An Idiot Abroad

Because nothing endears your platform to users like throwing ads in their face during the high points of whatever they are watching.

I listened to one recently that was using AI. It was kind of off putting because of how robotic it came off.

It wasn’t the tone really, but I find that AI tends to not get human speech inflections right most of the time during active speech. And that can be jarring to me at least.

And no one that has an option should take them up on those job offers.

They have shown what they will do again as soon as they think AI gets good enough.

Open a Grindr account using his profile picture.

Advertising as a concept is not bad. But given the realities of capitalism, the greedy executive and shareholders can never resist the easy money. As a result anything that implements ads will eventually be completely overrun and ruined by them. Might take a year, might take 10, but once that door is opened it is inevitable.

It is amazing how much “crazy” mirrors rule 34. If you can think it up, someone has a conspiracy theory about how it is being used to harm or control the general public.

lol, Jesus. It is like what a screen writer would come up with for a movie that contained a terrible company run by terrible people doing stuff so outlandishly terrible everyone watching would think “the absurdity of the terrible is how you know it is made up”.

It is all running in a Proxmox cluster. 2 nodes have 62GB and one has 32GB. So while it is a good chunk. Not enough to bottleneck available RAM for other things in the cluster.

It is not a security thing to me. It is a “I want to do what I want to do with the things I paid for” thing.

I know full well something so locked down is technically more secure, but using those platforms as my primary devices would cause a lose of device flexibility I have no interest in taking part in for the use cases of a desktop or laptop.

Those platforms have their place, just like my video game consoles. But I am not interested in making anything I consider important contingent on something that is more at the whims of the company that made it than me.

We are going to move away from Google, by basing our new future on AOSP, which is also primary maintained by Google…I smell another FireOS level product on the horizon. Still Android, but worse.

Personally, I don’t want multiple app stores specifically. I just want to be able to install IPA’s from Github or where ever like I can on Android.

Could have something to do with it costing as much as a sit down restaurant used to while tasting like it came from back water gas stations.

TLDR: I don’t like the philosophy behind how Android and iOS devices are created and managed by their OEMs nearly enough to give them near total control over what I can do today or in the future with my primary computing platforms.

Its not a specific thing I can’t do that I want to do that stops me from liking it.

Its that it is a specific OS image bound to a specific hardware model that is very limited in what options or upgrades or changes are available to me.

With a Framework laptop (or most other generic models) or a generic ATX desktop tower I can replace whatever internal component if need be and then put whatever base OS on it, just because I want to do that.

With a Pixel, or Galaxy, or iPhone it runs the OS it came with and is blessed by the OEM on the hardware they compiled it to run on. Unless I am willing to accept large inconveniences in functionality and usability.

If I replace my desktop/laptop with a Pixel running Debian for desktop mode, now Google has vastly more control over what my desktop experience is going to be via their control of the hardware and host OS layer than they do today. If they decide they don’t want something being done in that Debian container in the future for some reason, then they can stop me from doing it with little recourse for me as a user.

It is allotted 16GB out of the 62GB total that the host has. Which is the amount their docs call for in a 20 RPS or 1000 user scenario. Since I am the only one doing any commits or pulls, it does fine.

Does take its sweet time to reboot though. 😆

I used to think the idea of a phone that is also my desktop would be really cool. But then I got to thinking just how locked down iOS and to a lesser extent Android are compared to Linux/Windows/MacOS, and decided I wouldn’t use my Pixel as a replacement for my desktop or laptop even if the feature was there.

1. Gitlab (version control)
2. Bookstack (wiki)
3. Joplin (not a webapp, but sync server)
4. Semaphore (does all of my infra updating via Ansible)
5. Uptime-Kuma (monitoring/alerting)

Been thinking about adding NextCloud mostly for the Google Docs/MS Office replacement at some point.

But honestly most of my stuff is just for me, my family prefers to to use whatever commercial thing is out there. So I tend to limit things to infrastructure type things that are of personal interest to me alone.

There are a lot of things at Apple that I, as the paying customer, would rather Cook care more about than AR/VR boondoggles.

And just think, there were those out there that doubted he would get anything done. /s

In their defense, I’m not sure I have ever seen a major UI redesign of some piece of software that the users of that software actually liked, at least at first. Inertia and muscle memory are powerful things.