Yet another problem is churn. If people find a life partner they drop off the site, and you constantly have to find new users to replace them. This is one way a dating site is fundamentally different from e.g. Facebook. As a result, some of the less-scrupulous sites purposely make it less likely that you will see people who seem like great matches, or they interfere with your ability to message those people, just to keep you using the site longer.

Jump-starting the initial chicken/egg issue in an ethical way is AFAIK an unsolved problem. In the post-OKC era, Bumble is the only one I know of that semi-succeeded because they made it woman-centric from the start.

Finally (yeah, I've thought about this a lot), the modern mobile app-only approach can be a distinct turnoff for people like me. Mobile apps make it difficult to write much text about yourself, which was something OKC encouraged. Apps also present a safety issue: Apps often require location permissions, which means employees of the site can stalk women. (This has happened.) There's no good reason dating apps should require location permission, but most do for the same reason most apps of any kind do: Location gives the site owner personal info they can sell to advertisers. All that having been said, the vast majority of the market probably prefers mobile apps to web sites.

The whole space seems like a cesspool of bootstrapping problems coupled with extreme incentives for unethical behavior. Sorry if I sound pessimistic but you asked what's stopping this from happening. This is my take.

Smart appliance: You buy it, it works more or less as expected for 1 year, then it fails in new and exciting ways, and then you replace it with a dumb appliance.

No affiliation; just a satisfied user.

I don't use Mightytext a lot any more except for 2FA since I mostly use Signal for messaging. And of course Signal has an Electron app for desktop that works for both text and voice.

For file and photo sharing I just use Dropbox. I have Dropbox on my phone set to upload photos as soon as I take them, which means they also show up immediately in a folder on my desktop (on MacOS. I assume this works in Dropbox for Linux but haven't tested it.) Caveat: Dropbox still doesn't support ARM Linux. It's Intel only. WTF Dropbox??

My concern is that Motorola is a Chinese company. Sure, Pixel and Apple phones are made in China too, but they're overseen by American companies. How can we know these Motorola phones will not one day be placed on the "do not trust" list like e.g. Huawei phones?

Them: "But then how will I get Netflix?"

Me: "Get an Apple TV and connect it to the internet. Then connect that to your TV with an HDMI cable."

Them: "I don't need an Apple TV. I just bought a TV!"

Me: "Apple TV is not a TV. It's a little box."

Them: "Then why does Apple call it a TV?"

Me (snarky): "I told Steve Jobs not to call it a TV but he did it anyway."

Them: "This is all too confusing. Just buy the things and hook it up. Here's my credit card."

Me: "OK"

Them (one month later): "Hey our new TV is working great!"

Me: "Good!"

Them: "Except it shows us an unskippable ad whenever we turn it on, and the ad seems to know a lot about us."

Me: "Um...that shouldn't be happening."

Me: "This TV knows your wifi password!"

Them: "Oh yeah! After you left last month the TV asked us if we wanted to 'finish the setup process'. So we did what it told us and now it's happy. Aren't you proud of us for figuring that out all on our own?"

Me (to myself): choose words carefully before speaking, self

By running Linux in a VM on MacOS on Apple silicon, you sacrifice some raw speed but in return you still get to run MacOS apps occasionally and have access to the same data from either MacOS or Linux without having to duplicate everything. And battery life is reasonable, which is not true yet with Asahi.

When I buy from a local farmer I expect to wash my produce thoroughly, and if his product makes me sick I can come back later and complain to his face. If that doesn't fix the problem I can probably get him excluded from market participation in the future.

When I buy salad in a bag* at the supermarket, I assume it's been cleaned. If not, a lot more people than me will get sick and we have little power to make the faceless company change their ways.

*Just an example. I don't buy salad in plastic bags because I think that stuff tastes like cardboard.

This is a description of a capacitor.

Correct. In principle if you have enough current available you can charge several thousand 18650 cells in the same time it takes to charge one. But you also need low-loss switching to reconfigure all the batteries to be parallel and monitor them all for rate of charge, voltage, and temperature. The electronics needed are buildable but not trivial.

The cognitive dissonance is staggering.

Author is on the right track but it's much more actively evil than this. The real algorithm is "what if we just show people the results we want to show them, because showing them those things makes us more money*?

* Except for services like Spotify, which shows you the songs that cost them the least.