What's interesting here is not that Buttigieg is thoughtful and introspective. I mean, he is, but what strikes me here is the extent to which Hasan Minhaj has grown. Jon Stewart is some sort of journalism whisperer. Bring in comedians, then teach them news.

Who doesn't watch John Oliver every week? Who doesn't watch Stephen Colbert? Dude fucking found people who weren't ready yet but saw potential. I didn't like any of them on The Daily Show, but he's doing something we don't see.

Wow, is this cycle doing some interesting things. I've never really much cared one way or the other about Schwarzenegger, but this impressed me, as it meets me where I am:

“I will always be an American before I am a Republican,” he wrote. “That’s why, this week, I am voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I’m sharing it with all of you because I think there are a lot of you who feel like I do. You don’t recognise our country. And you are right to be furious.”

Some days, continuing to read the news can be stressful.

It's always weird trying to determine if things like this will be a flop or a serious societal issue.

Full disclosure: the author is a colleague I've known for almost two decades. But his takes have often inspired mine: There's always someone who knows more than you.

Archive link

I struggled with which community to put this in, but ultimately: When a presidential candidate tries to stop a movie about himself from being released, that's politics.

I've got my ticket for the first showing in town!

In this case, Facebook's 99-page user policy. The results, embedded in the story, are worth a listen. This is is some serious sci-fi shit compared to ChatGPT.

Archive link ... unfortunately, as I feared, the audio didn't work for me. Here is the direct link to the clip.

I edited the title because people thought this was about actual podcasts. It just generates conversational audio about the content.

Guessing they don't pray. Star Wars reference aside, learning about rampant Android piracy really made be rethink the pay devs receive for their effort. Per Business of Apps:

• Consumers spent $47 billion on Google Play apps and games in 2023
• Over 113 billion apps and games were downloaded on Google Play last year
• 2.61 billion apps and games are available to download on Google Play
• The top grossing app on Google Play in 2023 was Google One, a cloud storage service Instagram was the most downloaded app on Google Play last year, with 521 million downloads

The rest of the report is paywalled, so the number I was curious about -- MAUs (ideally DAUs, but that's a lot of time in Calc) for paid apps with at most 10,000 downloads -- is probably out there, but it's a Beehaw post. That report was the only result on DDG's first page relevant to the query "google play store apps by downloads."

All this to say, Apple's 30% and, well, walled garden that covers piracy to a sufficient extent is starting to look like the better choice for my next phone. And I have been an ardent avoider of Apple products since college.

I buil(t) my rigs, with every component suited to my needs (or budget; YMMV -- winning an i7-8086K gave me a lot of breathing room on the GPU side), but my life on a 24VDC electrical system has convinced me that a laptop need to replace my rig, and Apple seems to have my needed "lots of power with incredible battery life" nailed. But I now have to pick a final product that I didn't build and thus have no idea how to troubleshoot a hardware problem.

Except, I'm a light gamer, building factories and such. Being on ARM doesn't work.

I don't want to be in the iPhone-x86 crowd. Most things are doable, but hardly seamless. But giving up Factorio is a bridge too far.

I'm no longer seduced by Google's lie that app makers are rolling in the dough when it's actually slave wages supporting freeloaders. Sure, this is only one example, but as the issue is with Google policy, it's likely representative. That's why I wanted to see the figures.

Part of me thinks this rant could have also worked in Politics. 🤣