nitrixion

Good news! There is a phone for you. Android allows that. Why not allow others who want their device partially controlled by the vendor to have that option?

I agree with the GP and prefer the current iOS landscape.

> I, like half of us, took a ton of Spanish in high school, enough to generally stick even without continuing to build it afterwards.

Can confirm. My wife and I both took 4+ years of spanish in high school and college, over 15 years ago. We can almost get by on just that knowledge alone in spanish speaking countries, but it is difficult and we always have a translator around.

That said, we took a vacation last summer to a spanish speaking country and spent the 2 months leading up to it using Duolingo. We both had streaks for that entire time. Personally, the refresher course of Duolingo made conversing with people in their native language of Spanish MUCH easier compared to other attempts in the past. We didn't need to use our phones to lookup phrases or even ask locals to speak English. I even learned a few new words and phrases.

That isn't to say that Duolingo is the best or only option, just an anecdote about our experience.

> At this point iPhone isn't a product.

What? This is a weird statement. iPhone is 100% a product. There are many alternatives.

> Imagine if Tesla charged Starbucks money to drive you to coffee. Because that's exactly what Apple has been doing for the last decade.

This is not the current scenario. Using your example, it would be like if Tesla owned a building, a coffee shipping company, and coffee making equipment and Starbucks sold coffee using Tesla resources. In this example, it would be expected for Tesla to charge Starbucks a premium for this full service coffee company being white labeled by Starbucks.

>Apple is taxing the internet, basically.

No. Apple is charging a fee to list products for sale on their store. Similar to every other store in existence.

I'd be interested in reading more about this. I'm curious if that correlation is due to people with lower bodyfat being more likely to exercise regularly which, in turn, would increase testosterone levels.

Seems like the obvious conclusion, but that doesn't mean it is correct.

Some of the QA staff we had made barely more than min wage. It was really depressing talking to dudes that had been there for years being happy they were getting a raise to $17/hr.

While they may make above average in the overall assessment of income for a country, they make well below average for the type of work they are doing. Many game companies know they can pay below market wages because of demand for the jobs.

Source: When I quit game dev, I got a 60% raise and I was on the higher end of the pay scale at that game dev job. I know lead developers with nearly 10 years of experience making under 70k in games. I frequently offer them roles that would double their salary and they turn it down because they like working in games.

This is yet another instance where piracy provides the better product.

Installing uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock makes Youtube a much better product than simply paying for premium. If you haven't used it, SponsorBlock is a crowd sourced browser extension that identifies and skips sections of videos like "This content is brought to you by..."

I used to pay for premium and use YT Music, but after getting fed up with YTM I cancelled. I'm noticing a much MUCH better experience using UBO and SponsorBlock. Unfortunately, this setup means the creators don't get any revenue from me.

If only YouTube offered such an experience at a reasonable cost.

Very well, but people don't seem to want to apply to jobs in Healthtech. I say this as my company has many active openings that we just don't get many applications for.

My perspective is that if it doesn't serve ads it likely doesn't have a future at Google.

I would be interested in playing around with this tech, but I wouldn't integrate it into my business or any other part of my life.

This is what we do also. I have many streaming subscriptions. If a show is not available or is only available with ads (Prime Video does this a lot), then I feel zero remorse torrenting the show.

Additionally, if a show was ever on a streaming service while I had a subscription, I feel zero remorse for downloading that show once it is removed from that streaming service.

These license holders are getting more greedy by the year. If they don't want to provide the content for a reasonable fee through a streaming service, then they don't get my money. Simple as that.

That reasoning aside, there are an infinite number of ways to solve this that would be less "weird" to look at than simply nothing. Even a simple colored half sphere would be better than just nothing.

I'm in the same situation. I have a 2012 MBP but I use my desktop daily and most of it's components are from 2012-14ish, other than a 2080 video card that replaced a dead video card.

There just isn't as good of a reason to upgrade yearly as there used to be. My desktop is primarily used for gaming and it still keeps up with most games in High quality settings.

This is yet another reason to be apprehensive about Occulus and the "Facebook metaverse". I think it is only a matter of time before the mission for Occulus and the "Facebook metaverse" become similar to Facebook's current mission.

> recently we found that a major podcast network was autoplaying podcasts in order to juice their numbers

This is a tactic that some video game streamers use as well. One big example of this is the fextralife wiki site[0]. I get very frustrated when it is the top result from a web search or if it is the only place to get relevant information.

[0] - https://monsterhunterworld.wiki.fextralife.com/Monster+Hunte...

Yes, you can. Easily!

The point I was making about Spotify is that even if I solely listen to music as full albums, I only get recommendations for playlists. I rarely want to listen to a playlist. There are a number of other things I don't like about Spotify, but it works well enough.

I really miss Google Play Music. For my needs, it was the perfect streaming service.

Youtube Music is a huge step back. Spotify is far too playlist and recommendation happy, I want to listen to albums not curated lists. Tidal is decent, but similar to Spotify. Apple Music is the one I haven't tried for more than a couple of days and I don't recall what I didn't like about it.

That post or user did not get shadowbanned. I can see that comment just above this one. Yes, it has been flagged and downvoted, but you are not shadowbanned.

This type of decision has fully cemented that Google is an advertising company. Every decision they make is to benefit advertisers regardless of how it affects users and developers.

This is what I see for a vast majority of Diablo3 players. We are all forced to play online, but nearly everyone plays alone most of the time from what I've seen.

I'm sorry, but my feelings are more important than your feelings, so your free speech matters less than mine.

I see this type of attitude often and it is very frustrating, not because I'm an extremist but because I'm a centrist.

Thank you for both of your responses. This one made me laugh, which was needed this morning.

Sorry, this is completely off topic. Why aren't you using capital letters? I've seen this trend starting to gain more traction and it makes no sense to me.

It should have been "netflix for games". If it were, it would have been hugely successful.

As it was released, I had zero interest in Stadia for all the reasons mentioned elsewhere in this thread. And I am the perfect target consumer for Stadia. I have a large monthly budget for games, I travel enough that it makes sense to have a portable gaming platform, and I embrace tech early. Even with all this, I had zero interest in Stadia simply because it was a Google product that I knew would be canceled.

I don't mean to be rude, but your list of questions is a perfect example of why this type of test would be meaningless.

* What is a data base - Are you asking what type of military base stores data? Or did you mean database?

* What is personal identifiable identification and why does it matter? - Do you mean PII (personally identifiable information)? Or are you talking about a driver's license?

* What does a walled garden mean - Are you talking about what is in my back yard? What is around a castle? Or Apple's App Store?

As a dev that uses Unity on a daily basis, here is my perspective.

If this was simply a matter of "Unity wants to do ads better" and they purchased an adtech company, I doubt there would be much discussion about it. That is not what happened. ironSource is not just an adtech company but a company that has built and distributed software that has been classified as malware by Sophos and Microsoft Essentials[1].

While this may be an overdramatic take, once ironSource is fully integrated with Unity and we update to the latest LTS version that includes ironSource software, I expect that we will want to virus scan our own executables built through Unity. I do not trust ironSource nor do I trust any software that integrates with it.

Now, putting the malware concern aside, I also see this as a step in the wrong direction for Unity. There are MANY uses for Unity that are not games, that will never have ads, and that will never utilize anything from this acquisition. The concern here is that recent updates of Unity have made some of these features such that you cannot disable them.

To me, this is yet another poor decision by the Unity team. As an aside, I recently started looking into their freshly released new Analytics platform and it is an absolute mess of a release. There are massive oversights in the implementation and bugs that prevent workarounds to those oversights.

Unity is not looking like software worth betting your company's future on. At best, it is looking more like prototyping software before using a better engine.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IronSource#InstallCore

Thanks for the heads up! Adding this to my learning bookmarks.

Elden Ring's massive success shows the market for games without MTX is absolutely active and large.

I've been using Unity happily for 7+ years at this point, willfully ignoring all other engines because Unity is easy to use and has native C# support.

This merger has spurred me to try other engines. I keep hearing good things about Godot. That'll likely be the first one I try.

Both Dell and Lenovo sell Linux Laptop preloads. I think you may be overestimating the market for such devices.

As an anecdote, every developer that I know and I personally use Windows or Mac laptops and desktops. 1 guy in the group has a linux setup, but primarily uses Windows or Mac. While most of us have installed Linux on a device at some point, none of us use it as our daily driver. I'm talking about a network of roughly 100 devs that worked together or are a friend of a friend that chat on Slack daily. Yes, it is a small sample size, but it is relatively representative of what I've seen from devs at all of my previous companies over a 14 year software dev/engineering career.

This is not my opinion but instead how I view the Coinbase company's perspective. I'm playing the neutral party here.

ICE is a client that wants to utilize Coinbase services. Coinbase "core mission" is making money. As such, servicing ICE is completely within their "core mission".