Jrockwar
@Jrockwar@feddit.uk
- Comment on 2 days ago:
The paradox of tolerance. You’re quoting an racist remark - there’s no need to tolerate intolerance as the social contract is broken.
- Comment on UK phone retailers lock shop doors while trading to tackle rising thefts 2 weeks ago:
When the iPhone X was released (2017), the £1000 pricing was considered ridiculous. Most flagships at the time cost about £600 (this is what the 2016 iPhone 7 cost at launch, with the iPhone 7 Plus having a starting price of £720).
Obviously this didn’t stop Apple from selling them like hotcakes and establishing an immediate +30% increase of the flagship smartphone prices.
Today, a Galaxy Z Fold starts at £1800. This is a +146% increase over the 2017 release price of the Galaxy Note 7.
According to the bank of England, we’ve seen a total inflation of 34% in the 2017-2025, while phones have increased their prices by >100%.
So yeah, no surprise there. As phones keep rising in value, they are going to continue becoming an increasingly desirable target for thefts. A gym bag full of smartphone boxes can easily have over £20k at retail prices, and easily fetch £10k when sold at a hefty discount, but a smartphone store doesn’t have the security measures of a jewelry store. I can see how it’s attractive to thieves.
- Comment on England Trials Smartphone Rail Payment System with Real-Time Phone Location Tracking 2 weeks ago:
Why do you consider the UK’s ticketing system outdated? There’s oyster in/around London and QR codes everywhere else.
What are you missing, is location-based surveillance what would be needed to modernise it in your opinion?
- Comment on The Browser Company (Arc, Dia) Has Been Acquired by Atlassian 2 weeks ago:
What happened was, they realised that Arc was a niche product that had a fervient userbase but would never become a mainstream browser, so they declared the development was “complete” and they were moving on to Dia so that they could
jump onto the AI bandwagoncreate the next generation of browser. - Comment on The Browser Company (Arc, Dia) Has Been Acquired by Atlassian 2 weeks ago:
The best thing The Browser Company ever did was unintentionally making someone else decide to create Zen.
- Comment on The Browser Company (Arc, Dia) Has Been Acquired by Atlassian 2 weeks ago:
I’m very mildly pro-AI, in the sense that I remain optimistic there will be at least a few cool use cases and I’d love to find them.
So I tried Dia… And uninstalled it a few hours later. Why would I want to “chat with my tabs”? Even if I didn’t think this was a rubbish use case, every browser comes with a chatbot sidebar/extension/whatever, why would I want to change browsers just for that?
Heavy pass. Also, after how they abandoned Arc, I don’t think they can be trusted to develop a product and not pull the rug from under the users when it becomes mildly inconvenient to keep working on it.
- Comment on Are those of us who grew up on older games more attuned to latency? 3 weeks ago:
The generation of Amstrad, Spectrum etc had the games on tape. I would say they were the closest thing to a console pre-NES, so 1980s. I had an amstrad that was handed down to me by a friend of an older sister and it had tapes like this.
- Comment on Trump administration accuses UK of failing to uphold human rights 5 weeks ago:
I won’t be the one calling the UK blameless, but that’s rich coming from the country that’s doing what they are with ICE (which is just the latest one in a long list).
- Comment on As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame. States feel pressure to act 1 month ago:
In the countries where healthcare has existed (and worked) for decades, there are additional taxes to alcohol, sugar, tobacco, petrol to cover for this.
And also yeah, and I have no problem whatsoever knowing that a small part of my salary goes towards saving the life of people who wouldn’t be able to afford private healthcare. That’s called empathy - and I wish that’d sink in as well.
- Comment on Trump wanted a US-made iPhone. Apple gave him a gold statue. 1 month ago:
Because he might not be “Middle Eastern” or “Dictator” but he behaves exactly like “some sort of Middle Eastern Dictator”.
- Comment on Big tech has spent $155 billion on AI this year. It’s about to spend hundreds of billions more 1 month ago:
Imagine what we could have achieved globally if we had spent all that money on a different cause.
We could have managed to establish a colony on Mars, or perhaps we could have even finished developing Star Citizen.
- Comment on ByteDance AI IDE Trae telemetry continues even after opt-out 1 month ago:
To be fair, if anyone is surprised after the two red flags that are “ByteDance” and “AI”,it’s on them.
- Submitted 1 month ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 1 comment
- Comment on “You can't be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book or anything else that you've read or studied, you're supposed to pay for” Donald Trump said 1 month ago:
🙌 Communist Trump is making all textbooks free 🙌
- Comment on Should Humanity Continue? Glenn Reacts to Thiel Interview [20:56 | JUL 05 2025 | Glenn Greenwald] 2 months ago:
So the topics discussed are sci-fi, and politics. Not technology then.
- Comment on Should Humanity Continue? Glenn Reacts to Thiel Interview [20:56 | JUL 05 2025 | Glenn Greenwald] 2 months ago:
Who’s “Glenn” and why does he belong in “Technology”? Is he a robot?
What does this post about people ramblings have to do with Technology?
- Comment on Men are opening up about mental health to AI instead of humans 2 months ago:
I don’t think it’s only men either, but it’s worth considering the implications and potential causes for what is being said here.
We have had not decades but centuries of macho culture, where mental health is a taboo for men because “I strong, me no cry” and we know that mental health struggles go underreported on men. This is just adding more evidence to a symptom that we already know, of a society that hasn’t been able to course correct because it’s too set in tradition to allow those who need help to seek it without feeling like garbage.
While I’m not saying this is a problem exclusive to men, I think the causes and effects on women and men are rather different. We’ve now known for a while that women with mental health issues or disorders tend to go undiagnosed (even more so than unreported). The case of autism is particularly blatant, as women only started to get diagnosed in a meaningful proportion in the 80s (despite autism not being sex- or gender-driven). www.autism.org.uk/…/autistic-women-and-girls
Similarly, that underdiagnosing came from the stereotyping of gender roles and the fact that being quiet and pretty equated being “feminine”, which is “good”, so can’t be autistic, because autistic is bad.
- Comment on 2 months ago:
I once had the great idea of drinking a litre of beetroot juice, which I had read is amazing for sports recovery because of something something helping blood carrying more oxygen or something like that.
Instant diarrhea, and on top of it, beetroot tinted it looked just like blood, so up until I realised what was going on and the fact that it actually wasn’t blood, that was a scary experience.
I don’t know whether beetroot is known to cause diarrhea or it was just my body noping the juice out of it, but I have steered clear of beetroot juice ever since!
- Comment on Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not 2 months ago:
I think this means we can make a torrent client with a built in function that uses 0.1% of 1 CPU core to train an ML model on anything you download. You can download anything legally with it then. 👌
- Comment on The emulator that lets you play NES games in 3D has left early access on Steam 2 months ago:
Still, being able to argue they’re not for profit is what typically has protected emulators from being sued to oblivion (and with Nintendo, even that’s risky)…
- Comment on Honda successfully launched and landed its own reusable rocket 2 months ago:
In different ways. For example, it’s very rare for a car to explode in a collision, other than in movies.
One of the reasons that make hydrogen difficult to work with in this sense is that hydrogen (H₂) molecules are so small that they can permeate most materials, such as steel. Then it can get somewhat easily to wherever there is a spark, and chaos ensues. Annoyingly you don’t even need 100% Hydrogen for that to happen, as it can ignite with a concentration of just 4%.
After we stopped using Hydrogen mostly as a consequence of Hindenburg’s accident, it’s taken years to perfect hydrogen fuel cells to a safety standard that can be used in cars. As far as I know, its use has been limited to rockets/space propulsion otherwise (where you can just throw millions at the problem to make it safer).
- Comment on Cancers can be detected in bloodstream three years prior to diagnosis 3 months ago:
Only 6M €? For an event of that size that feels a lot cheaper than I would have thought.
- Comment on Digital Foundry: Yes, It's Faster: Switch 2 Back Compat vs Batman Arkham Knight + the Witcher 3 3 months ago:
A console in 2025 “runs at a stable 30” fps and that’s good news? Of course this is slightly faster than a mobile chip from 10 years ago, but that’s an incredibly low bar to set.
- Comment on Duolingo deletes all its TikTok videos after AI backlash—and then returns with a strange message 3 months ago:
What you’re saying absolutely makes sense. However as someone with ADHD I couldn’t relate any less, I wish I could get addicted to something like that and not lose interest after ten minutes!
- Comment on Duolingo deletes all its TikTok videos after AI backlash—and then returns with a strange message 3 months ago:
Even assuming we’re okay with using AI for language learning - then why would anyone pay for Duolingo instead of the many LLMs that people already use and pay for?
They’ve alienated their customer base hard. And this marketing video pretending they are siding with the users and against “their corporate overlords” is horribly tone deaf.
- Comment on YSK how to unclog a toilet 3 months ago:
I’ve had success with just dish soap - it makes blockages “slide” more easily.
In the last flatshare I lived, I had a particularly annoying combination of a slow toilet and a flatmate incapable of solving any blockages. Whenever I’d see that, I’d go “fuck this”, squirt a silly amount of Fairy in the bowl (I’m talking like 100 ml at least) and usually the blockage would resolve itself overnight.
- Comment on The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source. 3 months ago:
In my view it’s a Linux subsystem for Windows.
Why the name is the other way around, I’ll never understand.
- Comment on Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI | The Verge 4 months ago:
It’s okay. We can all play that game. I’ve replaced my use of Duolingo with AI.
Pro tip: have as your “system prompt” in your LLM of choice “at the end of every query, include me a short Swedish relates to my prompt”. No need for Duolingo.
- Comment on Facebook Pushes Its Llama 4 AI Model to the Right, Wants to Present “Both Sides” 5 months ago:
“There are some bad things on the internet”
“Just… Don’t use the internet?”
- Comment on 6* months away now. If you're on 10, do you plan to upgrade? Make the jump to Linux? 5 months ago:
The ads for apps, Xbox games, trial versions of Office preinstalled, the minesweeper and solitaire collection that are preinstalled but actually ad supported or non-free, depending on the region spotify/TikTok/Facebook also come preinstalled, “Movies & TV”, Bing/MS News…
I think all of those count as bloat. I haven’t included Edge because I guess having a browser is a necessity, or copilot/cortana because you said “excluding AI features”.