We both agreed that the late 20th century – broadly, the period from the early 1990s onward for a decade or so – had mostly been one of fairly steady improvement.

Ah yes, a famously bubble-free period. /s

Talking to old-timers, and reading history, it sounds more like revolving hype cycles have been around for the whole industrial age. TBF they do touch on that timeline later and correct themselves a bit.

Some were dumber than others. Foo-as-a-service wasn’t even a new concept, that’s just called renting shit out!

Wow there’s some really bad deals here!

History is full of trendy hustles, but people aren’t usually dumb enough to keep falling for them forever. Probably that will apply to these, too, and a lot of shitty subscriptions will go the way of the Juicero.

It’s worth mentioning renting rather than owning isn’t an intrinsically bad concept. Owning your own bus probably doesn’t interest you, and while streaming costs are going up, it’s still a better deal than buying a DVD you watch once.

You have to think when the infamous “own nothing and being happy” quote was coined, they were imaging there still was a nice diversified portfolio of investments in the background, which amounts to owning a small piece of everything.

Not shocked. The fact other people might be shocked just tells you how out of control trust in the magic boxes and the people who sell them has gotten. When they collect something more sensitive or embarrassing, people just assume the security and regulation must be tighter to match.

Putting aside from the implied EV context, I’m not sure I’d go that far. They were repairable, but had a lot of proprietary design in them as well.

I would still go with one of the “legacy” manufacturers for myself, though.

FairCar when?

X to doubt.

About the “hurting the economy” part. Replacing more stuff = more economy is a well-known economics fallacy and they should know better.

Oh? What else have they said? I didn’t know there was a reputation for fibbing.

Yeah, but they were talking about building out WhatsApp third party compatibility on top of it.

There already was Element One, which bridged to a bunch of things for a small subscription fee, although it had to break E2EE to do so. I’m just finding a lot of broken links now, though.

Wow, I’m surprised they got it up that high in a practical application.

They let OpenWhisper do the underlying protocol, so it’s solid. Beats the shit out of a plain text message anyway, and people IRL might actually have it.

Wasn’t Element going to integrate into it as well?

Now that I’ve actually looked at the study, what they did is make an apparatus with continuously adjustable distance to display and try to get people to distinguish scaled, fairly similar clips until they couldn’t anymore.

Actual maximum pixel-per-visual-degree values varied quite a bit based on colours involved and the like. And like @GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org said, they framed the results the opposite way to the article - human vision can distinguish more than previously thought.

A link to the study, because I don’t think I see one in this very clickbait-feeling source.

It sounds like the study actually did include display distance, and gave different requirements depending.

Like, libertarians? I have to think anyone seriously down the chud rabbithole would be embarrassed to even ride in one. Symbols of tribal loyalty are as big as ever in fascist land.

Looks like somebody’s backpedaling on a definite political statement after it became personally inconvenient.

It’s still possible to be off of the digital surveillance grid, but it is hard and a small subculture at best. I’m in it. It’s less that you’re forced to use whatever thing than that people forget not everyone does.

The Clarke book brought up elsewhere had the the right idea, but the wrong manifestation.

It’s a logical conclusion of facial recognition and mass indexing existing that anywhere remotely public you put your face is just fully public.

Honestly I have less of a problem with that than the illusion of privacy that’s been created anyway. Now we have a whole part of our economy that’s based on creeping on people, which couldn’t possibly exist if it was noticeable.

Dope. This one is new to me.

Image generation often happens in a kind of region by region way, too, so not just continuing the arm might be hard.

It’s annoying that she asked ChatGPT why it was doing that and they reported the answer uncritically.