Uh, I think it’s called the World Wide Web.

I mean, I’m joking, but I do remember buying games directly from a developers website, that’s a thing that used to happen.

I hate to be that guy, but… Is it time to get DSL?

So that “10,000 meters” didn’t scale right, clearly. But you also can’t possibly call those “high altitudes”. Small planes like cessnas fly at low altitudes, like 2,000 - 5000 ft, a 747 flys at a high altitude, 40,000 ft; 1600 ft is nothing, that’s lower than some buildings.

Have they? Is Roku dominant in this market?

I might switch to a flip phone if it had gps and maps.

That’s simply the killer app for smart phones, at this point it’s a necessary part of my life. Without it I need a separate device just for that, and that device is actually less useful.

Edit: now that I’m reading other responses I have to agree, secure messaging and 2fa are really important too.

I could live without everything else, but to be honest, I don’t use much else. A few games, Lemmy, music apps, audiobook apps. Of those, Lemmy is the app most likely to leave me feeling upset, or like I want to doomscroll.

I think limiting the apps I use is the biggest thing I can do to not make the phone a negative influence for me. But to be clear, if that starts happening, Lemmy is the first to go, I already don’t use any other social media.

I’m about to be seeing a lot less Roku…

They know they’re entirely replaceable right? Like the Amazon fire tv, apple tv, Chromecast… Making their platform shittier really shouldn’t be their top priority if they want to stay in business.

In all fairness, that is one of the strong use cases for computers in general. Doing simple yet tedious tasks accurately. When looking over 50 names checking for a particular letter, humans get bored and make mistakes. We actually aren’t great at that sort of task. I think simply calling this ineptitude both misses the point and under appreciates the reality of being human.

Alas, it is easier to call someone dumb than to try to understand them.

Yeah, I have to agree. When a breach occurs (and it happens to just about every organization at some point or another) a press release this honest, responsible and immediate is not really the norm. I see this as a show of competence on the security front and integrity for the company as a whole.

I do wish Plex wasn’t further enshitifying their product more with every release, but that’s a different issue.

When the keys cost several hundred dollars to generate? I’d say the price vastly outstrips the reward.

It does not necessarily have to cost that much… But even if it did, the key to my Honda cost a couple hundred dollars to copy, so that’s not really different.

I don’t expect to change your mind, but it seems worth pointing out that the things you’re saying are pretty dumb.

So you really think the ability to trade digital keys is useless? That’s honestly weird.

I mean there are so many instances of people actively using digital keys right now, so clearly that part of the functionality has value. Surely there are situations where one might want to sell access to something, and the ability to transfer a digital key with a single transaction would be useful.

I think you’re being overly dismissive based on preconceived notions.

So I’m hearing that perhaps the idea I talked about in my example didn’t sound cool to you. But it was cool to a lot of people, and your opinion doesn’t speak for everyone. And it does work, like today.

To be fair, the concept of an NFT was very cool when it was first imagined, but then all people used NFTs for was stupid gifs to be sold like trading cards or fucking pogs…

But the concept is cool if you actually use it for something. For instance, you can create an NFT as a digital key (like a literal key that unlocks something) or as a legal deed that proves ownership of something. Then you have a digital asset that can be resold or folded into a smart contract, where the digital item actually controls something physical. For instance, you could design an NFT to be the actual key that can unlock and start a car. If you sell this digital asset, you will not be able to start the car, but the new owner will. That is cool, monkey gifs are stupid bullshit. And if you try to convince people to buy bullshit, that makes you a scammer.

But Etherium didn’t invent the stupid bullshit, they just created a system that made more interesting things possible. And then with the power to do anything, some people made the stupidest shit in the world. It’s like, you can hand someone a pencil and paper and some people will use that to prove a theorem, some people will sketch a landscape, and some people will draw a huge cock and balls… But you don’t blame the people that created the pencil and paper.

Well I would agree with that except for one thing, the Amazon tablets are still the only product on the market that actually has usable parental controls.

I’m not saying I’ll ever trust Amazon, or ever have. But the fact is they had the only usable product on the market, if I had other options I’d use them.

And before anyone says “what happened to just teaching your kids good behavioral expectations?” Let me just say that this isn’t always possible. Some kids have developmental challenges or behavioral disorders that make this an impractical expectation. Sometimes you just need parental controls.

Amazon apk store shuts down August 20th.

Huh… This sounds like a huge pain in my ass. What happens to Kindle fire tablets, that you know heavily rely on that functionality?

I can guess what happens to any of us that use that store on other devices (I think it’s safe to say we’re fucked).

I basically only ever used it because it gave away free apps, but man, the DRM put into those apps was so aggressive and annoying.

This was a really interesting reply, thanks. I’d leave a longer response, but honestly I really need to be asleep right now.

If $120,000 is a bit much for you (it’s still far less than would be required for a Bitcoin mining farm)

I will say though, even today the barrier for entry is lower than that for bitcoin mining. You can definitely get started for $1000. I wouldn’t really recommend Bitcoin mining as a hobby at this point, but that’s basically the low end for a single machine.

Personally, that’s about as much as I ever spent on mining equipment, and it was fun, I learned a lot, and it was even lucrative in the end.

Yes, Etherium is very cool and it can do a whole bunch of really cool things! But on the other hand, it can’t replace Bitcoin. It’s too heavy, transactions are too large, the network can’t hope to handle the number transactions per minute that Bitcoin does. I think most people agree that the two systems compliment each other, they each work well in their niche, but couldn’t do the others’ job.

So yeah, I don’t see Etherium replacing Bitcoin. Perhaps a layer-2 could, but I have yet to see any that offer the kind of tangible improvements that would really make it stand out.

I think it’s early to call Bitcoin obsolete, it is still after all the dominant cryptocurrency by every measure.

Other blockchains have continued moving on.

So which systems do you see as offering real utility or innovation? Obviously there’s etherium, and it has its own issues, but what else out there do you think is really more than a just gimmick or a scheme?

Proof of work is inherently ecologically flawed, but proof of stake is inherently socially flawed. It’s literally “the people with the most money get to make the rules”. While it’s undeniably better for the environment, it doesn’t seem like an improvement to me. If anything, it undermines crypto’s greatest strengths, decentralization and equal access.

Oh man, I hate the whole git system so much, it was like the worst part of coding.

Now compare the gun violence rate of both of those countries with the gun violence rate of somewhere that bans guns.

Maybe we’ll see that Finland has a route to further reduce their gun violence.

Having looked into it a bit, I was essentially right. England mostly bans gun ownership, their gun violence rate is half that of Finland’s. In Japan, they have even tighter controls on firearms, the gun violence rate there is 30 times lower than Finland’s.

Removing guns from the situation absolutely seems makes a huge measurable difference. If you believe math.