Oh man, that’s hilarious. “Our business model doesn’t actually even work where we live. But I know what we’ll do about that, we’re going to do it exactly the same in a place we don’t have a clue about!”

The hubris, lol. It’s delicious.

Yeah, I know what you mean, and yep it looked like just input sanitization on a very specific thing. I don’t disagree, headlines being headlines, and even just broad benefit vs. overall level of effort seems pretty positive to me from an outsider’s perspective.

But then again, issuing a firmware update is also an implicit guarantee that no (unrelated) functionality will degrade, which really needs a degree of testing in order to be a responsible business decision. And then on the optics side, I can see there being a benefit to a hard line in the sand regarding EOL, vs getting into the weeds of determining on a case by case basis what merits violating their own policy, and all the implications such granular judgment calls would entail (although they and all others probably must do something similar, to some degree).

Idk, I don’t own much or any of their stuff these days, no real skin in the game, nor do I have any particularly relevant info or opinions on the company. Just rambling lol.

Yeah, I mean…what IS “end of life” / “end of support” other than not patching newly found issues, after long enough? Not enough info in the article to indicate any kind of bait and switch or annoyingly short support window, and the support window didn’t end recently either. Seems pretty reasonable TBH.

Then again it’s a lot of vulnerable devices, and doesn’t sound like too hard of a fix. But for all I know they’ve dismantled their tooling for testing patches on those devices, etc. Would be nice if they addressed it, but I can’t exactly condemn them for not.

You’re right, but I will say the federal govt has a sometimes magic way of greasing certain wheels and getting things done in a hurry, if the right person is pushing on it.

Lol ah yes, the “fork me daddy!” camp weighing in

When did they add blackjack and hookers?! That’s a hell of a feature update

We’ll also assume that destroying the universe takes constant time.

Well yeah just delete the pointer to it!

Yeah, in my case this one was too close to home for me to love it. 10 or 20 years ago I probably would’ve felt differently. Similar for Idiocracy, I don’t think I’d feel the same way about it if it came out today. Kinda chilling when I think about that, honestly.

Easily more influential. Broader scope, that’s for sure, and in a strong position to either amplify or counteract the typical “cop bullshit”, depending on their choices.

ETA: don’t think many of them work very hard at the “counteracting” side. To put it mildly.

That’s definitely part of the problem. I had an incident recently where an older family member had a minor panic. Because I left my (mfg in 2006!!) vehicle running in the driveway while I ran inside. During the day. In a very safe suburban neighborhood. Just a flat out absurd concern and she leapt right to it, instantly. She’s always been concerned, she’s a grandma, but she wasn’t pointlessly terrified like this years ago.

I think many of us don’t realize how badly this irrational fear has taken hold, or maybe I should say how effectively this irrational fear has been deployed. Otherwise ~reasonable people are walking around thinking the worst is going to happen everywhere at all times, based on absolutely nothing - worse than nothing, it’s based on weaponized deception.

So the police downplayed a dangerous situation, allowing it to fester and escalate until someone was predictably hurt? Weird!

Yep if I look at the back of my phone, instead of this, it is indeed!

And boy if that ain’t some cartoonishly evil shit. That uranium mine especially, woof.

Got anything to recommend? I’m a dude with butt and thighs that cause me to size up in the waist routinely, else I get the “pocket handles” thing, or just rip stuff lol.

Edit to add, by way of skin in the game: I used to shop for denim with a “tapered” cut (Levis had / has one, for example). If anything I now think they made the problem visually worse, drawing attention to the situation. I now prefer a pretty traditional straight cut, BUT when I’m overweight enough those may as well feel like JNCOs lol. I’m just barely trim enough at the moment to where a typical straight cut doesn’t feel like my ankles are swimming in fabric. Guess it’s Ankle Tents or Apple Bottom Jeans for the Lads, lol. Or be less chubby, in my case.

I’m becoming more aware of this lately too. Just realizing that Amazon for example has almost negative quality control, in the sense that a counterfeit product from one supplier just gets lumped in with the real ones from other suppliers, and then they sell them having lost the knowledge of who supplied the counterfeit.

And I know no one is checking for flammability of kids’ clothing / items. So I mean, who’s to say stuff made with lead or whatever the fuck else isn’t just getting hucked on down the line too?

Got any rules of thumb or heuristics you’re using? So far all I’ve really got is “nothing for kids from a store without a physical location in my country”. Just basing that on the fact there will at least be someone to sue, which usually encourages better behavior. I also generally avoid the “I can’t believe this is so cheap” products (outside legit sales) because usually something important is getting squeezed somewhere, given the already generally oversquoze situation that is “the market”.

That seems pretty plausible to me, yeah, because it’s being attempted already and we seem to be sliding that direction. Privatizing those public services sounds like precisely the way to usher in a fresh new hell like this, completely agree.

I really wonder what that may look like too and how likely of an outcome it is. I mean we’ve seen versions of it with “banana republics”, but that wasn’t quite the modern era and wasn’t sophisticated tech companies. I also think most tech companies today would not want that responsibility, just the rewards, it’s a bit hard for me to imagine them actually attempting to provide a government. I think what we’ll see is increasingly hollowed out public institutions matched with ascending power and control of the corps, but leaving the govt in place (largely for a target people can point to when they’re mad) and stopping short of overtly seizing power. Best of both worlds for the corps.

For real. The big tech companies are today basically approximating and exceeding what have before been exclusively state-level capabilities. Not all of those capabilities, of course, but enough that the writing’s on the wall. Meta, Google, Amazon (and others) - they truly see themselves as above “petty” things like governments. Just obstacles to work around.

The question is what will we allow them to get away with, not how far will they try to take things. We should be clear on that.

Hmm, yes, you’re onto something. I think we’ve sniffed out a very elaborate DnD campaign…in progress!

Exciting times.

an exercise in precision engineering with wood

With wood, an hilariously imprecise material (for anyone who doesn’t know). It refuses precision on principle first, and then just on occasion, at every opportunity later.

That delicious (infuriating) imprecision is probably why it can sound so frickin great, though, so…