Skull giver

This was much less of an issue back when you couldn’t open a bank account in someone’s name from halfway across the world. Phishing and identity theft were impossible to pull off until companies started trusting phone services and later the internet. You needed to show up in person with a realistic fake ID to do anything malicious. What else would you do? Spend (converted into modern currency) 25 bucks a minute on an international call to scam someone?

Now that nobody meets face to face for stuff like cashing a cheque or even ordering a large quantity of groceries anymore, the few bits of personal information we can use to prove our identity are the only things protecting us.

All the terrible quality and human rights violations also apply to any other Chinese shop as well as Amazon or whatever your local Amazon equivalent is. I’ve found the exact same shit sold on Temu in physical store shelves for those cost-saving stores. The entire supply chain is fucked.

I do order shit directly from China, but only if I need something specific like phone parts or electronics that I see “local” shops carry with the exact same photos, descriptions, and pictures, for twice or triple the price. I’ve fallen for that trick too many times, I’ll go straight to the source now.

At least the Temu shit isn’t as bad as buying chocolate or clothes…

I’ve had similar issues with getting CSS tables to lay out properly in Chrome. Worked fine in IE/Edge/Firefox/WebKit but Chrome just randomly threw a fit and rearranged items for no reason, even the Javascript engine agreed with me that the tables should look like they were supposed to but they just didn’t when rendered.

My experience with SVGs in Firefox is that Firefox supports pretty much every basic features, but it expects the SVGs to be up to spec. As it turns out, a lot of SVGs on the web rely on quirks and side effects and you only find out they’re technically invalid when digging deep into the spec. Them behaving differently whether or not there’s an img tag around them also doesn’t help, and I’ve run into a few files using SVG features that only worked in some Adobe product and Chrome (only on desktop, IIRC) .

Getting browsers to work consistently still sucks, even when it’s not nearly as big a problem as it was fifteen years ago. I totally get why people don’t test for Firefox. We didn’t use to test for Safari for the very same reason; practically none of our end users used it and there are no usable cross platform browsers to test with even if they were, so we’d probably tell them to download Chrome anyway. Safari mostly worked well enough that if someone decided to pull out an iPad during demos it didn’t completely fail and that was food enough. Firefox only worked because devs preferred its superior web development tools.

If there are obligations, Firefox is such a fringe user agent these days that they can probably go without supporting it. The 3.8% of Swedes not using Chromium or Safari will fall off any serious compatibility requirements.

I doubt anything will break in Firefox, though. They just don’t want the burden of having to support a few hundred people when Firefox implements a feature slightly wrong/non-standard/not at all.

This looks pretty good! Hope someone hacks support for the KDE Connect protocols into this because I don’t really feel like installing yet another app that runs in the background permanently.

The UI looks very slick compared to what KDE Connect has to offer on Windows and I don’t think screen casting is even an option there, so both apps could do with borrowing some code from each other.

Pro: it’ll probably work well enough to get your notifications and maybe even your heart rate and stuff.

Con: it probably won’t arrive. If it does, it probably won’t look like in the pictures if it does, it probably won’t work like described. If it does, it probably has done kind of cheep, toxic chemicals it’ll leave in your arm. If it doesn’t, it’ll probably come with an app that drains your battery. If it doesn’t, it probably sells your live location and notifications to data brokers. If it doesn’t, it’ll probably never receive software updates. If it does, it’ll probably be broken by the end of the year.

There are actually a few relatively cheap smart watches that some people like to reprogram with open source firmware. You can get a Colmi P8 or a Kenboro K9 for less than $30 and flash WaspOS onto it. You have to get lucky and buy the right hardware revision but flashing new firmware onto those things can be as simple as downloading an app and loading a file into it. These devices are underpowered and software availability is limited, but at least with the open source stuff you can rest easy about your data not being sold.

Exactly. Everyone wants the cheap and easy solution when something breaks, but nobody wants to pay the price for the cheap and easy solution to be available upfront, because what are the chances they run into a problem like that?

In this specific case, there is a credible ulterior motive for the company not to make cheap repairs available: the government will pay the bill if they sell a new expensive product and all the training/rehabilitation that comes with it. On the other hand, there is a very valid reason why things like batteries are so expensive to replace and why you can’t find replacement batteries for a lot of products a certain amount of time after production ends.

How do you stuff a 18650 into a smart watch controlling the device? Because that’s what the article implicates is the problem. For the exoskeleton itself there are no excuses.

But people don’t want that. They want small, sleek devices that don’t weigh much. Imagine what smartphones would look like if they still had to be powered by AAA batteries.

From what I can tell the battery in question wasn’t the one powering the exoskeleton itself, but the battery inside watch controlling the device.

Because there is little difference when it comes to passively degrading components like batteries. You can’t produce a battery and leave it in storage for a decade, the battery will degrade on its own. The only way to keep reserve batteries is to keep producing them, and maintain a production line for all that time. That’s prohibitively expensive for small markets like these.

A relatively simple solution is to stick with batteries that have a standard shape and size, but it’s not like you can just stuff a button cell in there, you need more power to operate the controller chip.

It’s pretty shitty that the company didn’t produce a backup controller box that works without having to stick to the wearable watch form factor that just takes a bunch of rechargeable AA batteries, but you can’t expect what is essentially a smart watch to still have accessible replacement batteries in twenty years.

This isn’t exclusive to medical devices, either. Computers running DOS or Windows 95 are still operating millions of dollars of machinery and are slowly failing and collapsing over time. The amount of affordable replacements (even at an industrial level) is slowly starting to dwindle. Nobody is producing floppy drives anymore, nor new floppies for that matter, so if that industrial controller you bought in the early 2000s dies you have to hire a computer greybeard to fix your hardware or replace the entire system.

In my opinion, it should be put into law that once a company stops supporting their bespoke hardware, the copyright and patents protecting them should expire immediately, so that once a company drops support anyone else can pick up where they left off.

However, anything with a computer in it has a limited lifespan, and that lifespan is significantly shorter than that of a human being. Even with the code and blueprints publicly available, someone still needs to find the compatible hardware, alter the designs to operate on modern commodity hardware, or pay a factory to ramp up a production line if they have the million(s) to do so.

The possibilities are limited and the legal responsibilities untenable. It’s a fun idea, though! Technically there’s nothing preventing you from distributing WiFi access points in your neighbourhoods and having everyone hook up their home network into a local, shared mesh for instance.

With a private IP address range (probably best to use IPv6 to prevent conflicts there, but you can try to allocate private IPv4 addresses if you like a challenge) you can even have your own internet next to the normal internet and use both.

I don’t think VR headsets put the battery in front of your eyes, the weight would make them uncomfortable. They’re probably somewhere on the side of the device, or in Apple’s case, around your waist.

Bad chargers, clearly damaged devices that are still used, you name it. Several exploding iPhone stories turned out to be the result of cheap, shitty chargers. Anything with a lithium battery can light on fire or even explode if you handle it wrong.

There’s a good chance that Samsung should still be made to pay up for the damages and compensation, but I’ve seen people do very stupid things to portable electronics containing batteries.

Based on the pictures, the earphone looks like it was on fire on both sides. That’s not a literal explosion at least (there’d be more than just hearing damage if it were). My guess is the lithium battery got damaged somehow and the escaping hydrogen gas caught fire One reason not to use earphones that have batteries inside your ear; had the batteries been hanging from the bottom like those Apple ones, the hearing damage probably wouldn’t have been as bad.

Unfortunate. The Samsung store is probably the biggest non-Chinese competitor to Google Play, and now it’s picking up Google’s annoying practices.

I know people like to be dismissive about every app they don’t personally use, but the Samsung Store really isn’t all that bad. A whole bunch of paid apps can be bought there for cheap or even gotten for free sometimes. I wish more people used it so Google would actually feel pressure to make the Play Store better.

Some TLDs do. Others don’t. Most commercial ones have very few restrictions. Country code TLDs like .ai or .io or .af may cause issues. I believe .cat is only meant for Catalan content, for instance.

I wouldn’t put any porn or feminist activism on the Tslibsn’s TLD (.af) and a whole bunch of other countries may not be compatible with other types of websites either.

It’s rare that anyone checks, but if you violate the rules and someone reports you, you may be in trouble. Most domain registrars also have rules about your registration contact (name, address, etc.) be accurate and inaccurate information may be enough reason to take your domain from you.

If you buy a domain, you’re presented with terms of service. Read them and you’ll know the rules that apply.

The Fediverse is a terrible name that only pushes people away. I’d welcome the change of name.

However, the Fediverse was never just about ActivityPub either. The old GnuSocial protocol ActivityPub is based on is also part of the Fediverse. So is XMPP and I suppose by extension Matrix. Like it or not, ATProto is part of the Fediverse too, even though most Fediverse software doesn’t speak it. Services can speak multiple protocols, they don’t need to restrict themselves to just ActivityPub.

ActivityPub folks are probably the largest group of people actually developing an interoperable social media network, though. ATProto is federated but small servers don’t stand a chance against the Bluesky firehose (hundreds of gigabytes of content per day on bad days!) because the protocol is based around “large servers talk to other large servers”. Other federating protocols simply don’t really care much about activism anymore.

Nobody is taking the “social web” away from your IRC channels and your NNTP news groups and your SMTP mailing lists. You can still call them the social web. And frankly, it would be wonderful if more ActivityPub services would speak NNTP because both share the same goals. “I also used to have a social web” doesn’t conflict with “ActivityPub is part of the social web”.

I agree that YouTube is pretty much dead as a audio medium (Google Play Music was so much better!) but things like podcasts don’t need Spotify; they work over RSS so any app is supposed to be able to play them (though I guess most people probably don’t know what podcasts are supposed to be these days). I’ve loaded my Patreon podcasts into Podcini, for instance, proving that subscription models aren’t a problem for podcasts either.

The hosting cost difference between videos and music is staggering, though. I’m still surprised YouTube can afford to exist on ads alone, even if they play three ads for every video. It’s unreasonable to expect YouTube to be the same price as Spotify if you watch any video content.

I don’t get the comparison between YouTube Premium and Spotify Premium. YouTube does much more than Spotify so of course it’ll be more expensive.

Those are steep price jumps, though. Google must have pretty high confidence in their adblock blocking tech.

There are other political parties, but because of the way American elections are structured, they have basically no chance of gaining any influence on a large scale. Dividing the vote just reduces the chances of your preferred party in the current system. If a “Republican-but-not-Trump” party would gain popularity, it’d divide the vote 50/25/25 and the Democrats would overwhelmingly win.

Third parties have a handful of representatives but they’re effectively powerless on a large scale.

This is very difficult to fix as it would require restructuring elections to remove the third party disadvantage. Neither party currently in power is a fan, because they only stand to lose votes when such a system is organised. I don’t think it’ll ever happen unless the USA collapses or we get some kind of united world government or something.

I’ve had the opposite happen. I (unknowingly, at the time) rejected a girl whose friends told me she liked me by going “haha okay then” and walking off, assuming it was a joke. Only realised nobody was laughing and it probably wasn’t a joke ten years later when the memory popped back into my head.

She seemed pretty happy dating another guy when I last saw her. Good for her, hope I didn’t hurt her too much by dismissing her like that. Would’ve absolutely crushed me had I been in her position.