Hah, my curse is calls always finding weird ways to drop. Then I moved to a place with no cell service, because I’m apparently a wireless masochist?

There’s some slight technical reason for it, but I think they swung a bit too far in the asshole direction with blocking too many.

The LTE rollout was completely botched from the start. LTE voice is technically supported on all LTE chipsets, but early on the voice spec changed. Early phones used LTE for data and 2G or 3G for voice.

Complicating matters further, AT&T and Verizon both have separate and slightly tweaked versions of the spec, as they didn’t want to wait for it to be finalized, and of course they’re both different in different ways. It’s also why T-Mobile allows so many devices. They just rode their very fast for the time HSPA+ network until LTE was finalized, got generic hardware on the network, and flipped the power switch.

To top it off, AT&T was sued at one point for 911 not working due to a handset bug and they got very controlling at that point to avoid future lawsuits.

VoLTE is ostensibly VoIP over cellular data at its core. All phones have to talk with the correct SIP signaling on VoLTE for voice calls to work. With 2G and 3G, the circuit-switched method of signaling was much more standardized (although not necessarily simpler, WCDMA at its end spanned literal volumes of books.) This made it so phones and networks were more easily compatible for basic things like voice, 911, etc.

Now, on top of Verizon and AT&T thinking that rolling their own flavors of LTE was a good idea, every phone maker also had their own idea about how the VoLTE SIP signaling was supposed to work. Due to flaws in the LTE spec, carriers going rogue, and companies interpreting things wrong, it has turned quite literally into a clusterfuck.

TL;DR: It took a long time for LTE to standardize enough across product lines, and there are a whole bunch of phone models that don’t talk the language quite right. So carriers chose to ban rather than make workarounds or work with the vendor to roll a software fix to the phone.

You think Thunderbird is insulated? Their latest big drunk UI lift seems to have somehow made it even less intuitive.

You have a preferred mobile app to access the service you’d recommend?

Recently tried MS Office apps for the first time in 8 or so years. Somehow they made them less intuitive than even ribbon days. They use a dark pattern save dialog that makes it easy to accidentally save to OneDrive, and if you have OneDrive disabled or uninstalled, there’s an always present icon in the title bar of the main edit window that says “autosave off” even though autosave is on.

Went right back to LibreOffice after one document and one spreadsheet.

Point the ticket using the value of a cryptocurrency.

Certs have existed a long time, are never implemented correctly, and the expiration cycle that is supposed to bolster security just causes pain as a result.

Certs should just be redesigned to have a kill switch. CRLs were supposed to handle that, but are rarely implemented or implemented correctly.

Certs are also used in so many places where they may not be suited to the task, but because they exist, they’ve become the de-facto standard.

A temporal expiration system seems flawed from the beginning anyway. What, you don’t trust your system anymore just because time has passed? Time is always passing. Are we all secretly racist against clocks now?

Have you seen how American corps code? 80% is GM release ready to go.

Made a joke when 6x CD-ROM drives came out that 6 in German is sechs. Sechs drive, sex drive, hurr-durr.

I was in middle school.

LLMs have improved my education, work life, and general knowledge search. I get more time to spend living my life and less trying to find one dude’s stacked change post from 2009 that fixed my problem.

They allow me to access information the way I learn and operate in a way that textbooks, college education, video courses, or online classes have never allowed me to do in my entire life.

That being said, the general AI buzz and buzzwords need to die, the real positives need to be celebrated.

Because they love and believe their corporate daddies they so worship, especially in the US.

The session keys for WhatsApp are stored on Meta servers, so the encryption is meaningless. Meta can read everything everyone types. Yet all of the eastern hemisphere seem to worship it like it’s pure platinum.

IIRC, Threema’s crypto algo is a patchwork cluster of copypasta and prayers.

I think you give the idiots in charge of the corps that can’t see beyond a 3 month window of time too much credit. It is just the natural progression of unchecked and unregulated Capitalism that will always lead to this place, regardless of the industry or technology.

Don’t get me wrong, I want to blame them too for their evil plot, but they’re too dumb to have contrived the whole narrative.

Example with the cloud:

• Look over past decades, storing your data in servers has been a thing for decades. Companies have tried time and again to get the concept to stick in various forms, and it always waxed and waned. (Reverse-example right now is AI, since people barely want it, and having it in the cloud is even creepier, manufacturers are trying to make people comfortable with cloud-executed AI queries, and otherwise releasing limited subsets of compute that run locally on the phone.)
• Voice recognition tech like Voice Command (predecessor to Siri for those super young) started on phone-only. Then Siri used to run on the cloud until phones became powerful enough to run more commands locally and they moved more commands to the phone.
• Apple used to synchronize SMS messages between iPhones and other Apple devices in a secure local method on your local WiFI network. Then, as they sold more types of devices, it made it evolutionarily (made up word) necessary to move that logic to the cloud. They probably didn’t pre-think that all this would be clouded, they just got there out of need to sell a new toy, and suddenly screw the alleged privacy they purport to worship.

The reality is, a lot of these cloud techs have been held up by:

• Lack of fast enough Internet bandwidth to make it doable, nobody is going to spend 4 hours a day uploading photos somewhere
• Lack of fast local compute, hilariously, local compute can do most things now, but in the past, the local compute wasn’t fast enough to be able to parse/process the data to send to the cloud
• Lack of local storage, again, prepping data for cloud transport and having local caching be performant requires enough throwaway space on the local machine that users don’t become frustrated with the latency of remote disks in a datacenter
• Lack of metadata for trust verification like FaceID, fingerprint, GPS geolocation, and other security functions so the company could avoid fraud
• Lack of quality mobile cameras and recording devices making the input content garbage

Once these problems ended up being solved, it wasn’t some visionary with a big plan executing. It was just another Business Weenie being paid 9 figures having the same idea 300 other people had, and it just sticking this time because the technological environment is different.

(Replace Apple examples with Google, Microsoft, Cisco whoever as necessary.)

GPT is selectively useful. It’s also, as of the last few weeks dumb as a bag of bricks. Dumber than usual. 4 and 4o are messed up. 4 mini is an idiot. Not sure how they broke them, but it started roughly around the time of the assassination attempt. Not sure if it was a national security request or a mere coincidence, but just the same.

I’m even seeing 4o make comically dumb and stubborn programming mistakes lately, like:

GPT: “I totally escaped that character”

Me: “no, it’s the same as your previous response.”

GPT: “Oh, sorry, here is the corrected code.” replies with same code again.

I canceled my sub.

Thank you for the clarification. WHQL is such a pain to set up, I’m sure the AV vendors whined, “but, security! Do we have to test everything every time? That would slow an urgent 0day release!”

Not even that. Kernel drivers are supposed to be Microsoft WHQL certified through a thorough testing process (that would have caught it in 3 minutes) before Microsoft will cryptographically sign them.

…but apparently Microsoft allows AV vendors to skip WHQL certification testing.

OneDrive is the devil. It symlinks the file structure on Windows and then moves all your photos and such into their chosen directory. If you uninstall it, it makes a half-hearted attempt to move them back, maybe, but will just do a random subset and give up.

After removal, you have to edit registry keys (obscure ones) to break Windows’ connection to onedrive\pictures and such, or you end up with two pictures folders in your home dir.

So much more fail I can’t even remember right now.

The walled garden needs to be destroyed. Compute devices should not be bound to the whims and fancies of their manufacturer. I’m honestly surprised it has gone on so long.

API is sitting there cackling like a mad scientist in a lightning storm.