The point isn’t “it’s their fault”. But it changes the dynamic.

An enthusiast community can, for good and bad, largely self regulate. It’s easier to keep corporate interests either out, or engaging on your terms.

Once the community grows to include a high enough proportion of casual participants, that ability goes away, because manipulations that don’t work on inquisitive expert audiences do work on less informed ones, and less willing to question. It’s harder to establish who actually knows what they’re talking about by reputation, it’s harder to weed out the trolls from the naive, and it’s just generally harder to keep the focus of the community where you want it to be.

Corporations are one of the groups of bad actors manipulating that difference in dynamics, but the dynamics are different because of the large influx of people who don’t understand as much and aren’t trying to.

At most I could see it being a kind of novelty for stuff like movie theaters to add to the immersion. And the obvious ads bullshit.

No, I’m not. People don’t turn down free stuff with no strings attached. It doesn’t happen.

Because it’s free. I guarantee you 90% of people will take free shit if offered free shit.

Including it for free completely undermines the whole reason for removing the cable.

Then everyone will claim one and you’ll increase waste.

The whole reason they’re removing the cable is because of pressure from governments not to waste materials including it.

Because there’s very little overlap between people who need them and people who know that it’s an option.

The people claiming them would primarily be people like me who do know how it works, know that I probably won’t use it, but am going to take it anyways, because it’s free and because it is within the realm of possibility that I need another cable as a temporary replacement until I get another one.

That’s ugly as hell too.

I haven’t played much of the older ones, but I really enjoyed Rifts Apart. It’s beautiful, but it’s also mechanically super polished and fluid, and while the storytelling isn’t really my style, I think they do it reasonably well.

If they were free on demand for people who asked with their purchase:

None of the people who need them would get them.

Most of the ones that did get handed out would still be to people who never used them.

That’s what they actually did if you read the article. They don’t pass through the eyes the same when you’re on a keyboard now.

You should do your research on how wake words work. They literally are only capable of identifying the selected words and they do an obscene amount of training to do so efficiently, because actually processing all the audio your phone is exposed to can’t possibly be done in a reasonable way.

That’s not my point. Most games do install fine from the disk.

He’s talking about playing from the disk, too, and that’s a problem.

They still have to install.

Disks are too slow.

It’s not “complexity”.

It’s that end users have no interest in paying for individual songs.

Choose between:

Entirely fabricated

or

On their own hardware, that isn’t a smartphone, because they don’t make them.

Both iOS and Android make it abundantly clear when your mic is hot and when apps have access to it. It’s not possible to listen undetected.

RCS is the new MMS. It’s the official “text message” replacement.

It’s shit and until the standard becomes not shit, messages between Android and iMessage are still going to suck. Almost all the stuff people think is RCS are the proprietary Google extensions that only work through Google’s servers.

But they’re supporting it because it’s the next iteration of “texting” carrier wise.

No, it’s not. “Your phone is listening to you” is an idiotic myth.

If the alternative is corporations violating privacy even more? Absolutely.

The absolute maximum information it’s legal for corporations should be a dozen orders of magnitude less than they do right now, and asking a single user for an ID without a clear, bulletproof cause should be an instant corporate death penalty with every bit of data they’ve ever collected erased.

Privacy is a fundamental right and you shouldn’t be allowed to operate anywhere if you don’t respect it absolutely.

Usually “expensive money” means that it’s hard to borrow.

“Devalued” refers to purchasing power. “How much food will $1 buy me?”

They’re describing different things. In terms of the economic relationships that result in the current scenario, I’m not even going to try. Ignoring that we don’t really know and a lot of traditional economics rely on the assumption that actors are rational (which we now know is absurd), I’m far from an expert in macro-economic theory. Systems are complicated.

Yeah, autocorrect is bad enough without the extra emphasis on it with swipe.