I hope we can elevate the discourse in the Android world to accept that Android isn’t about FOSS. It is, at its core, about making Google more money by getting Google more of your personal data.

Ad blockers and apps with ad blockers are hurting Google’s revenue and they’re going to go after it.

Honestly it’s not that much better (some argue it’s worse) on my side, being an iPhone user. Like yeah, we can’t sideload, but I’ve never really felt the need to. I think both platforms should have the option though. And screw these Apple guys who say “well you should buy Android if you want that,” doubly so now that it’s not guaranteed in the future.

He looked at where AI was six months prior and made a wild speculation that, given the data, seemed plausible, if a little outlandish. I’m not mad.

One day that prediction may come true, and there may come another day, later, where we agree that the time between when he said it would happen and the time it actually did happen is not significant enough to mention.

As an older guy who struggles with slang… I’ve seen it used by guys and gals alike, but sometimes it seems to be the girl equivalent of wanker.

Worth noting that wanker is predominantly a British phrase that refers to a masturbatory act but generally refers to a person who lacks certain social graces. Like a jerk. I like saying aho in Japanese — same thing. But wanker has a class all its own, along with most British slang. You get it or you don’t.

My current understanding of the term gooner is that it means “porn addict” of any sex, gender, identification, or orientation. And while gooning does seem to refer to the masturbatory act, it seems to specify while porn is being watched or otherwise consumed.

The sound of silence here is deafening. “Too much,” everyone afraid to answer you is shouting and it’s hurting my ears.

Murder is killing with malice. Assassination is killing for political capital. There can be crossover but it isn’t necessary.

Take a head of state — not strictly a current one, not wishing here. Just as an example. He’s giving a speech, it’s an assassination. You caught him in bed with your wife and shot them both — that’s murder.

Former not current… Bethesda never saw a dollar they didn’t like.

I want to try them even though they probably taste 95% the same as KitKat. They’re a reason they can’t market them to regions where KitKats are sold, and the article covers this. (It’s because it’s literally the same thing.)

Are you aware that Post It has an app? IIRC it’s totally free on phones. I don’t know about Windows sync but it’s worth looking into for phones.

Sounds like something that wouldn’t be too hard to do, given that Plex (and others like it) exists. The difference is, Plex is streaming.

So with a good network, you can just send the game and do the emulation client side, and sync the save and other data back to the server. With a powerful enough host, you can handle the emulation on the host machine and just stream the video, with the client streaming the controls back, but this wouldn’t be good for a lot of games (too much latency). Same issue as GeForce NOW. Good if you’re near their CDN; otherwise, useless.

Point taken — and yet, motion sickness is a real thing.

That doesn’t sound accurate. Plenty of places use ballasts and those are legal. A ballast is a barrier, typically concrete but some are plastic and filled with sand, and they are commonly used to keep cars out of pedestrian spaces. You might not even notice them sometimes, but if you think about what keeps cars off the sidewalk or out of parks, you might notice them.

That’s my point, for most people the performance gains of one 2024 or 2025 flagship over another don’t mean much.

I can transfer stuff over WiFi to my iPhone in seconds. Like 2-3GB movies, 100MB-1GB video clips, etc. Seconds.

microSD sucks and I think anyone familiar with the tech knows it. The issue is speed. microSD is fine for like 16GB, maybe 32GB. Once you get bigger, you wanna put bigger files up there, more files, but they move. so. slow. It’s painful to watch. Then you get a bigger one and it’s such a headache to transfer stuff between them. I think a couple companies tried to make faster microSD cards/readers but they never took off. So I talked about NVMe and UFS. Slower than UFS, on garbage Android phones that aren’t good enough for UFS, is EMMC, and EMMC is faster than microSD. microSD is good for Jack and shit, and Jack left town. Apple may have blessed the industry by never including it. It’s trash and Jobs knew it, and he didn’t put trash in his products. Lots of people know microSD is trash and that, not Apple, is why most Android phones don’t include them now either. One, because yeah, they wanna sell you the faster internal storage and/or cloud storage. But two, because it’s just so slow.

But yeah, I’d say get a big-ish phone (storage wise, like 256GB or more) and keep stuff on the internal UFS or NVMe. Optionally get a Samsung T7 or T9 portable SSD, 2TB for around $100, on Black Friday (I mean, that’s about what I paid for my T7, like $110 tops) and keep stuff on that. Yes, iPhones can read/write from/to flash drives and portable drives. Same as Android, you open the file manager, browse to the drive, copy stuff over. Apple’s built in Files does it. On Android I’m old school, I’d only mess with either Solid Explorer (my personal choice) or FX File Explorer (2nd choice). I know Android has a file manager now (Samsung had one longer) but I trust those.

I’m pretty new to this, so I can’t really game it out in my mind what the effect would be. My first instinct is to say that they would pour money into one instance, probably the biggest one, and the rest of the federated instances would just go about their merry way.

In fact, there are corporate federated services… I mean Bluesky is kinda federated, so is, I think Threads by Facebook/Instagram? But a lot of services don’t federate with it because they don’t like the people behind them.

Have you tried gaming on a plane before? I can’t do it. It’s more bearable than gaming in the car, but gaming in any moving vehicle messes with my head. So I’d go with an audiobook.

That said… old school RPG but plenty of people have suggested them.

A lot of names can be converted. My favorite uncle gave his oldest daughter a pretty name, but he wanted a son to name after himself. They quit after having two girls, and he named his youngest girl after himself, with the name converted to the feminine variety.

Honestly living well and not thinking about them at all is the best revenge you can enjoy. Just put them out of your mind and focus on other people. Worrying about them doesn’t do you any good, even if they aren’t doing well.

I’d say the good guys are the ones supporting, or trying to support human rights. And gay rights, trans rights, the rights of immigrants and such… are human rights. A civilisation is judged not by how it treats its nobility, but how it treats its working poor. And we need to do better.

Well, I have the best one. I have the 16 Pro Max, 512GB. I like the big screen, and I like a lot of things about it. And how well it works with my watch, my AirPods, and my Macs — for example, being able to copy something on one and paste it on the other. “The Ecosystem” isn’t as great as some say, but it does have its advantages.

Some apps cost money. I refuse to do subscriptions. I’ll pay for an app if I like it but I won’t pay monthly unless it’s a service (like say Apple Music). There are free apps on both platforms. There are paid/subscription apps on both platforms. Both platforms take 30% so they’re both incentivised to promote subscriptions and paid apps over free ones. The free ones still exist. Only on Android, you also have F-Droid which is all free/open source apps.

Nothing is more powerful than an iPhone in all conditions. Okay so the Galaxy S25 is faster right now, but when it gets hot, its thermal protections reduce power by like 50-60% to cool it faster. iPhone only loses 20-30%, so under no load, the S25 is gonna be faster, and the iPhone is gonna be faster under load. Talking about playing the top games. So most of the time you’re under no load. Also, on paper nothing has faster storage than an iPhone because iPhones use more expensive NVMe SSDs. Your top Android phones use UFS 4.0, or even 3.x, which is slower… on paper. The benchmarks speak for themselves. But power on an iPhone 16 Pro and a Galaxy S25 Ultra and open and close apps, you’re not going to see a big enough difference to say “I’m selling the phone in my left hand to buy the phone in my right,” whichever way you wanna go. Android has more RAM. Android has better AI. iPhone has never had a good keyboard — Gboard sucks on iOS but it’s amazing on Android. Android has Firefox with uBlock Origin. iPhone has better video cameras. Still cameras? iPhone over-sharpens, Samsung over-softens, and Pixel uses AI hallucinations to fill in what it can’t see. They can all show you lab-created conditions where their phone comes out on top. MKBHD has shown people time and time again that in blind image contests, most of his viewers/subscribers prefer pictures taken by cheap Android phones, not flagships from anyone.

So the truth is, there really is no best smartphone platform. For a Mac guy, iPhones have a slight advantage, but their disadvantages are notable, too. And honestly I’d love to have a better Android phone than my 2019 Galaxy S10, but the fact that I like my S10 better than my 16PM for a few things speaks volumes.

I think what I’m gonna do is, in a few years, buy a Galaxy phone that’s a couple generations out that is better than my S10 (it should be — by a lot) and then after a few more years, replace the iPhone… probably with a base model, because honestly I don’t play top end games and even the top iPhone can’t get something as basic as typing.

macOS is “certified UNIX,” whatever that means. And I think Linux is a spinoff/knockoff of UNIX? I’m not clear on the history. I could find out if I were too concerned. But with as closely related as they are (Windows is the odd one out here, pretty much everything else out there is *nix), there’s a lot of stuff one does that the other doesn’t. Like Proton on Linux for running Windows games.

But yeah, the Jellyfin server works fine on macOS, but the apps are kinda hard to get working. Like it doesn’t auto detect your server and it’s not immediately clear what you need to put in to connect them. And the server app doesn’t just volunteer this information freely. So it’s not the kind of thing you can help people set up and share with them. Plex… is. Like seriously, I can say “just register for Plex and give me your account name or email.” I add you to my shared users. Bam, you got all my content. It’s that easy, and moving forward, anything put up as an alternative to Plex should be at least that easy.

Reddit will tell you why you were banned. It generates a PM with the reason and a link to the offending post.

For example, I was banned for inciting violence towards a protected group of people… in reference to saying child predators should face stiffer legal penalties. Someone took it the wrong (or maybe right) way because their president is in the Epstein files. Honestly I wasn’t even thinking of him but if the prison jumpsuit fits… anyway, it was not a mystery to me.

I did appeal in case AI flagged me but a human upheld it.

But as to why Lemmy is better in that regard… more open platform trying to improve upon the formula of those that came before. Also run by people not corporations. And not operated by the GOP.