After discussing these concerns with the vet we decided to move forward, she’s in this morning. The kittens were one of the main driving points behind making this decision, thank you!

We are in the minority, its pushed so much because it works.

There are some people who are outright influenced, but other times even shoving visuals at the user is enough to subliminally influence to a degree, advertising is all psychology.

That’s why when I remember this when considering compromising and using something with ads. Its never worth the sacrifice, starting to apply the same philosophy to services who subsidize their cost of operating using data. Sure it costs me more but realistically that’s how it should be, there’s no free lunch.

After a lot of research I went with a gen 1 Volt and couldn’t agree more, just enough battery to keep me from getting gas! The car was clearly designed with a lot of thought, and really sound engineering decisions all around, making ownership pain free.

Man you guys think this is bad? My partner bought a Cricut because they thought it would be good for quilting (fancy vinyl cutter) and its a locked down nightmare.

Proprietary software with no alternative, cloud upload required to print anything, even over USB connection… Oh and repair-ability, total nightmare with very little access to replacement parts, with Cricut regularly bricking older models as they reach EoL.

Sorry rant over lol

Upgraded my ram, CPU was still a ways out but I maxed the speed anyway.

System kept locking up during games, couldn’t pin down why, ended up destroying the graphics drivers trying to fix it and eventually got frustrated enough to start fresh.

Turns out I exceeded the max ram speed my CPU supported (was running 3600hz on a Ryzen 2600…) Switched it back and everything went back to normal.

Sorry for the unwarranted input but like you I tried FlorisBoard and it was awful and to me seems like a dead project. Since then I went with a fork of OpenBoard and it even has gesture typing similar to that of Gboard! If that’s important to you of course

I might be a little paranoid here so feel free to lmk, but a few uses for the data gathered by a foreign government/keeping people addicted:

The most obvious: Propaganda to push people to distrust their government

The less reasonable but still possible: Time wasting, people spend less time trying new things due to the lack of instant gratification, decreasing productivity/capability of the users. We’ve seen China begin to address this domestically with new laws limiting usage, what the US would consider overreach (unless it effects the bottom line perhaps?)

The downright unreasonable: Profile building using accounts as a digital fingerprint to determine military capability, it’s amazing what people will advertise about themselves online, TikTok occasionally tells people what illness (mental or physical) before even they are formally diagnosed. Imagine leveraging that information in a ‘unethical’ way, the possibilities are endless.