Google was a search engine, first and foremost, and made their money primarily with ads on their search engine. Fairly unobtrusive ads, I might add. Because it was the best search engine, hands-down. Ostensibly the reason for Android was so that Apple wouldn’t have a monopoly and be able to shift people away from using Google as their default search engine. An open platform and open internet benefited them, because they were the best.

Now they’ve taken a hard dive into rent-seeking behavior, and their search engine is terrible.

Microsoft, on the other hand, engaged in anti-competitive behavior pretty much right from the word ‘go’.

When showing people VR for the first time, Elite was one of the games that I would pull up, starting with a docked ship. The sense of scale, from starting in the ship to looking at the hangar, to the ship getting slotted into the docking bay, and then flying from the docking bay out into open space with a planet in the background? Incredible.

You’re not wrong that the gameplay only has so much to it, and it does get grindy - but it’s one of the best of its genre at the moment, especially when you limit it to stuff that works in VR. Star Citizen might top it depending on your opinion, but 1) it’ll never see a full release and 2) it’s so resource hungry that I’m wary of trying to run it in VR. I upgraded my computer partly BECAUSE Star Citizen ran like molasses and it still didn’t hit 30FPS after getting a new CPU/mobo/RAM, probably because my GPU is seven years old.

In that case, have you tried Elite: Dangerous?

If you want something that cuts down on motion blur, the website BlurBusters.com is still an excellent resource.

At the time, Google was genuinely more trustworthy than Microsoft. I don’t know if you remember when Google had ‘do no evil’ as part of its mission statement, but it seemed like they actually made some token effort to follow that.

Microsoft, of course, is doing its best to make Windows as bad as Android in the spying-on-users front.

They pollute, they consume water and fiendish amounts of electricity causing our power bills to spike, they are making all sorts of computer hardware absurdly more expensive, they’re driving the unnecessary addition of AI into everything, the models they run are unreliable for the tasks they say they will revolutionize, they’re propping up tech companies that continue to raise prices and extract rent for every service they provide, they’re wrecking the economy at large with their circular self-dealing, and the models are built off of wholesale theft.

What’s not to love?

They’re a niche product that has a very solid use case (court transcripts). They require far less training than a stenotype, but because they’re so niche, the people who do make them can more-or-less charge what they want. If we’re being less skeptical, the low demand means the manufacturers can’t take advantage of the efficiencies of scale, so the price remains high.

Those were only two examples of an accelerating trend. But you’re right; if something is actually a necessity, you can largely get it without a smartphone. Society is doing its utmost to make them a necessity though, and it drives me nuts.

At this point, you can’t even participate in several aspects of society without a smartphone. A lot of concerts and the like have digital-only tickets. You can’t even get cheap McD’s food without using their stupid app; their deals are all digital now.

Boss makes a dollar, I make a penny.

That’s why, while on the clock, I’m browsing Lemmy.

Lordy but MAGAs are weird.

If the robot is the right size, it would be able to move vertically.

Mind you, you’re right, but new methods of locomotion can come in useful in surprising ways that you and I haven’t thought of.

Running cables through conduit is one example that comes to mind. You need something to drag the lead, and if there’s corners or something that thwarts using a fish tape, this kind of robot would be perfect.

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Datacenters largely have fixed power needs; the computers are going to be running constantly, or else they aren’t making money for their capitalist overlords. What you want is something located at the solar arrays themselves, so that you can selectively switch whether the juice is going to the grid or to your power sink - and the power sink ideally should be something that also makes you money, but doesn’t need to run 24/7 to do so. Like a crypto farm.

It’s not meant for prosthetics or manufacturing. It’s a robot that can get into tight spaces without depending on wheels, tracks, or legs, which are likely to get hung up on corners and debris. It could be used to, for example, crawl into rubble, or explore irregular caves. If it’s designed right it could be made pretty cheaply, even. Biggest downside is that it can’t climb, but that problem exists with most other robot designs as well.

Oooh, I’ll have to give those a try.

Right?? And my biggest problem is that the best ones I’ve found are, like, two hours away by car.

I like me some fancy chocolate.

Bean-to-bar dark chocolates let you distinguish the characteristics of different locales’ cacao beans. They’re not cheap but they’re a real pleasure.

I like chocolate covered peanut butter cremes. I’ll eat Reese’s in a pinch (my favorite regular cany bar is Reese’s Nutrageous, which is getting increasingly difficult to find) but getting the box-of-chocolate style is waaaaay better.

Also, chocolate truffles with rum. :-9

It may have been for something else, but it’s weirdly applicable here…