Xodium Dot Net

I'm writing this, roughly two days into a self-imposed hiatus from most social media. I'm active in  some  places, but for the most part I've pulled back from a good chunk of my main use social media, and that means Bluesky, Mastodon, and Discord. Spoiler: This is going to continue for an yet-to-be-determined amount of time.   As of these last few years, world suck has increased exponentially. My mental state has declined rapidly. Mostly because of generative AI and the sheer volume of evil it has allowed. Worse, because I consider myself to be an artist (a hobbyist photog who has done some professional work here and there), we were one of genAI's first victims, with boosters who don't know what art even is demanding we adopt it, or get "left behind".   I've even seen people I'd consider to be friends say stuff like this. That human artists are "slow and expensive". Nevermind the fact that creatives have never been paid what they're w...

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...

Been seeing this one bounce around the rumor mill and reddit and personally, I'm kind of tired of it. Because I'd bet a Caniac Combo that there is no supposed 20th Anniversary iPhone, simply because there's absolutely zero precedent for it in today's Apple.   These rumors swirled back in 2017, too, and I think what John Gruber wrote about it then is still relevant today:  "Apple is not going to make a special edition of any product — let alone the iPhone, their most important product — just to mark an anniversary. Don’t tell me about the 20th Anniversary Macintosh  — that was a product from the old Apple that was heading toward bankruptcy, and a perfect example of why they shouldn’t do something special to mark something as arbitrary as an anniversary." That was almost ten years ago. And sure, one might argue that Apple did in fact introduce such an iPhone in the iPhone X, but I really, strongly believe that the X name was more of a nod to Mac OS X, or spec...

I think I've spoken at length in other places about how I am a very staunch AI hater and covered everything I hate about how the tech is presented to us today. But I want to take a second to talk about  how  I became this way, because I wasn't always like this! Oh no, I thought the whole "I fed the Bee Movie script into a bot and had them make a sequel" thing that perpetuated the early era of generative AI was...amusing, but easily ignored at worst.   In fact, if ChatGPT just kinda sat over there and existed, I probably wouldn't have hated it. Hated the people that used it to "well, acksually" people and be annoying? Of course, but that's no real fault of the technology. Technology is a tool, and takes on the will of the people using it and controlling it.   And therein lies the problem.    At some point, the entire tech industry saw ChatGPT and fell into a collective psychosis and decided that this,  this  is the next big thing, and that we must ...

(I've already written about this over on Tumblr but I wanted to talk about it here too, and maybe type it out when I'm not sickly and half asleep.)   This summer marks an important milestone for one of the longest-running pieces of equipment I have in my collection: I will have had my trusty Nikon D7200 for  ten whole years . Still on its original battery, too! And still going strong short of a dead pixel developing on the sensor. Which is honestly fine in this day and age of AI making things look too perfect.   After thinking on it, I think this is also the year I retire it.    Not completely, mind, I used air quotes in the title for a reason.   But as far as bringing the camera with me to events or places where there might even be the chance of running into other people? It's staying home and in its place I'll either bring my Mavica or RX100M2, or just use my phone. Is it because a DSLR is unwieldy? Nah. Do I hate being stuck with a 35mm prime? Also nah....

In case you missed it, Plex (the company that makes the media server software) is again raising their prices, by a drastic amount. Some time ago, they already raised their prices, from $80ish to $250, while simultaneously killing off remote streaming for free accounts. Which in and of itself is absurd because none of that streaming data is being passed through Plex servers, they're just handling discovery and authentication. ...but I digress. That was already a pretty big jump in price. Now? They're doing it again! Except this time, they're tripling the price a second time, going from $250 all the way to an absolutely asinine $750. Yes. You heard that right. The better part of a full grand. Anyone who can read between the lines here knows that, effectively, Plex Pass Lifetime dies on July 1st. It's a classic move. Technically, yes, they still offer it. But the pricing is so absurd that no one is going to buy in at that price. It also has the effect of goading people ...

A short one, because it's exactly as it says on the tin:  As of iOS 26.4, Apple has seemingly fixed the Music app's search function so that it no longer defaults to Apple Music. In fact, in my case, they've done more than fix it, they've  improved  it. Now if you have Apple Music shut off in settings (Settings > Apps > Music) there's only  one  search tab remaining: Your Library. Radio? Gone. I don't use Radio ever, so this is a net improvement for me. But because of this, Music now defaults to Your Library. Which for someone who doesn't really do streaming (and on the rare case that I do, YouTube Music is what I use), this is amazing. There are still little keyholes through which Apple Music pokes through (like the tiles in search, which are annoyingly still there without a subscription), but given this has been a problem since iOS 18.0?  A win's a win. Given Apple totally doesn't have to give a toss about the few of us still using Music for l...

So, I am very much anti-AI. I hate it, I think it is no more than some techbro-fueled plagiarism machine that only exists because techbros don't want to pay people what their worth and think this wonderful black box of misinformation they created will replace everyone and do everything and will throw unfathomable amounts of money and natural resources at it to realize that goal.   It is peak enshittification, at least as the AI bros present it.    However,  the thing with being against something is being informed and not irrational about it, and yes, I  do  see some uses in AI tech (that don't align with what the AI bros and boosters are pushing on us without our consent). To try and be more nuanced in my opinion, I have a tier list in my brain that I use to classify generative AI stuff and whether it's something I'm going to give someone shit for, or if I'll let them pass and not think less of them.   This is that tier list, at least as best as I can ...

Apple did a thing I never thought they'd do and they made a budget MacBook and called it the Neo. (Hey, AlphaSmart fans...)   Personally? I think it's pretty neat for the target market. It's $600 USD, $700 to double the storage and give you Touch ID. $100 less if you buy them via education discount.   It's a pretty cheap way to get a MacBook that gets the job done. People have been sneering at the use of an iPhone chip in these when I think people forget just how powerful the A-series processors have become. The A18 Pro in the Neo compares very favorably to the M1 in the MacBook Air just judging on Geekbench 6 scores:   A18 Pro (iPhone 16 Pro) 3445 Single/8624 Multi 32574 Metal Score   M1 (MacBook Air, 2020) 2347 Single/8342 Multi 33148 Metal Score   This is an A18 Pro  in an iPhone,  mind you. In a MacBook with greater thermal headroom? It'll probably perform even better. Going by these numbers the only thing the A18 really trails on is GPU performanc...