Android already does that, no AI required. Some fairly simple math is enough.

The device first charges to 80% and holds there. It also calculates how long it will need to charge from there to full and when it will need to resume charging so that it will hit 100% just before the next alarm goes off. Then it does that.

I have to disagree on one point – that iOS home screens somehow look more orderly because they’re full of icons arranged in a strict top-left-to-bottom-right fashion. It doesn’t look any less cluttered than an overly full Windows desktop.

I found desktops that limit themselves to core functionality and maybe a nice wallpaper to be better looking and more usable since the days of Windows 95 and that hasn’t changed since.

That “strict grid of icons” look certainly is uniform across iDevices and that’s what appeals to Apple but I never found it to be particularly attractive.

Ugh. I just finished dealing with what turned out to be a simple configuration problem that took me three days because the tool’s documentation sucked. Turned it in feeling bad only to hear that four other devs had previously failed to get it to work.

One important lesson on life is that everyone is bumbling around all the time. (Like me with autocorrect in the first version of this comment…)

True. It’s just the automated transfer that doesn’t work.

I didn’t bring up F-Droid’s very existence as an argument because iOS also allows a form of sideloading these days. Android still makes it a lot easier but Apple isn’t entirely out of the loop anymore. Baby steps, I guess.

I’m the spirit of fairness I will nitpick you.

Firstly, porting apps over between Android devices works seamlessly only if those apps come from the Play Store. Android has no provisions for auto-transferring e.g. F-Droid and its apps. So it’s no wonder you can’t transfer your iOS apps (which might not even have Android versions). But it is true that auto-transfers of Play Store apps between different Android spins is seamless.

Secondly, whether and how easily you can modify or replace your Android is dependent on the phone’s manufacturer. A Pixel is a very different beast from an Xperia in that regard. Still, Google do provide AOSP and are very mod-friendly on their own devices. Apple very much aren’t.

Then again, those 100 MB are usually mostly assets I want to look at or listen to. Certain websites contain 100 kB of text and pictures I want to look at and load 2 MB of JavaScript frameworks that add nothing to the usability of the site. Bonus points for automatically streaming a 20 MB video I don’t want to watch while I look for one sentence’s worth of information.

Soon they will launch their new product, Copy of New Teams Classic (work or school) (2).

No, you get to set that. The defaults are global. But you can override that (both globally and per community) only for you. If you never like jokes except in joke communities you can set “Funny” to -1 globally and to +1 in Ten Forward. But that doesn’t affect how it works for me.

This would, of course, man that posts are sorted completely differently for us. A really funny post might be extremely highly upvoted for me but in the deep negatives for you.

It would also mean that a global karma counter doesn’t exist.

Why not just go to a collection of votes with configurable values of +1, 0, and -1? They all have global values that default to something sane and each user can define custom values both globally and per community.

I might set “Funny” to +1 except in /WorldNews, where it’s a -1. I might appreciate controversial posts so I might set “Flamebait” to a global 0 so it doesn’t affect a post’s rating. And so on.

(Wait, that’s basically just extended Slashdot. Eh, I like Slashdot’s system.)

True. “Suck it up” works in some occasions and in others it makes everything worse. It’s a terrible default approach to teach your children because they can end up never learning how to deal with stress in a healthy fashion.

The result is usually someone who builds up stress where other people don’t (and then acts accordingly) and who has absolutely no ability to comfort other people when they need it. Few parents want their children to be lonely assholes.

Of course it’s harder to teach someone nuance. Identifying when it’s okay to be vulnerable and when you need to tough it out by yourself is difficult. But if you’re not capable of both you’re lacking essential tools.

Legit answer. I like how BATB acknowledged the Silver Age and the weirdness of the DC universe without becoming a complete farce. It poked fun at all of it, yes, but it did afford it some dignity as well.

And the same can be said about its incarnation of Batman.

I wouldn’t call the Framework “cheap”. Its price is higher than other similarly-specced laptops. But in the long term you can save money by not having to buy a whole new laptop when it breaks or becomes obsolete. You can even take your old mainboard out and repurpose it as something else.

The MacBook is expensive to buy and has no upgrade path. macOS is sleek and well-designed and the M1/2/3 is a very capable CPU but saving money is not a thing you can expect to do here.

Both are reasonable choices depending on what your use case is.

Can’t confirm. My default browser and web view are Firefox on both Sony and Samsung devices.

People are using their smartphones instead of their PCs. That hurts sales. So PCs need to behave more like smartphones, e.g. by being able to notify you of new messages at all times. Then people will surely ditch their smartphones again and buy laptops.

Intel, Microsoft et al never considered that that’s fundamentally not how PCs should work.

Oh no, it’s not funny to Germans either. Or rather it stopped being funny about three memes in.

Last winter, in order to protect the dwindling completely full strategic gas reserves, the government issued an order for all govenment-owned office buildings to limit the central heating to no more than 19° C because that seemed to be the most pointlessly bureaucratic solution at the time.

This included buildings that don’t even use gas for heating. Remote heat? Geothermal heat? Free waste heat that you have to actively vent to the atmosphere in order to lower the room temperature? Yep, all required to not exceed 19° C. The building I worked in at the time (for a company that rented some excess floor space) actually wasted energy adhering to this well thought-out rule.

So yeah, I’d say that in order to change a lightbulb you need at least 1000 Germans. You need both chambers of parliament to create and pass a new ordinance that applies specifically to this lightbulb (and several other contexts it has no business applying to but does because it’s too vaguely worded). Then you need at least three different expert panels to advise the government, regulatory agencies to make sure the ordinance is adhered to, licensed trainers to make sure the people executing the job are formally certified to do so… Actually, we might have to get the European Parliament involved; the new ordinance might benefit from being propoted to a European standard.

I’ll get back to you about this in about three to five years; we need to get this figured out.

Gentoo is great for two things: Firstly, learning about all the parts that go into a Linux system and how they interact. Secondly, typing emerge world into a shell and feeling like a god raising the continents from the ocean.

She just got the car back last week so very recently.

A 2007 Opel Agila that might’ve been a decent car four owners ago. But seriously, her price limit was 2500 € and she got the car for a bit over 2000; it’s hardly a surprise that she didn’t exactly get premium quality.

Well, once all repairs are factored in the total cost is closer to 4500, which could’ve bought her a much nicer car. Or at least a much healthier one.

Yeah, my girlfriend recently needed a new car since her ancient Ford Fiesta finally kicked the bucket. She decided to limit her budget solidly to shitbox territory because she’d just had some major expenses and didn’t want to owe someone money.

I offered to lend her some money to help her get better offers. She refused – and ended up buying a car that immediately needed a transmission rebuild that cost as much as the car itself. For which I lent her some of the money.

By Grabthar’s hammer, what a savings!