What’s mildy infuriating is your attempt to advertise your app here. I have ad blockers, but I kind of suspect this site has ads on it somewhere.

I’m not trying to be rude here, but please read my post. Paying to remove ads is part of the ad business model. Anyone who pays to remove ads means the developer profited from ads.

Sounds good to me. I’ll have friends and family watch from the outside so I’ll be confident it isn’t some kind of ruse.

Developers should make money. Just not with ads.

That would be a good idea too.

Almost all of Syncs business model is ads. The free version has ads and almost everyone who pays for it is doing so to remove ads. Which is just rewarding the implementation of ads. I also disagree with the concept of profiting from free user content with ads like Reddit does. Which was Reddits primary goal of preventing third party apps. They wanted the ad revenue themselves instead of third parties getting the ad revenue.

The only way this can be acceptable is to not have a free ad version and only have a paid version. That way you are paying for software and not paying to remove ads or profiting from free user content.

After being mostly disappointed by Artemis and The Martian I was quite wary of this one. Perhaps my expectations were more reasonable this time around, but I think it was also a better book. Considering how those other books were trying their hardest to stay within a reasonable level of scientific accuracy and plausibility I was completely surprised that there turned out to be an alien in this one. An intelligent sentient species no less. He also just kind of showed up out of nowhere and I was in disbelief that that was the direction the story was going for a bit.

Like someone else mentioned I did find the book to be a bit too much “for all ages” kind of thing. Like it was intentionally written so that it could some day be a PG movie for both kids and adults. There is nothing wrong with this of course it is just not my usual thing. I did find it a bit eye rolling at times how great this supposed average teacher was at any kind of science and alien communication. Rocky was clearly the best character in my opinion. If he wasn’t there to offset the whole lone savior idea like The Martian I don’t think I would have enjoyed this book.

The science bits were a bit too sciencey and not enough fictiony for my tastes, but I don’t think it is Weir’s style to try and make up his own fictional science. Almost all of the science was just real science and math. I think the only thing that was pretty much entirely made up was the idea that something like astrophage and its neutrino harvesting amoeba could exist. I did like the details given for everything Ryland and Rocky were doing.

I kind of wish he actually managed to get back to Earth. It felt like a bit of a cop out for us to never fully see the impact to Earth. We know that at least somebody survived, but I wanted to see the scale of the damage. Anyway I liked this book more than I expected and I’ll more than likely read whatever book Weir publishes next.

I believe you can send DMs over the Matrix protocol. I’ve never looked into it.

No reason in particular. I can’t get interested in video games anymore. So I have unintentionally replaced my free time playing video games with reading. If I could manage to get interested in a video game then I would still play it.

When you design a new device from the ground up you make them fit in a way that allows the remaining space to be a single large rectangle to be entirely filled with battery. This might require custom PCB to have some L shapes. If you want to target a specific weight and having that much battery is too heavy then you make the device thinner. Instead it looks like they took pre-existing components from other devices such as Pixel phones or the Google Home and put them in a larger case.

It’s not necessarily a problem that this device exists how it is, but that it is a cheap way to go about it and yet still sold at a premium price.