ROFL - Are you seriously telling me a device running Roku software is trouble-free? Sell this lie somewhere else please. Devices running Roku software, TVs especially are a straight up dumpster fire.
On top of that, its harvesting the hell out of your data.
Stop being a sucker. Toss that Roku powered shit out of the window.
As it so happens I currently run a Roku TV that is not connected to the internet with an Apple TV attached. However that is not long a term solution and if it ever dies you can be damn sure I'll buy a different television.
Roku is breaking things constantly. If you ever have to replace that hardware, it will have more up to date software and your experience will be broken. This will be by design.
Even implying that somebody should consider buying Roku hardware at this point is stunningly irresponsible. In the last few weeks they broke HDR. Before that they broke the ability of their TVs to display content properly when using apps on the built-in OS due to some new craptacular frame rate feature they pushed out and have refused to roll back. Thankfully I can work around it on my Apple TV by turning on Game Mode for the input. They are currently testing a wide variety of invasive ad features that you can be damn sure will destroy your experience once they officially roll them out.
They harvest every bit of your data and sell it to whomever will pay.
Roku is a stunningly objectionable company. On top of all that (as if it wasn't enough), their platform lags behind everybody else. They refuse to license a full range of video codecs so pieces of software like Channels DVR will never work on their platform. Not to mention that when you run a Roku TV that isn't connected to the Internet, you lose the ability to customize various aspects of it. You can't rename the inputs for example.
Nobody should ever even imply that somebody should buy a Roku device. They are crap and there is virtually no chance of the company changing course.
I'm not sure how anyone accidentally fell into the smart TV trap, honestly.
From day 1, all smart TVs had horrible latency when it comes to navigating through menus and screens. I'm glad for that, because it stopped me from ever buying one in the first place!
Maybe it's the people that show up at best buy without doing any research and just buy the most expensive TV not realizing it's a crappy smart TV. Who knows. Do your research!
This post resonates a lot with me. As somebody in the twilight of their coding career - I totally understand what the author means by "over-responsibility"
After 25 years - I'm over it. But the flip side of that is that I can't un-see the fact that so much of the tech shit in my life is broken and it has practically become a second job trying to manage it and / or fix it. Thankfully I don't do it by trying to code replacements like the author seems to. Instead I try to come up with workarounds or find replacements.
Nevertheless the weight of the curse is about the same I figure.
So over the last week I’ve been subjected to multiple uses of the term “vibe coding”. Now back here under the rock that I live, that term struck me as rather peculiar so I queued up some videos to watch and took a tour of the idea this morning. Now now, don’t worry. This isn’t going to be just another anti-AI rant. We’ve had our fill of that, right? No instead we are going to focus on the flaws of the Venture Capitalist class, courtesy of the people running Y-Combinator.
Why them? Well it’s because they made this video which happens to be the first one I watched on the topic. I was going to watch a video in which Primeagen reacts to this video as that is what my friend sent to me but decided to just watch the source video instead as I didn’t want to waste the additional time listening to Prime to bash it (though make no mistake, Prime is awesome). As you may have noticed, I’m quite capable of doing that myself.
Hell I’m not even going to go into specifics here. Because the idea behind this is so ridiculously stupid that I just can’t be bothered to give it enough credit to waste that kind of time on it. However the 1000ft summary of the idea is this: Vibe coding is essentially a hipster name for so-called software engineers (or as the Y-Combinator staff likes to refer to them “product engineers”) who basically prompt coding AIs and mindlessly toss whatever crap it produces into the mix. Now to be fair by mindlessly I don’t mean just dumping the first round of output into the IDE, making sure it compiles and shipping it. No instead what I mean is dumping the third or fourth round of output into the IDE, making sure it compiles and shipping it.
So with each passing day I’m being forced to face the cruel reality which darkly looms: My country, the United States of America, is basically speed-running its way towards collapse. What does that look like? I can’t give you specifics, but I know for a fact that short of a sudden and abrupt change to either our leadership or the political institutions our leader has surrounded himself with, the world that we know and take for granted is about to come to an end.
Before I continue, I want to make one thing exceptionally clear: I’ve spent weeks thinking about what to write in this post. I have struggled with finding the right words and the right thoughts to clearly relay my ideas here. I have spent even more time trying to codify and validate those ideas for myself. As a writer who essentially has a front row seat to this horror show, I am awash in conflicting emotions that simultaneously are begging for my attention. It’s hard to not write about this topic emotionally. Very hard. That being said, I believe I have my thoughts organized enough and that I’ve spent enough time thinking this through, to accomplish my objective.
So what is my objective? My objective is to redefine the parameters for the upcoming civil war. Yes, I absolutely believe that’s where we are headed. But as it stands right now, I believe that the battle lines have been incorrectly defined. I believe this circumstance is the result of decades of propaganda and efforts on the part of the actual perpetrators in an effort to channel the easy to predict violence in a direction that points away from them.
So who are the perpetrators? That’s easy: The insanely rich. Trump is one. Musk is another. The big tech CEOs who lined up to show fealty on inauguration day are also included. A thousand others who you don’t see hamming up for the cameras are also to blame. These are the people who have laid the groundwork for the horrors we are currently experiencing and for the civil war we will all soon be taking part in. But if that war was to be fought today, it wouldn’t be fought between us and the billionaires who have spent decades embezzling every bit of money and resources they could get their grubby hands on. Rather it will fought between the relatively poor people who are all actually the victims of their charade.
Over the last few weeks, the situation here in the United States has degraded considerably. The Republic is breaking down and none of the checks and balances the founding fathers put into place are working as intended. I do not anticipate this situation improving anytime soon. That’s because no remaining government official with actual power seems willing or capable of actually stopping Trumps agenda. To make matters worse, the CEOs of Big Tech companies basically lined up to kiss the ring by both contributing to the inaugural parties and attending the actual inauguration.
No it wasn't. The law specifically states that the president can only enact an extension in the event that TikTok is credibly attempting to negotiate a sale. They are not doing that, hence an extension will not happen.
Anybody who thinks TikTok is coming back anytime soon is a sucker. They aren't selling and the law only allows for extensions if they are in the process of selling. Trump may be able to violate the law with impunity thanks to the morons on our Supreme Court but nobody else involved with the TikTok ban (Google, Apple, Oracle) has that luxury.
"WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden won’t enforce a ban on the social media app TikTok that is set to take effect a day before he leaves office on Monday, a U.S. official said Thursday, leaving its fate in the hands of President-elect Donald Trump.
Congress last year, in a law signed by Biden, required that TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance divest the company by Jan. 19, a day before the presidential inauguration. The official said the outgoing administration was leaving the implementation of the law — and the potential enforcement of the ban — to Trump."
After all of the drama, hand wringing and endless unverified claims that TikTok is a national security risk, I can't believe this is how they are going to end this. It's utterly mind-blowing.
Jan 19. is Sunday. Trump becomes president Jan 20. Biden understands that it's Trump's problem now. Filing stuff in the morning just to complicate any decisions Trump may take is just silly.
So the other day on Mastodon I posted a link to this amazingly depressing video in which the author laments the fact that he lost one of his freelance writing gigs to AI powered tech. I also said that “the tech industry has devolved into a money hungry mob of extortionists, grifters and rent-seekers” and promised a subsequent blog post on the topic. This is that post.
So let’s start this post off on the right foot by making some declarations most of you will likely regard as a sign of premature-dementia on my part, shall we?
...Click through for the rest! Comment here for a spirited discussion!
On top of that, its harvesting the hell out of your data.
Stop being a sucker. Toss that Roku powered shit out of the window.
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