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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Over the years I’ve found, in the grand scheme, unless the CEO murdered your family, who cares? I didn’t buy Sony products for a couple of decades, right now I don’t even remember why I stopped. I think it was around shit warranty handling. Meanwhile, I was removing viable options from my purchase pool.

    More recently, I’m just trying to make my purchase decisions like I’m a business. Does the item at a given price fill the needs of the role? Does buying the year-old model at heavy discount fit the need? Avoid the top-tier release-day buzz, buy at a discount, use the tool as long as possible. These techniques collectively will stifle all the “economy” they’re trying to make a profit from.

    Vendors that are truly terrible will lose customers. One person’s soapbox won’t affect them, however, despite best efforts.



  • Everything mobile manufacturers have done since smartphones finally became popular in 2007 seemed like temporary solutions due to moving so fast. It’s clear now that it was all an attempt to paradigm-shift compute into leased property.

    It really needs to end, along with the terrible disposable hardware designs. Even if we were not in a climate crisis, it is about as bad as the US was in the 1950s throwing trash everywhere.

    On some level, especially now, want to find an alarm clock or an mp3 player or even a camera? It’s getting harder and harder. Old phones with their battery removed or replaced are perfect for those roles.









  • Most of the software updates you see are a result of CI/CD processes. The industry claims it makes good design patterns to get features our faster and more reliably. In reality it is just a rushed shitstorm that results in half-assed Friday releases that aren’t fixed until the following week.

    I’ve long turned off auto update of my apps. Too many times I’m on a trip or other scenario where my tool is meant to be a tool and not some tech bro’s rented wet dream, and the tool is broken.

    But here’s the kicker. CI/CD exists for another reasons or so:

    • Frequent updates tend to reset review rankings in app stores. Not only does it offer plausible deniability to the app company, but it also screws with the review scores in their favor, as well as other rankings.
    • Great way to help nudge along planned obsolescence. All that pointless rewriting of flash storage on a daily basis.
    • Psychological manipulation, it gets notifications in your face to try and increase app engagement, which ensures it is fresh and running gathering user telemetry to sell as a side-hustle, as well as direct-interaction telemetry and getting more ads in your face.

    It’d be better if we all just went back to landline phones some days. Modern tech is too noisy, abusive, and intrusive.