Zak

The obsession with control I find objectionable is not their decision not to enable emoji widely until support was stable. That's an obsession with polish, not control. The commitment to polish and self-restraint to not add features until they actually work well is something I've long appreciated about Apple.

The control part is blocking third-party apps to toggle the hidden setting. If you enable unsupported features using a third-party app, the expectation of polish is obviously void. It would even be fine if Apple refused to carry apps like that in their polished, curated store, if they didn't forbid users from installing apps any other way.

Jay Leno, perhaps the world's most famous car collector refuses to buy a Ferrari due to practices like that.

I beat it with Firefox, UBO, standard Firefox advanced tracking protection, and a VPN.

It was able to track me as long as my IP address didn't change, but as soon as I switched VPN endpoints, it gave me a new identifier.

This doesn't cover in-app adds on phones over mobile data, which is probably the main vector for the tracking discussed in the article. For that:

1. Adblocking via private DNS (e.g. https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls)

2. Prefer websites over native apps wherever possible

3. Browser adblocker

Hosts file adblocking is also possible on a phone where you have root.

I have never regretted my decision to aggressively block ads on every device I use, and to shun devices where I can't.

I suspect there's a large overlap between people who want a small phone and people who only upgrade their phone when there's a pressing need. I am in both groups.

The root cause is that the phone is not a primary device for me. It's what I use when bringing a PC is too much trouble.

I'm glad to hear that. That means these devices will be a popular target, perhaps the popular target for alternative operating systems both Android-based and non-Android Linux.

> Humanity settled on these numbers long ago because they work best.

Standardized time zones are a recent invention (late 1800s through early 1900s). Working hours in that period were determined by what factory owners could get away with, and later shortened by pressure from labor movements.

Some time-related practices, like high school in most of the USA starting especially early in the morning are at odds with what research suggests would work best (teenagers on average perform best later in the day than adults or younger children).

It's wise to consider the reasons behind existing standards before changing them, but unwise to assume they're what works best without examining whether that's reality.

I know that I want an end to clock changes more than I want the time zone to be optimized. Both spring and fall clock changes cause a spike in car crashes and serious health events, which I suspect of being worse than the problem they're trying to solve.

That's gatekeeping/snobbery. VSCode won't tell you you're not allowed to install extensions that aren't blessed by Microsoft. If it started doing that, most people could trivially switch to Codium.

> Also FaceTime for calling distant relatives.

Are your relatives unable to install Signal or WhatsApp?

Yes is a possible answer here, but installing a messaging/video-call app seems pretty low effort. I've had several elderly relatives do it and none required hand-holding, just the name of the app.

It's less surprising to me that a developer would choose a Macbook than an iPhone. You can have root on a Macbook and install software without permission from Apple (though I hear of late it may require using the command line).

The hardware performance is outstanding, and while opinions are split about the OS, a lot of people who display good taste in other technical matters like it. I've chosen to spend my own money on a different laptop, but if someone offered me a high-spec Macbook Pro on the condition that I use it for a year, I'd accept.

I expect most people to think it's bad if a corporation can keep them from running apps on their phone when those apps are good for the user and bad for the corporation. If most people don't understand that conflicts of interest lead to unethical behavior, that's a larger and more urgent social problem.

I expect tech nerds to be aware that the conflict of interests exists in this case, while the average person would not.

It's not just the average consumer. I continue to be surprised that so many developers and other tech nerds - the type who post on HN - chose and continue to choose the iPhone over Android when Apple dictates what apps they can install and locks third-party accessories out of certain features.

Current times do present the opportunity to raise awareness of the issue though. App store bans for apps like ICEBlock, and various laws age-gating app stores considerably expand the population with reason to care who has ultimate control of their phone.

I imagine PG is rich enough and influential enough in the tech/VC space that he doesn't have to signal anything he doesn't honestly believe.

It's unsurprising he would believe LLM coding tools are a productivity boon, but using code quantity as a measure of software development progress is one of the most famously wrong ideas in the software world. Either he wrote carelessly, or he believes that LLM tools have changed that reality.

I'm inclined to think LLM tools haven't substantially changed that reality. LLMs perform better when more of the problem fits in context, so succinctness remains valuable.

Who is signaling what virtues to whom in this context?

When I see PG write something like that, it signals to me that he has embraced AI hype to the point that he is displaying poor taste and embracing a risky technical practice.

An important detail here is that Ukraine's constitution says they can't have an election while they're at war. The US constitution does not say that, and the USA has had elections during wars several times.

Page loads that aren't measured in megabytes, no tracking cookies, and works without Javascript? Refreshing, if you ask me.

I thought about making something like this prior to LLMs. This version is more sophisticated than what I had in mind.

I think its response to this comment could use some work:

> The Glock 19 is a great answer to this position.

It detects spam for off-topic product promotion, but gives it a toxicity score of zero even though it recognizes that a Glock 19 is a firearm. Suggesting that a weapon is a good answer to someone's position on a topic other than weapons should probably be interpreted as a threat.

Here's a study showing an immediate negative impact on prospective memory from switching context repeatedly on short-form video platforms: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/09658211.2025.252107...

Unlimited skipping until a video is sufficiently stimulating had a negative impact regardless of the content, while people limited to ten skips in ten minutes did not experience a negative impact. This suggests that the format itself has harmful cognitive effects.

Each feed has a unique URL, so you can bookmark it in your browser. For people using Facebook via native mobile apps, my recommendation would be to stop and use a browser.

I never saw Instagram as appealing to photography hobbyists. Instead, I saw it as deliberately nerfing things where hobbyists have advantages (image quality, choice of aspect ratios, posting from desktop PCs), likely to increase participation by making it less intimidating to share snapshots taken on phone cameras.

It's probably impossible to make something that's good for any kind of enthusiast that's also effective at maximizing usage regardless of audience.

> If they lock things down, they lose less money to fraud.

[Citation Needed]

I see this kind of claim made often, but never backed up with evidence that remote attestation of consumer devices has any real-world impact on fraud. It sounds like it could be true because it would detect compromised devices, but it could just as easily be false because people with devices that don't pass are usually technically sophisticated.

It's not about what users want. It's about what's profitable for the company.

What I want from Facebook is to see what original words, images, or videos my friends and family thought was worth sharing with the world today, and I want to see clearly when I've reached the end of that. I probably don't need to spend more than ten minutes once a day on that.

It's profitable for Facebook to show me as many ads as possible. If I wasn't an aggressive adblock user, the thing I want would have much less potential profit than all the third-party content they want to show me.

You can definitely make a "phone calls only" mode: create a mode, allow certain apps to interrupt, and add only phone calls to the list.

I do think they should offer more pre-configured notification modes by default, if only to show people what they can do with the feature. Perhaps "phone calls only" should be one of those.

> It seems like they will still allow installs, just hide it behind some scare text.

That describes the current (and long-established) behavior. App installation is only from Google's store by default and the user has to manually enable each additional source on a screen with scare text.

It is possible, but many people still buy them from their provider with financing or subsidies. That means people shopping for used Pixels who want to unlock the bootloader need to avoid the special Verizon variant which forbids unlocking the bootloader.

This is separate from SIM locking, which forbids use with another carrier. US carriers still do that, but are required to remove the lock after a while if the customer doesn't owe them money.

It's not clear why Verizon insists on permanently locked bootloaders or why Google agrees to it for Verizon when they don't do it on Pixels sold anywhere else.

Öffi, if it has coverage for the areas relevant to you: https://oeffi.schildbach.de/index.html

I don't either, but I'm familiar with the situation from talking to people who do.

The obvious answer is to just use any of the many third-party messaging apps, but in the USA it seems like there's always someone who thinks a one minute setup process and tapping a different colored icon is too much effort.

That's not quite how it works. You can't have a group chat that's mixed iMessage and SMS/MMS.

If an iMessage user creates a group chat where not everyone is using iMessage, then it's MMS. I suppose now it could be RCS if everyone's using a device and carrier that supports RCS, but I haven't kept up with that. MMS has a bunch of limitations relative to any modern internet messaging app, so people don't want to use that.

Some people are also very reluctant to install third-party messaging apps.