It’s unclear, because the relevant official bodies insist that things are fine

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

Damn, I didn’t know this, thanks for sharing. I am not American, and I was pretty young when Hurricane Katrina happened, so context like this is new to me. More reasons to hate Bush

That would be a metal as fuck cell phone stand

"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.

To be fair, it is difficult to rebuild one’s understanding of the world after finding out that your previous understanding was built on fundamentally wrong ideas. Not that I’m excusing people who respond to cognitive dissonance by digging deeper into willful ignorance — after all, the reason why I know it’s hard is because I’ve done that work myself (a couple of times). I do have some sympathy though.

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

They’re so close to getting it, but so far.

You have reminded me that StreetComplete exists. I used to use it a while back, but for the last few years, I lived in an area that was already pretty thoroughly mapped. However, I would wager that where I live now is more sparsely documented; I’ve only recently moved here, and StreetComplete could be a nice way to become more settled.

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.

Location data is one of the things that you can export through Google takeout , I believe — though I’m not sure what format that would come in.

I don’t imagine it would be too hard for a dedicated nerd who is procrastinating other work to write a thing to parse that data and view it in a map based on something more open, like Openstreetmaps.

This comment section is surprisingly spicy

“at home (Sheffield)”.

There’s a small section of my brain that seems to be permanently reserved for mentally cheering whenever I stumble across someone from near where I hail from, even if I haven’t lived there for many years now

A friend of a friend is the daughter of a Russian oligarch. It was a messy situation in which she was at risk of being drawn into the politics, even though her dad was an asshole who she would’ve been glad to see defenestrated. I only know the surface level info, but it sounds like a fucked up situation in many ways

What’s really stupid about this cycle is that some of these fail-upward executives genuinely believe the crap they’re spewing. Weirdly, I think I respect the grifting executives more

Edit: by grifting executives, I mean the ones who participate in that cycle you describe, and are aware of the harms they cause in their wake, but don’t care because they’ve gotten good at knowing when to skip out

Saaaaaame. I’ve heard that semi-colons are similarly associated with LLMs; This is another thing that feels like an attack on me personally.

It’s a good answer. I like to think it says something for my own techiness that I am able to fully parse your answer, even if I’m not Gentoo levels of techy myself

I liked it more than season 3. It gave a sense of closure in many respects, and if the show had ended here, I would’ve been happy with that.

Thanks for this perspective. I cringed so hard at the part about the guy with the PhD being listened to over you, because I know so many dumbasses with PhDs.