GOG is pretty good because of this. I check in there if I’m considering buying something on Steam. There might still be compelling reasons to buy on Steam, like I bought Parkitect on Steam because a review on GOG specifically called out how the mods really only work well on Steam, but I’m at least checking first and maybe Wishlisting the game on GOG. I have fairly reasonable trust in Valve while Gabe is running it, but I feel like I can have longer trust in keeping copies of installers myself.

They can bring some nice benefits like remote starting in cold (or hot) climates, but there needs to be much better design to minimize the exploitability of these systems.

I haven’t seen one of these in a long time

I have off-and-on searched for alternative software for personal blogs that can be self-hosted and it doesn’t seem like there are many options anymore. The only ones I’ve seen are WriteFreely and FlatPress. Are there any other options you’re aware of?

I was an early adopter of Firefox 20+ years ago. It started going downhill more than 15 years ago and I bailed to Chrome when that launched. It really was better than Firefox at the time. Then Chrome got worse and I wound up back on Firefox, not because Firefox had gotten better in that time but because everything else had gotten worse than Firefox in the intervening time. Also, if going from 48% market share in 2009 to a barely relevant <5% in 2024 doesn’t count as a downfall I’m not sure what does.

This process has been underway since the project switched their focus from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox. Early Firefox was lightweight with limited features and the idea that you would add your own as extensions for the features you wanted. Then it started gaining traction and the Mozilla developers started forcing features in that should’ve been extensions. It’s been downhill ever since!

I guess how new are you talking? I think this said it was based on the 2019 release, but I haven’t heard much about recent releases. Winamp 2 was the classic one most people remember. Winamp 3 was a rewrite that was supposed to be better under the hood but a lot of people didn’t like it, mainly for the new interface it seemed. They jumped to Winamp 5 (2+3) to restore much of the old interface while keeping the capabilities of 3. I never had issues with 5 and continued to use it through Windows 7. Haven’t used Windows much since then so I don’t know how it runs now. There have been very rare point updates since AOL took over and later sold it, mostly bugfixes.

You can certainly be paid in cash legally. Finding an employer willing to do that, though, might be challenging. It would probably have to be retail or another business that regularly deals in cash.

I like the sound of this for a device, but couldn’t it be more for these new ARM laptops?

Earlier this year a doctor advised us (male and female) to take prenatal vitamins, and yesterday a nutritionist told us the same. They really just have everything anybody needs, apparently.

What’s funny to me is Ireland wasn’t trying to collect these taxes, the European Commission decided that the Irish taxes were too low and amounted to an illegal subsidy.

If the TV supports it. I haven’t come across many in the wild that really use it, or at least situations where a TV and device both work well with the protocol.

Yes it’s for a cable box/DVR. The Spectrum logo is for Spectrum cable, the brand that resulted from the Charter Communications purchase of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks.

You have 13 months left on Windows 10 before it becomes potentially unsafe to use:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/end-of-support

TL;DR: Repairable, but no long-term OS support and not easy to load an alternative OS on.

The specifications pages for the HMD Fusion and HMD Skyline explain the phones are only guaranteed to receive two major Android operating system updates and three years of Android OS security patches. There’s no guarantee of a release schedule for security updates on the Skyline, while the Fusion will get two years of monthly updates and quarterly updates for the last year.

I think it’s a valid criticism. I was a longtime Android user (at least a decade) but my last Android was a Pixel 2 that I bought at launch. That was the first Android phone I’d had that I wasn’t dying to replace after 2 years. I made it to 3 years and then the phone stopped getting security updates, a Qualcomm problem as much as a Google problem at the time. Meanwhile I looked at my stepdaughter using my wife’s old iPhone, which was 6 years old at that point and still receiving updates and still easy enough to take to a local shop for repairs when she would break it. That was my largest reason to make the switch.

I’m glad to see Google is now promising much longer support on its phones, 6 to 8 years on more recent Pixels, and it seems fairly easy to put an alternate OS on. Other Android brands should really try to follow that lead.

I’ve been assuming that their user engagement is down. Fifteen years ago when I was fresh out of university I had several hundred friends and could spend hours every day going through posts from dozens of different people. Now it feels like I can spend ten or fifteen minutes to see everything and mostly it’s from the same half-dozen people, and I’ve realized most of them are people I don’t really know as well and frankly am not as interested in seeing. At first I thought it was because they were the most prolific posters and I’d inadvertently trained the algorithm to show me more from them by interacting with them the most.

But over the past year I’ve noticed if I actually click on someone else’s profile, maybe having seen their name on a memory or just randomly think of an old friend, most of them only make a few posts a year or haven’t posted anything at all in years. Their accounts still exist, but they’re not using them.

If your feed was only this, a few posts a day from a few people, you’d have no reason to be on Facebook much. So they fill it in with junk from other places that will hopefully engage you. If it doesn’t they’ll try other posts. Whatever it takes to keep you browsing longer.

Maybe they can use AI to finally get people the titles for the cars they bought

This whole thing is horrifying, but the last paragraph is especially disturbing:

Since Herrera himself has a young daughter, and since there are “six children living within his fourplex alone” on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, the government has asked a judge not to release Herrera on bail before his trial.

Even more disturbing is it said he was also producing content.

That would be very device-specific, if they wanted to add additional support for data discs. It would be outside the scope of the actual DVD-video playback functionality.

Are the numbers about DVD sales strictly about DVD sales or do they include all optical formats (Blu-ray/UltraHD Blu-ray)? Because unless I’m getting an old TV show that was only ever SD, my preference is to get a Blu-ray, not a DVD. I suppose if I still saw the super cheap ($3-5) DVDs in the grocery store for something I like but not enough to buy normally (this is how I bought Brewster’s Millions) then I might buy a DVD, but otherwise I at least want HD quality.