Is it that much harder than remembering that some emojis now map onto secondary meanings, like 🍆 meaning penis and 💀 meaning “I find this to be very funny”? Or even the primary meanings of emojis, where you’d totally understand what someone is saying when they type ✈️🇯🇵🍣🍜?
The difficulty comes from the sheer number of them, but human communication is full of things where meaning comes from non-alphabetical symbols.
I’m with you.
GoPro obviously found a really interesting niche that they dominated for about 10 years, and POV videos can still be cool for sports and things like that where the videographer tends not to have hands available for actually holding a camera. I think that’s still pretty cool, and glasses can be a useful form factor for that general use. I’m all for making camera ergonomics better.
But the AI assistant stuff and the attempts to make them part of the actual day to day (both by attempting to making them fashionable and socially normalizing a camera pointing at everything all the time) is obviously a bad development. Even if we implement countermeasures (re-normalizing masks in public, making lighting terrible for digital cameras, etc.) it wouldn’t be a symmetrical effort.
and every forum had rules against bumping, typically only once in 24 hours, and only like once or twice.
You’re talking about pure bumping where someone has a zero-content comment like “bump” and nothing else. I’m talking about the entire spectrum of low to high quality content, from “bump” to the general phenomenon of reviving old threads to soft bumps like adding additional useless information to an unanswered request.
Other examples include stupid arguments that needed moderation to be shut down (a phpBB or vBulletin post that spanned 50+ pages in a forum where 3-4 was the norm, all because 2 users wouldn’t shut the fuck up), always occupying the top of the chronological sort.
The point is that any active forum with more than 1000 comments per day needed to be heavily moderated. User votes allowed forums to scale beyond that limited size. Chronological sort was terrible and didn’t scale beyond a group of 100-200 users (not coincidentally similar to Dunbar’s number), which is why any decent forum today doesn’t do it by default, including any totally free and open source forums, like the fediverse forum platforms of Lemmy and Piefed and Mbin. And even choosing to put these platforms on pure chronological sort reduces the quality of the overall experience.
Honestly, I dont know how anyone can say that the days before gamification, before adpocalypse, before billionaire hijacking of the internet for their own personal ends, is worse than what we have today. It borders on either lunacy, or propaganda.
I’m talking about the use of user voting, which undoubtedly improved the quality of forums (along with comment threading so that each comment could branch off into its own collapsible side discussion) when slashdot and a bunch of copycats started doing similar things (see HN, Reddit). You can’t look at Reddit in 2026 and complain that the sorting algorithms they implemented in 2005 or 2007 made things worse. No, things got worse around 2015-2020 when the front page algorithm stopped prioritizing quality over engagement bait.
The internet was so much better before that shit.
No, you’re looking at it through rose colored glasses. Pure chronological sorting purely awarded the most active commenters regardless of quality, and led people to submit lots of low quality comments. Plus there was the “bump” phenomenon where a useless comment was made simply to manipulate the sorting.
Forums before slashdot just weren’t that great without heavy moderation. By outsourcing some portion of moderation to the users, it made for higher quality discussion in the forums that allowed threading and voting.
Every radio band is subject to their own rules.
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth transmit on frequencies that are “license by rule,” where the FCC license to transmit is granted to everyone who follows the Part 15 rules about the technical details. So nobody needs a separate license to use wifi or Bluetooth, and the devices themselves are only subject to certain technical restrictions, like maximum transmit power and the like.
Ham radios transmit on bands that allow for a license for anyone who can pass the test and pay the fee.
Cell phones operate on frequencies and bands that have much stricter licensing rules, and the devices are certified to follow the technical rules under pretty much all circumstances. They go through much more thorough testing than the radios capable of transmitting on amateur bands or license by rule bands.
I never needed more because I just had a dock. My monitor, keyboard, mouse, and Ethernet cable stayed in the same place, so I’d just bring my laptop home and plug in a thunderbolt dock, and I’d have every peripheral I needed. And I’m someone who tries to use wired stuff over wireless whenever convenient.
JPEG Organisation?
The G in JPEG already stands for “Group.”
I’m giving some reasons why turning on or off location services at the OS level doesn’t appreciably change battery life.
You can turn off higher level location services at the OS level, but at the radio level the cellular network will always need a precise enough location to handle tower handoffs and timing issues between the tower and phone, as well as modern beam forming techniques where the tower “aims” the signal at the phone. The simple act of the phone communicating with a specific tower tells the phone where it is (sometimes with surprisingly high precision).
911/emergency services also use more low level location techniques, but I’m pretty sure those functions don’t get called unless you dial an emergency number.
Arch’s package management is actually the ideal, in my opinion. Official repositories for the stuff the distro maintainers want to officially support, a user-maintained AUR for other common packages, and the ability to build your own software with the Arch Build System, and letting pacman know where everything is. In a sense, the stuff in the official repositories have a privileged position, and you should be aware of the difference between the AUR and the official repositories, but you’re still always in control of what software is installed.
The AUR packages and user-specific builds can be thought of as side loading, and the distinction can matter in some circumstances. So I’m ok with having another name for different installation/upgrade/update methods.