Keep in mind Apple has a poorly documented and mostly unknown daemon called knowledgeconstructiond that cannot be turned off and solely exists to profile you based on accessing every Apple apps data - ical, messages, mail, photos etc, which is astoundingly personal info especially considering a lot of Apple users dump everything into stock apps, as the “strength” of Apple has typically been consistency of the platform

https://8rank.ai/game/apple-intelligence-personal-knowledge-graph

The person who wrote that article vibecoded an app that allows you to visualize the data captured: https://github.com/8rank/iKnow

It is basically all the gross shit that ad networks do. What does Apple do with this data, that has been aggregated since macos 13? Officially it’s probably to “enhance the user experience” but at a minimum it probably changes how Apple delivers ads to you. do they sell it? Who knows

Those fabs would need to be retooled. So intel spends billions, butchers their ability to fabricate their core product line, and all so that they can now fabricate a deprecating asset. By the time they got up and running ram prices would be about to drop significantly as 2028 has Samsung, micron, and sk Hynix all opening expanded fabrication capacity. Not to mention if the 3 main ram manufacturers take ~2 years to get additional capacity online god only knows how long it would take for someone who hasn’t fucked with dram manufacturing since like the 80s

Who’s gonna pay for it? A ram fab costs hundreds of billions and takes years to get online, then takes tens of billions every year to constantly upgrade to new standards. And all that for a commodity that while right now is obnoxiously expensive is typically a razor thin margin and sometimes even sold at a loss

The user base isn’t homogenous

I like that Claude can jailbreak consoles and decomp and port games quickly. These are projects that are cool, have utility, are obnoxiously difficult and or tedious, and exclusively unpaid. Is it better if some super coder does it all? Probably, but the unpaid bit means progress is painfully slow and limited to people doing passion projects. But is it also cool I can play a bunch of retro games natively on basically any platform and then jailbreak a ps5 to run Linux and steam? Yes

there is myst 3, 4, and 5 with 5 being a definitive end to the series

If you liked myst and riven you’d probably like them as well. The series was pretty strong if you’re into the whole “narrative over gameplay” thing. At the time they were also widely regarded for the graphical quality but that obviously didn’t hold up

If you liked those point and click adventure games the journeyman project trilogy from presto studios in the same era is also great, though there was supposed to be a 4th installment that was cancelled. The Lucasarts and sierra games from a bit earlier in that genre (the dig, sam and max hit the road, Indiana jones and the fate of Atlantis, day of the tentacle, police quest, kings quest, monkey island, etc) are also great

Getting all of these games to run on a modern pc is a bit of a headache though. Some are on gog and some have support in scummvm but not all. The renaissance of point and click adventure was like 1995-2000 and the genre really died around then. Great games, although they can be extremely frustrating and obtuse at times

This should shock no one and if anything the shocking thing is transparency (though that is likely a ploy as I guarantee based on these articles plenty of people will go view it to correct the record, giving Amazon a great source of refinement for ad tracking)

Literally every major website (and basically every website that run JavaScript for that matter) tracks and profiles you. Your tv does the same, as does your phone and almost all the apps on it, etc. and the profiling they don’t show you definitely exists: race, political affiliation/leaning, income estimates, address, educational level, health issues, etc

tft lcds got in this too because they’re so dirt cheap and capacitive touch interfaces are cheap as fuck to manufacture. Even if the parts costs are a tiny bit higher relative to physical buttons and interfaces the money saved on assembly makes up for it (and in some cases the parts actually are cheaper

Plus in a kitchen or bathroom setting this is much easier to make water and dust resistant, which is an actual benefit tbf, but at the expense of ergonomics and accessibility

You can literally go on Amazon right now and search LCD toaster. There’s the $4-500 ultra bougie American designed (not made lol) smart one but then there are a ton of Chinese designed ones that are like $50-60 because it’s a $20 toaster with a (when bought at scale) $0.95 lcd strapped on

Marketing is dumb, this is why I left ui/ux/hci work. You can create an ergonomic and intuitive system that is evidence based and the ad men will be like “but can we pander to the lowest common denominator by ruining it with some useless feature that’s objectively worse to use?” And then they just dropped the pretense and said fuck ux, embrace dark patterns

I could bitch about this for days

We’re kind of describing the same people I think

See that’s utility and depending on the sensors you choose that can definitely be local only

But skimming the page for a Samsung smart fridge none of this is in the features. It’s that it can play music, you can put notes and pictures and shit, there’s an “ai camera” that can tell you what you need to buy (though something tells me that struggles if your fridge isn’t set up like a stock image and is actually loaded with like food and condiments and shit like a normal person)

A Bluetooth speaker can do the music part likely with much better sound quality, a smart speaker can handle the typical kitchen tasks like setting timers (which can be done purely in HA, you don’t need Alexa or whatever), a dry erase board and magnets can cover notes and pictures, and the reminders app on your phone can probably do a much more accurate job of keeping a shopping list. Then you can buy a fridge that doesn’t have a 32” proprietary lcd that is a major point of failure, and you can literally save thousands of dollars (quick search shows these fridges are 3500-4k, which is insane for a fridge, even a fancy huge one).

The market for these is people who have too much money (or are willing to take on credit debt) but also can’t be bothered to spend the 1-2 hours it takes to read up on how to do what you’ve done. Samsung, Apple, Google, Amazon, etc prey on these people

The top of the line one can make spherical ice though, which is admittedly super cool

I just don’t see the utility. I can be pretty pro “smart” stuff, especially if I can run it without an internet connection, but what’s the point for a fridge?

Like an oven I get, though I don’t have one. It’s laziness but there is some utility in being able to preheat the oven without getting up, or double check the oven was turned off. Although newer ovens tend to have rapid preheating that really can be quick (unlike my 1996 oven that takes 15-20+ minutes)

But a fridge? What are you going to do? Ensure it’s running? Except when something like this happens lmao. The only real thing it could add is an advertisement and data collection vector, which is the opposite of utility. I’ve also seen smart toasters. Not toaster ovens, but like pop in two slices of bread and push the plunger. Why? You have to come to the device to load it. Do you leave bread overnight getting stale and save the 30 seconds and greatly raise the risk of cold toast? Ridiculous

You can run Linux and steam on ps5 but jailbreaks are as of now limited to older firmwares. The ps5 is aggressive about making updates mandatory so you either need a console someone purposely did not update in anticipation of a jailbreak break years later or one that’s been sitting around not being used for a somewhat long time

I promise you your definition of worthless is far different than an investors

The stock market is overwhelmingly owned by about 10% of Americans who tend to be on the very wealthy side and the “mindless capitalism drones who simply want number to grow” side. They just see user growth and applaud. They love this change and all the changes Reddit has made over the past few years because it means harder to scrape for free and more likely to convert casual browsers to users

What is potentially killing Reddit (and twitter, Facebook, etc) is that advertisers are starting to lose patience with bot activity, which is the overwhelming amount of content on social media. The misleading statistic that those companies throw out is that bots make up a (relatively) small amount of accounts, which is arguably true, but sidesteps that those bots post like crazy. Thus the “power user” effect, where 5-20% of the user base makes up like 90+% of content. Advertisers are getting wise to the fact that an overwhelming number of social media interactions are just nothing (and no one they can sell to) and they’re starting to demand better analytics as well as run their own

This is where Reddit is potentially screwed; meta has dozens of other things to fall back on besides ad revenue. Twitter has Elon propping it up. But this is still pretty wishful thinking, the reality is that Reddits valuation will likely be propped up by institutional investors for years, maybe decades, on the hope of something that never comes (see: Tesla). The quality of the site is essentially irrelevant

Reddit sucks but this is asinine. The stock is down ~35% this year but still up almost 250% since ipo.

Discord is privately owned still but you bring up another key point: the players you’re up against are so powerful, with so much wealth and the most comprehensive legal representation, that even if you manage to have some success they will either buy you or destroy you. Meta has a presence on the fediverse, even

The numbers are staggering. A game is incomparable. Facebook has over 3 billion users and instagram has another 2.5. Even a game like Fortnite “only” has a bit over 600 million users, and the vast majority of games see nowhere near that

You can bootstrap an audience in the millions, maybe, with a lot of luck, but getting to meta numbers takes significant capital to sustain your advertising. More importantly even with that it will still take ages. Facebook took almost a decade to get to a billion. Reddit took 18 years

Both platforms (and twitter, etc) are obviously infested with bots but what’s interesting is that from some research it appears the percentage of user accounts that are bots are far lower than many guess. I’ve seen people guess like 50+%. Per Facebook it’s more like 4-5%, and while Reddit doesn’t disclose based on content removal the numbers are similar (possibly slightly lower). This is definitely underreported though as it’s in their best interest to inflate user counts. Independent research pegs it closer to 20%. But the really interesting part is what validates the people guessing 50+%, which is user activity. Neither network comments on this but independent research pegs bots as responsible for like 50-70% of user activity.

So if you can get a network going with power users you can make it feel much more alive with possibly only 30% of the user base. But that’s where the staggering numbers come in. For Facebook that’s still 900 million people, almost 3x the entire population of america

Lmao plex has been pulling anti consumer bullshit for years

Optimization will actually get much worse because software will be designed to run “in the cloud” on servers that have much more resources than the average budget pc or smartphone that 90% of users use for computing. You will own nothing etc etc

Coreelec on ugoos am6b+ is the best option if you want the broadest support for formats possible (though notably missing av1)

Htpc with streaming content or stuff like Dolby vision is a licensing nightmare. Some stuff works, some doesn’t, Linux support is trash, etc

https://youtube.com/shorts/jm2c--qzSbk

If you buy these things you’re a fucking creep

that’s true but they’re more expensive, sometimes prohibitively so. If you want an oled panel they’re basically unfeasible, especially if you want a larger panel >55”