TIL, I did not think it was possible to use SMS with another app on iOS.

But will you still receive SMS messages in the iMessage app? AFAIK, there’s no way to move SMS to another app, like Whatsapp, and delete iMessage from the phone completely.

Apple is not stoping anyone from using them.

You can’t change your default messenger on iOS, so they’re not making it easy to stop using iMessage completely.

I have a friend who use iMessage on their Mac and will check that more often than their phone. If I text them during work hours, it’ll be hours before hearing back from them. Turns out, from what I’m told, iMessage on Mac has a setting to not show SMS on the desktop, so my messages were only going to their phone, which wasn’t checked as frequently. I guess when you enable SMS, notifications get messed up, and read SMS on your iPhone aren’t synced, and show up as unread (or something like that). In anycase, SMS got turned off at some point.

Obviously, none of this is really my problem, but it’s frustrating, more than just the color of the bubbles. The Network effect is real, and asking someone to switch to a new platform is not as easy as it sounds.

Exactly, either setting themselves as an alternative to Twilio, or to be acquired by them. Companies will pay more than $2/month/user for customer engagement on all platforms.

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”

It’s obvious they’re restricting the quality but it could be that they implemented the MMS handling in 2008, when other phones could only support 3gp and the carriers couldn’t handle high bandwidth. I’d bet they haven’t bothered to update it since, and do the absolute bare minimum to keep it compliant with the carriers.

It’s been more than 100 years since an incumbent didn’t run for a second term and their party maintained the presidency (excluding Calvin Coolidge who technically didn’t run two terms, but basically did). No one knows what would happen if he were not to run, but history has shown that it’ll probably lead to a Republican win. It’s easier to predict the outcome having the incumbent run, and probably against the same person last time. Not saying it’s the best decision, but it is the most logical one.

They’re a for-profit company. All of their new features are aimed at increasing revenue, either by introducing ad based content (and growing the user base that watches ad based content), or new features behind a paywall. The only way for those bugs to get fixed is if they risk reducing potential revenue.

Made a guarantee that if they shut down within the next 10 years, every game you play will be refunded in full.

This would have given people confidence, but really doesn’t reflect on Google as a whole, and just reinforces that they as a company will kill things at a moment’s notice.

I think in addition to all your points, they could have distanced Stadia from Google, and announced a new gaming company under the Alphabet umbrella. The hardware bundles they were selling with Chromecasts probably wouldn’t have been a thing, but I’m not sure if that would have been a bad thing. Having stadia as a completely separate entity from Google may have given it the breathing room it needed to get a good user base, without the stigma of google killing products.

I misremembered, it was when she was secretary of state:

https://www.theregister.com/2009/07/13/firefox_and_us_state_department/

I don’t know what your quote is from, is it chatgpt?

Remember when government websites only worked on IE6, well into the late 2000s? I even remember Hillary Clinton proposing that government employees only be allowed to use Internet Explorer when she was a senator.

You’re correct that they’re not doing live transcoding when a video is played. That’s way too expensive in every regard. There are still ways to embed ads dynamically into the video without requiring live transcoding. They likely have 5-10 qualities they encode to, and segment the video into 10s segments, so a 5 minute video would be cut into 30 segments, and then each of those files encoded to multiple qualities upon upload.

That way when playing, if your Internet gets slow, the player can seamlessly downgrade to another quality. These small files concatenated together appear like one long video. Adding some ads served from the same servers as the content could be done dynamically for each request and be difficult to block without impacting the video content delivery, since you can’t have uBlock Origin block the domain hosting the content.

Realistically, they probably don’t do this approach because you don’t know if the ad was loaded because of buffering, but never viewed, so the ad network gets less metrics and therefore the ads are less valuable. Also, I would bet the content upload and distribution team are completely separate from the ad team, so that cross collaboration is more difficult to implement.

Biden has been the only one to win the presidency against Trump. If you’re expecting Trump to be the nominee, Biden is the safe best.

If you’re expecting change and only focus on and vote during Presidential elections, you’re gonna have a bad time. Congress is in charge of all the budgetary concerns you’re talking about. Before the shit show of the current Congress, they passed the inflation reduction act which is huge for average Americans.

Even in the limited cases where Biden can make meaningful changes in the lives of Americans, like his plan for student loan forgiveness, the Republican nominated Supreme Court judges blocked it.

If your state has closed primaries, make sure you’re registered and vote during primaries. This is the only way progressive candidates will make it on the ballot.

As for the news, try listening to NPR Now when you have 5 minutes a day and go from there.

Shit, I can’t afford that

Signal allocates $6 million annually to telecommunications companies for SMS messages, utilized to send registration codes for new Signal accounts. This expense has escalated due to rising charges by telecommunications firms, compensating for the global decline in SMS usage.

Spending more than 10% of their expenses on sending SMS registration codes seems insane.

Anecdotally, having to have to take the stairs down during fire drills, the number of steps between floors 15 -> 14 is the same number of steps from 14 -> 12.

I think it’s simply that 13 is considered unlucky, so people won’t rent/buy those properties, and it’s cheaper to renumber the floors than to risk the floor being unoccupied or below market value.

North Korea? You don’t even have to commit a crime and you go to a forced labor prison.

No no no, you’re thinking of the Army. The police are trained to shoot first, cover up the shooting, find/make up past crime the victim did to justify the shooting, get acquitted by a grand jury, and receive a full pension later.

This is a good reminder to designate someone access to your accounts if you don’t log in after a set amount of time (and now less than 2 years). If you die and someone is relying on you to pay the bills or whatnot, they will need access to that information.

You can also have it set up so that all your data is wiped.