phones are already very full and dense, and a headphone jack is a very large component. plus, the Bluetooth is simply part of the small SoC, it’s a microscopic size. That doesn’t mean I prefer Bluetooth, but it makes some sense.

as someone has been fiddling with dongles for years, it’s not that bad, and you can just permanently connect your headphones to your dongle. the apple dongle is excellent and beyond enough for iems and a lot of headphones. I personally have one dongle + iems for my phone and another dongle + headphones for my PC, and that setup works really well for me. You might want to consider it. Otherwise, those big beefy Bluetooth headphones might be semi-repairable, and there are of course also Fairphone Bluetooth earbuds that are apparently fairly repairable (though I know nothing about those). At least you can replace the batteries and the ear tips or pads, and that’s usually enough to last you a decade with these things.

yes but what if a company has the ability to create billions of close friends who can recommend sponsored products to you? why would it care about whether you want that or not?

also bard was a way better name for google’s LLM. it has its origins in an isaac asimov story about a robot who is programmed to tell random stories.

just one is not enough

Big steel spikes around every sidewalk

i meant other types of captchas as well, but yes, cloudflare is fairly configurable. I also know other captchas can be more aggressive. And of course captchas can also block or harass “high privacy” configuration browsers and clients, and there’s also the strategy of infinite delay, where a captcha is never quite sure you’re really a human, so you have to work through 12 phases of it only to have to do the exact same thing again the next time you’re on the site. Recaptcha V3 with its “automatic” background captcha is also in a surprising amount of places you’d never know about unless you’re infected with some kind of The-Mainstream-Internet-Hates-You disease. Captchas discriminating against poor countries isn’t some big secret though, as far as I’m aware it’s fairly well known.

they also often prevent legitimate traffic from poorer countries, and aggressively so

In case you’re legitimately wondering about the acronym, it’s multi-factor authentication

you must be the physical embodiment of the map reduce, channeling your inner ingredient to sandwich pipeline. alternatively find a partner who can do it for you. probably tastes better that way.

pretty sure AA and AAA studio execs can also organize and collectively agree on an $80 or higher price tag

minecraft allows left-handedness ever since they added the off-hand mechanic

I think the comment was meant to resemble the popular “guns don’t cause death, murderers cause death” comment

I unironically love comic sans derivatives, they’re just super readable to me