True. Even I've been guilty of that at times. It's just hard right now to see the positives through the countless downsides and the fact that the biggest application we're moving towards seems to be taking value from talented people and putting it back into the pockets of companies that were already hoarding wealth and treating their workers like shit.

So usually when people say "AI is the next big thing", I say "Eh, idk how useful an automated idiot would be" because it's easier than getting into the weeds of the topic with someone who's probably not interested haha.

Edit: Exhibit A

The issue is that "AI" has become a marketing buzz word instead of anything meaningful. When someone says "AI" these days, what they're actually referring to is "machine learning". Like in LLMs for example: what's actually happening (at a very basic level, and please correct me if I'm wrong, people) is that given one or more words/tokens, it tries to calculate the most probable next word/token based on its model (trained on ridiculously large numbers of bodies of text written by humans). It does this well enough and at a large enough scale that the output is cohesive, comprehensive, and useful.

While the results are undeniably impressive, this is not intelligence in the traditional sense; there is no reasoning or comprehension, and definitely no consciousness, or awareness here. To grossly oversimplify, LLMs are really really good word calculators and can be very useful. But leave it to tech bros to make them sound like the second coming and shove them where they don't belong just to get more VC money.

Lots of countries just don't care about you downloading pirated content though, they just punish distribution.

I don't really have that problem but for the places that do punish downloading, I hear VPNs can be helpful to mask your traffic and that ISPs don't really care enough to pursue as long as you're not blatant about it and have plausible deniability ("no, I just downloaded a linux ISO that happened to be exactly the size of a whole season of <insert show>, total coincidence")

Obviously not legal advice though.

On the bright side, new Italy unlocked

For me it's roughly 6/9 of the times it's on the table but everyone's different and you really should consult your physician before your holey activities.

That's actually amazing! Maybe I should start ranting about stuff that annoys me in software I love. Wouldn't mind being lead dev on something I'm an active user of.

How many years until we get the Veldt?

30 seconds in and subbed because "man rants about DAW UI/UX" is a genre of video that I never knew existed but suddenly can't live without.

The way I see it, don't dish it out if you can't take it...living memory or not

In reasonable amounts, yes

Yup that sounds about right for iOS.

Meant more that if Android ends up in the same boat (and by the looks of it, that's exactly what Google and Samsung want), then iOS starts to look viable because the situation becomes: all the same bullshit but iOS is polished to a shine.

Don't plan on switching phones until my less than year old Note 9 kicks the bucket 😅

Huh...the more you know. I just assumed Magisk was a spiritual successor, apparently I misunderstood how any of it works.

This!

APK signatures exist and they're enough for making sure the file you got isn't modified. Warning people when they use apks for stuff like banking, I get, but if they wanna take the risk, it's on them.

Blocking root makes no sense because I'd argue that if the person knows enough to root their phone and got past all those bricked phone/thermonuclear war warnings, the onus is on them to not get their keychain compromised by giving root to some random app. Again, a warning is fine.

Aside from that, people need to understand: THE CLIENT IS NEVER SECURE. NO EXCEPTIONS.

Any self respecting secure API is made under the assumption that all the calls are coming from some malicious state actor using curl until proven beyond doubt that it's an actual user.

I've used Magisk with the safetynet module + hiding root from apps with like a 95% success rate. Quick search for "magisk safetynet" and look at the xdadevelopers threads

Whoa, is Xposed still a thing that works? Had to use Magisk instead to get the safety net stuff working on Lineage OS android 11

Hardware isn't everything. Apple has a couple of advantages over iPhone that let them do more with less:

• iOS needs to support a MUCH fewer devices than Android. Even before they switched to their own silicon, they've been optimizing the OS to the hardware really well giving you devices that go toe to toe with Android flagships of the same generation with SIGNIFICANTLY better hardware and like double the RAM. Also why Apple doesn't really care to increase RAM as much as the android side of things.
• Apple silicon is actually really good and making their own hardware allows them to optimize on both sides of the equation and lets them do more with less.

The selling points for Android (at least the way I've seen it over the years) have always been full control (talking about non-root, I'd rather not go down the root rabbit hole here) and (since iPhone 11 started doing firmware blocks on parts) reparability...but both seem to be going out the window lately.

Prices are crap though, but then again Android phones on the top end don't seem much better. 1-2 gen old iPhones are usually a bit more reasonable though tbh.

The more I think about it, this may finally convince me to...shudders...switch to an iPhone. I've always stayed on Android because despite the recent Google bullshit, it still for the most part lets me do whatever. Side-loading apks is a huge part of that.

If it's turning into a shittier iOS clone, what's the point?

There's a bank here that refuses to let you log into their app if you have developer options enabled. Their service was getting much better until that point, but I dropped them completely after that.

I use developer options to get better screen density on my large ass screen, and to you know...develop apps 🤷‍♂️

FUCK THESE ASSHOLES WHO THINK THEY CAN TELL ME WHAT I CAN AND CAN NOT DO WITH MY PHONE

My favorite was the bit about the increased chocolate rations! 😄

On Android, Flud has been good to me over the years even though the ads can get annoying at times. Hopefully it helps you get Linux ISOs on your phone with ease :)