This is an argument for having your own domain for emails. There is an annual cost but at least your address isn’t locked to a specific provider sokcd you can change some DNS settings to point at a different mail server.

XD, I totally did this to make a smart alarm clock a couple years ago. That said it is completely stable, don’t think it has ever crashed or locked up on me, unlike the echo show it replaced that did so frequently (not to mention it occasionally updating in the middle of the night and waking me up at full brightness)

Lights are one of the areas where I think automation is genuinely useful, but my rule with anything “Smart” is that it has to be able to run 100% locally.

I had to call into my bank recently and had to listen through what was effectively an ad to sign up for their voice authentication service. All the while I’m thinking, “How dare you implement this crap when you don’t even support TOTP or security keys.”

It is about managing risk, you do need real world testing for many products, and it is impossible to do that without risking the public sees it (you could camouflage it like they do with cars) , but at the same time it probably isn’t suitable to take an unreleased phone into a bar where the risk of losing it is higher than say a grocery store.

How is a large language model going to apply to a visual inspection?

This is probably a CNN trained to identify different types of damage. Similar to how your phone identifies faces.

I disagree about this being a good solution. USB-C is not meant to take the strain of being used as an audio port when being used in the go so there is risk of damaging the port while a headphone jack is more stable and allows the plug to rotate. Plus I don’t want to have a dingle I can forget when in a rush.

I’ve used Vivaldi for a long time before switching to Floorp (based on Firefox) and recently back to Vivaldi.

Pros:
Vivaldi is fast with lots of features.
I like how it works much more than other browsers (e. g. Sidebar tabs, pinned tabs can’t be closed)

Cons:
Still built on chromium.
They have ways to customize the address bar autocomplete, but screwed up the implementation so every option doesn’t work the way I want it to.

If you are running business critical applications on Windows 10 that is a problem. Windows 10 is only meant for end user machines. Other services should be running on OS’s that are meant for the application such as Windows Server or server versions of Linux distros running LTS kernels.

Not to mention, near every piece of software I’ve been involved with at work has required specific versions of Windows Server and whatever database it uses, if you want to upgrade the software you use, then upgrading the OS is part of the task.

This is definitely a problem in sectors that are boom/bust. You have senior engineers ready to retire and nobody is ready to move up into their positions because there just aren’t any intermediate level engineers in the industry.

I’m a big fan of the manta “Make your designs as simple as possible and no simpler”. Pointless complexity drives me nuts, but others take it too far and remove functionality by making things too minimal. It doesn’t help that a lot of businesses optimize for people who make changes, so the positive feedback loop is change for the sake of change rather than improving the product.

maybe, just maybe if we didn’t move the same settings 1-2 layers deeper behind some UI bullshit we wouldn’t have to look for it.

This trend pisses me off so much. Companies need to learn that for settings I’m likely to have to change they need to minimize the number of actions to change it. But people in all these companies find the need to reorganize things to make it seem like they are accomplishing something.

This isn’t new though, I landed after a long flight last year and had a notification asking me to confirm rebooking to another flight because mine was delayed.

Turns out that no the flight wasn’t delayed and luckily I mentioned it when dropping my bag because a person had to sort it out for me and rebooked me back on my original flight that was on time. So now I don’t trust the technology at all.

I don’t see how this could be worse than the current Gmail search. I have to use the sync tool to Outlook for my work email because outlook’s search is so much better.

Vivaldi if you really need a Chromium based browser.

I 'm forced to use Chrome on my work laptop and it is the worst browser (even before the disabling of Manifest V2), but for security I can’t access many systems with even another chromium based browser . Funnily IT forces an extension on us and it isn’t compatible with Manifest V3.

Time and motion studies can be incredibly effective. My company once wanted to automate some processes and sent me down there to watch the workers and identify the processes we could automate. Talking with the workers and filming a few of them gave me all the information to save well over $1M per year just by making the current process more efficient. Literally cost some people’s time to do the analysis, change some documentation and validate the improvements. Even the workers were happy because they had less waiting around for things to happen and were part of the process.

Nah their laptops are shit too. We are forced to use them for work and they have sharp uncomfortable edges everywhere, randomly have the fans on maximum (even when in sleep) and sound like a jet plane taking off.

Yup, this degradation is all well understood. The only value I see is studying how a large portion of people use their devices to identify what the expected life actually is with the abuse they put their devices through.

PebbleOS was open sourced and now the original founder who hasn’t worked for alphabet for ages wants to build a new device using the now open sourced OS. No way Google can drop support and they have essentially given the code away because they aren’t using it anymore.