This is most definitely a feature here. What ARS won’t say (but their source articles do) is that Newsbreak is an app right out of China. That’s why they don’t care that this creates entirely fictional stories. This is the leftwing equivalent of all those rightwing agitprop sites that pretend to be local news in order to trick people

They hook you into an ecosystem. That’s it, thats the game. I don’t think it has too much to do with insecurity. Group chats and video chats with people outside of imessage is awful. Group chats lose a lot of features because SMS was all there was for a long time. Standard (not Google-ified) RCS is still too bare at the moment so I don’t think the looming rcs fixes that aspect of it.

And the hardware is often total junk. There’s a reason people still recommend the Shield, a device which is 5 years old and runs Android 9.

People here don’t want to hear it, but using an Apple TV will ruin the experience for everything else from a hardware perspective. Software aside, of course. There’s no reason for Android devices to exist on such sub par hardware. And yet…

Probably depends on your subs. Most of mine have went far, far left and have become a tiresome dog pile of virtue signaling from behind keyboards and screens.

And I’m a leftist. There seems to be a huge difference these days in being a leftist and being a “this is now my only personality trait” leftist through which all views must be fundamentally filtered. Even non-political/non-social. It has made some subs unreadable for me, specifically my state and city subs.

Edit: I guess where I am going with it is that the extremes are becoming more extreme and seeking out new frontiers now that moderation is light.

Huge CEX have huge liquidity. Probably why Binance got hit with failure to follow antimony laundering practices.

Now, parking stuff there? Maybe ease. People are lazy and most are ill informed. Plus, CEX tend to offer other services such as staking or other ways to earn yield.

Yeah you could go to a DEX. but there’s a lot of risk there. A lot in CEX too but I get why some might trust them more than fly by night DEX that are one bridge attack away from insolvency.

I highly recommend Death Must Die. It is early access, as a fair warning. But it successfully mixes up Hades with Vampire Survivors and a few others. Runs great on Deck as well. The dialog can be cringe and the story is clearly under development. But if you want a fun gameplay loop–this is the game.

Has to be Krampus, and Anna and the Apocalypse.

Krampus really scratches that nostalgic itch every year and I don’t know why. The broken family dynamics, the environment, the sound and set designs are amazing. And it has a lesson like every good Christmas movie should.

And Anna and the Apocalypse is similar. It is funny, musical, and ultimately an allegory about growing up and leaving everyone behind to forge your own path. A good reminder that you never know when it will be your last Christmas with someone. Or maybe I’m looking into it too much and I just like zombie musicals.

Mastodon often feels to me more like Facebook for software developers

I wish. I’ve tried to curate mine as such.

My mastodon feed is awash in spam from authors hucking their LLM generated stories. Constantly. And random low viewer count streamers spamming hashtags every hour 24/7.

It’s crazy how much LinkedIn-like sociopathy is out there right now. Makes sense given the huge spike in new accounts we’ve had in the last month.

Interesting to see if this reverses the beginning stages of some EU countries pushing back against supporting Ukraine (specifically Poland, which was a shocker for me). I’m sure that bit was all very real Politik what with their elections coming up and domestic issues to handle… but still. The U.S. is one bad election away from permitting expansive war in Europe. And some European countries are seemingly tiring of Ukraine taking the hits for them?

Not OP, but generally the arguments I’ve been told are:

Microsoft is an abomination (true).

“Don’t make me explicitly state types; it is too confusing!” Installs 20 libraries including fucking pad left to eek out basic functionality.

Strongly typed haters are right up there with curly brace haters.

For now. Google is locking down certificates in Android 14 which absolutely cannot be changed even by devs (barring exploits, which will be patched because this is Alphabet’s bread and butter on the line).

Google has put into place infrastructure to lock apps down as well with its App Bundles to replace APKs. And, wouldn’t you know it, they just so happen to rely on Google to be functional and even built! Custom made for your device and configuration and account. What a coincidence that you can’t rip that off your device and widely share it without massive workarounds. And even then, with Google clamping down on CAs….

People best become acquainted with ROMs again. Providing, of course, that Android doesn’t start employing anti-root tactics like Apple does which essentially eliminates the possibility of almost everybody actually owning their devices.

From Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine:

"The project begins in the programmer’s mind with the beauty of a crystal. I remember the feel of a system at the early stages of programming, when the knowledge I am to represent in code seems lovely in its structuredness. For a time, the world is a calm, mathematical place. Human and machine seem attuned to a cut-diamond-like state of grace.

…

Then something happens. As the months of coding go on, the irregularities of human thinking start to emerge. You write some code, and suddenly there are dark, unspecified areas. All the pages of careful documents, and still, between the sentences, something is missing.

Human thinking can skip over a great deal, leap over small misunderstandings, can contain ifs and buts in untroubled corners of the mind. But the machine has no corners. Despite all the attempts to see the computer as a brain, the machine has no foreground or background. It cannot simultaneously do something and withhold for later something that remains unknown[1]. In the painstaking working out of the specification, line by code line, the programmer confronts all the hidden workings of human thinking.

Now begins a process of frustration.

[1] clarifies how multitasking typically works, which was usually just really fast switching at the time of the book.

I see a lot of people taking issue with how it was handled. An obvious troll controlling sock puppets apparently spurred this, sure.

But the mods of Lemmy World went on a reddit-like spiteful ban spree, apparently forgetting that we can all see their modlogs or simply not caring about it. People got up in arms over the very childish and assholish behavior of the Lemmy World mods, and folks were eventually unbanned in some cases, but still banned from the main communities as punishment. For example, people saying they would just leave and federate their own instance got banned with mod messages telling them “let us help you with that”.