The problem was acknowledged in a frank and unqualified manner… and they want to try fixing it? Is that allowed? Things can get better?? I, uh… gotta go return some videotapes

Sugarcoating pills is fairly common, especially for pills which are frequently ingested or target older demographics. It’s because sugar coatings are much gentler on the esophagus (i.e.: less likely to cause esophagitis, “pill burn”). Advil (i.e.: ibuprofen) is a cheap, well tolerated, and non habit-forming pain reliever – it’s about as safe as such a thing could possibly be, so hopefully that helps to explain why a sugar coating might be warranted given the aforementioned upsides (for the love of all that is holy; always read the directions on the label, it’s still quite possible that Advil is not safe for you specifically). FWIW: the bottles also have childproofing mechanisms built into the caps (… at least in U.S. markets. Not sure about elsewhere?)

Nothing quite like minimum wage to help you appreciate the affordability of an air sandwich. It costs zero hours of labor (after taxes!) to go hungry – great bargain – plus you can invest all of that saved lunch break time catching up on sleep in the smoking pavilion.

The above is absolutely not based on a terrible and completely wasted early adulthood wrought with minimum wage toil. I’m fine, that hypothetical experience has in no way permanently shaped my worldviews.

Watch out I saw these guys about to show up at your inbox

Yeah, I’m subscribed to notifications for the PR and have been holding out waiting for it to get merged because it’s easier to maintain a clean git history that way. If the PR’s still not merged by this evening I’ll just bite the bullet and do it the (slightly) harder way for the sake of staying current with the new seasonals

Male A to Male C is abolutely possible. It’s the Male A to Female C adapters which are evil. There is no pinout mapping that will turn an A host into a “real” C host and that’s exactly what a Male A to Female C adapter purports to do.

In any case, if you know what you’re doing then all bets are off the table. Hack away freely because at the end of the day it’s all just copper and bits anyway. With that being said, anyone who knows what they’re doing does not require my permission to… vague gesture know what they’re doing.

Like I said: in order to do it the non-evil way you need to cram in an onboard USB chip. Female USB-C from a Male USB-A plug-in is explicitly not possible to implement in a spec-compliant manner because of the pinouts.

You can brute-force a smaller passive adapter like those online but it’s a devil’s bargain. Nobody targets these janky adapters when designing products. USB-C things will just break without any rhyme or reason because you’re fundamentally breaking the hardware contract and “lying” about the capabilities of your port.

No, but now that you mention it that would be a pretty plausible thing to have happen. Just grabbing hold of a random armchair analysis and then repeating it ad nauseum until it transforms into an irony-poisoned meme totem… you’ve really gotten my hopes up now!

No, it’s because I read an expert opinion on the subject: https://old.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/m7rcu5/any_reliable_usbc_female_to_usba_male_adapters_yet/grducjr/

If you hate Amazon you can buy it on the CableCreation website instead.

EDIT: that monoprice adapter isn’t even active lol!

First thing’s first: all such adapters should be considered evil by default. The only way to make a compliant adapter is with active circuitry in the adapter essentially providing an entirely standalone USB controller interface.

With that being said, here’s an adapter which does exactly that. Back when I researched this topic in October I found that the linked adapter is essentially the only one of its kind on the market right now.

It’s cultural. I’ve experienced many times accidentally making others uncomfortable with my silence during a conversation. That specific phenomena is known in linguistics as backchanneling (see also: the Japanese art of aizuchi)

Much like backchanneling, some cultures demand interruptions while others look down upon it. It’s important that we don’t overly invest ourselves in the virtues or lack thereof lest we accidentally wander into the territory of cultural imperialism. Sometimes things are the way they are just because and you have to roll with it as best you can.

Making a mental note is often impossible for me, I frequently forget and need to address something immediately in order to remember it, unless I can pause the conversation to make a physical or digital note (can’t focus on what they’re saying while writing it) which people would probably find even more rude either way.

I sympathize as a person with (catastrophic) ADHD. Trying to hold in a thought feels like smothering it. The concept of a “mental note” feels like some sort of cruel joke – my working memory is 6 words long and people expect me to somehow hold a question in there without tuning out the rest of the conversation? Agonizing!

Even so, I try (and frequently fail) to behave as expected. I find that most people can come to appreciate the effort once they get to know you and your shortcomings. Never forget that people are not monuments; if you mean well and try your best others will bend the rules for you.

I am of two minds:

1. He’s not wrong
2. It doesn’t matter at this point

It’s a mess, but honestly so are a lot of critical FOSS projects (e.g.: OpenSSH, GNUPG, sudo). Curmudgeons gonna curmudgeon. There was a point of no return and that was years ago – now that Wayland’s finally becoming useable despite itself it’s probably time to come to terms with the fact that better alternatives would have arisen had anyone thought they could truly manage it.

Good for them. No cyclical mass layoffs and any paycuts always happened in the c-suite first. The U.S. game industry could stand to learn a thing or two from their Japanese predecessors, I think it’s safe to say.

Alright, enough cheerleading for a faceless multinational megacorp… I just had to give credit where it was due so that I can still take myself seriously the next time I criticize the games industry for inevitably shitting its pants again.

95% of the time he plays the straight-man and then the other 5% of the time he behaves like an unhinged lunatic. It’s the perfect recipe for cultivating an audience of viewers who love to torment him with his own words. After that it’s just one step further to put words he didn’t say into his mouth and see how he reacts to getting gaslit.

I make it sound like a cynical ploy but really this kind of thing is just intrinsically tied to Jerma’s online personality. Lightning in a bottle. If you ask me the most impressive part’s actually how he manages to stay in control of the situation and not get totally swallowed up by the increasingly bizzare behavior of his viewership.

(You’ve not been good)

When will it end? The streets run red with figurine paint

No, I am not contradicting myself. Let me say it again with the ambiguity removed:

1. Cox Media isn’t an advertiser, they sell a dressed-up analytics service. Think spreadsheets (that’s literally the service they’re selling in this copy, a monthly report spreadsheet).
2. The “technology partner” selling this data to Cox is accessing it by bypassing the normal and correct operation of the device using malware.
3. What does not “exist” is a shadowy cabal of smartphone manufacturers scheming to hide listening devices in the pockets of their consumers.

I’m sure you still believe this is a load of apologia and frankly you can think what you want, but you should probably know that I’d already read about the Cox story when it first broke and specifically chose my words with that knowledge in mind.

Read the document:

The growing ability to access microphone data on devices like smartphones and tablets enables our technology partner to aggregate and analyze voice data during pre-purchase conversations.

Key word is “technology partner”. They’re buying voice transcripts ripped from someone else’s spyware and selling the service of scraping it for keywords and maybe somehow tying that back to an individual by cross-referencing the hit against data from traditional above-board ad platforms.

Google isn’t buying transcripts, Facebook isn’t buying transcripts. It’s Cox Media buying shady recordings stolen from spyware-compromised devices and then trying to whitewash it into something sellable with their (unverifiable) cross-analytics middleware.

Hmm… what’s the purpose of loading amdgpu at all if you’re using an NVIDIA card? Optimus?

we still have people that do not believe that the phones are always listening when seemingly any website or app you use gives you advertisements about what you were just talking about in the other room with the phone locked.

Oh come on. Don’t bring this into conspiracy territory. Yes, eavesdropping does happen, but it’s not something an uncompromised Android phone will do when locked. Even when it does happen in the case of spyware, the people doing it aren’t selling your transcriptions to advertisers.

People should still opt out of as many of GAPS’s spyware-like features as possible, as you suggest, but not because it’s a special anti-listening-device warding spell.