When I first got into Android (I miss my Nexus 6 T.T ), it felt like I could do so much more with my phone than I can now. I had so much cool automation shit that leveraged stuff like Google assistant voice commands, but now it’s shit on so many levels. It goes beyond the user facing side of things; I used to use the app Tasker for a lot of the automation stuff, and over the years, it seems like the dev has been climbing an uphill battle against Google gating off functionality, and generally making things opaque and difficult for developers.



  • I wonder how useful this kind of approach would be.

    I’m reminded of a podcast recently where someone described that some of their colleagues in their day job (a very union heavy job) got pissed off at some cops at a petrol station, basically saying “ay, why are you protecting the Tesla dealerships, you’re union too — you’re meant to be on our side”. The podcast guy said that although he really wanted to say to his colleagues something like “just because they’re union doesn’t mean they’re on our side. Cops only exist to protect the interests of capital”, he felt it was more productive to stoke the existing anger of his working class colleagues by leaning into their concerns




  • I think maps can be used for other stuff than just navigating. You’re quite right that this would be useless for actually navigating (which is probably the main purpose of using a map or other navigation software), but it could be a fun concept for looking back on things.

    I don’t use Google stuff as much nowadays, so they might have gotten rid of it (knowing Google, I wouldn’t be surprised), but I remember that one of the sections within the Google maps app was a “Timeline” section. I used that section a few times to check whether I actually went to a particular appointment that was scheduled a month or so prior, or to check which restaurant I ate at when I was last in [city]. I also found it fun to look at the overview of things, like being able to see the pins corresponding to the silly road trip I took with friends a few years ago. It’s nice to look back every now and then.