You could also argue that if even if you’re not self-hosting (i.e. renting server hardware from a 3rd party), your data is still in a siloed environment. While it may be accessible by law enforcement if you are targeted specifically, it’s unlikely to be dragnetted like the data collected from popular apps.

I remember thinking the interactive TV thing was dumb when I read it in middle school (early 2000s).

But now we have streamers who just sit there and say “mmm ice cream!” whenever someone gives them a dollar.

I mean…books have been doing this for a while. No need to make it a game. Look at 1984 and see some parallels. Book was written 75 years ago but covers things like:

• information sources being constantly edited (far before things like Twitter were able to remove posts)
• constant wars where people are resigned to always being at war
• language being modified so people can’t even express what the problems they’re experiencing are (like how certain terms like CRT are being erased from schooling)
• the every day shmoe being complicit in it while just receiving orders from someone he’s never met editing news articles he knows nothing about (like everyone stuck in the “machine” as it were).

1984 is a bit of a cliche, but it has a lot of relevant discussion of modern issues in it.

Also Brave New World where everyone is too absorbed in entertainment and drugs to realize how fucked everything is, and Fahrenheit 451 because, y’know censorship.

Not exactly modern, and maybe a bit cartoonish, but given how old these books are it’s remarkable how relevant they still are.

Point is, doesn’t have to be a video game. Books are cheaper to produce and tend to need less financial incentive to be written. So you get better content.

Sure, but many people in the US have only one option for hardwired internet. Starlink and 5G options are the only other option.

I pulled down 100mbps and was able to FaceTime just fine. Maybe too much lag for serious online competitive play, but I never measured it.

And no bandwidth caps from what I’ve seen.

We got one for our camper. Works really well though we only use it in the summer months. What are your complaints?

…is starlink an option for you?

It always bugged me how in Man of Steel, Superman has to deal with the moral quandary of breaking the bad guy’s neck at the cost of vaporizing a family.

Like they spent the previous 20 minutes punching each other through buildings. No way that was the first family they killed.

Moore’s law factored in cost, not just what was physically possible.

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.

I mean, it’s a really slick gimmick. I think having a bendy screen is cooler than two screens even if it’s more expensive/difficult to manufacture and doesn’t provide any real benefit.

I’m sure there are a half-dozen ways you could at least fake it. Like if the bezel can be made clear and they overlap somewhat.

What I don’t understand is why nobody makes a foldable phone where it’s just two flat screens with an invisible bezel along one edge so they fit seamlessly together when fully opened.

It’s not like there’s a use case where you operate the phone half unfolded and require both halves of the screen to be seamlessly connected.

If the flexing feature wasn’t a gimmick and there was an actual use case for a foldable pocket iPad, someone would have released a phone like the Kyocera Echo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyocera_Echo to commercial success.

See? I do t even know how many boroughs there are!

Yep. Not what I intended.

I mean every American is expected to know the layout of a specific city.

My point is that people in the US are kind of expected to understand the layout of a city that they may never have been to or maybe only visited as a tourist.

It’s only the “local map” for like 8 million of us.

digitalblasphemy.com ftw

The solar sail reflects light instead of absorbing it so you get to double dip on photon momentum.

And sure, you can steer with the laser I suppose, but with that kind of super weak deltaV, you’re not going to be exactly doing donuts in the solar system.

Even the massive solar sail only imparts a super small amount of force. It’s only useful because it does so for free over a long period of time with no air resistance.

You’d be better off using a conventional thruster to do whatever steering you needed to do before letting the sail take over. It’s not like you need to steer around any obstacles.

Sure, but it would be less efficient than a sail, and since the incoming radiation would impart inertia on the solar panels, you would still be limited on where you could steer.

I ditched my smartphone spring of 2023. Still use it on WiFi at home, but every time I leave the house, I only carry a fliphone.

Every time a stranger asks me about it, they say something like “I wish I could ditch my smartphone.” Like I get it. It’s not easy. I can’t even go to a baseball game unless my wife has our tickets on her phone. Paying for parking sometimes requires an app.

Yet apparently everyone hates this thing that they are now required to carry around.

How did we get here?