JoshuaFalken
@JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world
- Comment on Are Cars Just Becoming Giant Smartphones on Wheels? 2 days ago:
The simplicity of the Slate interior is fantastic. They developed a screenless touch screen that you can rotate without even looking at them. I wish I were in the market for this type of vehicle.
Interior photo
- Comment on Proton Mail Suspended Journalist Accounts at Request of Cybersecurity Agency 4 days ago:
Small shoe.
My perception of Proton was never that users would be kept safe from governments, but that users would be kept away from advertisers.
- Comment on Signal announces a backup feature that includes 100MB of storage for texts and the last 45 days' worth of media for free, or 100GB of storage for $1.99/month 1 week ago:
Is Signal equivalent in scale to iMessage or WhatsApp? Does it come preinstalled on devices as well? All three are tools, I agree, however one of these things is not like the others. The average toolbox will have Phillips and Robertson screwdrivers, but not a Torx type.
Signal takes at least a grain of interest to even get a user to install it, whereas iMessage is already there ready to go and that suits most people just fine. The question I asked was based on my incorrect assumption that centred in the Venn diagram of people whom bother to use Signal, read a technology forum, and look at an article about backups, there would also be an overlap with people that already had a backup solution in place.
Your Marlinspike comment notwithstanding, thank you for demonstrating that I was wrong. I should have remembered most people just want to drive a car, not concern themselves with how or why the wheels go round.
- Comment on Signal announces a backup feature that includes 100MB of storage for texts and the last 45 days' worth of media for free, or 100GB of storage for $1.99/month 1 week ago:
It does strike me as funny that some fixate on the ‘why bother’ question when viewing what amounts to be another person’s hobby.
- Comment on Signal announces a backup feature that includes 100MB of storage for texts and the last 45 days' worth of media for free, or 100GB of storage for $1.99/month 1 week ago:
Well my point was not that every random maintenance task under the sun gets done and ticked off a mile long list.
It seems a reasonable guess that a person whose hobby is building custom mechanical keyboards probably does keep it clean. I figured people using an encrypted messaging system with backups enabled would probably go to the trouble of ensuring those backups didn’t live in one place.
From your comment and a few others, it’s evident I was wrong in this thought. Among other things, it seems some people don’t want backups at all, which is a bit surprising to me. That’s why I asked the question.
- Comment on Signal announces a backup feature that includes 100MB of storage for texts and the last 45 days' worth of media for free, or 100GB of storage for $1.99/month 1 week ago:
Are people not copying their backup off their device periodically?
Personally I’d find it useful to create backups by year so the process doesn’t take twenty minutes and wouldn’t create a massive backup file.
A couple years ago I had to make an effort of sending gallery links instead of sharing images and video directly through Signal since my backup file had grown so large. It’s a bit arduous.
- Comment on breakfast 1 week ago:
I wouldn’t have guessed before this image that a hundred blueberries would fit in a dish that small.
- Comment on What are some franchises with characters that personify countries? 1 week ago:
While not about France, the prominent example that comes to mind is Star Wars personifying the United States as the Empire.
- Comment on WiFi signals can measure heart rate—no wearables needed 1 week ago:
I didn’t give the privacy concern much thought in the moment, mainly thinking how useless and poorly designed those apps usually are, but I do agree.
Considering it now, I do have loyalty cards in my company vehicle for certain things, primarily fuel, and those of course remain in that vehicle as they serve no other purpose. Perhaps keeping an old phone for purposes of doing this scanning thing might be ideal. Though ideally I’d imagine a few dedicated handheld terminals kept in store for redundancy purposes.
Speaking of redundancy, you’re right about paying in cash. Perhaps as easy as a ‘cash’ button and it would send the purchase total to a customer service desk. Around here, all grocers have a ‘cashier’ desk where you get lottery tickets and gift cards and such.
Though it would be funny to see these handheld terminals have a compartment to accept notes and coins haha.
- Comment on WiFi signals can measure heart rate—no wearables needed 1 week ago:
The only solution for that which I see is taking photos of the labels for every product taken off the shelf, but that’s quite the imposition obviously. Trouble is there are no laws guiding these practices, and the result is going to be quite the mess for customers to understand.
In my opinion, the best purchasing experience for this type of shopping is using a handheld device with which you both scan the product as you take it off the shelf, and also process payment on your way to the exit. No cashier lines, and even better, no more unloading and repacking of your items just to purchase them. From the shelf into your bag, only back out again in your kitchen.
On another note, it boggles my mind to see the square footage used by all these self checkout machines when these terminal systems exist. Sadly I’ve never used one in North America. This is an aspect of shopping that could make me loyal to a single vendor. I would actually install the vendor’s phone app if they built in this functionality instead of having these terminals.
- Comment on WiFi signals can measure heart rate—no wearables needed 1 week ago:
I was referencing digital price labels that retailers are installing.
This technology is being touted by the companies putting them in place to be a cost saving measure as staff no longer need to print new labels and manually replace them for products on the shelf. This is true in that it is a benefit of digital labelling, however there are many other usage options that could be implemented after installation.
- alter prices around lunch hour for ready meals and snacks at retailers in walking distance to secondary schools
- automatic increases for products being purchased more rapidly than historical averages to capitalize on a yet unknown trend
- increases simply as stock begins running low
Imagine in a few years when this technology is combined with network snooping of phone identification, loyalty rewards card purchase histories, and automatic buying of customer information from data brokers, all to create a profile that predicts when a person would be likely to be menstruating and the moment they walk in the store, the hygienic products they buy every month raise in price by 30%.
It’s a bleak future I’m afraid.
- Comment on WiFi signals can measure heart rate—no wearables needed 1 week ago:
2026: Major grocers found using customer heart rate to personalise prices - higher the pulse, higher the price
- Comment on T-Rex Burger 3 weeks ago:
A local joint in my area did something like this last year. A five dollar burger with two patties, and one dollar per extra patty, no limit.
I’m sure in practice there would have been a limit, but we got a lot of burger for twenty dollars that day. It came skewered and served on its side in what I’m guessing was a submarine sandwich tray.
- Comment on this is exactly what copper would say 4 weeks ago:
Copper spools have the sheathing stripped off, wire cut to reasonable lengths, then brought to multiple recyclers in stages.
To be sure, the odd idiot will show up with a unadulterated spool and try to get paid, but most that go to the effort of abducting these things off the side of the road aren’t entirely stupid.
Then again, a less scrupulous yard might still buy the spool as it comes and strip it themselves.
- Comment on Tucson City Council votes 7-0, unanimously to kill AI Data Center 5 weeks ago:
This is a good showcase of how a few individuals can leverage power to fend off massive interests. For the good of the public even, in this instance.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Often find yourself inside many stores you find irrelevant when strolling around town? All those unlocked doors must be such temptation.
- Comment on Microplastics will be the "boomers all have lead poisoning" of millennials 2 months ago:
Based solely on your comment, I’m looking forward to watching a scene where Christian Bale goes around Wall Street collecting mugs in The Big Short 2: Polymer Boogaloo.
- Comment on Corporations are saving the planet! 2 months ago:
Imagine the power of combining this tosser initiative with the revenue sharing aspect of New York’s vehicle idling program. Save the planet and get paid all at the same time.
- Comment on The Outer Worlds 2 - Official Story Trailer | Xbox Games Showcase 2025 3 months ago:
Too bad burgers outpaced inflation then. It’d be nice to have a $1.50 option commonly available.
- Comment on The Outer Worlds 2 - Official Story Trailer | Xbox Games Showcase 2025 3 months ago:
I agree about everything in your first point. I hadn’t previously considered that the novelty of a new technology would necessarily increase have disproportionately high initial cost.
That said, I feel like any calculation of cost against how many hours played is entirely subjective. Your suggestion of $0.75 / entertainment hour is quite different than what I consider ideal. Games will vary genre to genre, person to person, platform to platform.
A person with limited time might exclusively play shorter titles, or maybe just multiplayer titles. A person with significant free time might spent hundreds of hours replaying an RPG.
To be incredibly broad, I would say that games shouldn’t cost more per entertainment hour than half of what any given person earns at their job - but even that is quite subjective and should be taken with salt.
- Comment on The Outer Worlds 2 - Official Story Trailer | Xbox Games Showcase 2025 3 months ago:
You make a good point, and I agree. I wasn’t thinking that it was the only thing on the market and therefore the price is whatever a new technology costs.
I tend to think of video games - being a form of entertainment - as a great way to be entertained while also being an incredibly low cost option for the amount of time I spend enjoying them.
Buying a $600 console just to enjoy a single $60 title is an extreme example but to me, if that game provides 100 hours of playtime, that seems well worth it. Cheaper than going to a theatre or most other forms of entertainment.
To be sure, I don’t do this, but I’ve always viewed gaming through a $/h lens, and could never understand why so many people saw it as a waste of time. That’s what I was thinking when I wrote that comment earlier - it seems to me that you get more playtime with some RPG from this decade than you would playing Pac-Man. Though perhaps I feel that way because games like Pac-Man don’t appeal to me.
Thinking about it, your point might be valid again, with the Atari being a new technology, people were likely to sink far more hours into a title than they might do with modern games since we have so many to choose from now. I’ve never thought about it that way. Thanks for pointing this out.
- Comment on The Outer Worlds 2 - Official Story Trailer | Xbox Games Showcase 2025 3 months ago:
The Atari 2600 released for $190 in 1977. Or about $1000 today.
The best selling title, Pac-Man released for $28 in 1982. Or about $95 today.
Compared to so much else that has risen dramatically over time, vastly outpacing video games comparatively, I think it’s a bit hard to argue with the value proposition of modern titles.
- Comment on Slate, a no-nonsense EV pickup for $20k 4 months ago:
A bacon egg vehicle?
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
That comment is a bad take to be sure, but it isn’t really about eliminating every vehicle in existence. We’d still need individual vehicles to serve for delivery and emergency services, as well as a bunch of other stuff.
The main thought is just that it’s a bit silly to have half the population driving a two tonne vehicle to the grocery store. There’s already communities where golf carts are used instead of cars.
The whole concept of ripping out every road and installing solar tramways is just as much a nonsensical extreme not worth taking seriously as ‘what do I do if I order a computer and I work from home’. I get your use of the example though, it is the equivalent counterpoint.
- Comment on [deleted] 11 months ago:
Not sure why people are beating up on @nxn@biglemmowski.win for saying his opinion. Different people value different things.
I think I can answer your question though. Buying a console is a plug and play experience. Building a PC is not. Not everyone has the time, the patience, or the technical experience required to purchase compatible components, assemble the machine, and install the various software.
Anyone that’s ever bought a prepared meal has overpaid in comparison to acquiring the ingredients, prepping them, and cooking the dish. It’s worth the price to do so because I sure as hell don’t want to spend time making a bowl of French onion soup.
