I spend quite a bit on Discord server services, but I'm out.

GFY, Discord and governments, for mandating this bullshit nonsense.

Myself and another IT manager friend were looking at the same time for new NAS units.

We both looked at Synology. I rejected them based immediately on the first article I saw about them restricting what drives you can use. It's none of your business, Synology, just use what's presented to you and get out of the way. I ended up buying QNAP (for work) and Asustor (myself).

My friend, though, was in a procurement nightmare and the people above them hadn't done their homework and they ended up with a Synology unit and a bunch of IronWolf drives. And only when it filtered back down to my friend did they realise that it just wasn't going to work.

Cue one month of more of arguments and having spent a small fortune to then have to back the Synology and buy something else. And now Synology changes its policy? Yeah, it's too late. You already burned that bridge and cost people money (now admittedly, through their own poor research and not keeping up with industry news, but why should that be necessary?).

My friend and I were basically sworn off Synology at that point. I'd dodged that particular bullet, but he was caught right in the middle of it DESPITE hearing this about Synology and trying to warn people.

Sorry, but your profiteering indicates your STATE OF MIND, and how you view customers. Whether you "fix" it or not, that state of mind persists. This is what people don't get. You've now tainted yourself because you clearly don't care about what your customers wanted, and only realised after people swore off buying them or by literally backing units that - as far as they were concerned - weren't fit for purpose.

You need to do an awful lot more to fix that problem - by showing customers that your state of mind has changed, not just your knee-jerk reaction to getting a bunch of returned kit and lost sales. We need to know you're not just going to try something else entirely to try to recoup that loss.

It's to do with reducing wastage as much as reducing profits.

I have a bunch of chargers that came with phones - and I don't use any of them, because all my house sockets have USB-C, I have a ton of USB-C cables, my car has multiple USB-C adaptors or sockets already, etc. etc. Another brick of copper to convert to USB-C is really unnecessary.

Hell, my bathroom scales are USB-C, my kitchen scales are USB-C, etc. etc. etc.

But I have a box of "old" chargers that have never been touched because they came with the device and they're worthless to me. Even if I gave them away at a flea market or similar, nobody would take them.

The most expensive phone I've ever bought was ~$500... and I have owned about 5 phones in my life. Not one of them did I use the "official" charger for for any significant length of time (e.g. to charge them up initially, maybe, but beyond that I had battery packs, charging sockets, docking stations, car adaptors, etc.).

A USB-C cable is pennies. A USB-C charger is, what a couple of $ if you want one. Any store would start bundling them together now if you asked for one. But for the millions of people who already have a drawer full of useless or surplus wall-bricks, or who mostly charge their phone in the car, etc. they aren't bundling another $5-10 of plastic and copper with every phone they sell.

That's right.

I put a pre-order down on a Framework laptop so I don't have to use Windows 11.

No different to "batteries not included".

If the world has standardised on chargers - finally! - after so long, then maybe we should just embrace that.

It was always Apple dragging their feet, and now all the Apple users have USB-C too (thanks, Europe!), there's no bad thing in everyone used a bunch of standardised chargers and having to build devices compliant with a wide range of chargers that everyone already has.

Well, if it's anything like the two shows I saw being shown in America based on Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit....

They were so awful I honestly continued to watch them only to see just how more contrived they could possibly be.

I mean... you'd think there'd actually be gameplay elements in two of the world's most popular board games to make a show that actually feels like they're playing it, right?

None of the woo "hurt him in terms of accelerating cancer". The problem is that he did that instead of actual treatment, and let a highly treatable cancer turn into a nearly-untreatable one.

When you mentioned "third partner" who cashed out early, I thought for a minute you were going to be talking about Ronald Wayne - what a life of bad decisions he made ;)

For those not familiar:

He got 10% of the original Apple stock (drew the first Apple Logo, made the partnership documents, wrote the Apple I manual, etc).
Twelve days later, he sold it for $800.
Okay, but he could still try to claim rights in court... nah, a year later he signed a contract with the company to forfeit any potential future claims against the company for $1500.
Okay, well, it's not like he had an opportunity to rethink... nah, Jobs and Wozniak spent two years trying to get him back, to no avail.
Okay, but he still had, like memorabilia he could hawk from the early days, like his signed contract. Nah, he sold that for $500 in 2016.
And that contract went on later to be sold for $1,6 million.
Okay, well, I'm sure he went on to do great things... nah, he ended up running a tiny postage stamp shop.
Which he ended up having to move into his Florida home because of repeated break-ins.
Which he then had to sell after an inside-job heist bankrupted him.

Jobs committed suicide-by-woo. He didn't "turn away from traditional therapy because it can't keep up with rapidly advancing metastasis", he turned away from treatment for a perfectly treatable form of cancer for nine months to try things like a vegan diet, acupuncture and herbal remedies, and that killed him.

Steve Jobs had islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. It's much less aggressive than normal pancreatic adenocarcinoma. The five-year survival rate is 95% with surgical intervention. Jobs was specifically told that he had one of the 5% of pancreatic cancers "that can be cured", and there was no evidence at the time of his diagnosis that it had spread. Jobs instead turned to woo. Eight months later, there was signs on CT scans that his cancer had grown and possibly spread, and then he finally underwent surgery, it was confirmed that there were now secondary tumors on his liver. His odds of a five-year survival at this point were now 23%. And he did not roll that 23%.

Jobs himself regretted his decision to delay conventional medical intervention.

I did some proof of concept tests with both Pointer Lock and PointerEvents, but both failed because you don't get *any* data if you're not moving the mouse, and only get (heavily rounded) datapoints when you do move the mouse. You'd need raw access to data coming from the mouse, before even the mouse driver, to do what they did.

You *might* be able to pull off a statistical attack, collecting noise in the fluctuations of movement positions and timing in the data you receive when the mouse *is* moving. But I can't see how that could possibly have the fidelity to recover audio, except for *maybe* really deep bass. And again, it'd only apply for when the mouse is actually moving.

Neat attack, but not really practical in the browser.

Finally, an AI product that's actually priced to pay back the cost of the AI.

As this trend continues and we see companies stop "loss-leading" on their AI, and especially when they then intend to profit from it, things are going to get very expensive very quickly.

Talking to people in public isnâ(TM)t harassment.

Talking to people on taxpayer funded grounds also isnâ(TM)t trespass.

Tax funded?

Not private property anymore.

If the AI was actually intelligent, you wouldn't need any more training data than the average person comes into contact with in a few short years of life.

Just saying.

Actually, I retract my earlier statement. I had read something about Tinker earlier today on another site, but crossreferencing, it appears to have been wrong.