Agreed on battery life. It's such a pity that advances in battery tech is never given back to the user.
As for green text, this is purely a US thing. Most of the rest of the world uses Whatsapp.
1,441 karma · joined September 14, 2023
As for green text, this is purely a US thing. Most of the rest of the world uses Whatsapp.
Google currently has a quarterly revenue of $70-80B.
Imagine an internal team launches a new product to collect $100M in quarterly revenue. An earth-shattering success for any entrepreneur.
For Google...it doesn't even move the needle. Does nothing for stock, it's not strategic, and may become a liability later on.
You would need to launch a multi-billion new sub business for it to be of any interest to Google, which is impossibly hard.
It's absolutely stunning what smartphones can do these days and Apple makes an excellent product. It feels ungrateful and cynical to keep calling new models "boring".
The reality though is that normie needs were accomplished several generations ago. I'll use my girlfriend as a sample of such user.
She can't tell the difference between LCD and OLED nor would she notice Pro-motion.
You can add a million features to the camera app but she opens it and presses the shutter. Her only awareness of features is when she accidentally enables one and doesn't know how to get back.
You could set her back 8 iOS versions and she probably wouldn't notice. Because she uses none of the hundreds of features released since. Not because she dislikes them, she doesn't know they even exist.
All the spectacular advances in computing power are lost on her as this makes zero difference for the Facebook cat video group and Pinterest.
You might assume my girlfriend is perhaps lowly educated or just not tech savvy. Wrong, she's highly educated, even works in IT, although not in an engineering role. It's not that she's unable to understand the advances, she simply doesn't care.
It's becoming ever harder to justify new models for normies. Pretty much they buy the new one when the battery of their current one runs bad, typically every 3-4 years.
I think this is also why Apple put many Pro features into the regular model. Most people don't buy the pro and they're desperate for selling points in the regular model.
If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.
The human part of any hybrid would be the weak part as it comes to performance. And since we don't care about typical human things, like family, why bother with a human part at all?
Not exactly a fertile ground to start a family on. And that doesn't even go into gender expectations.
My take on this is that the current performance culture we've been living since the 80s where we worship the economy over anything else is biting us in the ass. We value work over family and children. We even dare to call them an "opportunity cost".
We should return to a single income society. A modern version of it that is not gendered. A single full-time income should be enough to run the basics of a family. Fail to deliver this and there will be no families. In general we should work less and enjoy life more. Otherwise, what is the point?
The point of technical progress should be less labor needed. But this progress is never paid out because we keep using that room to make up new bullshit jobs to produce garbage products we don't need.
A dutch economist once calculated that about 40-50% of the world economy is bullshit. Busy-keep, non-essential, a replacement for boredom.
Anyway, a system that advocates for dual incomes, job insecurity and high retirement ages that sees children as a distraction to optimal performance will cease to exist. Children are the most valuable "product" in society, yet we care about it the least.
I'm asking because whatever policy you'd like to see applied to the current elderly, is to be applied with twice the intensity to yourself, as the generation behind you is even smaller.
When given the choice, most still want children. How many? 2. As some want 0 or 1, this averages out to the typical 1.5 - 2.0 range as seen in most countries. Which is below replacement.
Most people maxing out at 2 children makes sense. Two children already give a full and rich family experience, both the joy and its burdens.
There's no incentive to go for 3, 4, 5. You may not have space for them in your home, car or schedule. A cold thing to say perhaps, but there's diminishing returns.
Money doesn't fix this, it doesn't move the needle. Yet people will passionately argue that if only homes were cheaper and childcare free, we'd boost that number. It makes little difference. There is no quick policy fix for this.
It's also extremely hard to get people to care about this because for anybody alive today, they'll experience the world as getting ever more crowded for another 4 decades.
Fundamentally, I think individualism is at the root of the problem. We've sacrificed the institute of family and community to the economy. Modern couples are increasingly financially independent workers. We outsource childcare to strangers so that we can maximize work. There's no neighborhood or community support network because they are at work too. We outsource elderly care, again so that we can maximize work.
The irony of a dual income career culture is that it drives up the cost of living but an even more counter-intuitive effect is that it's a major cause of worker shortages. Why? Because all the wealth this labor produces fuels an ever growing demand, of which much is consumerist bullshit.
We won't change though. We will have all our bells and whistles and double down on this path.
Also, I think the need for masonry is vastly overestimated or perhaps not fully researched. It is presented/implied to be a common need but it isn't. Check the top 100 websites, check your personal top 20 websites, how many use masonry? I bet not that many, it's niche use case which also has plenty of usable alternatives. It also never even shows up in any developer surveys.
Anyway, if we're into the game of building very specific layout solutions into CSS itself now, I'd argue the layout as seen on Google Image search is the far more useful one. It is somewhat of a horizontal masonry, but not really. Each image must keep its original aspect ratio (no cropping) whilst all images on the same row have the same height, thus filling the vertical space of the row fully. At the same time, rows must be roughly of the same height. There can be no gaps at the end of a row nor at the last row.
Quite hard to implement, although there's articles describing how.
When you're born and you have parents that are 20 versus 40, that is a dramatically different situation. Likewise if you have grandparents that are 50-60 versus 70 or already dead. Sure, more lifespan means you'll have more years together but you're completely dismissing the quality of those years.
I feel the same way about relationships. Some people willingly only seriously settle in their mid 30s or even later. That means you did not share the other person's most energetic, adventurous, and exciting life phase. You're 40 and have zero shared history together, no stories, nothing. But hey, you're finally "comfortable".
Fuck comfortable. The clock is ticking, hurry the hell up. You're wasting the defining and most valuable years of your life.
50 effectively becomes and unlimited amount as capability grows. If AI can match the capability of a single programmer, it would then be trivial to scale up. Although in that case the term programmer makes little sense.
An interesting article with a confusing ending. These policy proposals do not at all seem linked to the root causes mentioned earlier. I would be skeptical that giving people more money/time off significantly addresses the problem.
I think what stands out about the US is geographic spread. It seems common to move a few states away to truly start a "blank slate" life. You lose physical access to your original family, friends in the town you were born, and maybe even the college you went to.
I'll compare to that my "typical" European situation, which is characterized by a lack of geographic spread in the tiny country of the Netherlands.
I still live in the small town in which I was born. And most I've ever known from this town are still here or in adjacent towns. I have immediate physical access to "kids" I've known for decades, everybody I went to school with (except for college, which was further away) my parents, in-laws, 20 or so aunts and uncles and a shitload of their offspring.
So this is an additive network of blood (family), friends, co-students, neighbors. It's a solid network in quantity and quality. It's not a lucky shot because I decided to stay in my town, the point is that everybody stays in the town because they don't need to move a thousand miles for opportunities.
My work actually is quite a long commute away and this reveals another typical European phenomenon: on average, Europeans don't have a strong incentive to build an intimate social network at work. They're less likely to build deep friendships or do dating there. For the simple reason that they already have a network back home.
My mentor: "Don't worry, by the time you graduate, you don't have to program, the world will soon be modeling software".
We'd go from 3G languages to 4G and beyond.
That never happened. Three decades have passed and we still develop at an obscenely low abstraction level. If anything, complexity has increased.
At the end of the day though, the point of computing is that the machine does what we want. Expressing this via a programming language where very expensive humans write text files is not necessarily to last forever.
To me the much more interesting threat is regarding purpose. As AI becomes ever more capable, an increasing amount of things become pointless.
If using AI I have the power of 50 programmers at my fingertips, how could one possibly develop anything sustainable and unique? Anybody else can trivially make the same thing.
What would set something apart if effort no longer is a major factor? Creativity? Easy to just replicate/steal.
Everything is cash-based. My dad got paid in cash. He spent in cash, in stores as well as freely transacting with friends and family. There were (hardly) any CCTV cameras anywhere and of course no smartphones.
The personal freedom and lack of surveillance might be hard to imagine for young people.
The government knows close to nothing about you. They know you exist and would know that you have a job. Nobody really knows how much money you have, what you spent it on, your whereabouts and the mentality very much was that this is nobody's business. The distributed nature of cash makes arbitrary seizure impractical.
Now the burden of proof is reversed. "Money as software" makes possible an unlimited number of disturbing scenarios.
However, if you do try it, I still believe a central network is superior. I would opt for baseline moderation (content should be legal) after which any further moderation should be in the hands of the user, not the network. Bluesky has interesting ideas in this area. For example, you can say to always block sexual content, show a warning, or just show it. To each their own.
With that in place, a centralized network is superior as it tends to have excellent discovery, search, no weird syncing issues, it's centrally monetized, doesn't depend on lots of volunteer effort and the track record in keeping content online is far better compared to alternatives. That's a lot of benefits to consider.
The only real downside is the algorithms that dictate reach and how they are gamed.
Federated social media is a really bad idea. Having separate instances is fine if you want to carve out a community, it's the federation part that sucks.
It's very resource hungry and still can't manage to properly sync up content, likes and replies.
Discovery and search is very hard which beats the entire point of a social network, which is to find people and content.
Reliability is low as any volunteer may quit on a whim, taking down your content.
Instance moderation is very heavy-handed in that it not only dictates instance rules (which is fine) it also dictates federation. Which means you have no say in which outside content or people you can see. The solution is the dreaded "switch instance". Social media users don't know what an instance is, you're not getting it.
The culture on the Fediverse is: connect nobody. Extreme safetyism.
The lack of some type of ranked algorithm is a problem, not a solution.
Reach is a problem. Bigger accounts, institutions, companies, news, sports...get no reach on the Fediverse.
Bottom line: fully centralized social media or fully isolated ones. Federated is the worst of both worlds.
First, nobody cares what anybody on the Fediverse says. It's tiny. It's pinnacle "app", Mastodon, is losing lots of MAU every single day and is now below 1M MAU. Besides being tiny, it's scattered and discovery and search do not work. How can this mess possibly counter propaganda?
Second, whilst the Fediverse may not have sophisticated algorithms, it very much has censorship and typically way more than traditional social networks. It's basically a collection of far-left misfits that engage in constant defederation wars. You can't even post a photo of a meal because somebody will be "triggered".
The digital world is really simple: we all work for Big Tech but without the pay. All revenue flows in that direction.
The request is very simple: max budget per month. Shut it down if it exceeds it. Implement it already and stop with the excuses.
They do all of this for the sake of diversity yet it's the least diverse place imaginable as it represents a narrow brand of politics only (largely) found in California.
Which is a laughable set of politics as most of its members (activists) as well as its host (Google) are in fact ultra capitalistic neoconservatives in their actual doing.
It's the total opposite of diversity and inclusion as its optical only.
It's absurd to claim that working or having a career delivers no monetary benefits.
For the longest of times they've had this giant money printer funding what is effectively a playground. An incubator of serial failure but without any consequence.
The trouble is, Google is close to immune to feedback. It's billions of users aren't customers.
When you prompt "business man" and it outputs a white man, this is quite probably reflective of representation in reality.
Whether this overrepresentation is even a problem at all is debatable as the idea that every job, role or subgroup of people is perfectly diverse or that this even should be the goal isn't just ridiculous, it's demographically impossible.
If you do have a problem with a specific representation in actual reality, reality itself should change. Which it does, it just takes time.
In the meanwhile, just prompt "black business man" if that's what you were after.
They're minorities, non-white, yet they perform. Outperform even. This suggests that merit works no matter your background which breaks identity politics.
Hence, successful minorities project "whiteness". This includes awful behavior like punctuality and rationalism.
I figured they should pay for it. But now that they do (in this instance), I'm realizing this might be even worse. They can just buy the entire market in the same way they buy Google search users by paying Apple billions a year.
And still the actual content creator, a Reddit user in this case, is not compensated.
It's truly wild how lax regulation is. This is probably the most important technology ever created and we just let 2 companies have it all: the data and the compute.
In a way, anybody can attempt to "add" a new species by describing it in a paper. So you'd typically send your specimen to the most fitting specialist willing and able to write that paper. The paper would then hopefully be reviewed by a naming authority.
But a naming authority is just a bunch of people that got this authority by reputation. It's not the government. There may be regional authorities as well as multiple naming authorities for the same groups of species, not agreeing on species' status.
All of this mess is then stitched together into a best-effort central database. Not even the categorization (so taxonomy levels) is singular, there's multiple systems. Species are constantly moved, split, merged.
There's no algorithmic feed other than "popular" (on large instances) which shows the same 10 people posting for months in a row, daily. Hence, discovery of people and content is very hard. No content or people are recommended and search is broken. Ordinary people not belonging to some cultish niche have a very hard time compiling a good feed, if they even understand it at all.
Federation itself is broken. The boosts and comments to a post do not accurately synchronize across the network, it depends on some complicated logic regarding whom from your instance follows anybody else from the other instance. The bottom line is that you may see 3 boosts whilst the original has 12. You may not care about boosts, but it's a disaster for comments/replies. Everybody is seeing a different subset of replies to the same damn post. It drives the OP mad because there will be 20 people replying the same thing because they cannot see that others already said it.
Instances have too much power over moderation. They control whom the instance federates with server to server. You may be following somebody on another instance but your instance owner defederates and now your connection is gone. This ability to not just moderate content but heavily impact your social graph isn't seen anywhere else. And this ability is heavily used as Mastodon is a network of activists.
Combine this over-use of moderation with the idea that instances go under all the time, and the only sane thing to do for most people is to join the default instance. Here you'll have reasonable "mainstream" moderation and the biggest federation reach with other instances/services. Which kind of defeats the point of a distributed social network.
I'm still impressed by what Mastodon has accomplished given its grass root origin and shoestring budget, but it's no social media of the future.
I don't know if Bluesky is, but at least it has a better design regarding nomadic identities, a user's ability to self-moderate, content protection, etc.