Apparently, the chargers will be updated to become dumb terminals that just charge automatically when plugged in, but for many end users, the main reason they went with Juicebox (which was bought by Enel) was that Enel would handle user accounts and billing. I work at an organization where we charge employees at a discounted rate, and the chargers are open to the public to use as well if they install the app and input their payment info. We’re going to have to close down public access if we can’t find a solution. A couple companies are saying they might be able to take over. Would have been nice to have more than a couple weeks to figure this out!

I used the Notes quite a bit and thought it was a mistake to get rid of it. People pay for notes and tasks related sync services, so it could have been a revenue source. I also miss Firefox Panorama

How is it clickbait?

They said they’d open source Pocket and they didn’t. In fact, they’ve simply allowed it to rot and just removed features. So here I think the skepticism is warranted.

I agree that X is enemy territory now, but in a world where billionaires can buy up all the major means of communication, it doesn’t feel like enough to just close up our accounts and move on. They can follow us wherever our accounts go and buy platforms out from under us. Lemmy and Mastodon are slightly better as open decentralized platforms, but they still could be attacked by Musk if he had the initiative to.

Honestly our sad EV offerings deserve to be disrupted

It was crazy visiting China last year. The EVs that everyday people are driving feel so polished and futuristic in many ways.

If they did that, anyone could spin up an instance and start just fabricating votes and there’d be no way to know

I think part of the motive is to make brigading harder (show if users or bots are colluding to vote things up or down)

It’s a tease for shareholders desperate for more and more elaborate ways to squeeze a few more cents per user

I have to set literally everything up again on a new microSD for my Pi because the apt-get repositories no longer support the Raspbian version I’m on. I’m not mad; good for security to update, but I don’t have half a day free anytime soon for it.

I think it probably breaks even and fits with their strategy to abuse everyone until they pay for premium

It is the aggressive megacolony of fungus embedding its mycelia in the base of the tree

They’re thinking quarterly. Improves OneDrive usage stats. They can also then coerce customers later by saying they’re running out of storage. I’m sure some users will pay, thinking they’re about to lose family photos and other important data

I set mine to auto-hide, expand on mouse over. I hope they do that as well!

PCR has been around since the 80s, though it has continued getting more efficient and cheaper

yes, I find Gemini actually not bad when it comes to my specific use case of showing generic examples for R programming, so I can figure out the syntax for my actual code. I don’t try to have it generate actual code for me because my topic of marine biogeochemistry is far too specific for it to have any idea how to work with it. Unlike ChatGPT, which often makes up nonsense functions or hallucinates whole packages, Gemini seems to do ok. I also found it pretty good for generating images of natural subjects. It did the best job of generating a pic of a giant clam of any image generator I’ve tried. I would never trust factual information from Gemini. So like Google+, it’s a pretty good product that in no way should be shunted into search results, Google Docs and other places where its output is not relevant, yet that is exactly the trap Google is falling into again.

That’s the rationale Google uses. “We’re the best, that’s why users pick us.” They built a moat of investment in search and the browser that other companies can’t compete with. But as a consumer, I am not willing to accept that argument. Ma Bell claimed the same thing. We’re a lot better off economically in a world where Ma Bell was broken up, and Microsoft was forced to stop their anticompetitive activities. Google will be better off as separate companies, worth more than the sum of its parts

If there were multiple sources of traffic, the pressure to optimize to one source would be lower, and the disruption caused by algorithm changes would be muted. Which would mean more interesting content less driven by a narrow set of metrics