Weird, who doesn’t want to buy a new computer because reasons, in this economy

Fine for what? My 8gb laptop was unusable on win11, swapping even at the empty desktop.

In the current economy people would buy the $100 game preinstalled on the SSD, then format the drive to use it with something else

On PC the majority of “physical” games is just a steam code in a cheap plastic box. One of the reasons no retailers are selling PC games

Didn’t they stole also from Alibaba? I read somewhere that if you asked in Chinese to Claude opus 4.8 which model was using the api (the web service injects an hidden prompt with bias), it replied it was based on Alibaba qwen 3.6

This seems to imply that before genai TikTok had quality videos and not handcrafted slop?

It’s a nice quality of life feature, you enter a fresh vehicle instead of scorching hot After being parked for hours in the summer sun. But I would never pay a €150/yr subscription for that, fuck them

Why they do this:

After the first three years, Volkswagen is charging ev customers €150/year to see the charge level on the app, remotely start the air conditioning, schedule charge and so on.

Any tinkerer is thinking “well, if I am paying this extortion just to see the charge level on the app, then I want to exfiltrate my data in home assistant or similar, getting better stats and so on”

So they blocked the API with Google play integrity signatures

Now, instead of spending money on engineering ways to block uncertified devices, they could have simply introduced an official API with rate limits and stuff.

The fact that they noticed all those “unauthorized accesses” it’s prove that people just want to pay for a lightweight API access, not a 250mb app that takes 4 minutes to remotely start the air conditioning

After all, we’re talking for €150/year for accessing the data of a €1 iot sim card using 0.0001€ of compute time. There should be enough margin for that.

The problem is that everyone assumes you have WhatsApp.

You take clothes to the laundry? The “your order is done” notification is sent via WhatsApp

Any kind of work stuff is also on WhatsApp

You order food delivery? WhatsApp

Amazon started to send delivery notifications via WhatsApp instead of email/sms

And luckily meta is charging businesses 5 cents for messages via API or otherwise even otp codes would be via whatsapp

At least here, being reachable only on signal means being a digital exile

Because in my country historically the telecom companies are charging 0.30€ per SMS (text) and 2€ per MMS (text with photo).

So WhatsApp when they launched with their “1€/lifetime” offer on the iPhone 3GS they were the right app at the right time and became the de facto replacement for any kind of messaging. It’s insane how basically overnight they replaced msn messenger and Skype because it was so convenient (Microsoft never did a smartphone client for msn messenger, only unofficial ones. It was available on dumbphones but it used SMS from the plan to send/receive, nobody used it because you needed to be a millionaire to afford it)

SMS now in my country is only for receiving OTP codes, for the rest is WhatsApp, because still in 2026 the telecoms are still charging 2€ for each MMS sent and nobody wants to risk huge bills. This includes iMessage because if a chat suddenly goes green and you didn’t notice, it costs dozens of euro

imo not at all, like for the recent github copilot enshittification

users will groan and complain for a month then move to a different VS code fork, one year later nobody would even be able to remember the shape of the icon

They don’t care at all about the vs code fork (probably his colossus data center with 89% vacancy can vibe code a clone in a few hours)

They care about the subscribed users and how they can enshittify their experience by removing access to Claude opus and introducing grok the Nazi vibe coder

It turns out that in modern versions (for Mac) they inserted a timebomb that disables the license check.

“Sorry the software now is EOL we can’t send an update to disable the timebomb that we set five years ago”

Users of office 2021 are luckier (for now) because it goes EOL in October, so they can receive the June patch that moves the July timebomb forward another five years

I bought it 20 years ago it was already yellow lol

Probably it’s like the Nintendo 3DS, the user facing clock is just an offset to the official internal timer, so when the user changes time, it’s just an aesthetic change and has no effect to time/date game unlock mechanics (mostly lPokemon games). When CMOS dies, internal clock resets to 1970, a clearly invalid date where all the signing certificates are invalid, and the user can’t set internal clock without hacking the console

To be fair, there are tio many arcade boards from that exact era that have draconian DRM measures where if the CMOS dies, the decryption key is irreversibly lost, and it becomes ewaste