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...