Mastodon seems like it could work relatively well.

The other side of the issue though is for social media to feel “social” now, people, consciously or not, want to feel connected to brands and advertising and popular culture. Social media, now more than television or magazines used to, generates our water-cooler moments. It generates the content we sit right here and discuss - it generates memes. These fringe alternatives aren’t popular because the they lack gravity. Gravity comes from investment. Investment comes from potential; typically, potential to make money.

But yeah, group ware, et al, could work for smaller groups. The friction there is getting people to install, and give a crap about, another app on their phone.

What used to be apps for catching up with your friends and family are now algorithmic nightmares that constantly interrupt you with suggested content and advertisements that consistently outweigh the content of people that you choose to follow.

In the case of Facebook, the decline is either reflected in — or directly facilitated by — two specific features: People You May Know and the News Feed.

Yep. I was screaming to bring back the chronological timeline when they pushed out the “beta testing”. I actually stopped using social media regularly because I was missing events that were happening in my neighborhood. There was no point once they chose what to show me. But, I’m not the target demographic for their platform.

Someone who wants to interact with their community and keep in touch with their friends and family is not what social media is for. It’s for selling ads. It’s for maintaining your attention. It’s for engagement and making you feel a way they’ve determined will keep you scrolling.

And honestly, it’s tough to complain. The more successful a platform becomes, the more content is uploaded and viewed. This doesn’t cost them nothing. Without charging to use or upload to the platform, they have to sell ads. The more engaging the ads are, the more successful business are with posting those ads. So they double down and post more ads - they engage more with the audience the platform has directed towards them. It just keeps snowballing from there until the platform no longer represents what it did initially.

The actual problem is that no one is willing to pay for “social media”. They’ll pay out the butt for streaming services and two-day delivery but connecting with real people and getting unbiased investigative news, not so much.

Hooray! 🎉

Second sentence:

It has a 4.4mm headphone jack to go with the more conventional 3.5mm type.

4.4mm is for balanced audio output. This audience for this device is audiophiles.

301 terabits = 37 terabytes… PER SECOND.

There’s some speculation that this may be a heating issue when charging the Vision Pro in the case or with the cover on. Others contend it might be a manufacturing problem with the glass or simply a design flaw that puts too much tension on that particular area.

That’s all the same problem.

I found something that was doing that after I thought it was going to actually delete items. I stopped the script and found something to delete. What’s the advantage of editing comments? Just to advertising alternatives?

Keep making feel good about deleting my 15+ years of Reddit content. Go on…

Edit: I’ve done it. I’ve officially deleted my account. For a minute there, I was looking at the front page of Reddit. It’s all rage bait. The content is designed to get you to feel something and engage with it. I could feel that itch to comment and downvote. It’s preposterous; and soon, all about quarterly gains.

I’ve just installed this. If there wasn’t an official news release (thanks for the link) I would have thought this was fake.

There’s no NFL. Under My Teams, you can’t select one of your teams to get information about them. There’s no games scheduled for today, and nothing shown for yesterday. No spring training MLB. And, most importantly, there’s no Widget.

Thanks, this is super interesting, but I’ll stick with TheScore for now.

I’ve seen this this morning as it was reported to be a skit.

As cool AF as this is for being “the future”, the video just had me worried about the future of idiots standing around town in people’s way (like Casey standing in the middle of the stairs while texting).

I mean, yeah, it would be super cool to walk into a grocery store with these on and get recipes and caloric info and suggested alternatives or on-the-spot deals from brands, etc. The potential for this as a user is incredible. But at the same time you’ve got everyone else in the store trying to walk around you flailing your arms around like while you watch a TikTok video about making chili. Which is not something I would have thought would be a concern twenty years go but we know now that most people are inconsiderate.

The one positive shown here in the video is that you can’t really doing anything while you’re moving (yet). So the fear of people actually walking and texting / computing or DRIVING with these on is quelled.

I use Bing and Edge daily for work because they integrate nicely with M365 and SharePoint. This Copilot crap does nothing but get in my way.

In fact, Microsoft pushing Copilot in our faces only results in a disruption of productivity. It took months (which is break-neck speed for MSFT) for them to add the option to disable Copilot in PowerPlatform. Why it was forced upon users in the first place is beyond comprehension.

Improvements in technology are great. Options are great. Getting out of my way and getting shit done is even greater.

I don’t know about everyone else but, whether it’s a major corporation or an indie app developer or an automotive manufacturer, the way they all keep changing things so quickly (mostly for the worse) is pushing me away from using tech on a whole.

Without getting too off topic (too late?), there’s just so much consumer frustration from streaming services, cars, phones, wearables, vr, delivery services, etc., that I have to imagine / hope that in the next few years we’re going to start seeing an anti-tech movement pick up more traction. I mean, how many people really want a voice driven AI assistant?

Do I want AI to give me better search results? Sure - if it can do so intelligently. It still gets things wrong sending me down a rabbit hole losing hours of productivity. I don’t have time to train your AI for you so just get out of my way and let me know once you’re smarter than me.

Sounds like you’re comparing a small town to a major city. We do have places in this country that meet your demands. And then there are smaller communities that don’t. And because lots of people prefer suburban sprawl over the convenience of living in a city, they may need to commute to where big business is.

If your small town is near an interstate or train track, and has open land, you may be lucky enough to have a decent size business break ground. Now more people can live closer to work. And now more people move to that town. And more small businesses open to support the growing community. And not far down the highway a mega strip mall opens. And within a few miles you have more homes and schools going up and now that train track has a train station. Congratulations, you now live in a small city. You got any sidewalks? Did they save any of that open land for parks? How’s the infrastructure holding up? How’s traffic?

That’s exactly what happening in the town I grew up in. I hated it and moved to an actual city. Life is relaxing and convenient and full of life. I have no car and use a bike public transportation. I more often walk to the stores and restaurants (those that haven’t closed yet). I engage with people (minimally) and find little joys in my daily life.

Now, imagine all of this if everyone just worked from home. There would be no need for a large corporate building or more homes or stores or schools. You’d have to drive further to the places where people live more densely for your everyday items. Or just rely on the miracle of the internet for someone to drop it at your door. Because as much as lots of people like suburban sprawl, they love not having to interact with anyone IRL.

Outside of Philadelphia is a region called The Mainline. It gets its name from the regional rail system that connects affluent suburbs with the city. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve spoken with who complain about living in the suburbs and having to drive one of the worst highways in the country for their morning commute. When I ask why they simply don’t drive a few minutes to the station and take a train in to their place of work, they look at me as if I had two heads. Because people don’t want to interact with anyone IRL. They rather waste hours a day in the confines of their own vehicle and scream so no one can hear them.

It’s not the cities that need to be fixed. It’s the American mentality of individualism and false security in isolation. This needs to change and then the cities will naturally follow in revival.

So, while I greatly appreciate the work from home perspective, there’s more to the story than real estate losing value.

grand plazas, city centers, districts to walk/shop/eat/live life

Yes. That’s called a city. I don’t know what cities you have in mind but this is how I would describe my city of Philadelphia.

How come no one wants to talk about all the small business closing and people losing their jobs. This is a real tangible impact that shouldn’t be dismissed. I live in a big city and we’re all feeling the impact of people not returning to office work. Lack of revenue (small business, real estate, retail) is going to play a huge role in city budgets in the coming years. I work from home so I understand the appeal. Still, I don’t know how we, the city, come out of this.

I’m curious if this is a “Cyber Truck” issue or an electric vehicle / drive train issue. I mean, do the electric motors in these vehicles have “gears”?

FWIW, this has been around for about twenty years.

Apple could care less about them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ask/comments/17wx1tq/whats_so_wrong_that_it_became_right/k9jzi63/

WatchOS 10 is unusable for me. I sent mine back to revert to OS 9.

The vast majority of my interactions with Apple Watch is swiping to change faces to quickly observe a bunch of data in a glance or to launch apps. With this user interface entirely deleted, it feels to me that they’ve handicapped the OS to a mere shadow of what is has been since this feature was introduced in WatchOS 3.

They should instead add a lock button for the people who are so greatly burdened to have to flick their finger to change from a face they accidentally flipped to.

“Smart Stack” is dumb AF. It looks nice and it’s probably usable if you’re sitting still crouched over your watch but to try to use it while you’ve active is a nightmare. It’s too small, doesn’t show enough information, it’s fluid, lacks permanence, isn’t possible to always be in the order of intention… it’s just a UX bag of turds.

Not a fan of moving Control Center but not the end of the world. It and the previous crown and action button presses were all much more ergonomic as they were.

The Weather app doesn’t make much sense. I imagine I’d get used to it but it’s certainly a downgrade, as is the rest of the OS, in usability.

It’s pretty though. I absolutely admire it for its prettiness. But I’ve lost count of the ways it’s taken a step back in usability. It’s a smart watch. Its primary reason for existing is to present data as clearly and efficiently as possible.

People may have their preferences and subjective feelings about things but WatchOS 10 is objectively more cumbersome to use than WatchOS 9.

Reuters also points out that Apple’s research and development spending grew to $22.61 billion during Q3 2023, an increase of $3.12 billion compared to the same quarter last year.

Holy fucking fuck. $22 billion a quarter?!

This just makes me angry that we don’t get to see any of this shit. I’ve been using Apple products for so long and it just feels like nothing has happened with this company aside from the silicon advancements. Nothing that’s relevant to me at least. Mostly what I’m seeing is their choices to make their user interface less intuitive. I don’t care about AI. I care about fixing bugs and responding to years and years of user requests.