I like you, but I don’t like your words because they make sense. I do wonder sometimes if it is actually late stage, or just 1929 stock market crash repeating with some variations. Or all the market crashes of the late 1800s. A lot of similarities, going up to 1929 people were doing BNPL on RCA radios. Today it’s groceries and cell phones.

I will say one thing though, late stage capitalism sounds dark and scary because “the way of life” is going away, which always means we poors suffer and die. The other angle, is maybe something better will finally fight its way to the surface. Not what those billionaire idiots want though. Hopefully it will be as damaging to them now as it was back in the 20th century when they were somewhat put in their place for a century. Capitalism only ever worked if the evil was regularly regulated, as greed is inherent in the design.

Next Stargate reboot ep, SG-1 visits a planet where they have the centennial saving of freedom by vanquishing the evil rich, as told over a few centuries, and only SG-1 can save them this time.

That’s the weirdest thing about it. “Green” can be, and is profitable. Why pass up the opportunity to be the front-runners in what could be the new age of wealth?

Discord, the cancer that replaced IRC. Which was an earlier form of cancer, but at least more disposable.

IIRC, Apple’s “open” browser implementation was so fundamentally broken and difficult that it made the actual implementation of a third-party browser exceedingly difficult. Kinda like how their call-blocking API is nothing more than a database loader with no feedback, so call blocking apps can’t share data back to improve through crowd-sourcing. The products all have to learn from Android phones on the same product to be able to share with iPhones.

They just copy GrapheneOS and take away features each release. Like soft-buttons instead of the silly swipe gestures? Gone (but they eventually brought back the option to enable.) Want to remove apps? They let you remove almost every one, then only disable some, then you can’t even disable but you can use ADB to mask the app for your user account so it appears removed but is still present. Quick settings for Bluetooth, WiFi get harder to disable with each release because they love metadata too much. Want to do GPS only and turn off their WiFi/BT stalker? Apps that use their modern GPS API will bring an OS dialog up to re-enable Google Stalking EVERY TIME, and still not fall back to GPS. (Watch Duty is a good example of this.) Disk access, you used to be able to at least SEE most of the filesystem on-phone including app container storage. Then you could only see the root folders but not files. Then not even the folders. You can still via ADB, for now, and even that slowly becomes more limited. Bootloader unlock? Not on many phones shipping today at all.

Then with Android 16, Google isn’t even shipping the binary blobs (hardware drivers) for the chips in Pixel anymore, Graphene has had to use kluges to get Pixel 10 support.

Google doesn’t release good OS features every major release, they just keep taking away everything they can until they find the cross-over of forcibly extracting the most data users will tolerate while supporting the least freedom and features as possible.

With their new closer Apple alliance, I wouldn’t be surprised if they cease phone/OS development in a few years. They seem to have no interest in making products worth buying anymore.

It is fun if you use fancy formatting with columns, and somehow the anchor character doesn’t show up on the ghost page even with hidden characters on, and you give up and choose 11.8pt font to make the page go away.

I miss ClarisWorks 2 and 3. Best office suites ever made.

The entire universe could collapse and these tabs will live on. Forged by Satan himself.

Oh, yeah, you’d think, but no. Instead you have to try and bend the clips, and while doing so, they catch the two layers of the spindle-hole and either crack the disc, tear the disc, or tear the layers apart. Sometimes the disc even comes out.

I’ve seen a dozen DVDs cracked in the spindle-hole across multiple box sets from this travesty of a design. Bought replacements and exchanged them. Seems they went back to a more sane storage format and these disc-eaters were just unloaded over the holidays or something.

Those still work? Time to dig in the wire bin.

If your ThinkPad is old enough, so is it.

I’d take Windows XP. It looked professional by comparison.

The tl;dr is: Control. Vendors want it, making it easy to run open software would make that control harder to keep.

Their deluded vision is that they think the traditional user interface is going away. Rather than interact with a machine, you’ll just be walking around, sipping coffee, having thoughtful conversations with a bot laughing along with your jokes as it writes your letter and does your taxes.

They just dangle the AGI carrot to justify their wanton destruction of everything.

Bored tech bros are in a “war” building datacenters until someone “loses” and to the victors go the spoils.

Meanwhile, they’re shredding the rest of the economy so they will have no customers to buy their products when the “war” is over.

Really hope this bubble pops soon.

Disney constantly edits old TV shows. Episodes of the Simpsons are slowly being sanitized of “bad” things, for example.

Bigger would be leveraging Android System SafetyCore or iOS mediaanalysisd to stalk-spy on the contents of everyone’s phones on-demand for the State. The software is already there, and on both platforms have deep entitlements…

Allegedly. But they are also looking at a Qualcomm chipset too, allegedly. Qualcomm is a US military contractor.

Gamification of reviews is one of the biggest reasons for CI/CD existing. Releasing pointless version bumps with no code changes on most apps. The whole update psychology needs to change, in general.