Instead, all that money is being used to accelerate our doom. AI datacenters unnecessarily consuming power and drinking water in small towns everywhere. Many just dumping humidity into the air and letting that water literally blow away via lazy evaporative cooling. Most “normal” water consuming processes consume, treat, and return water to the downstream-traveling aquifer.

Now, couple that with an overall warming climate. When air is warmer, the more moisture the air can hold. So we end up with more water vapor in the air than normal. With the weirding factor of climate change, this means more water energy for more powerful and destructive storms the likes of which humanity has never seen. Which feeds back into more ice melting, oceans rising, permafrost melting, cycle, accelerate, cycle, accelerate.

Also, real curious to see how millions of warehouses belching humidity and heat into the air across the surface of the globe can affect the general weather patterns, but that sadly won’t be known until after the damage is done.

And every fake-friendly long-winded response consumes more electricity and water than it should, while also being useless.

Native plants is such a misnomer. It really just means “plants that aren’t grass” - as often the “native” plant will end up being some tall grass from another continent or region. Something people should be careful with when going into this if they truly want to pick plants that are “native” to the region.

This is also why the AI datacenter race is so asinine. All the datacenters drinking all the water and power will end up being even more pointless wastes of resources in short order.

Obviously the tech bros are just doing the datacenter land-grab as a pissing match because they’re bored billionaires that need to get a life, and love creating nonsense contests. It is just terrible that so many naive communities will be bilked out of resources (or made sick and die from the pollution) as a result.

They stopped coincidentally around the same time Google announced that no third party messaging apps would be allowed to use RCS.

Totes. Gotta murder the Samsung keyboard though, or it’s still harvesting while using Futo. Ask me how I know.

The real challenge is De-Samsunging it. Can only disable Samsung’s keyboard and many other things via ADB commands. The keyboard itself is some kind of data hog that can consume gigs of space. It also has a 40+ slot clipboard history that it will retain even if you aren’t using the keyboard. It no longer saves the clipboard once you disable it via ADB though.

Translation: These features were using too much compute in their “AI” datacenters and they’re cutting costs.

Bubble so close to popping!

IDEs just get worse, bellwether signal for where software companies think software in general is going, if the dev tools are already going to crap.

The Federal government should not be allowed to directly tax anything. All should go through the states. This direct taxation is how we are stuck in this Nazi Feudalust situation.

There is a term for that. Duopoly.

It is nice if you prefer the original file with all the associated data/metadata instead of the stripped/transcoded copy that many messaging apps send. No need to cloud or message or nothing. Works without Internet. Just bulk-select 20 pics and tap on the person’s phone.

Probably will become more popular with so many leaving the cloud, as well.

It will be once the bubble pops. Small local tuned models for specific tasks that the user powers are much less expensive for the tech companies than tech companies powering and watering datacenters.

Right now the tech bros genuinely think people will be cool paying hundreds of dollars a month to rent a GPU for all their Internet tasks. AI fatigue is already setting in.

The tech bros’ investors will pull funding once they realize how asinine that is long-term. Probably already starting to, with the likes of Zuck trying to use green charity money to fund his LLMs.

So the way compute used to work, is you could install any program you want from anywhere. You could buy a program from a web site or copy a disk and install the program.

Smartphones have been around since the late 1990s in various forms, it used to be, you could just install whatever you want.

Then, in 2008, Apple released the iPhone app store, and it was a closed space, a “walled garden”. You can only install apps on their phone if they approve them.

Google decided to join the phone race and released a phone where one could still install applications from anywhere, not just their store. There are multiple stores like others have mentioned, or you can download an APK file from anywhere and install it on your phone.

Part of their behavior since is slightly open to interpretation, as the technology is now used by everyone, not just tech nerds. People could install “bad” programs, and they could lose money, cell networks could be compromised, etc.

It likely costs a lot of companies a lot of money to deal with dumb users doing stupid shit. So from one perspective, making it extremely hard to install unknown programs from anywhere will curb that expense.

It could be a defensive move, as LLMs now allow anyone to write computer software with very little knowledge of it, and it is just bad timing.

On the other hand, since the beginning of computers, the owner of the machine could run whatever software they wanted.

This move by Google is basically making it so there is NO mobile compute platform that the owner of the device actually owns, and is allowed to do with their hardware what they want. Apple or Google, that is it. Apple had always been closed, which should have been made illegal, but I digress.

It has been a slippery slope with Android for almost 2 decades, and this move is basically the end of the ability for free humans to install free software from anywhere on the hardware they own and paid anywhere up to $3000 for.

Basically a huge dive for personal freedom on a planetary scale, decided by one corporation.

They are not banks, nor regulated similarly, so more risk of losing money and not getting it back in trade for perceived convenience.

At some point people are going to start realizing they’re not temporarily inconvenienced billionaires

Hahaha, so accurate. The psychological poisoning seems so effective on many levels, like those on welfare voting against their own interests as they know they’re just one lottery ticket or get rich quick scam away from financial freedom. Or the billionaires that think they’re one harebrained scheme away from becoming a god-king.

What did you pivot into, if you don’t mind my asking?

Amazingly, there is this nifty thing called a “port” that allows a mouse to be plugged into a laptop. It is pretty incredible technology. /s

I tend to vacillate myself depending on the noise of the environment vs the work at hand. If I need to spread out across a few monitors, dock it. If I just need to do some simple paperwork, portable. If I want to force no distractions, portable (as it is more difficult to see things when your screen real estate is reduced.)

Helps if you have good eyesight too, laptop UIs today are at clown magnification levels anymore.

A tale as old as time. The US nuclear missile codes were 000000, but it didn’t matter. The chain of command was purpose-built, ironically, so the front line soldier in a cold war scenario had to make the last decision to delete all life on the planet. Chain of command doesn’t matter at that point. You are choosing to kill everyone you know from an order from who knows who. The ultimate checksum.

You will always be better at decisions than an n-dimensional matrix of numbers on an overpriced GPU.

The actual reason is control. VPN on the current Android stack makes it relatively easy for a non-technical user to sign up for a paid service that blocks telemetry-harvesting back to Google. Unlike Apple’s platform, Google’s historically heavily relies on a cloud connection for pseudo-real-time telemetry harvesting. If a person uses a VPN with ad/app/telemetry-blocking, Google gets cut off. That means things like, their Waymo cars not receiving real-time traffic updates, their WiFi geolocation database missing current information, their adtech arm not receiving user metadata.

Google’s software is quite tenacious at attempting to connect to Google too. If you ever want to see how much, install RethinkDNS and start blocking core Google services. Check the logs. You will see the app try Google in your country, then Google in neighboring countries, then other devices in your home running Google software. Any connection they can find to relay telemetry back to the big G-spot.

Google’s moves right now in lieu of any government taking action against them is to solidify their platform control and metadata harvesting pipelines. They’re cutting off alternate ROMs, cutting off open source hardware drivers for newer devices, partnering with Samsung to encourage Samsung to close their devices down, reducing security patch frequency on older devices, partnering more closely with Apple to ensure a stream of healthy metadata from Apple, closing the ability to install third-party apps, and also getting heavier into military contracting.

Google is an information vacuum, always has been. When their leadership was more “altruistic”, the trade-off was a contribution back to society. Now that they are in a late-stage profit phase, they’re just doubling down on that vacuum role hard.