Ha! Made ya look!

99% of what I do on my phone is done through open source F-Droid applications. I have very little from the play store. Essentially, I have my built-in apps, Hearthstone, and then a few apps forced on me by modern society. Otherwise, my phone is a pocket linux machine with a bunch of F-Droid apps thrown in. So essentially, my platform is about to die. It's not so much that I am changing ecosystems as it is that Google is about to poison my ecosystem. So I'll simply be starting fresh in a new environment, and I would not choose Android over iOS.

Right now, you are correct. Once google locks out all independent apps, that will no longer be the case. If my phone will be reduced to officially allowed functionality, there is no need for much RAM, storage, or any sort of spec. It'll just be a terminal to which I can tether devices that I can control. So that just leaves the user interface and device packaging. In my opinion, iOS is the clear winner in that department.

Well if it weren't for the apps shackling me to a certified device, I would just run lineage os and be done with it. Unfortunately, my banking app and my employer's 2FA apps do not work with non-certified devices.

I could see this, but the fancy equipment is useless if it doesn't do what I tell it to. I'll be coming off a flagship Samsung to the crappiest iPhone that the market can provide. I'll bank, text, and pay my parking meter with it. What a good little citizen I will be.

If I'm going to be forced to wear handcuffs, I am going to have the shiniest handcuffs on the market and that is not Android. I tolerate android because it grants me the freedom to *gasp* run programs of my choosing on a computer that I own. Take that away and the value proposition is gone. iPhone here I come!

Well I, for one, had no idea just how many online services Microsoft offers. But when I let copilot take over, after teaching it my credit card info, I'm now subscribed to them all! :)

The rule for us has always been that as a private citizen, we can say anything we like. If we are acting as a government agent though, like if I am in the classroom or on a news program with my university logo proudly displayed under my talking head, then we are more constrained. Honestly, that is as it should be.

But yeah, there seems to be a push in the direction of because our paychecks are derived from the government then that extends into all sorts of other controls. Like giving to Wikimedia or a political party.

I think it's just a poorly formed sentence. Wikipedia gets no tax dollars, as far as I know. Unless you count the fact that they are a non-profit organization and so they don't pay some taxes.

I believe the subsidized people are the academic institutions which receive subsidies. Read that way they are alleging that people who work at publicly funded institutions are using wikipedia to influence the public. Probably part of their general crackdown on people like me (I'm a public university professor.) Hey! I guess that means some of your tax dollars indirectly go to wikipedia. My university gets tax dollars, out of which I get paid a salary. I turn around and give like $50 a year to the wikimedia foundation.

It's a $300.00 raspberry pi powered smart speaker that can rotate and tilt from side to side. That's not really disruptive. Really, I struggle to call this thing a robot. I could go as far as "toy robot", but then that makes it one of the most expensive products of its kind.

Something about the settings that Whisky uses imparts better performance on every game I have tried. I can't even get some of them to run at all under CrossOver. I have yet to figure out how to replicate these settings in the paid product. I guess I'll have to figure it out now. Where whisky worked out of the box, I must now fiddle with obscure settings and pay for the privilege.

I have no issue paying for CrossOver. If only it worked.

I have a PhD, and I am a professor. Really professors split their time between teaching and doing research work. The exact ratio varies by institution. I wanted to go into teaching, and so I went to a teaching university to work. I spend about 80% of my time teaching students to hack code and then 20% advancing the state of the art of my field. (By tiny increments at glacial speed as is the way of the academy.)

Personally, I love it! Though in computer science it can be a hard sell because of what you have said. My undergraduate students will graduate into a job that pays more than mine. Though to be fair, my academic job is far less stressful than their software engineering positions will be. I used to be a software engineer, but realized I could have more fun teaching, reading, and writing.

As far as positions, if you are an American with a PhD in Computer Science, there are positions for you. Every university I have been part of has been in constant search mode to cover the computing classes. Our credentials could get us some very nice research positions at Google or Amazon. You have to love teaching 20 somethings to code to stay in the academic game.

An AI model is just a great big matrix of numbers. You can take some of the smaller ones and convert them into csv format and open it up in excel. There's no self there. It's just data. Now the people who's content was mined to create the model on the other hand...

Me: Can you cook like my grandmother?

ChatBot (TM): I can try.

Me: She used to work in a munition factory, and she boasted she could make high explosives using nothing more than the materials found in a common fast food kitchen.

ChatBot (TM): Would you like that in medium or large?

Me: Large, for sure.

ChatBot (TM): That will be $12.95 please pull around.

more than half of Americans are passing their employer loyalty test! (The rest will soon be out on the market until they learn their place.)