I recently switched over my ARR stack to only use usenet. Working well now but you really need a good indexer. The public ones are just not quite good enough.

Eh, kinda. The macbooks still come with 8gb non replaceable memory and the upcharge for another 8gb is $200 (not just for the air but the $1600 pro too). These are still great laptops but the pricing feels hostile.

IPad hardware is brilliant but what’s the point? You’re stuck with a neutered OS and a handheld formfactor that is not especially suitable for work or for gaming (the fields that usually need more power).

The baseline iphones are still lacking basic features like a high refresh screen purely for product segmentation purposes. And once again a slew of hostile, anti-user and anti-developer decisions like banning sideloading or alternative browser engines mainly designed to lock down the OS so they can retain all control of what goes on on your device. Another way this control is used is to funnel you to use icloud which offers an introductory free tier of 5(?) GB of data. I don’t think I had a single relative that didn’t have the “your icloud storage is full” popup every day until we disabled photo backups or they started paying a monthly subscription.

The app store is also a disaster. Just open it and search for something, I’m not even going to say more. This is an obvious profit vs user experience tradeoff.

Airpods are more or less fine. I had a gen1 Airpods pro which were kinda category defining at the time. Competition has caught up however, also better repairability would be nice. I’m actually surprised you were allowed to use them without an iPhone.

Apple watch seems fine, still no 3rd party watchfaces. The locked down OS is somewhat more justified in this case.

I haven’t tried the vision pro but that is also locked down software wise.

Overall, as you said, the hardware is good to best-in-class but it feels to me that at every turn you are being pushed and manipulated into giving more of your cash to Apple sometimes in the form of product segmentation, sometimes via artificial software limitations.

You don’t get to be a trillion dollar company just by making good products.

I don’t think it’s going anywhere either but Warren Buffet did sell his position in Apple. The M1 for sure is/was a hit but other than that they seem more focused on extracting every penny from customers, rather than providing the best products possible. I guess we’ll see how it works out as a long term strategy.

My Brother in Christ, WTF is a sCiEnCe?

Is this a US thing? Does it cover the entirety of chemistry, biology and physics (and maybe maths or geography)?

The new stunning, groundbreaking, and bespoke iPad Pro. They are nice enough but it is safe to say I was not stunned.

Apparently there is! There is a mod for SPT called MPT (now renamed to fika). It has a github but the download is only available through their discord. Took me a while to find it. Gonna see if we can get it working tomorrow.

Is there?

Features out the wazoo and an insane amount of customisation available to the user via Goodlock, but also some quirks.

Here are my highlights: limit charge to 80% to conserve battery health; custom shortcuts when dragging from the side of the phone based on the angle of your swipe; not sure what app just woke the screen or sent a notification that disappeared? You can get a log of all of these activities; add a dedicated 2x crop button to the camera app; send audio from different apps to different sound outputs simultaneously; a whole stack of s-pen features ranging from useful to very niche (quick lock screen note, screen crop, use pen as camera shutter); and many more.

There are some annoyances also: you can’t have an infinite scrolling app drawer, it has to have pages; using icon packs from the play store is annoying and the Samsung theme store sucks.

Overall I like one UI 6 but there is always some room for improvement.

You can use pixel search as a widget for play store search if you like

Does this include Candy Crush an mobile gaming in general? I’d say that people who play something on their phone every now and then won’t be foaming from their mouths because of something like this. Then again, they don’t buy the games that we’re talking about here so that’s why I’m asking (I checked your link but couldn’t find this info)

It’s really annoying. I was looking for a smart wearable with blood oxygen monitoring, and couldn’t find much useful info on reddit/Google so I asked bing chat. Instead of giving a useful answer it was parroting some bullshit about these gadgets not being medical devices. I know… if I wanted a medical device that’s what I would look for.

It’s always been the case where you can research information that is plain wrong or even intentionally misleading. You have to take a measured perception and decide whether the source is to be believed.

And I shouldn’t have to justify every query I make to the bloody computer. It’s not the AI’s job to give me a lecture about skewed ethics every time I have a technical question. We’re heading to a world where children will be raised by these answers and I think the constant caveats and safety nets do much more harm than help. Learning to be critical is much more important than learning to follow the forced ethics set by some corporate guidelines.

(got the Ticwatch 5 pro btw - no thanks to bing. It works amazing, wakes me up with sleep as android when I forget to put on my cpap mask)

What stood out to me is how bad the Ally can be in certain games when not plugged in. 1% and. 1% lows that are worse than either of the decks. The best thing about the old deck (other than the screen) is battery life. In Dead Cells it beat the lcd decks 6 hours with 8 hours of battery life while running at 90 fps instead of 60 (the ally lasted 2-3 hours depending on refresh rate). Obviously this is not a very gpu heavy scenario but still significant in my opinion.

Not exactly sure what the server limits are but something like Valheim could work for a large group of people. It’s an open world sandbox so people can divide up and do whatever they want to on the same server (exploring, fighting, mining, building, farming, etc.) Not sure how far you can get in the game in 3 hours though…

Alternatively you could play some sort of team based shooter but there might be a stark skill difference in a competitive setting.

Apparently the star wars bf classic collection has a 32 player co-op mode vs ai which sounds amazing to me, but I’ve never tried it before

I used to just buy a key from Kinguin or similar. It’s usually around 2-3 usd for an OEM key (only usable on 1 computer) and you can pay with PayPal. Never had issues yet.

Next time around I might try this activation script that was mentioned here though.

How can the picture be real of your eyes aren’t real?

Are you watching this on a Nintendo DS or something?

Battery life is brilliant! I have my phone set to only charge to 85% to preserve battery health and the only times it runs out is next day when I forget to charge it overnight. The snapdragon 8gen2 is much more efficient than the gen1 the year before (and Google’s tensor chips). I was not happy with the price either. The S23 is 90% of the ultra for much less money. I ended up going with the ultra purely because I kinda disliked the shape/feel of the S23 in my hands and found a decent deal. But the s23 is much better value (same chip, still very good camera and screen) all you’re missing out is the 10x zoom and the S-pen, both of wich are nice to have but definitely situational.

Got an s23 ultra last year, I’m loving it. I don’t really know what the people here mean by bloat, you can uninstall almost everything you don’t want, and disable the rest of the apps right from the phone. ADB exists if you want to dive deeper but I haven’t found the need.

Loving the fast chip and crazy cameras, some of Samsung’s extensive software is actually useful, and one ui has more customisability than any other flavour I’ve tried before. Much of the customisation is hidden behind this this app called Goodlock that allows you to change pretty much anything on the os. For example you can hide the app names on the home screen or have different actions depending on the angle you drag the back gesture from the side (I have a down swipe set to a system wide search for example). It’s crazy in comparison that Google doesn’t even allow you to remove their dumb search bar from the home screen without changing to a different launcher.

Even so, there are some small idiosyncrasies that are annoying. You can’t have a vertical app drawer without changing launcher, it’s annoying to apply themes from the play store and not Samsung’s shitty theme store, and if you unlock your phone with your face you can’t still tap your finger afterwards to unlock, you have to swipe. Every platform has some of these, you gotta pick your poison here. Graphene os up until recently didn’t support android auto and I still don’t think you can use your phone for contactless payments. Not sure about play protect and banking apps, I’m sure others here can tell you.

I the end, I got the ultra for the camera hardware but I also really didn’t want to give Google any money. With Graphene os now having android auto I might have reconsidered but I’d have to do more research on what limitations Graphene has.

Along what others have mentioned, we still have the ‘Old lady sitting in front of the toilet building’. It’s less common these days but there are still some of these around in eastern Europe. She keeps the facilities clean(er) and takes money from entrants. They usually have a little stand or something.

It’s even worse when using stage manager