For anyone struggling, lemmy web interface added the colon into the URL for the blog post link. Here’s a clickable version without the colon:

https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/how-unix-spell-ran-in-64kb-ram

Yeah except one is a private entertainment establishment, and the other is a public transportation service.

The perfect consumer-facing example of this is Clear at the airport.

Instead of waiting in line to have your ID checked by a TSA agent, you let an iPad take your picture and then have an agent walk you to the TSA agent and vouch for you.

The whole iPad thing is marginally faster than just checking your ID by hand, so really they just found a way to monetize cutting the line. This provides zero net benefit to society except for extracting money from people for something that’s supposed to be free.

Also, when everyone has Clear, we’ll be back in the same boat with long lines and they’ll probably charge more for Clear+ or some shit.

Heh forgot about the App Store.

Maybe a bad example, but there is certainly a trend recently of purpose built hardware with “free” services failing to justify the expenses of the necessary backend infrastructure getting turned into useless landfill.

Car Thing, Facebook Portal, and this dumb little treat dispensing dog webcam that I used to have come to mind.

Everyone hates subscriptions, but when it comes to hardware that needs to generate revenue to function, I think a token dollar or so a month is appropriate.

Edit: also thinking about it more, core OS software features that are arbitrarily linked to new hardware (like Apple Intelligence) are definitely designed to sell more phones over just selling more software on existing phones. I think it’s fair to say that there’s a revenue link there.

I’ve been using a Sunbeam flip phone for a year or so. Paid for the phone up front, and pay $3/mo for use of maps, speech recognition, and continued bugfixes.

Even if phones never got new features, dev time still needs to be committed to security updates, and services (like Siri) need to be paid for. The model of getting 100% of your revenue from new phone sales is starting to break. If I could pay $3/mo for Siri or whatever and never have my phone go obsolete, I think that’d be a good deal.

I worked as a consultant at a product development firm. One of our clients had us making a kitchen appliance that would take a “pod” of some kind (like Keurig).

Their little ad video that they made before involving us had a little CG video showing the pod floating into the receiver and sliding down into the machine.

When we showed them the prototype, the first question we got is if the pod receiver thing was motorized.

Like…no. You push it down. Takes 1 second.

Anyway replacing a phone battery does not need to be automated.

That article covers a pitch deck by an ad agency with absolutely zero detail of how it works.

If this is happening, it should be easy to test.

Do you connect to company WiFi?

You are in the same geolocation as other people and they are searching for the stuff you’re talking about. Try whispering to your phone alone in a closet.

Calm Down—Your Phone Isn’t Listening to Your Conversations. It’s Just Tracking Everything You Type, Every App You Use, Every Website You Visit, and Everywhere You Go in the Physical World

That’s why I like to check if someone has already rooted a purpose-built gadget before buying.

My RabbitAI will make a nice little MP3 player when the company folds.