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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Their recent ToS update: “We bricked your TV until you ‘consent’ to waiving your right to sue us if we do something illegal. Also, we won’t tell you what you’re consenting to up front, instead we’ll make you spend hours reading through pages and pages of legal garbage to find where we buried this statement.”

    They know that nobody would agree to this if they put it in big bold letters right above the “agree” button, so they bury it behind hours of tedious reading so that people cave in and just “consent.”

    If you roofy someone’s drink and pester them until they “consent” to sex, you would get thrown and jail and probably shanked in the liver. If Roku bricks the TV that you purchased and won’t let it work again until you consent to something that you’re nearly guaranteed to miss or not understand by design, their profits go up because people can’t sue them.

    This capitalism hellhole can’t burn down fast enough.



  • There’s gotta be a way to disable telemetry. My first thought is to cut whatever antenna is used to transmit your data to the corporation. It could be the same antenna used for radio, but I’d go without radio in a heartbeat if it meant Ford, Chevy, or whoever can’t spy on me in a car I paid $15,000+ for.

    Of course, we shouldn’t have to do this. My first choice is to not give any of these car companies a dime of my money, but literally every single brand is doing it. This disgusting trend of spying on people should be illegal. It’s rapist behavior.




  • Just to clarify, the FOID approval process is effectively performed in every state for any gun purchase. It’s not like the FOID background check carries more scrutiny or anything. If a Texan resident can buy guns in Texas, they could get a FOID card if they lived in Illinois.

    And it’s federally illegal to sell guns to non-residents of the state the sale is made in, so Chicago residents can’t buy guns in neighboring states. Indiana and Wisconsin residents could bring guns into Chicago, but that alone is highly illegal too.




  • You can’t trust Amazon reviews either though.

    * Sellers frequently farm good reviews by including cards in their packages that state “give us a 5 star review and get a full/partial refund!”

    • Sellers update their listings with good reviews with different pictures, descriptions, etc. which effectively creates a different listing while carrying over a large review count.

    * Amazon doesn’t allow reviews after 30 days (?) from purchase, so items poor durability will not have that reflected in their reviews

    It’s a damn shame, but between this broken review system and their incredibly low quality items and quality control, they’re not worth the money or headache to use. Especially since most of their products are no name Chinese garbage that are exclusively available on Amazon. They’re basically Wish, Tubi, or Alibaba.

    Edit: Amazon must’ve updated their review policy since I’ve last used them, 2+ years ago. They explicitly ban monetary rewards for good reviews, and I don’t see a mention of review deadlines either. The only references I found about their review deadlines is a few Reddit posts from a year ago. So my bad!

    If nothing’s changed though, they still sell hot garbage.






  • I have an S21 with Android. Sync runs in the background but it doesn’t use much power. It looks like about an hour or so of use each day accounts for about 5% battery drain, including background activity, and not including power used by the screen or other services running in the background.

    Just a thought though - maybe Sync is making tracking attempts in the background? I recently started using Duck Duck Go’s free VPN which blocks tracking attempts made by apps. Some apps, like Messenger and Robinhood, make thousands of tracking attempts every day, even when the apps are closed and not in use. Google makes tracking attempts through Sync, but I’ve only seen these occur while I use the app. I figured the attempts are made each time an ad loads, but I could be wrong.




  • Your plastic is jammed. I think the clicking sound is from the extruder moving, but since the plastic is stuck, it compresses a mil or two before springing back and compressing again.

    Your jam might be in the hot end. Heat it up really hot, pull the plastic out, and clear the nozzle with a fine metal pin. If that doesn’t fix it, you might need to replace the nozzle and reseat the bowden tube against the nozzle, making sure the end of the tube is cut very straight and perpendicular.

    Hope that helps! This happens to me too from time to time.


  • It’s really hard to say without being personally involved. Two years is a very comfortable amount of time to implement that specific change. The biggest hurdle is passing regulatory testing early enough to begin manufacturing in time to build a large enough stockpile before release. If they really pushed it and threw enough people at it, manufacturing could begin as little as 6 months after starting. But that’s a very risky timeline because about a million things will still go wrong all throughout the process, and “simple” design changes like this are never, ever simple.

    I’m impressed if they began production one year after deciding to make the change. The EU directive might’ve been approved roughly a year ago, but Apple might’ve seen writing on the wall and started earlier too. Regardless of context, this is definitely not a >2-3 year process though.


  • Eh, I don’t know Apple’s intentions but this specific design change isn’t that complicated. The lightning port still uses the USB protocol so the firmware will be the same or very similar. The supporting electronics also wouldn’t change much, but at most they’d omit/add a few small passives and slightly reroute that part of the circuit to make things fit together. They’d also have to lock down a large production run of USB ports, but any manufacturer would accommodate a customer as large as Apple. They’d need to test fit it with the new phone chassis but that’s relatively simple as well. Regulatory certification would also be smooth sailing for a change this simple, since most of what’s changing is simply the form factor.

    I figure it would take two years before customers would see this design change from the moment engineering was assigned it.

    I’m an electrical engineer who works in production if that matters.