I agree. I'm going to be very sad when my Pixel 4a dies. Perfect size, plus the headphone jack, and flashable to the various ROMS if I need to. My ideal phone/messaging/audio device, and that's really all I want in a phone these days.
909 karma · joined October 28, 2010
However, if we're sitting around playing super mario at a mutual friend's place, and the iPhone user says something like "Oh, I'd invite you to the group chat, but you're an _android_ user, so uncool." yeah, we don't need to interface in any way, and likely won't ever be friends in any substantial way. You've just signaled you're fundamentally not a nice person, and that's all the information I need to decide if I want to spend any further time around you. There are many such other signals, some widely accepted by society and some simple personal preference. (For example if we're in the same situation and you're a heavy social drinker who just wants to go to bars I'm similarly unlikely to invest time in you as I don't drink personally.)
"talking about you behind your back" likely goes both ways. In my friend group we mercilessly mock people hanging off of Apple's every announcement and panic-buying a new phone as soon as the store comes online just because it has a feature that our android phones have had for 9 years now. I think this is just an in-group social thing that happens everywhere. Some people judge others by the sneakers they wear. The problem comes in when you lump everyone into this "other" category and treat them as lesser. I'll make fun of a iPhone user for their lack of awareness of the reality distortion field they live in, but I'll still be friends with them. (My best friend is getting the new phone that was just announced.)
Mocking someone behind their back because they don't make the same choices you do is just a fundamental signal that you're not very open minded and probably not the type of person I want to spend time with. Wear whatever shoes fit you well.
Although I admit that I've excluded people from group chats because they don't use Signal messenger, although not because of any snobbiness, but because of the lack of feature support, and because I HATE the way iPhones do "<name> reacted to <ENTIRE TEXT MESSAGE QUOTED>" type crap.
Almost like we'd all be better off with a nice open standard (and not the crappy RCS either)...
I'm curious about the Ortholinear layout though, and how much benefit that confers by itself if you're already using a split keyboard and/or optimized layout. It seems like most people switch all three factors at once, which makes it hard to isolate which ones are the most beneficial. Anyone have any experience switching no factor besides the ortholinear layout?
- Still more irritating to have to keep charged rather than just plug in. Still more irritating to switch back and forth between my phone and my laptop and my desktop though.
- Still more irritating (or even impossible) to share my single audio source with someone else's headphones though.
- Still more irritating to pipe into the mixer and play back over big speakers though.
I had a phone with only USB-C for a while. Sure, dongle's exist. They also get buggy and drop out occasionally, since they've got firmware. They also make it challenging to charge and listen simultaneously. They also get lost easily.
There's a lot to recommend a simple 3-wire electrical connection with a standard plug. I don't begrudge people who want to use bluetooth at all, we can all coexist, just keep the headphone jack available so we can. :-)
I use this feature with a friend of mine. We both have NAS', and we both have each other's NAS as an untrusted SyncThing device. (It's also pretty trivial to run a Linode/DigitalOcean low end VPS as an untrusted client. In fact if neither has a one-click install I'd be surprised.)
It's multi-user support is... entirely non-existent. And they seem rather uninterested in feedback. I'd happily pay them for a feature where I could easily make dinner, and split it between multiple users. But no, I have to save a "recipe" (which stays in the DB forever) and then add a portion of that recipe from the other user's account.
So a family-based offering is definitely an interesting idea!
Personally I'd rather live in a world with consequences than live in the lowest-common-denominator big-brother world.
Get caught in a DUI? You simply never. drive. again... Ever. No 2nd chance. Hurt or kill someone as a DUI? Mandatory minimum jail time.
The difference is that this encourages personal responsibility and has personal consequences, rather than attempting to police the entire population for the bad deeds of the few.
Definitely issues worth being worried about, but it does appear that SpaceX is taking them seriously! And you have to admit that the potential good that a truly global high speed network is capable of is worth considering.
I mean, I suppose get it. I find CenturyLink horrifying and would love almost nothing more than for them to go out of business. I don't get much choice about who manages the cross-continental pipes my data moves through so I don't worry about it too much.
Best available internet is a 3mbit down, 1-if-you're-lucky-mbit up DSL connection from CenturyLink with latency that jumps into the 2.5+ second range when it rains hard. Which, fortunately it never does in the pacific northwest. :-D
And no, traditional satellite is a no-go, even if it was an affordable option. We have these things called "mountains" you see, and the satellites are only at certain spots in the sky, sadly occluded by a couple billion tons of rock and tree.
To reiterate, this is within commuting distance of "big tech" HQs.
Starlink can't come fast enough. Existing ISPs need to feel the pain of screwing their customers so bad for so long.
If you're interested in the intelligence, empathy, and minds of animals, I can heartily recommend this book. The last third or so of the book covered Orcas (and some whales and dolphins) and it was pretty amazing. I particularly liked that he covered some of the stories that are not quite scientific in nature, while calling them out as such. The book will definitely leave you with the lingering feeling that minds and awareness are not quite as simple and clear cut as we might believe them to be.
If they bust my best friend and I for sharing an account now that we no longer live together that's fine, but I simply won't re-subscribe unless they can move my profile over.
I think this illustrates a massive flaw in the current streaming wars. The content is only half the value. Remembering which shows you liked and want to see more of, and which shows you've watched and decided you hated, etc, is a huge value in the increasingly large sea of available content. (And recommendations too, if they're good. I subscribe to Spotify almost exclusively for the recommendations it provides and discovery of new things I like.)
Site I manage run separate VLANS for admin (switches, APs, etc) and Internet-of-Things, and both of those VLANS are default deny on outbound. That rule blocks a fair amount of traffic.
I wonder if part of the answer is better tools in firewalls for this sort of thing. Easily tagging "unstrusted device" or something perhaps.
It'd be kinda cool if HN had reddit-like flairs for stories so you could tag them as "no-incognito" or "soft-paywall" so you knew what not to bother clicking on.
For example, the wiki.debian.org blocks users of (at least) privateinternetaccess VPN. (You get a 403 forbidden. This doesn't happen when I use my personal VPN routed out through a VPS provider, only through PIA.)
I have encountered this with various other sites as well, both outright blocks and degraded experience.
Frustrating. Although I don't really trust VPN providers, I trust my ISP even less, and a VPN helps me get by some of their more heavy handed shaping.
Because that seems MUCH more sensible than a lot of the stories/comments about this recently make it seem.
Aren't there some "hijacks" that are actually valuable to users? For example, if I run a network inside an extremely limited internet environment, I can hijack the user's DNS and redirect them to a "Hey, we're sorry, but running Netflix here will ruin the network for everyone, we hope you understand" page. If their browser is ignoring my local DNS server my option would seem to be simply black-hole netflix packets in the firewall, which is a lot less friendly to the user. Would I be a malicious network operator in this case?
Just seems very wrong to me to take the control away from the user/network-admin in any way. I mean, if you're gonna do it, go whole-hog. Delete HTTP from the browser entirely, right? I don't think that would go over well either, although it could certainly be justified by the same logic.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something about the issue, there has been a fair bit of FUD, but I simply don't feel good about the browser taking authority outside it's "please render this code into a webpage" scope.
Sounds like interfering with the way my intranet operates to me.
I don't understand how trading one ISP for another (Cloudflare?) is an improvement long-run. The system itself needs to be resilient, not just depend on the kindness of the upstream gods.
Interference from browsers with network level operations is my real worry. As far as I'm concerned, as long as the browser speaks HTTPS to my router, and my router speaks HTTPS to the servers, no problem. I'm worried about the "to protect the users we've hijacked their DNS directly via the browser" possibility though.
I know it used to be that using ISP DNS servers gave you access to some of their local caching and such. I don't hear that talked about much in these discussions. Is that no longer a thing, and thus we truly don't need ISP DNS?
When my tablet has a full IDE which lets me compile a new app and install it on the tablet, and share it to my friend's tablet, they will be "professional". When my tablet allows me to plug in any accessory I want without it having to be blessed by the tablet manufacturer, maybe it will be able to replace a "real" computer. (Although on this front USB-C gives me a little bit of hope, maybe..)
Those replies about how people are just grumpy that the times are changing are completely missing the point. We need to figure out how to re-focus the conversation and make people think about about the walled garden seriously.