This. I have a mobile workstation with a 12th gen i7, 32gb RAM, and NVME SSD but it’s not uncommon to be waiting multiple minutes for boot due to all the pre-installed spyware from IT. It takes up half the RAM at all times and severely limits the performance for many non-whitelisted apps to the point I can’t even run Firefox smoothly on it anymore.
Amap doesn’t support English unfortunately. Neither does Baidu. So it’s about as useful in the US as Google Maps is in China.
Edit: Apparently as of late January 2025 it supports English. This is SO USEFUL for foreigners visiting China, it was so annoying to navigate before without being able to read Chinese characters.
This also is under the assumption you’ve met your deductable for the year already which for many HDHP can sometimes be hard.
Their access to news is controlled and for some topics all available news is what we’d call propaganda. Particularly anything about Japan or the Taiwan issue. Most people I know there realize this to an extent but without any other information do still believe the core idea even if skeptical of details.
But at the same time I’d argue there’s no such thing as a population that’s not propagandized. In the US the big news corporations only will present views favorable to their profitability and continued growth. Sure they disagree with eachother, but it’s still always a pro-business view. State news from Russia is (I’d argue rightly) not available on many US platforms to discourage it’s influence for example.
As a portion of median income it’s still far far better than the out of pocket costs in the US (just like pretty much every other country on earth)
There does come a point where the inconvenience slowly moves the masses to other platforms. It’s not that difficult to access the full internet in China with any data-only esim being unrestricted by default and many VPNs working just fine. But it’s just difficult enough to do this that the masses don’t. Piracy functions the same way, if piracy were truly broad in scale then it would be taken much more seriously.
Conveniently just in time for Trump to blame it on the Democrats even though he started the process during his previous term.
Generally it’s not too hard to disable the smart TV part of it and just use HDMI for TVs running Android. But on Roku TVs for whatever reason you need to connect them to the internet and a Roku account at least once to unlock the picture settings. Hardware features of a TV like brightness adjustment have no business relying on some random server.
A3 TDI? I have one of those and so many breakdowns in the first year. Luckily the warranty they were forced to add from having cheated on emissions covered all repairs. Haven’t had any major issues for two years now on it thankfully, I’m not sure I’d recommend it generally but realistically with what you save on fuel cost the extra long term repair cost balances it out a bit.
WSL is sufficient for many Windows users and developers without privacy concerns motivating them to switch to a full Linux distro.
I miss the old topic specific internet forums so badly, but having tons of different accounts made the barrier to entry high so I understand why they died out.
Offsite backup is not optional for anything important. It’s worth paying for AWS or literally any other online storage solution for that copy. You don’t want a natural disaster to lead to the loss of all your life’s photos for example.
I also personally don’t recommend doing your own software for anything related to backups, you can’t test edge cases easily and it could easily lead to loss of data. I once used an app that attempted to manage its own backups delete it’s online backup when it lost its local data as it attempted to back up the blank local data.
The ads on over the air programming are so so terrible. And even with a great antenna the many channels aren’t exactly the highest quality content even if they didn’t have ads.
YouTube has taken the place of over the air TV and for good reason.
Dental and vision are never included in US health insurance and operate on a totally different confusing insurance framework. They’re only available through separate plans and have their own deductables and terms. But unlike health insurance the premiums are generally orders of magnitude lower for both vision and dental.
The problem I’ve had is that the maximum benefit is typically in the range of $2k-$3k/yr for dental which is quickly hit if you have any oral surgery needs. Unlike with healthcare I don’t feel ripped off when paying for dental/vision since the few hundred dollars per year covers preventative care visits too.
Without a distro to rally behind I’m personally somewhat skeptical. Ubuntu was the best shot we had but since switching everything over to SNAPs it’s on the slow side. With the number of Windows ads and early end of support for Windows 10 there’s a real opportunity for desktop Linux, but until there’s a well supported distro that genuinely doesn’t require using the terminal I can’t see there being mass adoption.
I work in tech and needed to do this as part of onboarding after receiving an offer. Asking during the interview is a little weird but if they’ve had problems where their desired candidate didn’t have the necessary documents then it makes sense. I wouldn’t assume they’re wanting to see your house, they’re likely just wanting to make sure you won’t need H1B sponsorship to get the necessary documents to complete the I-9.
Tasker has a similar companion app, it just doesn’t work with as many things on my Pixel 8 Pro as Macrodroid. The only phone automation I rely on anymore is Wifi hotspot toggling based on connected Bluetooth devices, which Tasker is incapable of now even with the companion app. I really don’t know how Macrodroid does it.
Of the automation apps my preferred UI Automate with its flows. It allows the complexity of Tasker without becoming unreadable as the automations become big. It’s harder to edit and even worse without root than Tasker.
It’s still a cat and mouse game between Google and playintegrityfix/next. If you need to rely on your phone at any time rooting isn’t really an option anymore. I don’t see Google changing to be less hostile toward device automation unfortunately.
We really need a 3rd competitor or better workaround. It would be cool if you could have a virtual Android device inside a rooted device to run apps requiring safetynet. But that’s way way way easier said than done.
Starting yesterday unfortunately Chrome and not Firefox. I just need a working web browser and haven’t had the time to figure out what is wrong with my Firefox installation. I have no clue why but after updating to firefox 135 it eats up all my RAM (20GB+) and uses a significant amount of CPU while idle with only the process monitor tab open. Attempting to browse is unreasonably slow. Refreshing Firefox did nothing, despite now having a Firefox installation which isn’t logged into anything and has no extensions. So I figured that if I’m going to deal with a browser not logged into anything it might as well be Chrome for a bit until I can figure out what the problem is since that’s what all of the internet is designed to work with lately.