I’m not getting this, at least not yet.

Maybe it’s because I run Pi-hole; I know it filters out a TON of Roku’s telemetry and other traffic. Might be worth setting up Pi-hole on your network and see if stuff like that goes away?

Mozilla’s “least to most creepy” ranking is the best resource I’ve found so far:

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/categories/cars/

Respectfully, an article from four years ago that I cannot read in full without creating an account, which seems to just reference a calculator from FT that is over a decade old at this point (whose sources I also cannot seem to find) doesn’t impress me. Do you have anything more recent, preferably that sites sources, that you can share? I’m genuinely interested in what data is actually worth

Honest question:

If you feel these tools are essential and there are no other options (not sure I agree, but that seems to be the argument you were making; let me know if I am wrong), what is the alternative?

These things take money to keep the infrastructure running, pay staff, patch security vulnerabilities, and bring new features for those same communities to use. And they are also a public company, which means they have a legal responsibility to return money to shareholders.

I’m not defending Meta, I refuse to use their platforms and will not be buying any of their hardware. But if it takes money to keep the lights on (at a minimum), how does offering ads or a subscription equate to a false choice?

I also feel many don’t understand the full extent, either. They’re used to using fairly secure devices in their everyday life (often not realizing how much the software they install is also spying on them), so why wouldn’t these IoT things also be secure?

In my experience, it’s all very vague and ethereal until the risks are highlighted for them. “So what if Google can read all of my emails? What could they possibly do with that information, anyway; why should I care?” is an example of a portion of a real conversation I’ve had.

That was a fun read, thank you.

I honestly wasn’t super familiar with WebView until you asked!

It looks like WebView is a stripped-down browser, more than anything else. It can leverage different rendering engines depending on the platform, and on Android it looks like it leverages Blink just like Chrome.

Technically, WebKit is Apple’s rendering engine (Safari).

Google uses Blink, which is a fork of WebKit, but is its own thing now.

So, you can still use Safari without directly contributing to Google’s de facto rendering engine monopoly.

I hear you, and fair enough, but I think the fact that none of these gaming-specific phones has physical controls like you described built in speaks to how impractical that ask is.

And I think it’s important to note: there’s weren’t just powerful phones (in fact, many of them seemed to get bested by other phones in more benchmarks than they won), they were specifically marketed and sold as gaming phones; that was the specific niche that Asus, Lenovo, Razer, and others all sought to fill. Despite that, and despite basically all those companies having a ton of general experience building gaming hardware of one sort or another, none of them thought it was a good idea to include physical input methods on-device. They pretty much all have accessories that turn it into something looking akin to a Switch or DS, but none had them baked into the actual phone.

And I honestly think that makes a lot of sense. Thumb sticks aren’t super pocket-able, and I feel like even if they could be made to fit into a pocket, sliding them in and out of bags and pants over and over would make them fail faster. And while A/B/X/Y buttons might be more reasonable on that pocket-ability metric, do you want to smush them (or thumb sticks, for that matter) against your face while you take a call?

While current controller-esque buttons and thumb sticks remain the primary input method for games, I really don’t see gaming phones including those input methods within their physical form factor. It might be a limitation of my imagination, but I just can’t envision how one would make that work (and it seems I am not alone in that).

I mean, Asus and nubia have been making a gaming-specific phone for many generations now. Razer even gave it a try back in 2018, but I don’t think they released any follow up devices.

Lenovo also made a couple devices, but announced earlier this year that they’d be discontinuing their gaming phone business.

There seems to be a fan base and market for gaming-specific phones, but given Lenovo and Razer got out of the game and the fact that you haven’t seemed to have heard of any of these devices/product lines: my guess is that they are super niche.

Could not agree more!

That said, I did call out one legit problem with widespread EV adoption in apartment dwellers. I really hope something is done soon, either governmentally or through the market, to make EVs a more viable option for renters.

Ha, we posted around the same time and said basically the same thing. Nice!

Have any sources to back up your claims?

According to KBB, the average American drives around 37 miles per day. That means that the overwhelming amount of driving could be accomplished by a plug-in hybrid, let alone a fully electric vehicle. When it comes to the occasional long road trip (what, once a year or less for the average person?), is it worth burning - and paying for - gas for the thousands of miles that could be easily covered by even the most pathetic of electric vehicles’ range without issue just so you can save a bit of time pumping fuel and hitting the convenience store rather than stopping a bit longer to charge up? In those cases, it may even be cheaper to rent a gas vehicle for the occasional road trip if if is that big of a concern for you.

Your use case may be different than mine, but I can’t think of too many trips where I couldn’t stop for a half hour here and there to charge up a bit. Most people, especially people with kids, have to stop periodically anyway, so use that time to charge up and you won’t even notice. It’s true that, especially in the particularly sparsely-populated western United States (speaking from a US perspective), some route planning may still be required, but that will get better as more people buy EVs.

Why are battery swaps even entering the conversation? Are engine swaps a concern for most people purchasing a new car? According to J. D. Power, every EV in the US comes with at least an 8 year or 100k mile warranty on the battery. Some manufacturers, like Hyundai, have a lifetime warranty on the battery. Most batteries are expected to last somewhere between 100k - 200k miles, which is often longer than the rest of the car will hold up and certainly competitive with combustion vehicles.

If you want a serious argument detailing a real struggle with which EV manufacturers and the market/government must contend, then here you go: apartment dwellers. From a US perspective, you pretty much have to own your home or work somewhere that provides charging parking spots to be able to fully take advantage of the benefits of an EV. While using a public charger is a viable option, it is more expensive than charging at home (though, in my research, it is still cheaper than gas).

EVs make sense for a super-majority of the driving that takes place today by normal people in North America. If you don’t own your home, want to tow a boat, or travel hundreds of miles a day on a regular basis, then EVs will serve your needs somewhere between “fairly well” to “not at all”.

If “range anxiety” is the only thing keeping people from pulling the trigger on an EV, I strongly suggest they consider the possibility of renting a car for the rare cross-country trip if finding a DC fast charger every once and a while and spending a little extra time at each stop isn’t a viable option for them.

Aww, now I’m feeling nostalgic

Ah, I guess I misread (in my own research) or somehow missed that a degree change in Celsius was directly pegged the same degree change in Kelvin (shifted by 273.15 ) when the Kelvin scale was updated to be pegged to the Boltzmann constant. Thank you for helping me understand where my understanding was flawed!

I guess I still don’t understand the utility of Celsius, though. If it’s really just an alias, shifted by 273.15, for Kelvin, what utility does Celsius offer? Why not just use Kelvin?

Apologies, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Both Celsius and Fahrenheit are based off the exact same thing: the freezing and boiling points of water. Fahrenheit just gives you more resolution between the two (180 degrees for Fahrenheit vs 100 degrees for Celsius), but otherwise they operate in the same way.

I agree that the underpinnings of the weight and distance measurements used in the Imperial system are silly, but they are still just as accurate as the weight and distance measurements in the metric system. The metric system’s units for weight and distance are more logical and easier to use, but that doesn’t make them more accurate given modern measurement methods.

I think the US should adopt the metric system in general, but I honestly don’t see the point in bringing Celsius along with the rest of the measurement standards.

I honestly see zero benefit to Celsius over Fahrenheit: they are both pegged to the boiling and freezing points of water, Celsius was just unnecessarily limited in the number of degrees between those two points. Beyond that limitation of Celsius, there’s basically zero difference between it and Fahrenheit.

Respectfully, I don’t think you are completely correct.

While you are right that Kelvin is tied to absolute zero, it is also defined in such a way that a change in 1K corresponds to a change of thermal energy kT by 1.380649×10−23 J (the Boltzmann constant).

It is the difference in what 0K describes, along with the fact that a change in temperature equals a specific change in thermal energy (the measured value to which I previously referred), that separate it from Celsius. In Celsius, zero is the freezing point of (mostly pure) water (at sea level), and a change in temperature has no relationship to a specific/prescribed change in thermal energy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin

Ok, but the comment to which I was replying was referring to when Tesla (supposedly) opened up their parents almost a decade ago so I’m not sure your comment addresses my question.

Honest question: other than the number of people using Celsius, what benefits does Celsius bring over Fahrenheit?

Even the scientific community felt the need to hollow out the Celsius scale, leaving the numerical values of Celsius in tact but otherwise completely decoupling the scale from the properties of water when it created kelvin. It instead moved to measured values, like basically all other SI/metric units.

Celsius is there to describe water. Well, it’s used to describe a mostly pure form of water. Well, it’s used to describe a mostly pure form of water at around sea level. So, why does that make Celsius more relevant or useful for temperatures than Fahrenheit?

Frankly, it feels like Celsius is, to the rest of the world, what the Imperial system is to the US: a vestige of times past that has been supplanted by a better, measurement-based standard, but has yet to be abandoned because it is so entrenched in popular culture.

I’m sorry, but Fahrenheit has nothing to do with the errors you cited. Hell, even the overall Imperial system, silly an (mostly) antiquated as it is, has nothing to do with the examples you cited.

The expensive failures you listed were caused by a lack of standardization. Those failures wouldn’t have taken place if every international agency had standardized on the Imperial system or the metric system.

Your point is not only a nonsensical non sequitur, it is also wrong.