Saved you a click: they’re reporting on a minor problem with iPhones where “A strong magnetic field can interfere with OIS and closed-loop AF” and then link to a Samsung patent trying to mitigate this problem.

Lens-position sensors respond to magnetic fields. If you place a magnet near these sensors, the magnetic field will interfere with or temporarily disable the sensors. This can degrade the sensors’ accuracy and limit the range of movement available to the lenses. The camera will continue to take photos with other means of stabilisation but without the benefit of OIS and closed-loop AF.

Damn, it sure needed that scary title invocative of data loss and severe hardware damage are you fucking kidding. Garbage clickbait.

Edit: the Apple support article was published 22 January 2024, so real groundbreaking reporting here; the patent was published 14 May this year.

Firefox has begun the AI enshitification process

Dude, it’s like five things – one of which is just translations that can be performed locally, and another of which is an alt text accessibility option – with an obvious universal kill switch (and of course individualized ones). Calm your tits. Chill your balls. I don’t use LLMs at all except for translations, and I still think the whinging over this is completely overblown.

“Begun” implies a slippery slope of much more, and that just doesn’t seem to be the case.

Here’s the study in Minerals. I’ll caution that it’s an MDPI journal, but it’s better than Earth.com’s content mill dogshit.

Article is from 20 September 2024.

Do you mean that sales were poor? If not, and you mean that literally, then they did – about 25,000 units, making it a commercial failure, but nevertheless “brought”.

Cohen added that eBay’s earnings power could increase materially under tighter cost controls, arguing earnings could potentially double over a relatively short period.

Okay, yeah, he’s fucking delusional.

(Also, ‘GameStop stock sinks’ feels like a mild tongue twister.)

God. Damn. It. A cup of tea sounds really refreshing right now, and I’m going to have one. Stupid science bitches finally made I more smarter.

And you can’t dismiss the accumulated experimental data

I don’t. I actually read psychology meta-analyses about accumulated experimental data, and relatively few individual papers are using terms like “superego” (and I can find two meta-analyses, one of which is just describing psychoanalysis). Even then, it’s within a modern framework of psychoanalysis which has evolved over 100 years, not regurgitating what they think “Freud would say”. You’re citing Freud specifically by literally saying “here’s what Freud would say”, so don’t strawman me by pretending I’m anti-experimental data or whatever the fuck.

Psychology isn’t a question of physics.

I’m not saying it is; it’s an emergent phenomenon in a chain thereof. I’m saying it is a science that deserves to actually be taken seriously, not mired in “here’s what someone who barely understood the field as we understand it today would’ve said” like that holds literally any weight about why people behave the way they do.

Freud would

Can we please not. I don’t bring up hylomorphism when I talk about physics, so can you please give psychology a similar dignity by treating it like an actual science?

The only type of debt that does exist, is the one humanity has towards earth.

Untrue. We all owe a debt… to ourselves, for always being there. But… does that mean we’re the Earth? This is so crazy.

Removed by mod

I’m neither stoned nor a teenager

“financial acumen of a stoned teenager”. Can you just not read either, or do you not understand this is that thing you learn about in 3rd grade called a “comparison” and not literally calling you a stoned teenager? I’m getting concerned here.

You also clearly have no idea what an “ad hominim [sic]” is either.

make no pretense to be some financial guru.

You certainly considered yourself well-informed enough to say the person BBC News quoted had no fucking idea what they were talking about without doing the most basic research first.

Ah, yes, I forgot that if I rack up $3000 in CC debt but have $10,000 in the bank, I actually have zero debt, “depending on who you ask”.

Really tried to “um ackshually” the article with the financial acumen of a stoned teenager?

Edit: Anyway, to answer your question because “does GameStop currently have debt” is kind of beside the question: leveraged buyouts often put debt toward the company being bought out. Thus, the debt being discussed is likely the debt from the buyout, not the $4.36 billion GameStop has right now. I got sidetracked because of your completely bullshit, confidently incorrect claim.

Gamestop has, depending on who one asks, no debt

GameStop has 4.36 billion in debt who tf are you asking and can I borrow their confidence?

Edit: Anyway, see edit below. This whole thing got kind of sidetracked.

With your phone you can get any music you want at any time - essentially 100% convenience.

With streaming you can, but again, that’s a “streaming versus local playback” argument. I have to buy and download the songs I play. Even piracy would be jumping through some kind of hoop to find a good copy (purchasing being arguably more convenient). I download them to my PC and make a copy to my phone so I can easily listen on both (and stream via Jellyfin on LAN if I want).

The iPod is barely an inconvenience by comparison, even if I directly downloaded to my phone. It’s such a minimal step to physically transfer the digital audio to the iPod. The actual inconvenience is having a second electronic device taking up valuable pocket space, and that’s not a quaint little spice-of-life inconvenience like a retro console taking up shelf space; that’s just fucking annoying.

Dude, I do get it. I work on PCSX2; I’m around people literally all the time who will use physical hardware for no other reason than that it’s more holistically enjoyable to them. I think it’s super cool. My PS2 console is objectively inferior in every conceivable way that actually matters to me as a player; I will nevertheless sometimes boot it up simply because it’s pleasant and more unique. I buy all of my PS2 games and burn them even though it’s more difficult for mathematically the same outcome. I think it’s cool as hell that the author enjoys using their hardmodded iPod.

What I don’t get is why the article’s arguments for the iPod are so abysmal. It decides to ditch apples-to-apples (local-to-local) and go straight into apple-and-oranges (local-and-streaming) for an inordinate amount of time, decides to frame the iPod’s inconveniences as a convenience (e.g. “don’t have to bring a charger”), and overall gives exactly one valid argument for why the iPod is nicer, namely the ClickWheel. It doesn’t even mention the potentially different feel of the DAC and just gives that as a straight win to the smartphone in a throwaway line.

I don’t think the vinyl analogy holds up here, because even though I don’t use vinyl, I recognize it’s a very different way to experience music. Vinyls you have to physically go out and buy, physically retrieve, physically place into your player, and then listen to in one static location. The iPod, meanwhile, is damn-near the same thing: you have 1) a portable electronic device 2) of a similar size and form factor 3) holding the mathematically exact same digital recordings of songs 4) which you listen back to through nearly the same medium (same speakers; different DAC) and 5) can see displayed on a screen. Navigating through the music is very slightly, near-meaninglessly different. As noted: the ClickWheel™.

Nevertheless, even under the premise that it’s highly analogous to vinyl, this would be like if you had a comparison of vinyl versus digital audio and spent half of it ranting about streaming services while basically ignoring local digital playback. That’d be fine if you set out with “vinyl versus streaming”, but you started on the premise “vinyl versus digital”. “Here’s my comparison of CRTs and OLEDs. But first, a rant about Netflix.”

Also, thinking 40GB fits 10 FLAC albums is stupid.

Sorry, you’re right; it’s more like around 20 of mine.

I can’t imagine putting this much effort into complaining about someone using their media player of choice.

I’m not complaining about their media player of choice; I’m remarking that the way they chose to discuss it in this article – especially being so focused on streaming – is stupid as fuck. Like 50% of this article is spent bitching about non-issues with phones. I don’t even mean “non-issues” in the sense that they don’t annoy me personally; I mean “non-issues” in the sense that this devolves into a comparison not of iPod versus smartphone but of iPod versus streaming, or that they’re talking about it being so convenient not to have to worry about charging a second device. They can enjoy what they want to; the reasons they describe are, for the most part, asinine.

You’re not considering the iPod DAC which is higher quality than most cellphone DACs.

The author of this article certainly did consider DACs: [Modern smartphones have] got […] a DAC chip that is by all measures transparent, near-lossless wireless streaming […]" and that’s the last they mention of the DAC, so they clearly don’t give a shit about the Wolfson.

The fact they chose to wait until the middle of the article to say “yeah btw this thing is hardmodded for the battery and the storage” is so telling. That’d be the first thing I’d mention about a technological comparison.

Yet, when I want to sit down and actually listen to an album, the phone is often the most frustrating tool in my pocket. Between the constant pings from Slack and the AI-generated discovery feeds that keep trying to shove viral tracks down my throat

Bruh, what? Just have the songs locally like on your iPod; you don’t have to stream, and it’s easier to put on your phone than your iPod. And what do Slack notifs have to do with this? Just turn it on DnD or whatever. In what universe are Slack notifs distracting you less than your phone while you listen on your iPod? If you give that little of a shit about them, you can turn them off.

I can leave for a week-long trip with my iPod and not have to think about bringing a charger along.

??? But you’re already bringing a phone that needs to remain charged?? Playing audio doesn’t drain the battery that hard, and phone batteries nowadays get enough charge that even an absent-minded dipshit like myself barely has to worry about it.

This author is either nostalgia-baiting for clicks or an absolute moron. Using an iPod might be a fun novelty; absolutely the fuck is it not “the best way to enjoy music”. You’re carrying around a separate, fairly large device just for music that probably even has worse audio quality; that’s so unnecessarily cumbersome if I just want to listen to music.

They’re using a ClickWheel with, at most, 40 GB of storage. That’s like ten twenty FLAC albums. Is what I would say, except: “Since I replaced the original spinning hard drive with a microSD adapter, there are no moving parts and significantly less power draw. I am currently running 512GB of storage paired with a significantly larger battery that lasts weeks, not hours.”

So they wait well into the article to tell the audience that they hardmodded their old iPod and that’s why it’s actually viable. What the actual fuck. Basically nobody is going to do that. Even with that hardmodding, the literal only advantage they have here, then, is the ClickWheel – because again, your phone should be charged and always on you in 2026. The ClickWheel is not that special to warrant hardmodding a 2006 iPod and using it separately for music.

Then they have a gargantuan segment whining about streaming as though local storage just doesn’t exist on their phone. It’s literally a non-issue. Right now I’m listening to a FLAC album I got off Bandcamp months ago. On my phone. Because I don’t use streaming services. On my phone.

This piece of shit article could’ve been boiled down to “the haptic feedback on the ClickWheel was cool we should bring that back lol”.

I can confirm this guide is accurate and very straightforward on the OpenStreetMap and Wikimedia Commons side. Unless I’m missing something, I think “Make sure you publish the image under a CC0 Waiver license” is an overcorrection. You’re just linking to it on OSM, so the Open Database License shouldn’t factor in. I speculate that line is an opinionated one and not related to a technical hurdle for using the image on OSM. CC0 could theoretically be better depending on how downstream users want to use it for e.g. activism – that is, if they want to download the image from Commons and redistribute it. I just don’t know what context that would happen in.