US really trying its best to be the worst. Land of the expensive and unfree.

Idk why, but this is oddly satisfying to me.

This is something I am considering. Could even put it in a Faraday bag when I’m not using it.

Unfortunately it doesn’t really work that way where I’m from.

I really wish I wasn’t so dependent on certain financial apps. How much happier I would be to just give Google the finger and switch to Lineage, Graphene, or something like that. Unfortunately, a lot of must-have apps for me to even be able to live in my country, practically speaking, are incompatible with anything other than official iOS and Android.

Well you can’t attach a machine gun to a dog with teeth. I mean you can, but it won’t hit anything.

I have no scientific sources I can point to to back it up. A hunch is what it is, ultimately. It seems true to me, but I suppose I could be wrong. I suspect it’s difficult to really prove this one way or the other.

Sure, but it certainly seems like we are seeing a greater number of software errors caused by bad or sloppily implemented features now, compared to before LLMs were readily available and good enough to produce (mostly) passable code. Far too many companies, including Microslop, put too much faith in the technology, and that seems to correlate with many of these problems popping up.

I’m aware of that, but I wasn’t aware of the much more stringent (non-technical) requirements for tap to pay

That’s… Fucking stupid. But it’s to be expected from greedy, overly powerful tech corporations I suppose.

I never realized you could have NFC and not tap-for-payment support. Is that not how tap-for-payment works?

It’s almost as if different people have different opinions, despite being on the same platform.

Glad that I recently bought a bunch of storage so that I’ll be covered for a good amount of time.

After all the shit I’ve seen and heard about the creepy shit smart TV manufacturers get up to I am never ever connecting a smart TV to the internet in my home.

As to whether it’s possible to get certain apps use specific physical RAM sticks, I am not sure, but that seems unlikely and would probably require some very low level modifications to your operating system. But even before you get to that point you’d have to physically connect them to your new motherboard, which will only work if there are both free RAM slots on it, and your new motherboard has slots for the same generation of RAM that your old PC uses.

Just curious, what is the evil monopoly shit you’re referring to? Is it simply the fact they are effectively a monopoly in games distribution, and that in and of itself is bad, or are there more specific practices or actions you’re thinking of?

But if you just run it locally an a media server in your home, and you don’t expose the service to the internet, that doesn’t really matter? Though perhaps more people connect to their Jellyfin instances remotely than I realize.

If Miss Information gets married, does she become Mrs Information?

On the one hand, sucks that a leak like this even happens anymore, no one deserves to be doxxed like that. On the other hand, I struggle to feel bad for the users of the doxxing app getting doxxed in return…

I’m from neither the US nor Canada, and in my case it certainly isn’t a matter of projection. I’m sure things have been getting a lot better for many people in China. However, it is still the case that China has a lot of human rights issues which are simply not as widespread in a lot of Western countries, the US included. And due to nation wide systems, such as hukou, it is very difficult for the population in poorer, rural areas to work legally in more affluent areas where the pay is higher. My understanding is that this has led to large scale “illegal migration” within the country’s borders, where workers are paid far less (sometimes not getting paid at all), work under poor conditions, and suffer abuses at the hands of their employers with little to no legal recourse due to their illegal status. China is a very inequitable society, and a lot of the misery that its less rich and powerful citizens have to deal with goes unnoticed by the rest of the world (and indeed the rest of its population), because we see stuff like this and are impressed by China’s progress. And no doubt that there’s actually been progress in a lot of areas, but the somewhat tired “at what cost?” question is still as pertinent as ever.

None of this is a defense of the US or Canada. Just saying that for the average person, China is probably a worse place to live and to work in.