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  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • You can tell that this is just a cash grab, as opposed to a technical or administrative motivation, by the mere fact that Simple/Select Choice plans will be migrated to Magenta, while Magenta plans will be migrated to Go5G. So Magenta isn’t going anywhere for the foreseeable future.

    Also, of course, by the fact that you can opt out of the “upgrade.”

    I switched to T-Mobile a few years ago and, coming from AT&T, it had been hands-down a positive experience. More features, unlimited data, better customer service, better speeds, all for less than what I was paying AT&T. I even have a line or two that was added for free, no strings attached.

    But then there were the many data breaches and the announcement they would add a surcharge for credit card payment. And now this.

    Looks like I came on board just in time to witness the enshitification




  • What about “INSTALL A DIFFERENT OS!!!”? Is that better? There are reasonably two others to choose from, and one of those doesn’t require the purchase of expensive equipment and arguably a path into an even more controlled ecosystem.

    And your analogy is way off. This isn’t a malfunction of Windows that a technician is going to fix, never to be seen again. This is more like a rep from the car manufacturer meeting you at your car every morning to ask if you want to install their factory upgrade. You tell them that you never want to see them again, so next week they start sending a different representative. You have no other options.

    Well, except getting a free car that doesn’t send a rep.



  • For most utilities (water, electricity), there’s a relatively linear relationship between the tangible value provided (energy used, water dispensed) and the cost to provide it (coal burned, water sourced/treated). Even for wind- or hydro-powered electricity, the amount that everybody uses has a proportional amount of wear on the system and consequent required maintenance.

    But not so much for ISPs. Instead, you’re basically paying for a “fictional” amount (speed) of a non-tangible product. Granted, there is a linear relationship to the amount of electricity the ISP uses to provide each bit, but it’s negligible.

    Instead, what you’re paying for with internet is essentially to recoup the fixed costs of the providers equipment. They do need to upgrade every so often to accommodate more capacity and faster speeds, but this is proportional to speeds provided and not data volume used.



  • The --hold feature was introduced with snapd v2.58 which was released as recently as Dec 1, so less than 9 months ago. So I would consider this a relatively new feature.

    Furthermore, as best as I can tell from the documentation, there isn’t even a way to configurably hold updates in general or for a specific package like can be done with apt-preferences; refresh.hold only allows 90 days out.

    I think it is a perfectly valid criticism that the snap developers didn’t implement this feature at all until well into the life of the product and then, even then, done begrudgingly at best evidenced by the minimal implementation.

    Now, I feel like I did my research, but feel free to let me know if there’s something I can do better or if you have any other general life advice for me.