rainynight65

I had lots of time to play games, but not a lot of money to buy games.

Now it's the other way round.

If I could bring back anything from back then, it's boxed PC games that can be resold and traded. Covered a lot of my gaming needs from second hand shops.

Ideology over identity, every single time, without fail.

The USB transfer speed claim is misleading to say the least. The iPhone 15 was already capable of up to 10Gbps transfer speed (USB 3.0 support). You could quibble over the fact that the included cable didn't support that (if only the USB-IF could get its shit together), but to claim the hardware doesn't support it is a lie.

Also, non-US iPhones support both physical SIM and eSIM.

Over two hundred phones have been ported to postmarketOS and every person giving it a shot will improve it.

It's not that cut and dried.

A look at the postmarketOS devices page reveals:

• "the most supported devices, maintained by at least 2 people and have the functions you expect from the device running its normal OS, such as calling on a phone, working audio, and a functional UI" (aka what you need a phone to be); Device count: 5, not a single one of them the kind I can go into a regular phone shop and buy

• "Devices that have had a lot of work put into them, where regressions are actively fixed, and the port is overall in a pretty good shape (read: your experience will likely be bumpy and not overly smooth); Device count: 28, largely older devices (pre-2018, so again not something I can just go and buy, and exotics like above; There is a lot of orange in the features table)

The rest is under "Testing", and the best summary of that status I can find is "All the devices in this table can at least boot postmarketOS. To monitor boot progress, you must be able to receive output from the screen, a network adapter, or a serial port". So there is a total of 33 devices right now, largely exotics and older devices, that you could reasonably use with postmarketOS for any purpose other than testing and tinkering.

I am what you'd call 'tech interested'. I tinker with Arduinos and solder electronics as part of my hobby. I do a smidgen of self-hosting and similar, though I am not nearly as far into the weeds as many people, and it's not my key interest or activity. The thing about a phone is, I need it to work, because I need it for work. I don't have time or compunction to go through the process of installing an OS the manufacturer doesn't want me to install. I don't have time to deal with a non-polished UX or capricious apps that need workarounds to install on a 'non-standard' OS (for lack of a better term). I know that's not the fault of the OS, but a choice made by phone manufacturers and app developers, but that doesn't make it any less real or an issue for me.

I can get the battery replaced on my phone for a fraction of the money it would cost me to buy a new phone. So I have to take it in to the shop for an hour. Big deal. I can do that once every few years. And I can still use wired headphones with my phone even though it doesn't have a headphone jack. Sheesh, I wonder how that works.

The biggest anti-consumer practice to make your device lifespan as short as possible is whatever software update practices the manufacturer has. Annual major versions increase hardware requirements - I can tell every day how my 5 year old phone is getting long in the tooth. Lack of long-term software support is another way to make sure the average user buys a new device well before the old device has reached end of life.

And yet every time Apple announce a new product or feature, Android fans are here with their 'welcome to the past' memes.

Sure, training data selection impacts the output. If you feed an AI nothing but anime, the images it produces will look like anime. If all it knows is K-pop, then the music it puts out will sound like K-pop. Tweaking a computational process through selective input is not the same as a human being actively absorbing stimuli and forming their own, unique response.

AI doesn't have an innate taste or feeling for what it likes. It won't walk into a second hand CD store, browse the boxes, find something that's intriguing and check it out. It won't go for a walk and think "I want to take a photo of that tree there in the open field". It won't see or hear a piece of art and think "I'd like to be learn how to paint/write/play an instrument like that". And it will never make art for the sake of making art, for the pure enjoyment that is the process of creating something, irrespective of who wants to see or hear the result. All it is designed to do is regurgitate an intersection of what it knows that best suits the parameters of a given request (aka prompt). Actively learning, experimenting, practicing techniques, trying to emulate specific techniques of someone else - making art for the sake of making art - is a key component to humans learning from others and being influenced by others.

So the process of human learning and influencing, and the selective feeding of data to an AI to 'tune' its output are entirely different things that cannot and should not be compared.

Generative AI is not 'influenced' by other people's work the way humans are. A human musician might spend years covering songs they like and copying or emulating the style, until they find their own style, which may or may not be a blend of their influences, but crucially, they will usually add something. AI does not do that. The idea that AI functions the same as human artists, by absorbing influences and producing their own result, is not only fundamentally false, it is dangerously misleading. To portray it as 'not unethical' is even more misleading.

Please be sure to draw a clear distinction between Marxism and Marxism-Leninism.

Make sure you don't pull a muscle performing all those mental gymnastics.

After pretty much failing as an overambitious game designer...

Someone among Linda Reynolds' advisors should have had the courage to tell her that persisting with this defamation trial, especially in the wake of the Bruce Lehrmann trial, is really shitty optics.

And the fact that they tried to make it all about alleging that Higgins wanted to bring down the government, while putting Reynolds into the role of the victim, makes it even worse.

I really hope Reynolds fails in this trial.