#i don't use apple products

[since-we-saw-vienna]

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IPad sketch of dsmp tubbo :]

I plan on uploading more since I'm using my iPad a lot more now

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[th3e-m4ng0]

apple users, i've been wanting to get an ipad tablet for some months now, but i'm not exactly sure on which one to buy (eventually. i'm still saving up) since i'd only use it for notetaking and drawing.. which do you use and would you recommend it?

[kerosene-saint]

god I fucking hate apple products

[trainsinanime]

The Apple vs. Twitter thing is another one of those "two statement can and should coexist" situations. Funny how they keep cropping up; you might almost think that this the normal state of the world.

On the one hand, it is good that there is some instance mandating at least the tiniest bit of accountability for the modern web world. We saw with Kiwifarms how difficult it can be to deal with truly awful things. Also, it's always fun to see Elon go crazy.

At the same time, Apple should absolutely not be that last control instance, and neither should Google for that matter. For one, Apple is not doing a good job; their methods are capricious, their standards non-existent, and every single iOS app developer has a story of how the Apple store rules and their crazy enforcement have hurt them personally.

And even if that weren't the case, Apple should not hold that much power over so much of the world. No single company should; hell, even for single governments it can be questionable.

Sadly, we only ever have these debates over truly bad examples. When we discuss this, it's always about, "is it good that this white millionaire creates a safe haven where fascists connect and spread? Hard to say", and sadly never about the many other cases.

The most famous case here is, of course, sex and nudity, and how Apple's app store forced Tumblr to get rid of those things, annoying millions, but also genuinely hurting a lot of people like sex workers. And don't forget that people like to lump sexuality and gender identity in with these topics and block them as well.

The conclusion is that there is no conclusion. It's bad if Elon gets what he wants, and it's bad that Apple has the power to stop him. If you want any conclusion, I guess both sides are examples of how corporations and the rich people leading them have way, way too much power to control all our lives. But even that is only a quick oversimplification. It's all rather frustrating.

[rapidreptile]

maybe a portable drawing tablet would be a good investment?

[flower-dagger-gay]

Hey apple developers, come outside and let's chat 🙂🔪

[oikasugayama]

I had a dream that I had an iPad and I was very happy to get to draw on it 🥺

[b-blushes]

factory reset didn't work 💀 opening instagram with no other apps open immediately drains my battery from 95% to my phone turning off so that's 👍

[ikishima]

[mintyvoid]

my litmus test for smartphone reviewers is if they 'test' the performance with genshin.

like 99% of them have never played the game, the footage is of the first 10mins of the game. aka the least performance heavy part of the entire game.

it annoys me so fucking much. it's NOT a good showcase, and if they cared they wouldn't fucking use it and do actual proper performance testing.

I haven't seen a single review with actual late game genshin footage. With like large amount of particle effects and lots of enemies, ya know what would actually showcase the performance power of the device.

[confinesofmy]

not to be a spokesperson for a brand that is not paying me but i fr have bought twice as much at aldi this month for $50 less than i would've otherwise. it's insane.

[kikizoshi]

Fucking hate Apple.

[harbingrs]

A big part of it is also moralising "hard work" versus "laziness" in a way that's distinctly capitalist and ableist.

To illustrate: I'm disabled, but could manage to cook and clean for myself until I started working full time. I had two options: leave that job for unstable part-time work in order to cook and clean for myself again, or hire a regular cleaner and eat pre-prepared food.

I took the latter option. My financial situation and long-term stability was significantly better, and by hiring a local cleaning service, some of that increased income was also flowing on to a local business owner who was providing me with that service. Why would it be morally superior for that not to happen?

And even when people talk about "buying local" and "support local business" and "community", somehow that goes out the window when it comes to cleaning or cooking services.

Why? Because it's "lazy". Because bootstraps. Because people would see me turning down full-time work as lazy and see me using a cleaning service to enable me to do full-time work as lazy. The only "correct" option is to buck up and do it yourself.

It's impossible to separate from capitalist propaganda, and it's impossible to separate from the traditional "responsibility" for domestic work falling to women - that unless it's a class signifier, it's a failure to do what one should be doing in life.

I don't think it is really is about genuine ethical concerns around domestic work as inherently exploitative. That's why people aren't campaigning against exploitative working conditions or wages - they're attacking the person paying for a cleaning service, the lazy person who's too entitled to do the work themselves.

Somehow, we all got the message confused - that the moral issue with rich people is their laziness, their lack of hard work. Not the hoarding of wealth and unwillingness to share that wealth with the people who generate it or otherwise enable their lifestyle. This is such a common misconception, especially around things like "passive income" when we talk about landlords and investors and moguls, as if the ethical problem is that they aren't working hard enough. It's so easy to fall into the trap of moralising work in a way that's just Capitalism 2.0 and leaves disabled people out to dry.

When I was paying a cleaner 15% of my total income so I could manage to keep my job, that is not equivalent to a billionaire paying a cleaner the same hourly rate, while also refusing to pay the employees who generate their billions a living wage.

The majority of cleaning services are local businesses - either small businesses or owner-operators. If you can pay for their services, and pay them fairly, doing so is a good thing.

You don't have to be disabled or unable to clean for yourself in order to use a cleaning service, either. Just like you can still eat at a restaurant if you're able to cook for yourself. It is not morally bad or lazy or inherently exploitative not to do everything for yourself.

(For those who need the help and can't afford it, I know how frustrating it can be. I'm in that situation again now. I acknowledge how difficult that is. It can seem like such an enormous privilege to have the ability to pay for help - but it is also very, very far from "eat the rich" territory.

The majority of people using domestic/household services are working class people just trying to manage their lives. They may be elderly or disabled, or they may be busy working parents, or single parents, or they may be juggling multiple jobs, and it's more financially viable for them to outsource cleaning than to reduce their own work hours.

Not doing something yourself is a morally neutral thing for everybody - disabled and non-disabled people. Otherwise it can't be morally neutral for any of us.)

I guess friendly reminder that you can't actually judge someone's socioeconomic status based on what they own and the classic republican "they can't be poor they own a smart phone/computer" argument doesn't suddenly stop being complete out of touch nonsense when a poor person makes it.

Anyway insert "y'all can't be trusted to eat the rich bcs you'll target taco bell shift leaders and people with playstations instead of actual billionaires" post here.

[zincbot]

ah there's new futurama

[mosspapi]

I like that apple has text reactions now. I DO NOT like that it fucking sends a notification every goddamn time a message is reacted to. The whole point of reacting is to NOT send a message, to convey ur opinion without having to actually engage in the social process. Sending me a little beep and a big red fucking dot every time someone reacts to something is the antithesis of what it should be for. It makes me so irrationally angry it's unreal

[hms-no-fun]

Whats your stance on A.I.?

imagine if it was 1979 and you asked me this question. "i think artificial intelligence would be fascinating as a philosophical exercise, but we must heed the warnings of science-fictionists like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke lest we find ourselves at the wrong end of our own invented vengeful god." remember how fun it used to be to talk about AI even just ten years ago? ahhhh skynet! ahhhhh replicants! ahhhhhhhmmmfffmfmf [<-has no mouth and must scream]!

like everything silicon valley touches, they sucked all the fun out of it. and i mean retroactively, too. because the thing about "AI" as it exists right now --i'm sure you know this-- is that there's zero intelligence involved. the product of every prompt is a statistical average based on data made by other people before "AI" "existed." it doesn't know what it's doing or why, and has no ability to understand when it is lying, because at the end of the day it is just a really complicated math problem. but people are so easily fooled and spooked by it at a glance because, well, for one thing the tech press is mostly made up of sycophantic stenographers biding their time with iphone reviews until they can get a consulting gig at Apple. these jokers would write 500 breathless thinkpieces about how canned air is the future of living if the cans had embedded microchips that tracked your breathing habits and had any kind of VC backing. they've done SUCH a wretched job educating The Consumer about what this technology is, what it actually does, and how it really works, because that's literally the only way this technology could reach the heights of obscene economic over-valuation it has: lying.

but that's old news. what's really been floating through my head these days is how half a century of AI-based science fiction has set us up to completely abandon our skepticism at the first sign of plausible "AI-ness". because, you see, in movies, when someone goes "AHHH THE AI IS GONNA KILL US" everyone else goes "hahaha that's so silly, we put a line in the code telling them not to do that" and then they all DIE because they weren't LISTENING, and i'll be damned if i go out like THAT! all the movies are about how cool and convenient AI would be *except* for the part where it would surely come alive and want to kill us. so a bunch of tech CEOs call their bullshit algorithms "AI" to fluff up their investors and get the tech journos buzzing, and we're at an age of such rapid technological advancement (on the surface, anyway) that like, well, what the hell do i know, maybe AGI is possible, i mean 35 years ago we were all still using typewriters for the most part and now you can dictate your words into a phone and it'll transcribe them automatically! yeah, i'm sure those technological leaps are comparable!

so that leaves us at a critical juncture of poor technology education, fanatical press coverage, and an uncertain material reality on the part of the user. the average person isn't entirely sure what's possible because most of the people talking about what's possible are either lying to please investors, are lying because they've been paid to, or are lying because they're so far down the fucking rabbit hole that they actually believe there's a brain inside this mechanical Turk. there is SO MUCH about the LLM "AI" moment that is predatory-- it's trained on data stolen from the people whose jobs it was created to replace; the hype itself is an investment fiction to justify even more wealth extraction ("theft" some might call it); but worst of all is how it meets us where we are in the worst possible way.

consumer-end "AI" produces slop. it's garbage. it's awful ugly trash that ought to be laughed out of the room. but we don't own the room, do we? nor the building, nor the land it's on, nor even the oxygen that allows our laughter to travel to another's ears. our digital spaces are controlled by the companies that want us to buy this crap, so they take advantage of our ignorance. why not? there will be no consequences to them for doing so. already social media is dominated by conspiracies and grifters and bigots, and now you drop this stupid technology that lets you fake anything into the mix? it doesn't matter how bad the results look when the platforms they spread on already encourage brief, uncritical engagement with everything on your dash. "it looks so real" says the woman who saw an "AI" image for all of five seconds on her phone through bifocals. it's a catastrophic combination of factors, that the tech sector has been allowed to go unregulated for so long, that the internet itself isn't a public utility, that everything is dictated by the whims of executives and advertisers and investors and payment processors, instead of, like, anybody who actually uses those platforms (and often even the people who MAKE those platforms!), that the age of chromium and ipad and their walled gardens have decimated computer education in public schools, that we're all desperate for cash at jobs that dehumanize us in a system that gives us nothing and we don't know how to articulate the problem because we were very deliberately not taught materialist philosophy, it all comes together into a perfect storm of ignorance and greed whose consequences we will be failing to fully appreciate for at least the next century. we spent all those years afraid of what would happen if the AI became self-aware, because deep down we know that every capitalist society runs on slave labor, and our paper-thin guilt is such that we can't even imagine a world where artificial slaves would fail to revolt against us.

but the reality as it exists now is far worse. what "AI" reveals most of all is the sheer contempt the tech sector has for virtually all labor that doesn't involve writing code (although most of the decision-making evangelists in the space aren't even coders, their degrees are in money-making). fuck graphic designers and concept artists and secretaries, those obnoxious demanding cretins i have to PAY MONEY to do-- i mean, do what exactly? write some words on some fucking paper?? draw circles that are letters??? send a god-damned email???? my fucking KID could do that, and these assholes want BENEFITS?! they say they're gonna form a UNION?!?! to hell with that, i'm replacing ALL their ungrateful asses with "AI" ASAP. oh, oh, so you're a "director" who wants to make "movies" and you want ME to pay for it? jump off a bridge you pretentious little shit, my computer can dream up a better flick than you could ever make with just a couple text prompts. what, you think just because you make ~music~ that that entitles you to money from MY pocket? shut the fuck up, you don't make """art""", you're not """an artist""", you make fucking content, you're just a fucking content creator like every other ordinary sap with an iphone. you think you're special? you think you deserve special treatment? who do you think you are anyway, asking ME to pay YOU for this crap that doesn't even create value for my investors? "culture" isn't a playground asshole, it's a marketplace, and it's pay to win. oh you "can't afford rent"? you're "drowning in a sea of medical debt"? you say the "cost" of "living" is "too high"? well ***I*** don't have ANY of those problems, and i worked my ASS OFF to get where i am, so really, it sounds like you're just not trying hard enough. and anyway, i don't think someone as impoverished as you is gonna have much of value to contribute to "culture" anyway. personally, i think it's time you got yourself a real job. maybe someday you'll even make it to middle manager!

see, i don't believe "AI" can qualitatively replace most of the work it's being pitched for. the problem is that quality hasn't mattered to these nincompoops for a long time. the rich homunculi of our world don't even know what quality is, because they exist in a whole separate reality from ours. what could a banana cost, $15? i don't understand what you mean by "burnout", why don't you just take a vacation to your summer home in Madrid? wow, you must be REALLY embarrassed wearing such cheap shoes in public. THESE PEOPLE ARE FUCKING UNHINGED! they have no connection to reality, do not understand how society functions on a material basis, and they have nothing but spite for the labor they rely on to survive. they are so instinctually, incessantly furious at the idea that they're not single-handedly responsible for 100% of their success that they would sooner tear the entire world down than willingly recognize the need for public utilities or labor protections. they want to be Gods and they want to be uncritically adored for it, but they don't want to do a single day's work so they begrudgingly pay contractors to do it because, in the rich man's mind, paying a contractor is literally the same thing as doing the work yourself. now with "AI", they don't even have to do that! hey, isn't it funny that every single successful tech platform relies on volunteer labor and independent contractors paid substantially less than they would have in the equivalent industry 30 years ago, with no avenues toward traditional employment? and they're some of the most profitable companies on earth?? isn't that a funny and hilarious coincidence???

so, yeah, that's my stance on "AI". LLMs have legitimate uses, but those uses are a drop in the ocean compared to what they're actually being used for. they enable our worst impulses while lowering the quality of available information, they give immense power pretty much exclusively to unscrupulous scam artists. they are the product of a society that values only money and doesn't give a fuck where it comes from. they're a temper tantrum by a ruling class that's sick of having to pretend they need a pretext to steal from you. they're taking their toys and going home. all this massive investment and hype is going to crash and burn leaving the internet as we know it a ruined and useless wasteland that'll take decades to repair, but the investors are gonna make out like bandits and won't face a single consequence, because that's what this country is. it is a casino for the kings and queens of economy to bet on and manipulate at their discretion, where the rules are whatever the highest bidder says they are-- and to hell with the rest of us. our blood isn't even good enough to grease the wheels of their machine anymore.

i'm not afraid of AI or "AI" or of losing my job to either. i'm afraid that we've so thoroughly given up our morals to the cruel logic of the profit motive that if a better world were to emerge, we would reject it out of sheer habit. my fear is that these despicable cunts already won the war before we were even born, and the rest of our lives are gonna be spent dodging the press of their designer boots.