Hah, my curse is calls always finding weird ways to drop. Then I moved to a place with no cell service, because I’m apparently a wireless masochist?

There’s some slight technical reason for it, but I think they swung a bit too far in the asshole direction with blocking too many.

The LTE rollout was completely botched from the start. LTE voice is technically supported on all LTE chipsets, but early on the voice spec changed. Early phones used LTE for data and 2G or 3G for voice.

Complicating matters further, AT&T and Verizon both have separate and slightly tweaked versions of the spec, as they didn’t want to wait for it to be finalized, and of course they’re both different in different ways. It’s also why T-Mobile allows so many devices. They just rode their very fast for the time HSPA+ network until LTE was finalized, got generic hardware on the network, and flipped the power switch.

To top it off, AT&T was sued at one point for 911 not working due to a handset bug and they got very controlling at that point to avoid future lawsuits.

VoLTE is ostensibly VoIP over cellular data at its core. All phones have to talk with the correct SIP signaling on VoLTE for voice calls to work. With 2G and 3G, the circuit-switched method of signaling was much more standardized (although not necessarily simpler, WCDMA at its end spanned literal volumes of books.) This made it so phones and networks were more easily compatible for basic things like voice, 911, etc.

Now, on top of Verizon and AT&T thinking that rolling their own flavors of LTE was a good idea, every phone maker also had their own idea about how the VoLTE SIP signaling was supposed to work. Due to flaws in the LTE spec, carriers going rogue, and companies interpreting things wrong, it has turned quite literally into a clusterfuck.

TL;DR: It took a long time for LTE to standardize enough across product lines, and there are a whole bunch of phone models that don’t talk the language quite right. So carriers chose to ban rather than make workarounds or work with the vendor to roll a software fix to the phone.

You think Thunderbird is insulated? Their latest big drunk UI lift seems to have somehow made it even less intuitive.

You have a preferred mobile app to access the service you’d recommend?

Recently tried MS Office apps for the first time in 8 or so years. Somehow they made them less intuitive than even ribbon days. They use a dark pattern save dialog that makes it easy to accidentally save to OneDrive, and if you have OneDrive disabled or uninstalled, there’s an always present icon in the title bar of the main edit window that says “autosave off” even though autosave is on.

Went right back to LibreOffice after one document and one spreadsheet.

Point the ticket using the value of a cryptocurrency.

First they have to integrate Google Meet with it so they can have three Meet clients.

My best guess is that I know one of them uses Facebook. Apple phones. Facebook, Uber, and a few others have had pretty deep access to APIs not accessible to other software companies. Sometimes they’re caught like when Uber was caught using a screen scraping API. Sometimes they aren’t. The other guess that glues it together is that Facebook has indeed scraped audio to text for a long time. It was almost 10 years ago that I had the EE conversation.

Google and Meta pay Apple money to gain access to their user metrics. It’s likely symbiotic relationships. Facebook once had hooks directly in iOS. Likewise, the little mic/video indicators the OS displays when they are “active” are completely software-controlled and can be overridden.

At a time, I worked at a company that had(has) deep access to other aspects of iOS. Apple always required the source code is available to them so they could inspect it. I doubt that has changed. It also means they would be complicit. External tools wouldn’t really be able to figure this out. For someone to black-box this they’d need a jailbroken iPhone and some specialized tooling or MITM decryption capabilities.

Not to sound hyperbolic, I’m connecting dots with no evidence, it’s pure speculation. The compute seems to be there and with no regulation in source code, anything goes, if you want money bad enough. Especially with the mad dash every tech company has been on for the last 20ish years to harvest everything they can, ever since smartphones became powerful and commonplace enough.

It’s surprisingly easy to use adtech without voice and make a connection to serve a targeted ad. Had a friend ask me about what I was drinking. They were on my guest wifi network. They searched for it. Next day, I’m getting ads because of geoIP pinned my IP address as having an interest.

Also had someone that lives off the grid with no active network or devices watch a DVD of a movie and the entirety of their Internet connectivity was two cell phones in the room. They started seeing things related to the movie. They’re older and not constantly on their phones. The phones just sit somewhere in the room.

Had a discussion with some tech friends a few years back and remarked that keeping awake to do this would take a lot of power. The EE mentioned running audio recording would take basically nothing. I expanded from there, the device uploads audio for off-phone translation to text, or queues batch jobs to process locally when power is high enough or on charger. Etc.

It is 100% probable that code runs on phones and just ships off amalgamated text frequency charts or entire conversations and the user won’t even notice the battery dent.

That being said, I can’t find even in the greediest capitalist money-claw that the person giving a go would not think, “well, I can’t trust my own device anymore…” and maybe go: “yeah, I shouldn’t do this.” Maybe I’m too optimistic though.

Certs have existed a long time, are never implemented correctly, and the expiration cycle that is supposed to bolster security just causes pain as a result.

Certs should just be redesigned to have a kill switch. CRLs were supposed to handle that, but are rarely implemented or implemented correctly.

Certs are also used in so many places where they may not be suited to the task, but because they exist, they’ve become the de-facto standard.

A temporal expiration system seems flawed from the beginning anyway. What, you don’t trust your system anymore just because time has passed? Time is always passing. Are we all secretly racist against clocks now?

Have you seen how American corps code? 80% is GM release ready to go.

Made a joke when 6x CD-ROM drives came out that 6 in German is sechs. Sechs drive, sex drive, hurr-durr.

I was in middle school.

LLMs have improved my education, work life, and general knowledge search. I get more time to spend living my life and less trying to find one dude’s stacked change post from 2009 that fixed my problem.

They allow me to access information the way I learn and operate in a way that textbooks, college education, video courses, or online classes have never allowed me to do in my entire life.

That being said, the general AI buzz and buzzwords need to die, the real positives need to be celebrated.

Really curious to see how the modem stacks up, but I also guess reviewers given demo devices were told to not talk about or play down the modem performance, rather than fix the problem.

Hold on now, let us not start using logic when referring to computer programming here. It’s all magic and bumbling around on a keyboard.

I’d like another choice, both platforms have become terrible metric-collecting, dark-pattern-infused data-harvesting trash. (iPhone users, don’t believe the commercials claiming privacy.)

Because they love and believe their corporate daddies they so worship, especially in the US.

I was trying to think of a mental image that was internet-safe to imply something like you’re stuck in deep mud that is pulling your boots off but at least you survived. Or less internet-safe, you’re trying to get home and have no ride and for some reason the weather turned to a storm of actual shit and you’re walking home with shit raining down upon you but you must survive.

It definitely wasn’t scientifically accurate.

Hey, friend. Definitely not saying Windows is better.

That being said, in this example, a UI open dialog that will blindly consume any file fed into it with behavior bad enough to crush the entire computer into absolute uselessness is… let’s just say, not something one would want to run into on a bad day just trying to deal with life stuff.

Now, if one were piping /dev/urandom into the framebuffer expecting to load Firefox, that’s another matter.

Hey, good to know. It was one app that was only available as a Snap. Will look for alternatives.