• 0 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 5th, 2023

help-circle
  • 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.






  • 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.








  • During my senior year of college, I made a burner Google account for my girlfriend and I to use with apartment/property websites. We needed a place to live after graduation, but neither of us wanted to use our personal email addresses to make accounts because fuck 'em.

    The last year of engineering school requires completing a design project, typically for real business owners. My senior design team and I had a weekly video chat with my clients where we gave progress updates on our project.

    During my video call the week after I made this burner Google account, the first thing my clients say is “OP, what is wrong with your name? It says something very strange.” I had no idea what they meant by this, so I shrugged it off and the meeting continued.

    Later that week while I was driving home from class, what they meant finally dawned on me. I forgot to log out of my burner account before joining the video call, and the name I gave this account was “Joe Lickembottom.” So instead of my real name shown under my face during this meeting, Joe Lickembottom was.

    This may not sound that bad, but one client is a self-made Texas rancher sorta character, and the other is a retired Navy SEAL commander. These people meant business and were dead serious the whole time I worked with them.

    But hey, they offered me a job after graduation so they must’ve not thought too much of it haha



  • 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.




  • There is exactly one firearm on the market that has reliable fingerprint/facial ID. It’s made by a company called Biofire, and it starts at $1500.

    People who have children in their house can choose to buy one, but no one should rely on this sort of safety mechanism to stop their kids from killing themselves. Education and a simple gun lock works perfectly fine for kids and standard firearms when taught/used correctly. There’s nothing wrong with layering safety like with the ID features in Biofire’s gun, but requiring these features by law is just unnecessary, short sighted, and prices put poor people from arming and defending themselves.