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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: January 16th, 2024

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  • We’ve been getting tons of rain here, but we are still in an outdoor water ban.

    Between 8-5, no lawn watering (except golf courses and businesses), no washing your car (except at a car wash), no watering your ornamental plants (except for farms and garden stores). No filling your pool (even a kiddie pool) or running through the sprinkler (except at the water park).

    It’s not because of drought, but because one of our water sources is offline due to elevated PFAS, so they are blending water from other reservoirs, and those sources combined can’t make up the extra demand.

    And also protecting businesses by making sure we can’t wash our own cars or lollygag through our own sprinklers. Gotta pay for that privilege.

    We have to pay…for the privilege…of lollygagging through our sprinklers.

    I get the lawn part. I hate lawns. But my yard is also a barren mud pit. I gotta put something down. Trying for mostly clover and other plants that don’t need a ton of water, but they still need to stay moist to germinate and start off, and that’s real tough to do if you can’t water it during the hottest parts of the day. I don’t really care what grows as long as it holds the dirt together and it’s comfortable to walk on barefoot.









  • Consider the difference between “would do” and “could do” to be the same as “will do” and “can do”, respectively.

    One implies action, the other implies capability.

    There’s also “should”, which implies permission.

    Consider, also, the progress of learning Python (programming language):

    1. Could I do this in Python?
    2. I would do this in Python.
    3. I shouldn’t do this in Python.

    Edit to add: Would, could, and should are usually considered future-tense. But add “have” and it’s past-tense…“I would have done that”









  • I mean, the market did what the market does.

    They released a device with the intent of being a tinker kit for programming and interacting with the physical world. The next technological jump for hobbyists from PIC to Arduino, became an ARM SBC.

    Of course, they released a cheap ARM SBC, and industry quickly learned that these are great for rapid prototyping and any case that called for a small low-power Linux system.

    I wouldn’t say they lost their way. There’s still a great hobbyists market around it, and tons of good competition. I’d say it’s more like they are a victim of their own success.


  • One of two things can happen…

    Either Apple does the bare minimum to implement RCS, continuing to make interoperability a pain in the ass. Meanwhile, keep making improvements to iMessage.

    Or Apple does it right, fully implements RCS, contributes back to the standard, and abandons iMessage as maintaining two separate platforms for the same function is a waste of resources.

    I’ll take a guess as to which it’ll be.

    Alternatively Americans just accept using 3rd party messengers. But that field is huge with big and small names competing, and ultimately anything that displaces FB messenger or WhatsApp will just get bought by Meta (or some other FAANG) and we’re back at square-one.

    Everybody just remember that Apple is the stubborn ones here, reluctantly adopting the standard that every other OEM has been using for a decade, and the reason they’ve been doing this was as a means to keep people in Apple’s walled garden by “othering” people who don’t have iMessage.

    They knew exactly what they were doing. I got rid of my iPhone to go back to Android literally a week after the original announcement. Exchanging multimedia with my wife was literally the only thing holding me to iOS. The alternative, using third party messengers, is just plain cumbersome for one user (and likely means selling your soul to Meta nowadays, anyway).

    I doubt I’m alone.

    And RCS is a neutral standard, belonging to GSMA. Even though Google is a key player, they aren’t the only ones. Any phone OS or OEM could always have implemented RCS. Apple has historically chosen not to, while also not reciprocating the openness with iMessage.

    I guess there is one other possibility…Apple embraces RCS and, being keenly aware of its limitations and with Apple and Android cooperating, they collaborate to develop a new open standard that fully replaces both. That’s probably the best outcome but also least likely to happen.