No, the difference between amphetamine and methamphetamine is that they are literal different chemicals.

If one could 'add meth'(??) to chemicals to make them more potent, without changing the chemical, it would be the difference between (for example) citric acid and really strong citric acid, or codeine 2.5mg and codeine 5mg.

You'll note that neither of these involves changing the name of the chemical, because that is not how chemical names work.

As someone else has pointed out, the difference between 'hydrogen monoxide' and 'dihydrogen monoxide' isn't 'it's like hydrogen monoxide with added di', because that is ridiculous.

Please stop saying anything beginning with 'meth' is just meth with added bits.

It's a really odd misinterpretation of the terrible dangers of: methane, Methodists, methanol, Methaemoglobin, methicillin, etc.

Meh, I think it's more disrespectful to pretend you love someone or feel something noisy just because it seems to be expected.

Very 'come a give Grandma a big kiss and tell her how much you love her' vibes

Honestly this has been my main issue with the tech privacy issue for years.

I love smart gadgets. I really wanted to go all in and automate my life, and the whole 'personal data' thing seemed like a really fair trade off for what was promised.

Only, they took all the data and never really delivered the convenience.

I spent about 10 years trying to figure out why WearOS needed to collect all my data, all the time, even when I wasn't wearing a watch, and yet when it crashed every few weeks, there was no way to restore anything from a backup. Had to start again from scratch every time (or ADB). What's the point in collecting all that data when I couldn't usefully access any of it?

Same thing with Google home, more or less. I wasn't a big fan of the terms and conditions, but hey, it's super convenient just being able to announce 'ok Google I need to get out of bed soon' and have it turn on the lights, play music etc.

Only, some mornings it wouldn't do that. Wouldn't even remember that I'd set an alarm. And alarms kinda need to be reliable: if they work 19 times out of 20, that's not actually good enough to rely on. Dumb alarm clocks, or phones, you can be pretty sure the alarm will go off So, not much point using Google for morning routines and alarms. So, not much point giving it full access to everything I say any time.

I would give it all my data if it could reliably remember to play preset alarms, or give a basic backup and restore option. Hell, I'd probably give Google access to all my photos if the UI wasn't so ugly.

I still don't really understand big techs reasoning here. If data is the new gold and everyone was dying for more ways to track odds us all and harvest our data - why not just build a decent product? If phone batteries lasted for days, people would spend more time on their phones, isn't that what the tech companies want? If competent people worked on making Gmail efficient, light, user friendly, and not crawling with bugs more people would use it, and more data.

It's like the oligarchs trying to take over the world will do literally anything, anything to win, other than paying people to develop decent, reliable products

Tricky to take data off the cloud, even with thermite

I think your reflexive disagreement is a testimony to the point of the article. And the fact that you didn't immediately notice what was the authors view vs what they were relaying, may be testimony to the author's good writing.

I found it to be an unexpectedly evocative piece, a kind of poetic prose style that I don't see very often in journalism, let alone tech journalism. Each word seemed carefully chosen to make the reader almost fell like they were there, witnessing, understanding.

So, I can imagine the author being a little pleased that you reacted to that passage with a sudden skepticism. Seems like a very successful case of 'show, don't tell'.

Man, if you seriously would exclude someone from social interactions because of the colour of their speech bubble in group messages, I dread to think how m stressful it would be to interact with people who's entire bodies were different colours.

Not even joking. 'Its legit stressful if someone's messages use a different colour background' is not logically compatible with being ok having different coloured people in view. I'm not actually calling you a racist, because it would also mean you get distressed if people wear different colour clothes and have avatars that look different, and I think a social group like that would have struggled enough to realise that the solution might not be 'get the Wrongly Coloured Group Text Guy to purchase a different phone rather than, idk, stop spending so much time staring at screens.

But it was amusing to imagine how wildly conformist one would have to be to actually dislike someone because their phone number doesn't have enough 7's or their name is longer than everyone else's so it looks untidy or whatever.

He's not saying HE is this way, he's saying the US culturally is this way.

Which... uh, yeah, it is. The US is superficial, it's vain, it's racist. I thought everyone knew that.

'Lots of people say this, but I don't agree' really doesn't logically lead to

'therefore, the majority of people probably agree with me'.

Lots of people say they love in India, and that is not true for new. That doesn't make the likeliest fact that a majority of the world lives in the UK and, while India is an oddly vocal 'minority'.

What?

Given that the esteemed Dame is almost completely blind and has never positioned herself as a tech influencer or aficionada, I feel that her (thoroughly deserved) prestige and social power might be a little wasted on the grand cause of 'the iOS keyboard could be better'.

I mean, I'd agree with her. But it's hardly Joanna Lumley championing the gurkhas, when she's been saying for years that she can no longer recognise even loved ones standing right in front of her. Apple could do a lot better, but I'm not sure they could improve the keyboard that much.

I also took it as a joke; I'm glad at least one person validated my sense of humour, I was getting a bit worried reading all the replies.

At this point, I assume 90% of complaints about the apple keyboard are either tongue in cheek, explicitly humorous, a detailed, qualitative study with new information, or written by someone who is very new to apple, the internet, and technology in general.

I don't see how else anybody could seriously think 'The apple keyboard is bad, and the world needs to know about it! I'll make my opinion known, and surely that will solve the issue', let alone following it with 'no more Mr Nice Guy: I'm going to threaten Apple, the company, with consequences that will force them to act. It's high time somebody held these mega-corps to account and I'm willing to put myself on the line!'

Like, even if the article was written by the United Nations or the EU, there are very few actual threats they could include that might realistically spur apple to finally sort out the keyboard.

'If Apple don't sort it out, I'm going to fine them 75% of their revenue,' might be logical but seems a little deluded: terrorism or personal violence would be... unadvisable... and 'I'll switch to android' is also comically unthreatening, while also being hugely overplayed and almost always played straight, empty, and uninspired.

Everyone knows the keyboard sucks. Everyone knows that's not going to stop people buying iOS devices. It's the equivalent of 'fast food isn't nutritious but companies pretend it is' - in the year of our lord 2026, a multi paragraph article to that effect can probably be assumed to be numerous, new, surprising, ironic, or insanely naive.

The fact that a realistic, honest assessment of one's probable future purchasing decisions reads as a joke is maybe a little dark, but hey. It's a dark world, and it won't be lightened by yet another 'I'm totally gonna boycott if they don't stop!'

Short version - OP, you've either pulled a terrifying psy-op or proven that the nearly 100-year old one is still in effect. Either way, I need to be a hell of a lot more discerning what I read online, because if I hadn't known for sure that money has nothing to do with class in the British system, I don't know how many other parts of that article I might have absorbed before I reached the massive clangers like 'the Nazis were pretty benign'.

I don't know what everyone else on this page is talking about, really, or why. I don't even know if they're real. Maybe I'm the weirdo, freaking out because a sci-fi giant presented a skewed version of reality.

But there have been enough people in history who've created touchstone works of art intended to last through the ages to say 'this is what it looks like when ordinary people are hypnotised into bloodlust', and I'm not convinced I'd recognise any further signs in time to get off.

I really, really don't want to get off the world wide web. My life is on it, now. But it's a web, and we must remember that webs were not built for the endless entertainment of the flies who explore it.