The tech industry shouldn’t be dominated by a few companies.

FTFY

Also the patent office needs to employ actual specialists and reject the bullshit patents, like rounded rectangles.

In my city, city planners decided to bring trees that aren’t native to our country (sycamore trees), and now we have an invasion of these bugs that bite and stink bugs.

But at least we don’t have, god forbid, bees.

The annoying thing about fruit trees is that the fruits are only good for picking for like 1-2 weeks of the whole year. If you don’t pick them during those 2 weeks, they rot and spoil. That’s why the whole street tries to sell them pretty much at the same time, because you can’t pick fruit like a basket at the time. You have to pick the whole tree during those 2 weeks.

If you draw a line to unite the right edges of the 2 curves, you got the back side of a fish.

This isn’t a war, it’s a slaughter.

Amazon is on my shit list and will not buy any products from them ever again. They are one of the worst monopolist mega corporations. They treat their employees like slaves, are anti-repair, anti-consumer.

I gifted an older Kindle to my sister, and the screen broke (out of warranty). I contacted Amazon about it, and they basically said they don’t make replacement parts and don’t service the kindles, they can only give me a small discount for buying a new one.

I looked up a guide on doing it myself, and even if I find a replacement screen, it’s really difficult. The screen is glued with a strong adhesive. The entire device looks very cheaply built and deliberately made really difficult to repair.

You can use an USB cable to upload files to the Kindle, the @kindle email address is just a convenience thing. Calibre is great for converting to a compatible format.

Which is why I will never buy a modern console. Once the company making them shutdowns the servers, the hardware will be useless. Unlike retro consoles that use physical media, which are highly sought after today.

To be fair, those tech upgrades aren’t exactly trivial to do, and most programmers aren’t skilled enough to do it.

These kinds of projects need very careful management to avoid running overtime and over budget.

We need better consumer protection laws.

Why is it legal for companies to collect every data they want or the ability to turn it off (and not allow you to use the device you purchased unless you consent to their abusive EULA)? Why is it legal for companies to remove functionality from a device after the purchase? Why is it legal for companies to prevent you from using devices you paid for unless you agree to forced arbitration (and there’s no way to withdraw your consent).

Dick stuck in the ceiling fan again?

There are very few places on the Internet where your data won’t be scraped and used for AI training. Every social media company does this, including Discord and Reddit. Federated platforms are quite easy to scrape (not sure if they are yet). Even if you make your own website, it’s definitely going to be scraped by crawlers from every company wanting to make AI.

Ah, the aspiring musician’s keyboard who can’t afford a real one

Keyboard players: everything is keys

You can still yank the power chord out.

Just like AAA game studios, movie studios don’t want to take risks, so they go with productions they consider “safe”: aim for the lowest common denominator, play into nostalgia, don’t make anyone upset by touching subjects like politics, religion. And you end up with the garbage they are making right now.

Also, the movie industry is struggling because of many reasons. Movies are getting too expensive, the safe formulas big studios relied on aren’t working anymore, customer habits are changing with people going less to movie theaters.

At the same time, just like with video games, the indie world is in a golden age. You can get amazing cameras and equipment for quite a small budget. What free software like Blender can achieve is amazing. And learning is easier than ever, there are so many free educational resources online.

Zfs is just software raid, not an archival /backup solution. Sure, you can hold data on a zfs array for long term, but not without active maintenance (powering the drives periodically, replacing old drives, doing some kind of data refresh / scrubbing) and backups.

Hard drives offer the best price/capacity ratio, but they need to be powered periodically (at least once or twice per year). As with any other storage medium, include parity data and have multiple backups to avoid data loss.

Tape is too expensive.

Optical media can also be pretty good as long as you get discs made from inorganic materials and store them properly. M-disc is supposed to last like 100 years. The biggest problem is that they are on the path to obsolescence and optical drives may stop being manufactured. Also, it’s a good idea to check on the condition of the discs periodically and redo any that shows signs of degradation (probably a good idea to replace non-M discs every 10 years regardless).

But regardless of the media, there is no archival method that doesn’t require active maintenance, like periodically checking the data, ensuring you have multiple backups, refreshing any aged media.