Hutch

Powerbeats Pro have hooks over the ears and only get used when a wire would be intrusive such as workouts. I don’t much like them but they are hard to lose. They’re notorious for not charging properly and worked much better on Apple than Android, but at least I still both left and right buds.

Earbuds are worse, it’s always one that’s dead because it didn’t sit properly in the charging case.

My experience: via iPhone 8 + Apple adaptor, it couldn’t drive big cans, and even for earbuds they lose significant volume. My phone has the 3.5mm jack, and it can deafen me. This matters more when hooking up to sound systems because it raises the noise floor.

It’s better than nothing, but it’s not good. I don’t know about the USB-C alternatives though - I can only hope they are better than the ‘lightning’ connector ones.

No headphone jack, no sale. I have three hard criteria:

headphone socket usb-c charging expandable storage

I’ll stick with my Sony. Two-out-of-three isn’t good enough.

I know I’m probably in the minority here but… I’m a desk jockey.

I don’t use Lemmy on a handheld. I didn’t use Reddit that way either. The web interface works well enough for me, or rather whatever lemmy.ca uses is good when set to vaporwave-light. Try the different themes, some are better than others.

The pagination though… it’s a little short for my taste but I prefer it over doomscrolling.

I think I’ll stay on Mastodon. I don’t like the Firefish UI. I haven’t tried Akkoma yet.

This is good in some ways and I welcome the BBC to the fediverse as an important step to universal acceptance. It’s far better than using flaky bridges from other social networks.

What is disappointing is the very small range of content provided so far, Radio 4 & 5 plus some curiosities. I’d hoped for the excellent 6 Music channel. Let’s see if they keep up with the sports in particular on 5. I’m glad that it’s divided by station / topic so I can follow only what interests me.

I too would like more national broadcasters to get onboard. CBC I’m sure have some interesting content to share with the world, as do ABC, RTE, NZBC, others? I’d love to have culture from across the globe, which is the real value for Mastodon for me rather than as a news feed.

As someone who has had to actively contact an AI company and expressly deny use of digital images on our website, I’m confident there are no boundaries with what they scrape from the Internet. They don’t have any respect and slurp up everything in their path, which unfortunately leads to only one possible outcome - a culturally desensitised dataset. It will become the ‘neutral average’ of the internet, banal in many ways and biased in others. Don’t expect anything that resembles Canadian sentiment to come out of any non-Canadian AI (Same problem but different locale for me - UK/Eire).

Any that’s before it starts eating it’s own tail - there’s pictures of generative images where they fed data back in, and it’s as interesting as it is amusing and horrific. Keeping the data clean is an unsolved problem because it’s hard to differentiate organic and synthetic sources.

All of this pales into insignificance with (as far as I know) all AI lacking the ability to admit when it doesn’t know. It just makes it up from nothing.

I have access to ChatGPT, Bard, etc. I haven’t found a use for any of it yet (software engineering) where I trust it enough and the experiments I’ve run have proved this, for me personally. It’s a novelty, a toy, it will evolve. As for the Online News Act, I’m conflicted. I believe in a free and open Internet, which goes against both restrictive legislation and against the likes of Google and Meta who abuse their position in the online landscape. My instinct is I’d rather have the Online News Act than Bard as the publisher should own their content, so good luck with that.