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  • 5 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: August 9th, 2023
  • odelik@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•Apple brings age verification to UK users in iOS 26.4 beta - Users who don’t verify their age may not be able to download or purchase apps.English
    1·
    6 hours ago

    So fighting against this new understanding of the term is either pedantry for the sake of it, or you have some sort of stake in Google perhaps?

    Great use of a bad reason fallacy with a touch of ad hominem in an attempt to discredit.

    Your claim is that the term has been used to mean something negative. You present no evidence to back this up other than your feelings.

    I don’t discredit that major corporations do evil shit.

    However, I presented you with the experience I’ve had with the term dating back nearly 30 years where I, and the people I talked tech with, was sideloading files onto our PDA and Rio MP3 players.

    The term started out as a technical distinction in the circles I ran in (Detroit area) back then.

    Aside from your feelings on the term, I see no valid justification to stop using it when I’m trying to clearly communicate something. I work in tech (and no, it’s not Google or Apple. Fuck publicly traded companies) as a lead on the platform support group, and I need to be able to clearly communicate with my peers and reports. Sideload is a widely recognized term in the spaces I have worked in.

    I’m not going to stop using a precise technical term because some internet strangers have unfounded negative feelings about the possible marketing connotations.

    Present me with evidence that it actually means what you’re saying and maybe I’ll consider working on making the language change. Just like I’ve done with actually real problematic industry terms (master/slave, black/white lists. Etc).

  • odelik@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•Apple brings age verification to UK users in iOS 26.4 beta - Users who don’t verify their age may not be able to download or purchase apps.English
    11·
    7 hours ago

    I’ve been using the term side loading since the late 90s/early 2000s for installing software or files to a device via a transfer cable. And by the time Android came along, the early app development community was using the term to push the app to your device via ADB. And from there it’s expanded from transfer cable push to download and install from an unmanaged 3rd party source on a mobile computing device.

    So the term has existed in some form throughout the tech/power user community before modern mobile computing. Now did Apple and Google usurp the term? Ehhh, possibly? I’ve yet to encounter somebody that uses sideloading to mean something negative, but I’m sure there is a group out there that does. I’m not convinced that group is large enough for me to stop using language I started using nearly 30 years ago to mean something specific. “Why use more, less precise, words when this single term says it already?”