soylentcola

Sure, but to play devil's advocate:

..."until I want to do something that the default Apple behavior does not do."

To oversimplify, it's like saying "you can do these 10 things and they're guaranteed to work". On some platforms, you can do things 11-20 as well, but there's a chance they may not work as desired. This may still be preferable to a total inability to go past the first 10 due to restrictions.

I find that a lot of computing devices work fine out of the box if you use them exactly the way the included first-party options were tested to work. It's gotten to the point where I'm less concerned about how nicely they succeed at the "common" things than how well I can deal with them when they "fail" (to do the thing I want them to do).

I appreciate easy and convenient as much as the next person, but if I have to choose between "must install app or change configuration to do what I need" and "nope, you can't do that", I'll take the former.

For me it was more about the mismatch between what my eyes saw and what my inner ear felt.

Running around in first person while sitting or standing in a room took some real getting used to. But cockpit games or mostly stationary (in a reasonably small volume) standing-perspective games were fine.

Yep. I wanted a decent sized OLED with good image quality. Couldn't find anything remotely like what I was looking for in a commercial option, so I said screw it, cashed out some credit card rewards, and bought a spyware LG TV that never gets connected to the internet. Display itself is gorgeous. Set it to start up on the last used input (the AV receiver). Video sources connect to the AVR and those get managed individually depending on what access they need to function.

> Replacing the Google launcher (I used ATV Launcher Pro) was one of the best quality of life upgrades I've ever done, if you haven't already I highly recommend it.

I use Projectivy for the same reason. Sucks, because Android TV still has some of the best flexibility in a TV-appropriate OS (compared with other options I could find at least) but their priorities don't line up with mine regarding the ads.

Groverhaus for the modern age?

I'd be hesitant to install software from a gas station (or most any retailer, really) on any device I own.

Not to minimize Meta's push for these things, but there have been devices that do this for quite a while now. You can get tiny cameras hidden in pens, watches, glasses, and all sorts of other items.

It's just that in the past, these were sold by janky companies selling them as spy/hidden cameras, not massive multinational data brokers like Meta.

Surprised it hasn't been closed already. Sometime back before I left entirely in 2017, I tried making an account that wasn't tied to my real name, email, phone number, etc. and after a few days they asked for proof of ID because they couldn't tie me to their "social graph" or whatever. Didn't give ID and they disabled the account.

Yeeeap. Was thinking about that and the Matrix mostly.

Not sure it's possible to say this without being pithy, but haven't there been stories told, perhaps TV episodes and films made, regarding the concept of using human bodies to generate power in support of machine intelligence?

Seems a little on the nose to me, but I guess some days it's hard to tell what's a gag and what's a legit pitch.

I always wondered if "Lightspeed Briefs" was a pun on the "FTL" abbreviation that Fruit of the Loom used at the time (no idea if they still do).

Good thing that could never be used as a "death ray".

> shoot in whatever orientation fits the content or situation best.

I'm with you there. It's the same for shooting still photos.

...but that doesn't stop people from shooting portrait video and then constantly panning back and forth because the whole (crowd, landscape, giant sea monster, whatever) doesn't fit in the frame.

And then (at least around here) they often make you scan a QR code in order to see the menu. It's often not a direct link to the menu, but rather a third party site or a link shortener that tracks traffic for marketing data.

Oh yeah, it was awful by then. At my store you made essentially minimum wage plus a sort of commission for addons/upsales (as long as they were over a certain percentage of your total sales) and flat bonuses for new cell contracts, phone/accessory sales.

Theoretically it could add up to a passable paycheck for retail, but they had it set up so that only a few senior staff ever got enough hours/good shifts where you could conceivably hit the addon percentages needed to qualify for commissions. So the only way to make any money was to sell cell plans, phones, and accessories. The whole store was totally focused on hawking cell plans.

Then we had to go to monthly meetings an hour out of town on our own dime. That's where they talked at us about the company and how cool and great it was. Such a shitty place to work. IIRC there was a dedicated web forum called "RadioShackSucks" or something like that where staff complained to each other.