Yup. For all the making fun of chinesium (socially acceptable racism often when people talk about chinese products. Very clear when one scoffs at a taiwanese product as being trash because chinese but then walks it back when they learn it’s of taiwanese origin), in my life I’ve seen chinese phones, audio products, and cars go from scoffed at to being well regarded in enthusiast communities.

I saw it in other hobbies of mine. Not long ago people only talked about Japanese and German chef knives - Chinese knives must be trash. Then eventually people started to try out Chinese knives that weren’t just grocery store bargain stuff. Now progressively people are trying knives from Vietnam. Turns out people have been making knives in these countries for thousands of years. Not as bad but maybe worse is when a person I knew told me they were at first surprised to learn movies were made around the world rather than just being in hollywood, english language. Went from American and European made video game peripherals dominating to more and more chinese competitors like 8bitdo, aula, whatever.

In my lifetime, earlier if it said made in South Korea of made in Taiwan, the assumption was poor quality. Hyundai was scoffed at until like the mid 2010s in my experience. I’m told Japanese products were scoffed at as poor quality until like the end of the 70s and then you had major strikes and violence against Asian American people in the rust belt as anti-Japanese sentiment primarily in regards to competition for autoworkers and steel. Now Japanese made is fully regarded as high quality and the desire to compete in quality+value+parts+serviceability doesn’t seem to be of much interest to US or European automakers (that parts availability and serviceability is major)

I imagine it the same as decades back with Korean and Taiwanese made goods, you get you pay for. If you start on the premise that a $200 Chinese product should be as good or better than like a $500 American product, that’s a nonsense expectation to have. People will go from a $1200 iPhone and use a $200 Ulephone and determine that $800 phone from a company with a Chinese sounding name, name of their CEO, are trash unless it turns out that that Chinese sounding name company is headquartered in Taiwan or Singapore

We’re in a mature software stage for these art software applications. Easier to catch up than create new features that people make essential to their workflow. Today it’s commercial alternatives that have closed the gap well enough. Someday in the future open source stuff will. It’s inevitable

I remember a study that had Duolingo as the most egregious data collector by far on people’s phone

One thing is that I email and receive emails from almost no one that uses an encrypted service on their end so I have nearly zero expectations when it comes to email. Regardless, as long as it’s encrypted so they have been demonstrated in court to not being able to provide the content of my emails and you can pay with some crypto, then I consider it good enough. Other thing is that regardless of what country you live in, a service outside of the country you live in. Preferably even countries that have the least if not just about no significant information sharing treaties. Maybe hostile to the country I live in is best. I have no concerns about law enforcement in other countries. My concern is the authority that I live under practically every day of the year regardless of their behavior in the present

Other types of services I have higher expectations for privacy like cloud storage and VPNs

I’d absolutely use crypto if it was more available in anything I’d want to pay for. So far it’s mostly just VPNs and donations

At the size of transactions they’d be doing, it’d probably be worth it to set a high fee so that it gets picked up and processed faster. Should still be peanuts compared to the value of cargo these tankers are carrying

I’m hoping by the time googles Android goes to shit, GrapheneOS is readily available on more phones or PostmarketOS. Same with Linux with KDE Plasma Bigscreen running on a minipc rather than using an android TV box

Like others, desktop I’m using Firefox with ublock origin. Android phone, Firefox with ublock origin. Android TV, SmartTube. Ad blockers have always outpaced Google in my experience though I use youtube maybe like twice a week and I don’t randomly browse reccomendations. Just there for specific stuff

They’re propaganda laws. Internet censorship laws. Palestinian genocide started trending on social media and suddenly all the countries out in the west wanted to start banning/controlling social media. Plus the earlier push to ban TikTok by Facebook to try to ladder pull the market from competitors

To me twitter started off as like how the facebook timeline used to be, people posted inane stuff about their day. The place for people to overshare. It was the evolution of early 2000s personal blogs now told in a daily stream of single sentence posts.

Then it became celebrity gossip and it continued to be that until celebrities got on and it became the text version of Instagram. As in it was a major advertising portal. Then the scammers/wellness/influencers came in (just like Instagram) and it became where people tried to get people on financial multi level marketing schemes and special pink salt that removes negative ions from your surroundings (that’s still advertising). Around that time Trump was a hot take artist on Twitter and managed to parlay that to the White House (he really worked the media well in 2015/2016 - Twitter was the ultimate guerilla advertising platform then). To that event, whatever good discourse was going on on Twitter was deep in obscurity by like 2012. It had been a culture warzone well before Musk bought it

Everything becoming a punchline, I associate that with twitter. Like no delays joking about sex trafficking and Diddy became a joke day one of his arrest. Joking like that became mainstream on twitter a long time ago

Still worse than it was before. There’s no win in that

New consoles and maybe new steam deck. Maybe raspberry pi and similar SBC hardware won’t be stupid expensive anymore

These idiotic lawsuits. First of all, this isn’t even Valves responsibility. Second, Steam/Valve are small frys compared to Amazon/Apple/Google/Microsoft. In gaming they may be smaller than Sony and Nintendo and those two have full on closed software platforms. Steam is one software store among many on Windows, Linux, and MacOS. All these groups want to enshittify PC gaming. They want to enshittify personal computing in general. Turn pre-iPhone smartphone operating systems into iOS

They’re hosting their own Forgejo. Forgejo is easy to self host. There’s even easier simpler stuff like Gitbucket. If you want something with a ton of features, Gitlab self host but that takes way more resources. Personally I have Gitbucket on my NAS for my basic stuff but am thinking about giving Forgejo self hosted a try. It looks better than gitbucket

Tech writers consistently suck. We’ve had 3rd party app stores for a long time. Googles trying to make them worse, not welcoming them

I use it mostly two ways. Important emphasis enclosed statement as compared to in between parentheses which I treat as lesser required context/info. Second way is an indicator of a pause in a statement but not so much like an ellipses. Like a short pause for a punchline whereas ellipses for a long thought or time collect feelings/compose oneself. A sharp contrast compared to a period from the first part of the sentence to the post-em dash part of the sentence. I’ve been using it before LLMs and frequent enough that I am pretty self conscious now since I’ve noticed people call out em dashes as a call-sign for bots. A lot of times it’s such an innocuous usage that I feel like people are witch-hunty paranoid reading posts on the internet

If someone doesn’t like Mozilla, use a Firefox fork rather than a chromium one. Brave and other chromium forks to get away from Google surveillance and dominance of web standards makes no sense to me

You can use this to connect your TV to bookshelf speakers through an optical cable. Just need some speaker wire or banana plug cables to go with it

https://a.co/d/06KEUx7E

This one has HDMI ARC which most sound bars use for connection along with optical

https://a.co/d/0cKQrMAZ

Then offerup/craigslist/marketplace for used bookshelf speakers. Practically anything will be far better than your TV. Like $50 used polk, klipsch, and sony speakers are real common on the second hand market. They may be old but speakers last a real long time if you’re not blasting them at super high volumes. Go for speakers that have 5.25"-6.5" woofers. You’ll appreciate them for music too

There’s a bunch of brands and you really can’t go wrong compared to TV speakers. Edifer powered speakers don’t require a separate amplifier. Other major brands like ELAC, Kef, wharfdale, paradigm, …

Usually when I hear someone swear by lossless audio one service provides compared to another, I swear the reality is either placebo or one service is just using a better masterering of an album compared to another. The service that has on their service the better version album mix and mastering. Like they could serve it as 192kbps MP3 and sound better than a lossless encoded album version with the non ideal mix and mastered release

I’ve been in the audio enthusiast community for like 17 years now. When I was fresh, the internet commentators had me thinking there was some audio heaven in the high end compared to the mid range priced gear. Now I know better and the gear community is not so high end price evangelicals like it used to be. I feel like there was a before and after the $30 Monoprice DJ headphones and the wave of headphones since. Then especially IEMs. Once ChiFi really got rolling with IEMs and amplifiers and DACs, $1000+ snake oil salespeople got to deal in a way more competitive market

Same with speakers. Internet changed everything. No more at the whim of specialty audio stores stock and Best Buys. Now you got the whole worlds amount of speaker brands at a click of a finger plus craigslist/offerup. Also again ChiFi amplifiers and DACs. Also improvements in audio codecs whether for wireless or not. Bluetooth audio was awful until it stopped being awful as standards improved

These days I mostly see the placebo audio arguments in streaming service and FLAC/lossless encode fanboys. Headphone and speaker communities these days seem a lot more self aware and steeped in self-deprecating humor over the cost, diminishing returns, placebo, snake oil they live in today compared to 17 years ago. I want my digital audio cables endpoints plated with the highest quality diamonds to preserve the zeros and ones. No lab diamonds. Must be natural providing the warmth only blood diamonds that excel in removing negative ions. I treat my room with the finest pink himalayan salt sound absorbent wall panels to deal with the most problematic materials used by homebuilders. Authentic himalayan salt has been shown to be some of the highest quality material in filtering unwanted noise and echos while leaving clean pure audio bliss