decorum: a solemn request that questions use question marks.

why: differentiation - between “hey. look at what I made” posts and “anybody know how I can?” questions.

… and liars lie.

devils.

In any problem, every solution that works is a solution, but not every solution is of equal value. In math we use the word "Elegant : Characterised by minimalism and intuitiveness while preserving exactness and precision. " To describe solutions that work well, are concise, and don’t add pain.

Jigsaw puzzle analogy: If you have a puzzle with one piece missing, there are at least a hundred things you can use that will fill that space … sawdust, sand, play-doh, cement, but the most elegant solution, is the puzzle piece made to go there.

With tech, its just more complex- we don’t create solutions in a vacuum ( a world by themselves ), they have to exist and mesh with a preexisting world. We call those limits constraints. And the problem with tech is that often the people who create the technology ignore (don’t care much about) the constraints.

Inventor: Can we do xyz with cameras? Society: And not let them be used for evil? Inventor: Not my problem.

Its easy to solve problems: the cat is sick. kill the cat. people: No that’s awful. inventor: but it did solve the cat problem.

Solving problems in a way that meshes well with the world is not easy. And our inventors are at the moment, shortsighted and greedy.

Just adding. This and all the bad things that will happen if they get the green light, is not how this is done or should be done.

‘But all the waste and ineficciency!’ Hog wash.

From the system that is working? and serves thousands of people what they needed every day of every year.

They have to say it’s horribly broken. Its a lie, but they have to justify why.

There are standards, procurement contracts, entire agency’s to make sure — Make sure what?

March 28, 2025 - Make sure that what will happen, doesn’t.

coda: The trick this cabal is using is simple - take a thing most folk don’t understand. Say it’s broken. Open it. Rob it. Say its fixed. Collect profits and praise, leave town.

Just clearing up the argument.

1. The files will be scanned
2. They’ve been doing for decades

There’s a difference here in principle. Exemplified by the answer to this question: “Do you expect that things you store somewhere are kept private?” Where, Private means: “No one looks at your things.” Where, No One means: not a single person or machine.

This is the core argument. In the world, things stored somewhere are often still considered private. (Safe Deposit box). People take this expectation into the cloud. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Box, Dropbox etc - only made their scanning known publicly _after they were called out. They allowed their customers to _assume their files were private.

Second issue: Does just a simple machine looking at your files count as unprivate? And what if we Pinky Promise to make the machine not really really look at your files, and only like squinty eyed. For many, yes this also counts as unprivate. Its the process that is problematic. There is a difference between living in a free society, and one in which citizens have to produce papers when asked. A substantial difference. Having files unexamined and having them examined by an ‘innocuous’ machine, are substantial differences. The difference _is privacy. On one, you have a right to privacy. In the other you don’t.

an aside…

In our small village, a team sweeps every house during the day while people are out at work. In the afternoon you are informed that team found illegal paraphernalia in your house. You know you had none. What defense do you have?

I just read up, and I didn’t know this is not so much about stopping new images, but restitution for continued damages.

The plaintiffs are “victims of the Misty Series and Jessica of the Jessica Series” ( be careful with your googling) https://www.casemine.com/judgement/us/5914e81dadd7b0493491c7d7

Correct me please, The plaintiffs logic is : “The existence of these files is damaging to us. Anyone found ever in possession of one of these files is required by law to pay damages. Any company who stores files for others, must search every file for one these 100 files, and report that files owner to the court”

I thought it was more about protecting the innocent, and future innocent, and it seems more about compensating the hurt.

Am I missing something?

just to be clear, for fear we mentally normalize this

1. this is hostile behavior from Chrome
2. what the customer does with the browser, in a sane world, is of no concern of the guy who made it.

to accept that another person has one sided authority to determine what you can and can’t do with a tool, after it is in your possession is weird.

Kids, remember, Google is an advertising company.

One thing to note - The science is still calculating. Yet. SpaceX (and presumably others) are allowed to continue and increase what they’re doing. This is the bass ackwards way to protect future us.

Its the same mentality as driving in a random direction for 20 minutes while someone looks in the car for the map on the off chance that when you get the map open you’ll be where you wanted to be anyway.

It has the potential (and at this point, just the potential) for planet level changes, and is being done by one group. Should I, a random dude, be able to do something that might possibly affect the entire planet, and the planet as a whole just have to wait and see how it turns out?

The hopeful thought that its probably nothing, before anyone can prove that it’s probably nothing, makes a bet where the short term wins are mine, but any long term losses are everyone else’s.

Nothing was taken away. It’s literally just combined with another port now. That’s not how either Apple or Samsung adapters work. The converters to a bit more than change the shape of the plug.

I didn’t respond to _any arguments you made. I thought you posed the question ‘why?’

[ confirmation bias at play. you have switched to bluetooth. it meets or exceeds all your needs. you don’t see much public indication to the contrary. you figure bluetooth is the best. ]

1. simplicity the cable just works. no configuration. no pairing .un pairing, figuring why it worked yesterday

2. Audio quality - bluetooth is lossy. we just were given AptX lossless in 2021 ( another confirmation bias ) “Sounds great to me” “I can’t hear the difference”.
   2 things are both possibly true though: I can’t hear the difference. Other people hear a big difference. this seems impossible to some people. As if their senses are the apogee of human sense.

3. lag. new codecs lower latency, but lag lag lag. You couldn’t possibly use your device as a synth/music instrument and ‘play’ the lag is far to great. Same with games.

4. whats the big deal. This is a bias for the plug users - would it hurt to keep it? we’ve always had it. The work is already done. Its already baked in the cake, why you gotta take it out?

5. Investment - I have really good headphones. I have really good earbuds. Yes there are adapters but they are finicky exactly when you want them to just work. They inevitably break. They often downgrade the sound - I have 3 usb to audio adapters for android that all hiss for no reason.

The issue is that when the marketers are selling us a ‘clean vision of the future’ they purposefully gloss over the things they are taking away. Then they paint the people who feel pain because of the change as neanderthals who wouldn’t know better if it bit them. When they do know better. They had better (for them) and progress made it worse (for them). To which the marketers generally say - you should be someone else.

167532282 :-) good times

You are not the only one.

This weeks game of ‘Internet pile-on’

What about the one sided ability to change a contract??

A year from now Roku pop up says “Click to Accept” , the text says **"this contract means you’ll have to give us your first born child? ** My reasoning says if they can do one then they can do the other. There is nothing that would prevent them from adding ‘fees’, or ‘subscriptions’ or simply turning off the device. (!)

This is egregious. We bought something. In normal commerce, the contract was set in stone at that moment. The seller can’t roll up 2 years later, change the contract, force you to agree before you can use your device, and then say , well maybe if you beg, you can opt out.

Win7 and Win10.

late to the party, but I had OperaGX do a clever evil thing recently - I have an old machine running MacOS 10.14 (for reasons), I had GX up, and I alt-tab’d and noticed there was the “don’t symbol” (ghostbusters) over the OperaGX Icon. I thought, “that can’t be right”. I’m running GX right now. I double checked, and I was using GX with several windows open. But the symbol was right - they had Updated OperaGX that I WAS running, WHILE I was running it, to a version that WOULDN’T work on the computer I was on. I eventually restarted GX, and got a 'You can’t use OperaGX with this version of MacOS". Jerks.

I dug around, and very roughly, the .app file is not the App. They use a folder off in Library to store the actual pieces of the app, and it there is a few different pieces, and the .app file points to the actual executables.

Anyway it was fun while it lasted. Never again.

Thanks for saying this. It’s features at price point.

“It’s better than the Pi at only 3x the price.”

And what’s with the “Avoid the Raspberry PI” sentiment? They are hard to get (?). I’ve been using the Pi for forever, and have zero ‘product’ complaints that would make me want to "Avoid the Pi’. If anything, I have plans for more. Again, the price - A Zero2W is $15 MSRP. For $15, You can put that in everything. A Pi4 is $35. Its just a great deal.