kimbernator

That's totally a fair point, but at least phones were actually adding new features year to year a decade ago. It's fair to have new stuff releasing yearly when you're in the "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" phase.

I feel qualified to say it's not just my bubble, having worked in cell phone sales. The business hinges on the fact that people don't run out the useful life of their devices.

Incentives exist on the part of the person who, being human, definitely want the new shiny thing, regardless of the logic behind it.

They exist for the salesperson, who will get a commission for selling the new shiny thing, regardless of whether this makes the customer's life any better or worse.

They exist for the carrier because the customer is on the hook for 2-3 years of service when they buy the shiny thing.

Finally, they exist for the company that made the phone because they make a profit on the sale price of the shiny thing.

I think it's interesting that you cite video game consoles as a negative. I'd argue the opposite, I think phones should be more like them.

With video game consoles, you have a single device where micro-optimizations are constantly done, new features are added, and all software can be purpose-built to work really well on that specific hardware. All of that for ~7 years means a really fantastic user experience and a massive community of people that have collectively worked through solutions to common problems and forced the company's hand on defects (joycon drift, for example). It also means tons of high-quality hardware-specific accessories, both from the company that made the console and from third parties.

This figure sourcing gallup has nearly half of Americans replacing their phone "as soon as their carrier allows it": https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/07/15/how-often-...

"significant" is the key word here. I'd be hard pressed to think of a generational release of an existing phone line in the last 5 years that I would describe as a "significant" improvement.

The things you listed (camera and chip speed) are basically the only things left that these companies can claim is better than last year's model, but only because it's so easy to use synthetic benchmarks and numbers that mean nothing to make them sound like a dramatic improvement despite the fact that we've reached the bottom of the barrel in terms of diminishing returns on the user experience for smartphones in their current form. More megapixels don't matter anymore, CPUs are hardly a limiting factor and yearly gains on their performance are marginal at best, and we have more than enough RAM for pretty much all use cases.

My point is that if these companies insist on re-releasing the same phone every time, maybe they could space it out a little.

I bought my pixel 7 early this year because my s20's screen broke and the cost to buy a new one to replace it myself, which is not something I think most people would be willing to do (instead paying even more for someone else to do it), exceeded the cost to buy another S20. On top of that, the moment my 3 year old, perfectly working phone had anything other than a pristine screen, it had zero trade-in value and basically encouraged me to throw it in a drawer or the trash. This was literally Samsung's flagship phone only 3 years prior.

That could have probably been mitigated if the s20 remained relevant for more than a year or two and there was a mature parts market that made it feasible to upkeep rather than scrap.

Based on the phrasing of this, I'm not sure if it's meant to be taken sarcastically or not. Apologies if you did mean it that way, because I'll respond seriously:

- Advances are mostly software.

- Massive quantities of e-waste (and plastic waste via cases, screen protectors, etc).

- Perverse incentives by companies to not properly support the user experience on older devices.

- Tons of money spent pointlessly.

This is fine and good, but the problem is that once your phone is no longer the newest thing, the experience takes a hit because there's little incentive to actually support your device anymore.

I think that a new phone release should just be warranted. The trigger should be "we made significant improvements that couldn't be applied in software to the old device" instead of "it's October"

I know there have been cases where companies seem to intentionally slow down old phones to encourage new sales, but it doesn't really even require an "evil" motive. By releasing new hardware yearly, they are dramatically increasing their workload by having to support every device. On top of that, there's the perverse incentive that spending the money to release timely, high-quality updates to previous-generation devices will actually have a negative impact on their bottom line by reducing new sales.

That is technically true. However, I do find that a lot of people I know tend to get new phones well before they actually have a need for them.

I don't entirely blame peoples' consumerism; As somebody who once worked in cell phone sales, the mere act of visiting a carrier store is likely to land you in front of a salesperson who is incentivized to sell new phones and lines indiscriminately. Not to mention the incredible amount of advertising that goes into phones - if people only upgraded when they needed new phones, I don't think Apple, Samsung, or Google would feel the need to advertise the new ones so aggressively.

HN is likely a much more tech-literate crowd than the average person, so I think to a lot of us it seems silly to buy new phones every year. But I know that every time Apple releases a new iPhone, I get a call from my dad asking if it's worth upgrading from last year's model. I say no, nothing has changed, but the next time I see him he has it. Why? Because the salesperson made such a convincing case, not only about the merit of the new phone, but the fact that they could give him such a "deal" on it.

It's starting to feel silly, having a yearly release cycle for smartphones. So much of this product page is focused on new software functions that may have some vague relationship with the slightly upgraded hardware, but that could mostly be released to existing phones. Every new iPhone, Pixel, or Samsung phone basically claims the camera is marginally better and hey, look at these software features that have very little to do with the hardware and should not fundamentally be a reason to upgrade to this phone.

There is so much time, effort, and physical waste that is generated by slightly redesigning phones every year purely for the sake of making sales (as opposed to meaningful improvement upon the existing design or introduction of a new hardware feature). Think not only of people upgrading for the sake of it, but all of the cases, screen protectors, and other assorted accessories cast in plastic for previous models that are garbage now.

It would be nice if we could just space these things out to 5 years or so now, because that's probably how long it takes for anything to change enough to justify a new model.

It's trivial to create a website (frontend and backend) that offers similar functionality to Amazon. There's nothing special about their software platform.

You can't open-source marketing and the insane delivery network Amazon has. Those, among other things, are the reason they are successful. They could release all of their software completely open source and literally nothing would change.

> I think Jinja-in-YAML is very much an antipattern.

The thought of working with Ansible again is my nightmare due to this. Apparently they had an actual Python DSL you could use instead of YAML for a while, but discontinued it? So now loops and if-thens are these awful drawn-out messes of YAML that interpret jinja in completely unpredictable ways.

Certainly that can't be enforceable. There's no agreement to the terms, in fact a tacit disagreement and loss of profit by the developer/storefront.

This all feels like Unity is pushing an obviously terrible concept so they can back down to a slightly-less-terrible one and look slightly more reasonable. I'd bet they will switch to a larger per-sale fee after a little longer of people making noise.

It has native controller support as well, evidenced by the fact that it is also available on switch.

Interesting idea for sure, but how do you distinguish between users successfully starting a relationship and those just not using the service anymore? Can I say "I did not find a relationship with that person and I'm not interested in looking again for a while"? If so, what would stop people from saying that even if it's untrue?

Also, it means zero monetization for people looking for single encounters and/or flings, which I would bet is a meaningful portion of Tinder's income.

I agree this is an incorrect usage of the term. Had they simply been unable to match with anybody but still saw everything as the same, that would be a shadowban.

I'm not sure what the correct term is for gently nudging people to get off the platform by making their experience worse.

I wonder how dating apps will fit into society in 10+ years - they are dominant now as the way for young people to find romantic partners, but from the accounts I've heard (all second-hand, I haven't used one in ~5 years) they appear to be getting worse and worse for people who are anything below average attractiveness (or perhaps are just bad at making an appealing profile). It makes me wonder if there will be a correction in the opposite direction where those people go back to meeting in bars, work, school, gyms, etc while the "very attractive" crowd remains in the dating app pool instead.

I have no data to suggest this will happen aside from the fact that there's a large segment of the population that is having more and more trouble finding partners this way due to algorithmic changes forcing them out of eligibility to talk to people they find attractive. I've had at least one friend get permanently banned for violating a rule she didn't violate on Hinge, and their policy was essentially "tough luck, nobody gets unbanned for any reason".

If such a shift did occur, it would be an interesting reversal from the early days of online dating (eharmony, match.com) where the perception was that it was a fallback for people who were unable to meet someone in person.

I mean, yeah that resolution is ridiculous, but anything above 1080p on a screen less than ~14 inches is going to have diminishing returns and most of those returns will be in how "pretty" it is, not how useful it is.

Yeah, I've never once seen a USB-C cable break in that the physical connector itself was damaged. I've been through plenty that just seem to stop reliably connecting if they are in high-motion environments (the cable connecting my phone to my car's entertainment system, for instance)

I will say that I really wish they had managed to not have that middle section sticking up in the female connectors - cleaning out my phone's USB-C port is about 20x harder than cleaning out a lighting port because I feel like I'm going to break that little thing in the middle.

Given that Musk's obsession with the "X" moniker goes back to the 90s at least, I imagine it would be more accurate to say his son's name and this rebrand are both branches from the same tree (see: x.com -> paypal, SpaceX, Tesla model X)

The same drug also had immediate effects for me when I was getting daily migraines a few years ago.

I feel like git services like github would be well-suited to join the fediverse. It's clear to a lot of us that our code is becoming too centralized, but it's also hard to deny the usefulness of being able to search across so much code in a single place.

I'd also expect that users of github would have an easier time than the average person figuring that change out.

Can you imagine how much engagement the platform gets as a result of his work?

Just saying, it's never fair to try and say any one party in this arrangement is just leeching off another.

Reddit provides a platform, Users provide the community, and third-party app developers make interaction between the other two easier. Third-party apps aren't even able to engage with certain reddit content because the API never exposed it, but people still choose them; That says a lot about how they feel about the official app, and the real value that third-party devs provide.

What's crazy to me is that Reddit could have easily achieved their goals by just investing in developing a really good native app that people want to use, thereby monetizing them while also building goodwill! This whole thing could be achieved and make them look -better-. But they are making stupid short-term decisions to be able to IPO and they chose the stick over the carrot.

An amount that doesn't mean immediate death to all third-party apps would be a good start.

I don't know what the right number is, but Reddit has made it abundantly clear with this move that they aren't interested in finding it.

Honestly, I doubt there is one anymore (for me at least). Any trust I had for their corporate leadership before has completely evaporated. If they were to lower the prices to a "reasonable" level now it would indicate that they either capitulated (but didn't get to do what they really wanted and probably will try again later) or they are just being manipulative and wanted to use this as a way to show "goodwill" by bringing the price down.

The concept of the fediverse these days has me hopeful for a time where we don't need to worry about these big dumb corporate interests holding our data and the control over it hostage. Any publicly owned (or private trying to go public) organization with a profit incentive is bound to make stupid, short-term decisions eventually, and this is just one of many of Reddit's forays into that arena. They will continue to get worse and worse, regardless of how effective the protesting is.

Funny enough, I just tried editing the url and the first post on the resultant page was https://lemmy.world/post/433283 (a post in the Fediverse community asking why they keep seeing new posts show up in all sorting types)

I will say that doing so on the "new comments" sorting type did still yield a good number of no-comment posts.

So long as it's a known thing, I trust it will improve. It's just unfortunate that it had to be this broken during Lemmy's most opportune moment to capture new users.

That, among other things, is creating a lot of friction for new users at the moment though.

I just tried that. 2 of the top 6 posts that popped up had zero comments. Within a few seconds, brand new posts (with no engagement) starting filling in from the stop.

It seems like the content algorithm is fundamentally broken right now.

I used to primarily browse /r/all because I like to see when niche communities produce things exceptional enough to hit it (and I'd just filter subreddits I didn't want)

Especially now, there are a -lot- of new Lemmy communities popping up so I like to be able to see that kind of activity.