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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 16th, 2024

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  • The problem is, the real money is in either the data that it acquires or in recurring monthly costs.

    Unfortunately, making a good, reliable product with no MRCs and no spying means fewer repeat buyers. Which is especially a problem for a niche community like selfhosters and privacy-conscious. You sell the product once and…that’s it. Eventually the market is full and some people are upgrading but now your product is selling on the secondary market.

    This is business in the 21st century. They can’t survive without forced obsolescence, telemetry, and/or MRCs.






  • I did. 1993 Saturn SL2. I bought that car for $1500 in 2001 when I was 16 and quite literally drove it until the wheels fell off (which then ended in me flipping over the car on the highway, but that’s a story for another day. That also ended with being the reason I can’t listen to “The Red” by Chevelle without a mild panic attack, also a story for another day.)

    The idea of buying an 8 year old car (with only 93k miles, at that) for $1500 just seems so foreign now.

    All it needed was a muffler, too. I drove it for about a year and a half before I killed the clutch, and that was the most expensive repair it had.




  • Samsung toyed with this idea with DexDock and there is support directly on some modern phones with most USB-C docks.

    I just tried this out on my Pixel 8 Pro…“Enable Desktop experience features” in Developer Options, reboot, plugged in Dell dock…got an android “desktop” on two monitors. They were mirrors of each other, but they were separate from the display of the phone, and they were in the monitors native res. Keyboard and mouse worked. Ethernet off the dock worked, too. It didn’t use the USB webcam I had plugged into the dock.

    The UI could use some polish. Android doesn’t really have great mouse support or really any keyboard shortcuts, and the apps themselves are built for a handheld, touchscreen experience.

    For example…Firefox for android…pages would default to mobile view, text scaling would be way high (can’t pinch-zoom to make it smaller) and well-known shortcuts like Ctrl+MouseWheel, Ctrl+L, Ctrl±, etc wouldn’t work.

    It could be great.

    I would personally love for my “desktop experience” to be a low-power, silent, cool-running system (especially nowadays, with Moonlight and Steam streaming and various “cloud gaming” services getting to be pretty damn decent if your network can handle it…and being docked means not needing wifi).

    It was actually kind of eerie, sitting at my desk, browsing the web with keyboard/mouse/monitor and absolutely no fan noise around me.

    I would love to have my laptop experience be nothing more than a dock with integrated keyboard/touchpad/screen/battery pack.

    I would love for these to be the same system.

    These would all be killer features and absolutely justify the $1000+ pricetag of a phone upgrade every few years, especially if you want high-end processors like the latest Snapdragons.

    But it’s not there yet.


  • IMO Microsoft made a decent mobile OS. I will give them that.

    You know what else kicked ass and died too soon? Zune.

    I really think both these were only bad because not enough people got them. Trying to enter a saturated market that already has two really big, established players is not easy. Their biggest mistake with both of these was launching way, way too late.

    Microsoft just really can’t go against Apple or Google.

    ETA: I should clarify that last sentence…Microsoft can’t go toe-to-toe with Apple/Google (and probably the rest of FAANG) anywhere they don’t already have the home field advantage. It’s honestly impressive that Windows still has the desktop OS dominance that it does. It is, quite likely, the worst desktop experience around. Unless you count, like, TempleOS. But they got there first.

    It’d be interesting to see what would happen if Apple entered the Gaming Console market, and actually did it right. Stadia was a cool idea but ahead of its time…and streaming game services really need to require wired Ethernet, or at least give a means to benchmark network quality and set expectations accordingly.








  • Incels were a group of young men who were very easy to manipulate to further ingrain chauvinistic, pro-patriarchy norms. Objectifying women and treating sex like a birthright.

    Put that on top of growing up in a media culture that paints a really unrealistic example of a “normal” relationship, and unlimited free porn that sets a really bad expectation for what a healthy physical relationship looks like.

    This was a stepping stone to swing them conservative and support Trump. That’s pretty easy. Just set thin in front of strong alpha male characters like Rogan.

    It’s pretty obvious now in retrospect. What ever happened with Cambridge Analytica, again?