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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • History: I used/preferred Android until the iPhone 4S. I still have Android phones/tablets laying around for software testing.

    1. I’m a developer and as much of a PITA the App Store is to deal with, their APIs are really productive to work with, especially in the SwiftUI world.
    2. I’m a Mac user (have been since 1990) and the platform integration is really good.

    One fun story: I had to implement the Google Pay equivalent of Apple Pay QR code passes and holy crap was that a shit-show. One Android phone I had had literally two different things called Google Pay, one as an app and one hidden in the Settings menu, with different feature sets and different passes. What the hell???




  • Microsoft’s thing takes a screenshot of everything on your screen and saves and indexes it. Opened up your password manager and revealed a password? Saved. Opened a porn site in a private tab in any browser aside from Edge? Saved. Opened up a private encrypted chat to try to get away from your abusive partner/parents? Saved and indexed. Logged into a portal at work showing HIPAA information? Saved and indexed.

    Apple’s thing is basically a better search feature of all the data you already have saved, that apps have already opted-in to sharing. It runs on device, and Apple has promised they do not send the data back to train the models. They also have some generic ChatGPT-like tool to help rewrite your documents, but that’s 100% opt-in so nobody really cares about it, it’s easy to just not use.


  • It’s not that they got DDoSed, it’s that unregulated off-shore gambling is illegal in many countries, so their IP addresses were getting blocked in these countries. The way CDNs like CloudFlare work is that many customers share the IP addresses, so they were getting other CloudFlare customers blocked as well.

    CF wanted them to move to a “bring your own IP” plan so that their IP blocks wouldn’t affect other customers, and that came with the steep price tag.





  • MySpace actually let you put in custom CSS and it was a huge free-for-all, everyone’s page looked completely different, and usually it was a tacky unreadable mess of hot pink comic sans text over a bright purple texture background, absolutely horrible but very charming. Facebook very explicitly in contrast allowed no customization at all as a reaction to how bad users could make their pages look.



  • What they got sued for was when they detected that the battery was too weak (old, worn-out) to support peak CPU performance, they throttled the CPU. If they hadn’t throttled the CPU, then the phone would have just crashed and rebooted. An Android phone with a similarly weak battery will just randomly reboot.

    The lawsuit was that they should have told the user the battery was bad and to just (cheaply) replace the battery, instead of people thinking the phone was old and needing a complete replacement. Which is what they do now.