Mozilla “sold their soul to Google”? What did I miss?

Your iPad sounds pretty broken, that’s not normal.

So you’re talking about SaaS / business tooling then? Again though, that’s just one of many segments of software, which was my point.

Also, even in that market it’s just not true to say that there’s no incentive for it to work well. If some new business tool gets deployed and the workforce has problems with it to the point of measurable inefficiency, of course that can lead to a different tool being chosen. It’s even pretty common practice for large companies to reach out to previous users of a given product through consultancy networks or whatever to assess viability before committing to anything.

Then we’re very far away from the 21st century though.

I don’t really get this point. Of course there’s a financial motive for a lot of software to work well. There are many niches of software that are competitive, so there’s a very clear incentive to make your product work better than the competition.

Of course there are cases in which there’s a de-facto monopoly or customers are locked in to a particular offering for whatever reason, but it’s not like that applies to all software.

I gotta say mRNA vaccines. It’s not technically a 21st century invention, but much of the work to make them viable started in the early 2000s. The speed at which the COVID vaccine got developed and widely deployed was honestly incredible and a massive W for humanity. I remember thinking a vaccine would be years away.

Please explain how Google would get my location if I don’t run a phone with Google location services and / or don’t allow Google services and apps to access my location. Sure, they may know where you are roughly based on your IP, but that’s just within a very broad region, and can easily be obfuscated by a VPN. Google siphons a shitton of information from everywhere they can, but it’s not like they’ve secretly implanted everyone with a tracking chip either… And neither can they get around any device’s OS-level location permission system.

Vast majority of people do, and on iOS and Android these days turning it “off” really just keeps it from connecting to peripherals. It’s still scanning even when “off”.

Tbh the reason for that is probably just that IMDB is wildly more popular

How are day one patches a “scam” exactly? Maybe they’re inconvenient, but calling it a “scam” is a bit of a stretch. There’s really nothing malicious about the idea at all. Also VAC bans, really?

• privatized, poorly regulated health insurance.