Xodium Dot Net

October is here, and as such, it marks almost one year of the 17 Pro Max's tenure with me. As such, I wanted to write a bit about my impressions over the last year, especially since so many people told me the upgrade wasn't worth it versus the 15 Pro Max it replaced. To spoil it, sort of: This phone was worth it. Very much so.    Worth it such that I went back on something I said on social media, that I was done buying Apple stuff just because of Current Events. What broke me on that front was my 15PM getting ever worse at doing basic stuff without suffering a hot flash + looking across the aisle and realizing that Apple sucks ass, but good lord,  Google is so much worse.  Especially with how they're pushing AI garbage. Anyway...   I don't know what to say without just launching into a gushfest about this phone. The 17 Pro Max (which from this point will be intermittently abbreviated as "17PM" as I don't feel like typing the full thing out every damn time...

Originally, I wanted to name this piece "Why I Hate Android", a reference to a piece I read long ago by parislemon over on Tumblr. While that post doesn't really cover the same transgressions I'm going to talk about here, it does--in hindsight--lay some groundwork for how Android became what it is today, and why I hate it oh-so-much.   When I first jumped into Android in 2008, it really felt like Android was marketed as the choice for those who wanted freedom. Apple was the closed off walled garden, Android was the wild west, where you could do whatever you damn well please (and even list apps in the Market so long as you pay a $20 one-time fee!) and no one (besides maybe the carriers and some OEMs) was going to tell you no. In fact, there was the famous Andy Rubin tweet that really summed up what early Android meant to us:       As someone who was an avid jailbreaker back in the day, Android was a breath of fresh air. All the tweaks and mods you can dream of, and ...

I want to get something crystal clear, here, before I begin this piece. By no means should this be construed as me saying I want people like Zuckerberg to get off scot free for all the crap they've done to the modern web. Absolutely not. I want nothing more than for these chucklefucks who ran Web 2.0 into the ground to be held accountable for the garbage that flowed forth from their respective companies.   These ghouls are the very people that delivered us into this crappy society we now enjoy where technology is no longer seen as a net good, but rather a net  bad.  These people are the reason I wax nostalgic for the tech landscape of the mid-00s. I carry a vehement distaste for these people. Do not think I ever, ever want them to get off easy for anything.   That said, I think these social media bans going around are stupid, and also  fail to solve the problem. Worse, they're being used as a means for government overreach, and on that alone I do not support the...

A sentiment I've seen amongst friends and folks in my social circles is that hey, AI isn't all bad! That there are some redeeming factors to it and some things it is actually good at if you look past what the cancerous US AI companies are doing and look at open source models + models developed by other countries.    I will admit: I can personally see some merit to this. While I vehemently hate AI, I do acknowledge that yes, it CAN have applications (specific models tailored to a specific task rather than trying to make a "it only does everything, badly" model). I do acknowledge that local models (on hardware YOU own) are nowhere near as problematic as the ones put forth by the likes of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.   However,  the time is not right for these conversations. No one and I mean  no one  is ready for them to happen. Not now. These are the types of conversations to be had when the threat has passed and the danger is over. As of right now, ...

And a hearty fuck you, Sony. Ever since the big announcement that Sony is going to completely kill physical media on the PS5, I've been feeling a bunch of emotions toward this. None of them good. Mostly, I thought back to the Xbox One's announcement. Which Sony famously dunked on, hardcore. What's interesting about that announcement, however, is that Microsoft clearly planned around that whole dumb thing they were trying to do with the Xbox One, and said as such: "Publishers, should they allow you to, will let you resell your game licenses/trade in toward another game, digitally." This is laughable, taken in a vacuum. Publishers hate us. They'd never allow this type of thing, ever. They want to milk everyone for all they're worth. But in the context of Sony's 2026 announcement, shockingly, that's more than Sony bothered to give us when announcing the end of physical games. Microsoft at least left us a ladder, even if the use of that ladder was...

So, today, YouTube announced that they were raising the threshold for the YouTube Partner Program (y'know, the thing that allows you to monetize stuff and use monetization features) for people not already in the program (as of February 2017)  to 8000 hours of watch time (or 20 million views over 90 days if you're going for Shorts).   In a rare show of mercy, it was announced that if you're already in the program, you'll be grandfathered in under the old rules, which is 4000 watch hours (with 3000 unlocking SOME of the monetization functionality, like superchats I believe). But 1.I don't trust YouTube to remain merciful forever, and they'll either stop honoring this  or  find some weird criteria to begin forcing grandfathered people out, and 2. This doesn't help the person struggling to hit that 4000 hour milestone and maintain it, either.   It's pretty much YouTube saying "last chopper out of 'nam is in January 2027, and if you can't grab on...