Also worth noting: the people they’re scamming don’t know a Galaxy from an iPhone, let alone a Galaxy from one photoshopped with a gold back and T1 on it.

I don’t think they care, either. If they know it’s a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and they’re being charged double for one but it has a Trump case and they think buying it will fund violence against dark skinned/LGBTQ+ people, they’re not really being scammed. They’re putting their money where their mouth is.

There isn’t a phone. They’re just photoshopping other phones into photoshops of gold cases.

There isn’t a phone. All there is, is a grift.

As someone who’s only used Telegram to chat with real people, this headline confuses me. I keep hearing about Telegram channels but all I find are scams.

It’s going to be plagiarism so yes, it is.

I’ve asked Copilot at work for word help. I’ll ask out something like, what’s a good word that sounds more professional than some other word? And it’ll give me a few choices and I’ll pick one. But that’s about it.

They’re useful, but I won’t let them do my work for me, or give them anything they can use (we have a corporate policy against that, and yet IT leaves Copilot installed/doesn’t switch to something like Linux).

Yes, I love using Firefox on my Galaxy S10. iOS has uBlock Origin Lite and it’s fine in Safari but there’s just no point in using Firefox on iOS. And that’s sad.

For ad free YouTube it kinda works but I’m sure it’s more reliable on Android.

I used to root, and if you do that you can edit the HOSTS file or have something like AdAway do it for you. Unrooted Android is like iOS: DNS filtering. Though I don’t even do that on my S10, I just use Firefox and uBlock Origin.

I should note, I don’t do tablets. My portable computer is a MacBook Air, and that runs Firefox with uBlock Origin just like Windows does, and Android. Wife doesn’t need all of a laptop, so she’s happy with the iPad. I don’t think I’ll ever get one, but if they made iPhone Mini Pro, I’d consider getting one and then getting an iPad Mini. 4” phone, 8” tablet, 15” laptop, 27” desktop monitor. But for now with a 7” phone I don’t need a tablet.

Not an online gamer, but I heard a similar sentiment from a boss about 20 years ago. He told me “if you make a mistake one time, I got your back, but we’ll speak in private and I’ll counsel you. Make the mistake again, I’ll let my pen do the talking. Make it a third time, you’re off the team.”

It escalates quickly, but his management style helped us learn from the mistakes. Sometimes the second time happened. But everyone was willing to go to war with this guy. I mean, proverbially. This was also a guy who would bring his grill to work and cook for everyone one weekend a month. Companies that say you’re family, big red flag. A boss who walks the walk as well as talks the talk? Huge green flag.

Just because Google has doesn’t mean that Samsung and other Android OEMs have. They’re still pumping them out.

Honestly though? What are the good Android tablets? How do you know?

My wife only uses Android phones, and we went through 2-3 Android tablets. They all crapped out after like a year. Ones we thought were good. She never even considered the iPad, until I bought her one. Now it’s been like four years? It was new when we got it. Fourth-generation Air. Still runs good as new. Sure, it doesn’t run Android apps, you can’t put Nova Prime on it, and if that’s what you’re used to, well, the home screen kind of sucks. It’s good enough to get you into the apps though, which is where the iPad pulls ahead. And you get the benefit of the ‘other’ app ecosystem.

For most people, the base level iPad is good enough. The Air and Mini offer premium upgrades over the base, and personally I think the Pro is overkill, but it’s also the biggest one, and some artists like that expanded canvas.

Sometimes it’s good to use different tech. Android tablets have never been great. iPads have never been less than “good enough.” There may have been a couple Android tablets that were better than the base iPad, but they’d be few and far between and you wouldn’t really know until it had been out a few years.

Can it see us or can we only see it? Is it any different from storage shed rental places having cardboard cutouts of the same security guard every few units? Do people even consider this a deterrent?

Continue to not use Facebook/Instagram.

I switched to Lemmy when Reddit came out in support of people who abuse children. I don’t even mean Trump, I just mean in general. I suggested abusers in general should face harsher penalties. They banned me for it. I said “holy shit you just did me a huge favor, apparently I was on the wrong site because our values are 100% incompatible.”

I mean, there isn’t even a debate. I’m not talking about people who find themselves attracted to kids. I’m talking about people who actually went out and hurt a real child facing longer, more meaningful sentences and they said nah, those people are people and need to be protected.

I’ve moved social networks on account of incompatible values and I think others will, too. Maybe not the majority but I think some others will. Especially as things get worse. There are networks for people who hate (like Truth Social), and networks for people who don’t care (like Facebook/Insta/Whatsapp), but I think as things change, more people will care and will look elsewhere. Not everyone but some people.

Which in turn trails the latest Apple A-series chips. Because Qualcomm had to compete. Apple doesn’t.

Then you have Samsung’s NVMe SSDs. They’re in iPhones and gaming PCs. Android phones use slower UFS. Slower in benchmarks. Equivalent in real world performance. And cheaper.

My main phone is an iPhone 16 Pro Max. Best Apple has to offer right now.

I also have a Galaxy S10 from 2019. It was weaker than the same year iPhone at launch. Now it’s five years behind my iPhone.

The iPhone might boot a second or two faster, but it’s very close.

Guess which one kicks the other’s ass when it comes to typing. I don’t know why Apple can’t figure this out. If I’m gonna be doing much typing, I will turn on the S10 and wait. It’s worth it.

Also literally everything you like about Android. Of course I have Nova Prime on it.

I like Apple stuff, especially Macs, but like Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak said, I like my iPhone, I just wish it did half the stuff my Android phone does. I see advantages with both.

I wouldn’t worry about this Tensor chip. I’m sure it’s fine. But I think we should all stop upgrading every year or two. I think after 4-5 years with these two, I’ll retire the S10 and get a Pixel. Then after another 4-5 years upgrade the iPhone. Because I have use for both platforms. And I think Pixel phones are just fine.

Here’s what’s wild though. At first with music streaming it was largely just American, Western, popular music. I left Spotify for Apple Music because the latter had Japanese music and I was tired of sideloading it into Spotify. Now Spotify has Japanese music too.

The Japanese music market is super weird. Anime is to Japanese music in the 2010s and 2020s what MTV was to western music in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It’s the international hit maker. So anime is bringing western eyes to all this music, not you go in YouTube and a lot of them have “YouTube edition” videos that are like half the video. Because they don’t fully trust us I guess? Sometimes the video is on Apple Music though.

I know Japanese music is more expensive than ours. I mean like the cost of a CD. So when bands would release a Japanese album, they’d add bonus tracks to help increase the value. Western bands do it too. Look up an album you know on Wikipedia and see if there’s a Japanese version with some bonus tracks.

I’m wondering how Apple Music and later Spotify more or less tamed the Japanese music market but TV and movies are so much harder.

My last PC was a 4th-generation Xeon build. It lasted ten years. I ran Cyberpunk on it.

I use Macs now, but I will always be proud of that build.

Honestly didn’t think they were still making Xeon chips. The deal back then was, you were getting i7 power at less price because it didn’t come with an iGPU. Back then, gamers wanted Xeon because it was more bang for your buck than i5 or i7 and we were gonna use a GPU anyway. So it sounded like a great deal.

Thanks I guess? Surely Mac and Linux users can be friends or at least allies against Windows. Linux comes from UNIX which macOS is based on so they’re very similar, only one is FOSS — which I suppose is the point — and the other is not. But another commonality — Macs and PCs can both run Linux.

Absolutely. But to clarify, Apple Music pays more per stream than Spotify and others. Spotify trends to cut bigger checks to popular musicians because they have more subscribers.

Also — someone feel free to fact check this — I’ve heard that if, say, you put an album out on BandCamp but not streaming, and I buy it and sideload it into both services, and you later add it to both services, Spotify won’t pay you for my streams because I’m streaming the sideloaded copy whereas Apple will match it. I keep the metadata if it’s different but you’d get paid for the streams because it matches it.

I switched to Mac after my old Asus laptop went out. I figure why bother with a PC laptop, it’s not gonna game and let’s see what the fuss is about. Love my MacBook Air. So then our desktop dies and I give my wife 3 options. A Mac, a cheaper PC, and a more expensive PC. She’s Android, figured she’d want to stick with Windows, but she picked the Mac! So happy. I mostly game on Switch and Xbox these days so that’s fine.

I keep feeling like I left Windows at the right time.

There’s an easy solution to this. I pay for Apple Music because I get access to pretty much all the music I want. I can sideload what they don’t have, which isn’t much. They have better audio quality, and aren’t stiffing artists to pay some right wing nutjob science denier like the other streaming platform of note. I pay because I love music and want to support what I love. Why isn’t there a similar service for TV and movies? That’s the solution. Let us pay for what we love and make it easy. Apple figured it out with music. Valve figured it out with games.

I think they don’t want to solve the problem. I think they want to solve a different problem. I think they’re making this a problem so they can push legislation to protect their profits.

Facts

I don’t think I ever had a Discman until I bought myself the $150 Philips model that also played MP3 CDs. It was a fine CD player with good anti-skip, but you “only” had 80 minutes per disc.

With MP3 CDs, you could have several albums up there and the quality seemed to be about the same. The organisation was not so great and it was hit or miss what album number your albums would be (and I think it could change from day to day, so it wasn’t like you could Sharpie it on the disc), but the anti-skip became nearly perfect as most of the song would be played from the buffer. I think (but I’m not sure) that made it spin less and thus, saved battery life. Makes sense anyway.

I knew they were from the 80s. I did not think they came out before '88-'89 though.

I remember when the CD was relatively new. And they were still writing the standards for it. Red Book is the standard for CDs. Philips, Sony, and the others went to the record companies and they negotiated quality vs storage amounts. The quality the music industry demanded would have allowed about 8 minutes per disc. The compromise got that up to 80 minutes. Now, CDs have pretty good quality audio. For a while we said “CD quality audio” and that meant something, largely in gaming, but also in streaming later to differentiate from lossy audio (that, to most of us, sounded the same). Later we’d surpass “CD quality audio” (e.g. Dolby Atmos on Apple Music… though, not everyone agrees spatial audio is an improvement) but for a decade or two, it meant something.

Anyway, my first CDs were “Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell” by Meat Loaf, and yes, I understand what he won’t do for love. I don’t know why this was ever questioned. Certainly not by anyone who listened to the song. He said he wouldn’t move on after she died. Because the fictional version of him talking was this immortal type, like a benign vampire or something. She made him promise that when she died, he’d move on and find someone else. That was where he drew the line. It’s literally right there in the lyrics and it isn’t hard to understand. The others were the Bodyguard soundtrack (so, mostly Whitney Houston), and “No More Tears” by Ozzy Osbourne. So, early 1990s. CDs had been out for a while, but I was happy with tapes for some years before I got a CD player. And, fun fact, I at least had the Meat Loaf CD for a while before I got my first CD player. I just kept it in a drawer until I could play it.

I just replaced my dying Windows machines (a laptop and later, a desktop) with Macs. Still closed source, but they’re UNIX certified. I know FOSS folks love to hate on macOS, but even being smart enough to use Linux, and having used it off and on for 20-25 years, I just didn’t want to. I did get away from Microsoft stuff, at least at home, except for Xbox. That was my wife’s choice and we have a bunch of games for it. I’m more of a PlayStation guy, but I kinda got outvoted on that one. These days I mostly just game on the Switch anyway. And the cool thing about new Macs? They can basically run Switch games, with a bit of help (but same-ish architecture). And a lot of games going to Switch(/2) can also go to Mac (e.g. Cyberpunk).

It’s a great time to get away from Microsoft. Their browser hasn’t been good enough in decades. Their office suite is probably their biggest strength, followed by Xbox. Their cloud would be third, I’d say — OneDrive is underrated. I use iWork on my Macs and it’s fine. And it can read/write the docx formats. For cloud I guess iCloud is fine on the Mac side, I just wish the pricing were more competitive. Don’t really have a good answer for cloud. And for gaming… if you were starting from zero, I’d say look at the Steam Deck, Steam sales are unbeatable, the thing runs Linux, it emulates PC games pretty well (there’s a whole certification thing), and you can do GeForce Now as well if you’re near their CDN. Microsoft is arguably the easiest of the big three (vs Apple and Google) to drop.

I don’t even need to know why people are going against Microsoft all of a sudden. I have my reasons. I don’t hate them, and I would have stuck with Office + OneDrive (MS 365) if they didn’t double the price to add AI to Office with no way to stick with the old product. They were getting $60 a year from me, now they’re not getting anything.