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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: August 30th, 2023

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  • What bugs me about this is THEY ARE ALL THE SAME! Flat rectangular phones with no buttons and few ports. Where is the innovation? Where is the experimentation? Where are the different form factors?

    Go back to like 2003 and you had all kinds of variety in the market. Some phones had slide out keyboards, some had physical keyboards like blackberries, they were all kinds of different expansion ports and slots and interfaces, and occasionally something totally different like Compaq had a gadget that took different backpacks that bolted on the back to give it extra capability.

    Skip 20 years ahead to today, and every phone is the exact same fucking form factor. And so we obsess over millimeters and megapixels and software. There’s no innovation here. There’s no variety here.

    The only even slightly interesting development I see is the new flip and book phones, but that technology is being used in the most boring way possible. I want to phone the size of a Snickers bar where I pull the screen out of it from the side and it unrolls as far as I want it to. I want a phone that flips open like a laptop to reveal a keyboard. Or even simpler, I want a phone that’s 4 mm thicker and has a battery that lasts all week. Give that phone a headphone jack and wireless charging, put a little rubber around it to make it indestructible, then you’ll have something interesting.

    Until that happens, you have like six manufacturers that are basically building the exact same product. Boring.


  • And that’s exactly why Ukraine is kicking ass. Paying $20k or $30k for a single enemy casualty is a pretty good deal in warfare. But these drones aren’t going through some huge defense contractor, they’re being 3D printed and assembled from off-the-shelf parts. Basically a little army of logistics people building hobby drones out of consumer level equipment, just with an improvised explosive like a grenade or some similar impact explosive strapped to the bottom.
    They aren’t even paying $20k for a casualty, they are paying $1-2k for a hobby drone and a grenade and many of them create multiple casualties.

    The more expensive ones cost more, but those are the ones you see that are reusable and can drop several grenades in one flight. Those are more like $5k-$20k. Still an insane bargain even if each one only creates one casualty before it is destroyed.


  • IT person here. Avoiding HP is a good idea. But a better idea is don’t buy shitty cheap consumer level inkjet printers from any brand. Most of them have this sort of bullshit, although not usually as bad as HP does. Instead I suggest buy it for life. Get a nice color laser machine, spend a few hundred bucks, and you will have a printer that lasts until you die. I like the Canon MF743CDw, it’s a little on the pricier side but it scans both sides of the paper in one pass. Also does color duplex printing.

    If you don’t want the extra size or weight of a color laser, get a black and white laser. How often do you really need color? And if you must get something cheaper, get one of the newer inkjet printers that use refillable ink bottles rather than cartridges, like there is an actual ink tank on the printer and you refill it with a squeeze bottle rather than replacing the cartridge.




  • Much has been said about the idea of ‘signal leaving UK or EU’. Little has been said about how exactly that would happen.

    AFAIK, Signal has no business presence in the UK or EU. IE, no offices, no registered corporate entities. Thus, they (arguably) have no more requirement to comply with UK’s or EU’s regulations than, say, Iran’s or China’s or any other jurisdiction where they do not do business and have no presence.

    Signal’s leadership has a record of giving any regional restrictions the middle finger, so I doubt Signal would voluntarily block EU countries. So that means the EU would either pressure Google and Apple to delist Signal (easily worked around, at least on Android, and soon on Apple too as EU is trying to force sideloading) or they’d pressure ISPs to block connections to Signal (more or less impossible).

    If EU tried to do that, it’d just create a giant game of whack-a-mole. And people doing real CSAM shit would just move to even more private distributed systems.







  • I only know some basics of the whole situation, but I really don’t get this attack. Israel is a modern Westernized nation and enjoys STRONG support, financial and military, from many/most other Western developed nations. They have modern weapons of just about all types.
    Israel is accused of some awful shit and stealing peoples homes. From what I can see they’re probably guilty of this.

    But I don’t understand how killing a bunch of civilians at a rave is going to overall help the cause. It seems to me like a. it’d give your better-armed adversary an excuse to smack you down once and for all, and b. a good way to make the rest of the world feel like they shouldn’t be stopped in doing so (and if anything, helped in their efforts).

    So what is the goal? Is this just an expression of pent up anger? Because it seems a poor strategy to me.