I would say the only silver lining here is that the exploitation of labor puts these giants in a precarious position where all of their critical work is being done by unhappy, extrinsically motivated people who are often only still there because they’re relatively immobile (i.e., they aren’t good enough at their job to find another one easily) or they were kept on because their salary is lower and they’re less experienced. It makes these massively complicated technology ecosystems extremely brittle, which is why software has been shit across the board for the past decade or so. It’s possible there will be a pendulum swing if and when quality becomes an attainable and marketable feature again.

I do. It’s not ideal but it still gives me something better to do than social media.

I’ve heard it’s quirky and kinda mid as a phone, but not unusable.

Color screen and the fact that Onyx, the makers of Boox, flagrantly violate GPL terms.

But it was the Boox Palma getting publicity that made me aware of the form factor and start digging. I’m super happy with the Bigme Hibreak, but I don’t have a SIM card in it. I mostly use it in airplane mode as a dumb e-reader and don’t even install any apps besides the minimum needed to do that.

I got an e-ink e-reader in the pocketable form factor of a phone (Bigme Hibreak Color). Instead of doomscrolling social media, I read a couple paragraphs of the Oppenheimer biography. Next I’ll reread Neuromancer. It’s life-changing. 10/10 highly recommended.

Yo momma so fat she doesn’t have a waist size, she has a Schwarzschild radius.

You callin’ me fat?

I’m so tired of capitalism.

So he skipped shorting TSLA and just shorted the actual Swastikar instead?

“We’re having trouble with AI solving problems. Let’s solve the problem with AI.”

It’s not strictly a bad idea or doomed or anything, but it makes me sad.

I would suggest redirecting slightly. Every single publicly traded tech company eventually fully enshittifies into predatory ad/data revenue generation due to the fundamental requirement that they not only generate profit, but that they consistently generate growth.

I could create an amazing app, sell it for $5, and if 5 million people download it and I don’t sell out or incorporate and go public, I could just cruise on it and retire happily. There’s no intrinsic pressure to switch profit models because I don’t owe anybody shit.

They’ve been added to the watchlist.

Wait, is that the watchlist?

Yeah that’s the one. Whew, for a minute I thought we added them to the war planning chat.

Wait, fuck.

Repeat after me: LLMs do not have intelligence.

Every dollar spent on Meta-owned properties goes towards making Mark Zuckerberg even more insufferable and monstrous.

Fair point. They basically did it with Windows 8 (engineering-wise), but that was even longer ago than the Surface Pro.

The actual hardware is irrelevant to their success unless they can pull off a Surface Pro type of innovative market lead (which we all know they can’t do anymore).

The only thing that matters is the ecosystem. Make every Windows machine an Xbox. Make the OS lean and portable. Run the same OS and games on PCs, laptops, handhelds, and set-top boxes. That’s it. Then console generations are obsolete and Sony is playing catch up.

FYI, Onyx egregiously violates GPL and basically gives the finger to anyone who complains. Not that anyone is necessarily clean as a whistle and even so they’re miles better than Jeff “I dressed like a fascist before it was cool” Bezos.

I’m a big fan of Kobo, but they also used to have a connection with Walmart.

“And if you turn it sideways it works like a mouse”

“Okay”

Why are we talking about this more than that?

That first paragraph is AI slop as fuck.

Valve did the same thing for the Index VR kit. They create these little brief but fully produced games to demonstrate the functionality when they release new hardware, and they’re delightful.

The game has changed to paying Nazis for Internet now.