I know this isn’t the topic here, but I really wish these researchers would unroll what all Apple harvests from Apple devices. It’s quite a lot as well. Could help pop that “we’re so private” myth.

Hah, my curse is calls always finding weird ways to drop. Then I moved to a place with no cell service, because I’m apparently a wireless masochist?

There’s some slight technical reason for it, but I think they swung a bit too far in the asshole direction with blocking too many.

The LTE rollout was completely botched from the start. LTE voice is technically supported on all LTE chipsets, but early on the voice spec changed. Early phones used LTE for data and 2G or 3G for voice.

Complicating matters further, AT&T and Verizon both have separate and slightly tweaked versions of the spec, as they didn’t want to wait for it to be finalized, and of course they’re both different in different ways. It’s also why T-Mobile allows so many devices. They just rode their very fast for the time HSPA+ network until LTE was finalized, got generic hardware on the network, and flipped the power switch.

To top it off, AT&T was sued at one point for 911 not working due to a handset bug and they got very controlling at that point to avoid future lawsuits.

VoLTE is ostensibly VoIP over cellular data at its core. All phones have to talk with the correct SIP signaling on VoLTE for voice calls to work. With 2G and 3G, the circuit-switched method of signaling was much more standardized (although not necessarily simpler, WCDMA at its end spanned literal volumes of books.) This made it so phones and networks were more easily compatible for basic things like voice, 911, etc.

Now, on top of Verizon and AT&T thinking that rolling their own flavors of LTE was a good idea, every phone maker also had their own idea about how the VoLTE SIP signaling was supposed to work. Due to flaws in the LTE spec, carriers going rogue, and companies interpreting things wrong, it has turned quite literally into a clusterfuck.

TL;DR: It took a long time for LTE to standardize enough across product lines, and there are a whole bunch of phone models that don’t talk the language quite right. So carriers chose to ban rather than make workarounds or work with the vendor to roll a software fix to the phone.

I asked ChatGPT if it knew of that, and even with it’s heavy microsoft influence it was confused.

…in the UK.

LLMs have improved my education, work life, and general knowledge search. I get more time to spend living my life and less trying to find one dude’s stacked change post from 2009 that fixed my problem.

They allow me to access information the way I learn and operate in a way that textbooks, college education, video courses, or online classes have never allowed me to do in my entire life.

That being said, the general AI buzz and buzzwords need to die, the real positives need to be celebrated.

Starliner boot up noise stuck in a bootloop.

But seriously, it’s a bit disturbing if a machine attached to your living quarters is malfunctioning.

I thought the Great Exodus from xitter was a matter of critical mass not yet being attained. Enough readers have to be elsewhere to get journalists elsewhere.

No, I think it’s just lazy journalists not learning new tools like Bluesky.

Because they love and believe their corporate daddies they so worship, especially in the US.

I was trying to think of a mental image that was internet-safe to imply something like you’re stuck in deep mud that is pulling your boots off but at least you survived. Or less internet-safe, you’re trying to get home and have no ride and for some reason the weather turned to a storm of actual shit and you’re walking home with shit raining down upon you but you must survive.

It definitely wasn’t scientifically accurate.

Hey, friend. Definitely not saying Windows is better.

That being said, in this example, a UI open dialog that will blindly consume any file fed into it with behavior bad enough to crush the entire computer into absolute uselessness is… let’s just say, not something one would want to run into on a bad day just trying to deal with life stuff.

Now, if one were piping /dev/urandom into the framebuffer expecting to load Firefox, that’s another matter.

Hey, good to know. It was one app that was only available as a Snap. Will look for alternatives.

And jumpers and terminators and make sure your SCSI IDs don’t conflict!

No diss. I read that slot comment above you and went, “yep, yep, yep, makes sense. Man our standards are often dumb.”

Laughed with joy at your comment, because I totally get how foreign this shit is to so many people. It’s like if I walked up to a building engineer asking how they know that iron beam is safe for another 50 years via their skills and I’d just be like “…do what now?”

You know. It’s interesting. I’ve been trying out Debian 12 with KDE Plasma. It actually has been a joy and feels like what Windows 11 should have grown into, had Microsoft actually been designing software with the customer in mind.

…but then there have been times where things so easily critically break until you fix them. Don’t get me wrong. I’ll go mess with kernel code if I have to, so I’m comfortable, but… I just want my computer to work. Windows, for all its shittiness, still keeps working through it like a slow cargo train pushing through a park piled in millions of pancakes.

I had one event the other day where I was installing a Snap app for the first time. Decided rather than installing the Snap package manager because I wanted to avoid Canonical if possible, I’d just manually put it in /opt. Figured out how to edit the KDE “start” menu to add the app using the included GUI tool. Wanted to use the app’s icon. The snap app had an icon embedded in it that Dolphin file manager recognized and displayed.

So I went, “ok, sometimes applications can parse out images from binary files. I’ve seen this work for decades,” so I tell the menu editor to ingest the snap binary for the icon, to see if it will scrape the icon. No icon showed up, so I found a a svg online and assigned that to the icon.

Then I went and saved and launched another application.

GUI slowly started not working and eventually the entire OS locked, even the alt text consoles would not load. Ctrl+alt+backspace was dead, caps lock died, which was when I knew, “he’s dead, Jim.”

Tried rebooting, tried launching that program again, (bearing in mind, not the program I manually added to the “start” menu) and every time the whole OS freezes up. Tried launching apps in different order, launching from command line, etc. When the one app launched that wasn’t the one I created a launcher icon for, same thing. Freeze. (It is possible that the bug is in fact time-based or boot-sequence-based, and since I was trying to reproduce the bug rapidly, the other app had nothing to do with it.)

I go remove the start menu link, hoping that, what I assumed was part of Plasma was trying to load this binary as an icon even though it should have checked the file, recognized it as “no I can’t parse this,” and done nothing or displayed an error or parsed it and showed the icon. Especially after I assigned it another image. I just hoped whatever screwed up would be connected to the code executing that app launcher icon config, and deleting the config for that application would delete whatever mess that was created, and hopefully was created discretely.

Shit you not, the computer became rock solid stable again after that and one more reboot. Hasn’t glitched since.

It’s shit like that that makes me proooobably give up on this experiment and end up on a commercial OS like MacOS again despite the cost and downward trend they are also suffering in a lack of innovative energy.

A mere jape, it was!

I truly LOL’d at that hah! It was actually a deep ref to the beginning the movie in DC where they did have telegraph stations all over the place in the white house. But the movie not explaining that they also were listening because it was completely irrelevant to the plot hahaha.

Who knew that a person from a party of lies and doublespeak, a party set on a warpath of subjugating those they don’t like, a party creating hypocrite rules that they themselves don’t follow unless convenient would not want to admit to the existence of happy emotions. They’re so caught up in a web of bullshit that they have no concept of which way is up, right, or good, let alone happy.

https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/remains-of-7000-year-old-sunken-stone-road-discovered-off-croatias-coast

Nah

I really should stop worrying about data backup. Why pay for it?