I once made a CEO a bit unhappy by describing the stock market as socially acceptable gambling, every day I’m proven more and more right.

In North America and Europe, tap to pay was implemented prior to smartphones that could scan QR codes being ubiquitous. Most of us have had cards that support NFC payments for longer than we have had a phone that can read QR codes so it made sense for phones to pick up the technology that worked with the terminals businesses already had than try to implement a new system.

The QR code thing is primarily a Chinese solution to the payment problem (all other Asian countries I’ve been to have widespread NFC acceptance). Payment cards were never widespread within China the way they are in other places, until AliPay and WeChat Pay became a thing people still primarily used cash for their daily communications. If businesses don’t already have credit card terminals but people have smartphones then the QR code starts to make more sense.

One interesting thing about this is that even before North America was widely using NFC payments, people in Hong Kong were using their Octopus transit cards as contactless payment at all kinds of businesses throughout the city. Yet that technology didn’t seems to make it into Mainland China.

I unfortunately have to use Chrome at work and uBlock origin light seems to work well enough. When I’m at home the pihole does most of the heavy lifting for the adblocking.

This article title is a bit confusing. WD cards are only going away because their parent company SanDisk decided to amalgamate their offering into one brand (which makes sense to me, I never understood the WD SD cards when SanDisk is the trusted brand). Totally different circumstances.

now on the 4th update it keep failing for some reason.

Running an Arch based distro comes with a commitment to learning “the Arch way”. You need to be willing to look at the terminal output of pacman and see what the errors mean. Being close to bleeding edge means that on occasion something will fail or end up in a state that you need to resolve. Its usually easy, but you need to pay attention to what pacman is telling you. If that isn’t something someone is interested in there are plenty of other excellent distros out there that will meet their needs.

Make it infeasible to run Windows on your personal machines by limiting how long you can use the hardware, but conveniently support it as a cloud vm service that is always guaranteed to work with a monthly subscription.

I’m beginning to think this is all a conspiracy to try to kill Windows because Microsoft doesn’t want to support a desktop OS anymore.

“But shareholders expect a new phone every year…”

I agree, the changes year after year are so minor at this point that a 2 year cycle is enough. Just look at the S26 that Samsung just announced, they are rightly getting criticised for how little they changed. Heck, they have been using the same image sensors for like 4 years now.

I was picturing more like a custom ROM on XDA: “Bugs? You tell me.”

The whole TV streaming space is just super depressing. Even though I try to self host as much as I can, nothing I’ve found comes close to the experience of Android TV even with the ads (though you can replace the launcher to fix that problem).

I really noticed when I switched from Spotify to Tidal that there is something different about Spotify’s sound quality that makes it worse even at the highest streaming quality. I was surprised since I fully admit that in 99% of cases I can’t tell the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and a FLAC of the same file.

I honestly used AI for something other than summarizing a meeting yesterday. It failed so miserably that I’m really not apt to use it again. Maybe I was wrong to assume it could summarize a simple graph into a table for me.

Good point, I missed adding that crucial detail.

Smart Homes arent terrible, but it is easy to end up with a terrible smart home if you don’t take care in designing it.

Consider who is using it. Are they tech saavy enough to use an app? Is every user only within your household? If not, make sure everything can be controlled without an app, smart buttons are a great solution. What automation actually benefits your lifestyle? Keep it simple where possible, start with just lights and maybe some sensors.

I think it is best to have an overall plan to make sure your devices work together, but start small. Choose devices that run on stable platforms and locally. Make sure everything can connect to Home Assistant, even of you don’t plan on using it, having the option may benefit you in the future.

I typically build a whole new PC and then do a mid-life GPU upgrade after a couple generations. e.g. I just upgraded my GPU I bought in late 2020. For most users there just isn’t a good reason to be upgrading your CPU that frequently.

I can see why some people would upgrade their GPU every generation. I was suprised at how expensive even 2 generations old card are going for on ebay, if you buy a new card and sell your old one every couple years the “net cost per year” of usage is pretty constant.

I have a hard time calling this enshittification, it dilutes term if it is just used to mean anything getting worse. Rather it should be used to describe the purposeful corporate destruction of a service’s value to boost profit after attracting users.

“Its the customer’s that are wrong” is essentially what he is saying. Anyone with any marketing ability should know how insane that sounds. Build something that people want to use to drive growth. This is pretty much an admission that LLMs are a solution in search of a problem.

What you might think is “common sense” may not be for others. There is value in this being documented, otherwise the person without “common sense” may be influenced by someone with an agenda who does document their thoughts.

Same as when people make fun of “obvious” research, there is value in having it peer reviewed as a reference for future researchers.

Have they actually gone up that much? Oraybe just specific models? I just bought a 12TB NAS drive on Black Friday and the price difference was less than $20 compared to when I tried to do the exact same thing the year before.

I’m a big fan of spicy food, but I rarely use hot sauce and am not a fan of buffalo wings. For me I like foods that have chiles where the spice is part of the flavour that makes the dish taste good.