Enshittification. I have become certain that any app owned by a for-profit company has to follow this path. There is no way to sustain forever growth without harming the product. I have used Pocket Casts for a decade and have premium. I stick with it because I love the web features and feel fine paying for those but I suspect the deal will keep getting worse all the time, Vader style.

Samsung had a little pressure sensitive area at the bottom of phone screens in the S9 era. It was handy and I had it set up like a hidden home button.

The S9 also had a variable aperture camera, which I feel like could have been developed a lot more.

I also miss notification LEDs. Sure, AOD mostly replaces it, but it was fun setting different colors for people, situations, etc

The Essential phone had a ceramic back that was very comfortable and cool in the hand. Though it was slippery. Another idea that could have been developed further.

The different back materials on the Moto X were very satisfying. The customization of that phone was unmatched!

Yes, honestly the most damning thing they’ve done, selling out their own users

Many types of malware are open source

That’s a good point. Can I still self host on my domain while also using their cloud for voice processing?

I have been fiddling with Home Assistant’s voice command solution. Because I have it running on raspberry pi, it is not fast enough to process commands efficiently, but I am probably going to move it to an old desktop I’ve been using as a home server and see if it runs faster.

Well voice assistants are very handy in the car and great for safety. They also do save time around the house, to ask things like what’s the weather this weekend, set a timer for one hour, how many cups in a quart, play Radiohead on my TV speakers, what’s the humidity in my terrarium, how long will it take to get to work, turn off all the lights in the house, play the NPR update, etc. I am working to set up Home Assistant’s voice stuff to replace as much of this as I can but still tinkering with it.

And fortunately I don’t care if you think I look stupid! ;)

I was trying to stick with the new one, but I just caved and put it back. I have started cussing at it when it responds incorrectly

This is why LLMs are not appropriate for applications where regular syntax is needed, like calling an API. I don’t understand why they made the LLM the first step, handing it off to the old hard coded Google assistant second, rather than the other way around. Having everything go through the LLM first is wasteful, slow and unpredictable. I am very confused about Google’s decision here

Listed here

https://securitylab.amnesty.org/latest/2025/02/cellebrite-zero-day-exploit-used-to-target-phone-of-serbian-student-activist/

Nice, right now I use Shizuku and an app called Darq to force some apps dark. This would save me that effort!

Authy is no good anyway. Keeps codes hostage with no way to back them up. So many great open source alternatives

I subscribe to more periodicals than most, I think probably almost twenty of them. I just cut out NYTimes, Washington Post, LA Times, Atlantic. I was growing disillusioned with some of their coverage- NYTimes desperately triangulating to the comfortable, safe, meaningless center, WaPo and LAT owned by oligarchs kissing Trump’s ring. Atlantic just bores me lately- lots of opinion and not a lot of investigative coverage. But happy to add The Verge. I’ve read them daily since they were This Is My Next and don’t intend to stop.

I had no background and nearly shat myself at a moment you can probably guess lol

I use Home Assistant DuckDNS and Nginx addons. DuckDNS handles the dynamic DNS updating when my ISP inevitably changes my IP address. Let’s Encrypt for certificates. Nginx for proxying to IPs on my network

Well, they are technically fish. Just like we and all other tetrapods are

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Buying music as CDs. Sure they were expensive at their peak, but they came in high quality, I could rip and do with them as I wished, while still having an offline copy. I have a lot of my old ones from childhood

Vertical would be if MS owned the carrier, the manufacturer, the operating system etc. Horizontal applies here where they own many interconnecting parts of the same layer of the market. Search, browser, email, etc, all being used to promote each other at the expense of competitors

I was actually a fan of Outlook for Android. Followed system dark mode before it was cool, had real multi account inbox, good wearos app, and other useful features. Then they started inserting Bing search into my long press menu system wide. And also recommending Edge when I clicked links. This kind of horizontal integration is just too baked into the company DNA. They can’t help themselves, even when it actually harms them