johnfernow

> How much of that actual cost is related to running a simple social blogging/connecting tool vs anything that is ad/surveillance/manipulation/etc?

It's plausible that the ad/surveillance/manipulation/etc makes up the bulk of development costs nowadays but I'd imagine the actual content (photos, videos, etc.) being served makes up the bulk of the costs. It undoubtedly could be made more efficient, but even if you could cut total operating costs by 99% (very unlikely) you still need $876 million/year. If you can only manage to cut it by 95%, you'll need over $4 billion/year. In any case, Reddit doesn't pay most of its moderators and it's still not profitable, so I don't think moderators make up a significant portion of the costs.

> >perfect feature-parity of Facebook

> All I wanted was a place to share baby pictures with grandma and they bolted on the panopticon...

> Even grandma knows that FB is evil now. She keeps asking me why the baby pics are on Facecrook, but I don't have any good solution for her today.

If you only want to share things with a small number of users, do you even need social media for this? Sounds like something a group chat on Signal or WhatsApp (with notifications silenced) would work for this if everyone you know is willing to use it. I like Facebook because it lets me see what my friends, family and former coworkers that I can't always see often are up to. Hard to stay in contact with everyone you've ever been friends with, but Facebook makes it a little easier.

I agree with you that Facebook is evil in many ways, and I'll 100% advocate for viable alternatives (which unfortunately I don't think distributed/federated networks are, due to regular users being confused by them), but I acknowledge that it's going to be very difficult to get people to switch. Ultimately I think there needs to be a reason to switch other than privacy (as most people don't care), and unfortunately Facebook can quickly copy any unique feature that an alternative network adds. It's not impossible for new platforms to come about, but most new platforms aren't really clones of old ones (TikTok isn't a clone of Facebook, YouTube or really any other major existing platform.) I don't know what the solution is. Not sure how much of an improvement it is for privacy, but in terms of mental wellbeing, I find Discord to be more enjoyable and less addictive, but again, it's not really the same thing as Facebook.

> Why aren't there non-profit (or benefit corporation) versions of these services?

From a quick search, it seems that the operating costs for Meta in 2022 was USD $87.66 billion. Twitter was $5.6 billion in 2021. Reddit's is a mystery but it has 192 million more monthly active users than Twitter (not that they necessarily post the same amount of content or that the content is as expensive to store/serve, but in any case it's not going to be cheap either.)

So to run something like Facebook, you'd have to have one of the best-funded non-profits ever. Non-profit doesn't mean it has to be a charitable foundation (so you could run ads and sell services, which you'll need to, because you're not getting $87.66 billion through donations), but even non-profit companies with a decent amount of revenue do not come close to that amount. I don't think it's impossible to create an ethical, non-profit alternative to Facebook, but I understand why one hasn't been created (there are non-profit social networks, but most seem to be distributed/federated social networks, which are a very different experience for most users.)

Even if you created something with perfect feature-parity of Facebook, it'd still be extremely difficult to convince users to switch. For messaging platforms, there is a non-profit organization that has a secure and private messaging app (Signal) but few people use it compared to Facebook Messenger, Telegram and KakaoTalk (which by default don't use end-to-end encryption) or even Snapchat (doesn't use E2EE for messages aside from photos) (WhatsApp at least always uses E2EE, not sure about Line.)

> Enshitification requires the profit motive.

Not really. Firefox killed support for WPAs: that alone is enough reason for some to switch to a Chromium-based browser. They've done several questionable UI redesigns that their users don't seem to like (people like a consistent UI.) They're also starting a bad trend of adding new features that they're killing within a year or two (their password manager, their E2EE file sharing service, their encrypted notes.) I personally didn't use any of those features, but for any user who used those new features that they promoted, having to switch a year or two later is a good way to turn them off your products. Google is obviously far worse with this with their various services, but the point is that quality can decrease even when their is no profit motive. I'll agree with you that it's certainly more likely to happy when there's a profit motive though.

> Any "new" used phone is going to come with a battery of undetermined age and quality as well as its own set of potential problems and failures

Not necessarily, as I can't imagine most refurb/used sales worldwide come from individual sellers; most of them are probably sold by businesses, which sometimes provide a warranty and return policy on their used products. Right now, on the Amazon Renewed Store, the unlocked Galaxy S20 FE 5G 128GB is $187.50. Amazon states,

> The product is refurbished, fully functional, and in excellent condition. Backed by the 90-day Amazon Renewed Guarantee.

> - This pre-owned product has been professionally inspected, tested and cleaned by Amazon qualified vendors.

> - This product is in "Excellent condition". The screen and body show no signs of cosmetic damage visible from 12 inches away.

> - This product will have a battery that exceeds 80% capacity relative to new.

> ...

> - This product is eligible for a replacement or refund within 90-days of receipt if it does not work as expected.

from https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Galaxy-128GB-Cloud-Mint/dp/B0...

So if 2.5 months into using that phone, you feel it doesn't function well, you can return it.

Even for sales from individuals, Swappa (an online user-to-user marketplace for used tech) requires you to list the battery health percentage on iPhones if it's below 80%. They also require that everything functions well and even is in good cosmetic condition. Their standard for "fair" is rather high.

Outside of pawn shops, I imagine most brick and mortar stores aren't selling phones in poor condition. In the US, the phone carriers, Best Buy, and even Apple themselves sell refurb phones, and they don't want to hurt their reputation by selling poor quality products. Apple in particular has high standards for their refurb phones:

> All refurbished iPhone models come with a new battery, new outer shell, are backed by a one-year warranty, have free delivery and returns, and also include:

> - Full functional testing, genuine Apple part replacements (if necessary), and a thorough cleaning

> - The original Operating System or a more recent version

> - All refurbished devices are repackaged in a brand new box with all accessories and cables

I guess anecdotally my iPhone 6S as of recently hasn't been performing well. Would a battery replacement help it? Maybe. But that's not certain (it could be that modern apps are so bloated that its 2015 hardware can't handle it despite most of those apps having essentially 0 new meaningful features in the past 8 years) and I'm surely not going to spend $100 on a nearly 8 year old phone to find out. I've replaced the battery myself before, but last time I broke the screen in the process (something that wouldn't have happened if the phone had a removable back), so I'm hesitant to do it again (I was being careful, and have done plenty of phone repairs at this point, but more than anything the ribbon cables break extremely easily.) But if I could just pop off the back and put a new battery in, I'd be willing to give it a try for $35. But instead I'll probably just deal with it for a little while and then get a different used or refurb phone with better battery health than my own device.

EDIT: another example of an affordable refurb phone: iPhone SE (2nd gen) is $147 in the US from the Amazon Renewed Store and has all the same benefits Amazon guarantees for the Galaxy S20 FE. So for $47 more than a battery replacement, you can essentially try out a "new" used phone for 80 days and determine whether you want to stick with it or return it.

https://www.amazon.com/Apple-iPhone-SE-64GB-Red/

Most people aren't spending 5-10x that amount on buying a new phone. Global average selling price of all smartphones was $317 in 2021. Excluding iPhones (only Androids), in 2019, the global average selling price was $269.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/788557/global-average-se...

And that's the average, likely brought up drastically by the sale of extremely expensive phones. Apple and Samsung's flagships start at $800 and go over double that for their absolute top of the line. Unfortunately I couldn't find the global median selling price of smartphones, but the source above mentions that 58.5% of all smartphones sold during the second quarter of 2019 in Latin America had a price tag of USD$199 or less, and 83% of all smartphones shipped to Africa during the 4th quarter of 2019 had a price tag of $199 or less.

From a quick search, one of the best selling phones right now in India is the Galaxy M13, which is Rs. 9,699, or about USD$118 — barely any more than what Apple charges for a battery replacement in the US (obviously it's not that much for a replacement in India, but it does show how unnecessarily expensive $100 for a battery replacement really is.)

https://www.bajajfinserv.in/insights/best-selling-phones-in-...

In China, those that can afford it seem to buy iPhones (10.7% of sales), but all the rest of the best selling phones seem to be cheaper phones (next best selling is around ~USD$220, and the ones after that seem to be a little above or below that.)

https://www.gizchina.com/2023/03/28/top-10-best-selling-mobi...

In Mexico, 63% of smartphones sold in 2021 were between 3,000 to 10,000 pesos (USD$175 to $585.)

https://expansion.mx/tecnologia/2022/08/04/smartphones-mas-v...

However, if I'm not mistaken that all is for new phones, and most phone sales worldwide aren't new. While used and refurbished smartphones make up only 24.4% of phone sales in North America as of 2020, they make up 75.6% of phone sales in the rest of the world.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1208609/used-smartphone-...

So the average person worldwide is not buying a new phone at all (and thus spending even less than whatever the median selling smartphone price is, let alone the average.) However, the percentage of phone sales that are used is projected to decrease over time (according to the source above.) Not super surprising, given that while flagship phones have ditched removable backs for a while now, in the past few years more and more budget phones don't even have removable backs, and if you have to spend a significant portion of the cost of a new phone on a battery replacement, then that's a risky decision, as you don't know how long the other parts in the phone will last, and that's a lot of money that you're gambling on it. Sure, 3rd party repair shops in developing countries aren't charging you USD$100 for a battery replacement, but the labor can still easily double the cost of getting a new battery.

At $35 (and that's from iFixit, which if I'm not mistaken doesn't even make the batteries — if the companies sold the batteries directly, it'd be even cheaper), a new battery would be a much smaller risk, and near certainly would lead to less e-waste.

The Samsung Galaxy XCover6 Pro has an IP68 rating (same as Galaxy S23 and iPhone 14) and has a replaceable back (and Samsung sells official OEM batteries for less than $50.) It also has a headphone jack, and is only 1mm thicker than the S23 Ultra.

https://www.samsung.com/us/business/mobile/phones/galaxy-xco...

Unfortunately, replacement parts are hard to come by for the Galaxy XCover6 Pro (Samsung doesn't sell them, iFixit doesn't sell them, and I can't even find certain parts from random sellers online), so it's arguably less repairable than other mainstream phones. An iPhone's battery is significantly more difficult to replace than that of the XCover6 Pro's, but if the screen, camera, speaker, port, buttons, etc. break on an iPhone, it's at least possible to replace them, unlike the XCover 6 Pro, so it's not the device for me and hard for me to recommend to others, as even if one doesn't do repairs themselves, with a more mainstream phone they can pay someone to repair their phone (either at an Apple Store if an iPhone, or some mobile repair shop for popular Android phones.)

I don't drop my phone often, but I've still had an optical image stabilizer that shook the camera violently, a vibration motor that worked sometimes, and a mute switch that worked sometimes, so replacement parts are very important.

But even still, the Galaxy XCover6 Pro is proof that you can have a waterproof phone with a headphone jack and replaceable battery that isn't very thick. If they sold replacement parts and committed to as many years of OS updates as Apple, I'd strongly consider it for my next phone.

iFixit sells iPhone XS Max batteries for $35, nearly a third of the cost Apple is charging. $99 may not be a ton in some regions of the world, but it is enough that many are unwilling to spend that kind of money on a 5 year old phone, versus for $35, it's a low enough amount that many might just stick with their phone and replace the battery, leading to less e-waste.

And while $99 may not be a lot in some regions of the world, but it's a significant amount of people's discretionary income in other regions (they may not be buying iPhones but the situation isn't much better for other brands as far as I'm aware.) $99 is also enough to outright buy a new cheap Android phone.

Same. Was the Samsung Galaxy S3 (which in 2012 had wireless charging and a removable back) not sufficiently thin? It's less than a millimeter thicker than the current Galaxy S23, and I'm not sure that the <1mm of difference in the S23 comes from having a non-removable back (as opposed to the 11 years of advancements in other technologies.)

Same (I also paid for it because of the numerous easy email aliases).

Like, it's a domain name registrar! What was their objective and plan and where did this go wrong? Out of the 2,650+ active registrars, it's the fourth most popular one!

It obviously was never going to be a massive money maker, but even if they had to raise prices, between their easy email aliases and clean interface, even though there were cheaper options, this easily could have been a small but profitable service for them. Also, it kept me in the Google ecosystem (I use Gmail with their email aliases.)

I don't know how this product realistically could have been more successful for what it is, and I don't know why you'd bother killing a service that could pay for itself, especially now that I (and the many individuals and businesses affected by this) don't even trust Google's paid services. There are over 10 million registered domains through Google Domains! That's a ton of paying customers who will be reluctant to pay for anything Google's selling in the future. Doesn't matter how good of a service Google provides if they're just going to kill it.

> This one doesn't make any sense to me

I'm also confused, it's a paid product! If it wasn't making enough money, why didn't they just raise the price? It already wasn't the cheapest name registrar, so I don't think people were selecting it solely based on cost (I went with it because of the free 100 email aliases included, but others liked the clean layout and simplicity compared to some other options.)

I get why they kill free things that don't make them money, but it seems very strange with a paid product, especially when, as others have said, they have GCP, which will presumably require a third party registrar in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36346941

This is exactly what needs to happen to get Microsoft to stop doing things like this. How many sites not working properly does it take for someone to switch browsers? Maybe as little as 1, if the user really wants or needs to use that site.

That, and lawsuits (as others have mentioned, this easily could have resulted in violating HIPAA and other laws) could help stop behavior like this. But fines are the price of doing business for many companies, so outright blocking Edge may be even more effective.

I want competition in the browser space, but Microsoft simply has not offered that in over 15 years. IE obviously was worse than Chrome and Firefox in many ways, the original Edge still had worse W3C compliance and performance than Chrome and Firefox, and the new Edge is just a Chromium fork. They seem highly interested in getting your data, but not all that interested in actually creating an good product.

I'm not even sure why Microsoft is doing things like this at this time. If they wanted to increase the number of Edge users, this is not the way to do so. Are they content having less than 10% of users on desktop and just want to milk those users for all they can? As others have said [1], even if this was done locally (so that there'd be no privacy concern), this is is a terrible feature to have on by default due to the risk of inserting false details.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36295837

Reddit is highly addicting but usually brings me little joy. Most of the time when I'm just browsing the front page I don't laugh or learn anything particularly useful.

But in a web full of bots and SEO blogspam, it's refreshing to have a place that is predominantly filled with content and comments by real people. Sure, it has tons of low effort posts and comments, but it's one of the few places on the Internet where you can ask a question about nearly any topic and get tons of answers from real people, and due to its voting system, in certain subreddits about specific enough topics, quality answers rise to the top.

As a tool, Reddit is indispensable due to how bad SEO spam has gotten. If I want an answer written by a human who probably has no financial incentive to lie, adding site:reddit.com to my searches is by far the quickest way to do so. For certain topics, it's not just the quickest, but the only way certain information can be found.

If Reddit dies or (more likely) becomes useless due to poor moderation, it's not hard to imagine us entering a new chapter of the Information Age. Many local newspapers no longer exist, and many magazines covering more niche topics have also shut down. People gladly share their experiences and discoveries on Reddit because they know many people will see it (easier to get motivated to write long posts if you know someone will read them.) Will people be willing to put that effort into writing on their own blogs? Many won't, as no one will even know it exists (before you could share your blog on Reddit!) Even if someone still goes through the effort of writing quality content on a blog or self-hosted site, again, it will be very difficult for anyone to find it due to SEO spam.

This is such a stupid situation they've put themselves in. I get that they want to show ads, but I don't think ads not being shown is why people use 3rd party apps. On desktop, I'd rather use old.reddit.com with ads than new Reddit without ads: new Reddit is buggier, slower and shows less content. And they trivially could have added the features mods wanted that are offered by the 3rd party apps. No one would use 3rd party apps if the official one wasn't so slow, buggy and lacking.

I understand the advantages of not having so much of the Internet's content all on one site, but I'm just not convinced the average user is going to switch to decentralized/federated/peer-to-peer social networks. People may stop using Twitter, but most of those former users aren't going to start using Mastodon. Likewise, people may stop using Reddit, but I don't think they're going to start using Lemmy or any of the other alternatives. As far as random forums go, discoverability is going to be an incredibly difficult, and in any case it's far easier for a user with little technical knowledge to start a subreddit vs starting and maintaining a forum.

I dread to think how much of my life I've wasted on Reddit. But for all its faults, I think it has added a lot of value, and I think the Internet would be a worse place without it.

C was created over 50 years ago. I wonder if the creator ever imagined that it would become and remain the language used to develop the kernel that powers the majority of the world's servers and phones half a century later (though Rust is just starting to be used in the Linux kernel.)

Even C++ is 38 years old.

And these are just the languages; the systems our current OSs are inspired from were designed without much security in mind: understandably so, considering Unix was also created over half a century ago, long before the Internet. GNU was created nearly 40 years ago, and even Linux released over 30 years ago, only 2 years after the world wide web was invented, so cyber attacks were not very common.

At least with iOS and Android we've been able to have a better permission model than most desktop OSs (e.g. applications have to ask permission to use the camera), as well as better sandboxing (one application can't just read files from other applications: users explicitly have to share things from one app to another, and can revoke permissions at any time.)

But I agree with you that they're ultimately built with primitive languages and questionable design decisions. That's not a criticism of anyone who designed those systems and languages: the fact that they're widely used half a century later shows how incredibly good they were for the time! But a lot has changed in 50+ years (and especially the last 20-30 years with the Internet), and we've learned a lot.

We do get new languages, though I feel like we still have much to improve: the fact that Electron is so widely used for desktop applications (even ones that aren't web apps) shows how far we have to go for languages and their frameworks. But at least there are people trying to make better programming languages and frameworks.

Unfortunately the outlook on OSs seems grimmer. There are some hobbyist OSs that are extremely impressive, but I'm not sure any of them look likely to replace the OSs we use for servers, desktops, phones or other devices. With all we know today, we could design and build an OS that is far more secure than what we have today. But the costs of doing so would be enormous, so I understand why no organization has taken on this task.

For the past 5 years or so, it has gone in spurts for me: no time in VR for months (sometimes even a year or more at a time), then nearly all my gaming time is in VR for a couple months or so.

Since the PSVR2's release, when I hang out with one of my friends, I play one of his VR games almost every time I'm there. That undoubtedly won't last forever, but it definitely has the best launch library of any headset so far IMO.

Maybe I'm just a really picky gamer, but for any given console generation, there are only a handful of games I truly love, but it's easier to enjoy a fine but not incredible game on a flat screen than it is in VR. A really good VR game makes you forget about everything else and gives you an experience unachievable outside of VR. If you're immersed in a story, a song, or intense gameplay, you forget about any discomfort coming from the headset being on your face. But if you're not enjoying it then you're going to get annoyed a lot faster than you would sitting on the couch looking at a TV.

That said, the PSVR 2 is looking to have the best library of VR games yet. Previously, you'd have incredible one-off titles such as Half-Life: Alyx release on Steam but then nothing for months or years, but Sony seems really committed to providing a large number of high-quality AAA experiences on the headset. It also has a ton of great games from smaller studios (most of which were already on Steam or the Quest, but with such big libraries on both of those platforms, they were kind of tough to find throughout all the mediocre titles: this isn't an argument in favor of stronger curation, just an observation.)

Nonetheless, I don't expect it to make up the majority of time someone would play video games anytime soon, and there are two reasons:

1. Most people don't have VR headsets yet, so even if I personally prefer Pavlov to other FPSs, only two of my friends have VR headsets, so it's not replacing those flat screen games. Maybe one day, but currently the most popular games run on nearly everything: Fortnite, Minecraft, Apex, Overwatch, CS:GO, LoL, DOTA2, Valorant, Rocket League, etc. I doubt those games' popularity stems entirely from the fact they're on tons of platforms OR have very low PC requirements (or are free to play, minus Minecraft), but it likely helps.

2. Nearly all VR gamers play flat screen games, but the majority of flat screen gamers do not have VR headsets. The Quest 2 may have sold around 20 million units, but nearly all of those owners likely have a Switch, PlayStation, Xbox or gaming PC. Medium-sized studios certainly are incentivized to create VR games due to less competition (getting a game released for PSVR2 nearly guarantees at least some sales, unlike releasing on flat screen), but large studios with huge marketing budgets looking to make a ton of money can make more by selling flat screen games. Maybe they'd get some additional sales by releasing it for VR, but it's not guaranteed (hopefully it becomes more profitable to port to VR as the number of users increases though.)

I am a huge fan of VR gaming: some of my best gaming experiences ever have been in VR (notably Resident Evil 7 on PSVR1 and RE8 on PSVR2).

Even still, I acknowledge putting on a VR headset comes with some notable downsides: those sacrifices are 100% worth it for some games because it enables an incredible experience you can't otherwise have. Sure, you can play a modded version of Half-Life: Alyx without VR, but you're going to have a much worse experience and a lot less fun. Same for RecRoom and plenty of other titles.

But for work? I'm 100% willing to put up with a little discomfort for an hour or two if I'm having a great time; I'm less willing to do that for 8 hours a day when my job can be completed in a far more comfortable manner.

Comfort no doubt could be improved upon, but even still, I like to see the world with my own eyes. VR is a nice brief escape, and it doesn't have to be a solo activity: playing RecRoom or Zenith with friends is a lot of fun! I even bring my Quest 2 over to my friends' house IRL and play Zenith in the same room with him. But it's not much of an escape if that's what you spend your whole day in.

There are many activities that are a ton of fun for short periods of time, but if done all day, are miserable. I enjoy gaming quite a bit, but I dread the idea of being a pro-gamer who Streams on Twitch 10-12 hours a day playing one title to get good: that'd suck all the fun out of the activity for me and I'd much rather just work a more regular job like web development. I see the same being true for VR: I enjoy it a lot for an hour or two a day at most, but being in it all day could cause me to hate it.

Finland "warned that the proposal could conflict with the Finnish constitution" and Germany "has staunchly opposed the proposal", so I don't think there's going to be an EU law banning end-to-end encryption. So if Spain were to act alone, I can't imagine banning WhatsApp (which uses end-to-end encryption) would go over well with their constituents. It's on 98% of their smartphones and (at least in 2015) they used it more than any other EU country [1]. WhatsApp (like Signal) said it would leave the UK rather than weaken encryption if end-to-end encryption was banned there. [2] I'm sure the same would be true for Spain.

1. https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2015/02/16/inenglish/14240...

2. https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/10/23633601/uk-online-safety...

Maybe WhatsApp is lying, but it would put them in a predicament for the following situation: a user from outside of Spain chatting with someone inside of Spain. Assuming they comply with Spanish law, they could,

1. Say nothing and show no warning message. Would generate negative press and distrust in the platform.

2. Show a warning message when a user tries to message someone in Spain. Some would commend the transparency, but the press and public may still be upset that they acquiesced to the Spanish governments' demands.

3. Create an entirely different version of the app for Spanish users. This wouldn't generate much negative press outside of Spain, but Spanish users absolutely would be upset that they can't contact people outside Spain with the app.

This is not an edge case scenario: 15% of people in Spain are foreign-born (likely contacting family and friends from their home country) and 2.7 million Spaniards live abroad (likely contacting family and friends inside of Spain.)

Option 3 is likely out of the picture, but of options 1 and 2, while neither would result in the death of WhatsApp, some users may indeed leave the platform due to it. In order to be worse than losing the entire country of Spain, 2.35% of WhatsApp users would have to leave the app. That seems unlikely, but even still WhatsApp might not feel it's worth the risk, and in any case they'd probably prefer to not have to spend development hours building systems to comply with the law. Easier to just cut them off.

Looks like they're still the leading cause of dead kids,

> While gun and motor vehicle deaths increased substantially in 2020, the latest year for which final numbers were available, claims that more children and teenagers die due to guns than motor vehicles only hold up when 18- to 19-year-olds are included, a group that accounts for nearly as many gun deaths as 1- to 17-year-olds combined do, according to an NBC News analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The gap between vehicular deaths and firearm deaths is narrowing among 1- to 17-year-olds, and may close entirely, according to the CDC’s provisional and incomplete 2021 data.

from https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/child-gun-deaths-car-d...

I'm not sure the word "kid" is legally defined anywhere, but for minors, it would appear that automobiles still are the leading cause of death

(or at least they were as of the time of that report, and from a quick search I'm not finding any more recent analyses. Traffic fatalities increased by a notably higher rate than homicide in 2021, and homicide decreased notably more than traffic fatalities in 2022. Would need to analyze the CDC's data to verify if the overall trends are present for minors too, but my guess is that they probably are.)

Not that which is #1 has much impact on resolving either of these issues, as cars were unquestionably the largest killer of kids for many years with politicians and even the general public seemingly unconcerned. The U.S. has an extraordinarily high traffic-fatality rate compared to other developed nations (higher than any other developed country in the world per capita [1]), with it being a leading cause of death in the U.S. for people ages 1–54 [2]. The U.S. has over 2x more traffic-related fatalities per 100k people than Canada, New Zealand, Poland, Greece, South Korea, Italy, Australia and France, over 3x more than Portugal, Germany, and the Netherlands, over 5x more than the UK, over 6x more than Spain, Japan and Sweden, and over 12x more than Norway. In other words, of the 42,915 people who died in motor vehicle fatalities in 2021 in the U.S., the overwhelming majority of them died unnecessarily.

The solutions aren't a mystery: passenger rail has exceedingly few passenger deaths, and rarely ever causes pedestrian deaths. More walkable and bikeable cities would also help as well, as obviously not every street is going to have rail on it. In the meantime, lower speed limits, enforced both by law and by design of the road, as well as lighter vehicles, would also help mitigate the issue.

Some say it's an unfeasible pipe dream to have good public transit and walkable cities in a country as geographically large and spread out as the US, but the US had excellent public transit and walkable cities 80-100 years ago. Many small towns from that time period had significantly better public transit and walkability than many major cities do today. One of my relatives grew up in a town of 25,000 people and her family had no car growing up, so she walked nearly every place she went. She tried saving up for a bike, but every time she could almost afford it, the price went up, so eventually she gave up and used the money she was saving to take a trip to New Orleans. Her town of 25k back then was more walkable than Columbus, Ohio — a city of 900k people — is today (it also had passenger rail, which Columbus does not have at all anymore, and has no plans of bringing back.)

I don't know what it is that makes people so insensitive to car deaths. I have a relative who lost her husband due to a car crash, and she herself suffered permanent injuries from being hit by a car as a pedestrian, but despite all of that when I talk to her the thing she always seems worried about is the crime and violence she hears on the news, despite the fact that you're far more likely to die in a car crash. I hear people complain about violence all the time (rightfully so, it's inexcusable) but I don't know that I've ever heard someone say they're worried about car crashes, despite being a far greater danger. I think people just think it's a natural part of life that is unpreventable, when it is neither natural nor unpreventable.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/pdfs/mm7126a1-H.pdf 2. https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index... 3. https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/docs/irtad-road...

My iPhone 6S (which still receives security updates) has received more years of major OS releases than Google plans for security updates.

I'm not a fan of Apple or iOS but Google's devices largely feel disposable: if I buy them on release I get less support than buying a used two year old iPhone.

Maybe a balancing act would be allowing Linux gamers for casual matches but preventing them from playing competitive matches. Unfortunately, there still might be some cheaters to ruin people's fun, but likely significantly fewer since it wouldn't improve their rank.

Long term, maybe Valve could work with Epic to create a driver to support Easy Anti-cheat on Linux that works with Proton so that devs don't need to create a Linux-specific version of the game. Unfortunately, that'd likely be a considerable amount of work and Epic currently has no incentive to help the Steam Deck be successful.

However, that could change. PC gaming is so much more expensive to get into than when they first created the Epic Games Store. A PS5 is $400 — good luck buying/building a PC remotely as powerful as that for under $1000. A Steam Deck is also only $400, and while weaker, it is portable and can still handle almost all AAA games so far. The Epic Games Store is never going to be allowed on PS5, but it could be on the Steam Deck. Unless PC hardware prices go down, it's easy to imagine a future where PC gaming declines and consoles become more popular, which is not good for Epic (since their store isn't on traditional consoles.) But the Steam Deck, due to its low price, could very well compete with consoles, and Epic could have their store there. Obviously this future of Windows PC gaming declining is extremely far from certain, but it's nice to be prepared in case it does.

I think that for most businesses, their sites could be statically generated, with iframes and embed tags for interactive parts like forms, and the web would become much faster, more pleasant to use, and have a notably lower carbon footprint. Making images smaller by default would help too.

For interactive sites, if videos were limited to 480p on mobile and 720p on desktop unless manually changed, I imagine the carbon impact of data centers would drop considerably. For content viewed on TVs (where you usually sit quite a bit farther back than a monitor), such as Netflix or Hulu, I think they could set it to 480p by default and a lot of people would never bother to change it.

Unfortunately actually calculating the carbon footprint of a bloated web (compared to a lite version) would be very difficult. As you mention, a lot of that bloat is on the backend. New Reddit may transfer 6x more resources over the network than Old Reddit, but both of them have to process on the back-end what links should even be shown for a given user, so I doubt switching to Old Reddit would result in 6x fewer emissions. But even if it only resulted in 2x fewer emissions, that'd still be a considerable improvement. Part of the investigation would require seeing how much energy is used by the data centers processing what to send, versus how much energy is used by ISPs transferring that data across networks to the end-users.

In any case, if sites were more like Hacker News, Craigslist, and Wikipedia, versus New Reddit, Amazon, and most news sites, I feel confident that the carbon footprint of the Internet would go down notably. HN and Craigslist's designs are going to be hard sell for most businesses, but something like Wikipedia proves you can have an attractive design with low page sizes. And in the case for newspapers, it'd be nice if their web versions were more similar to their paper versions. That is tough with a free + ads model, but honestly I'm more likely to see an ad if the whole site is just text and there's a text ad in the middle of it (hopefully properly identified as such, though.)

There's the Mylo etrike, which has a tadpole design (two front wheels), so it's far less likely to tip over than a delta style (two rear wheels). Unfortunately it doesn't have any pedals, so not sure if that's street legal in the EU (also unfortunate if the battery dies, though you can attach two batteries to it.) If I hadn't already bought an ebike earlier this year (not knowing about the Mylo etrike), I'd probably consider it though, as it folds up nicely, can carry a passenger, and seems a lot less likely to tip over (straights or turns) than a regular ebike. Hopefully with Rad making etrikes now, they'll consider something like that but with pedals in the future.

There are not many companies that make etrikes, especially none remotely as big as Rad. It is quite big news for one of the largest ebike manufacturers to start making one, as it up until now has been a tiny niche with only expensive models from small companies. Doesn't mean that the URL shouldn't be replaced by a third-party site, but I certainly consider this newsworthy.

> Does anyone know what Australia is like? I hear good things about it, and it is very homogeneous.

Never been there, but Australia has a very low murder rate (0.9 homicide victims per 100k people). But it's also not what I'd call homogeneous, as 30% of residents there were born overseas, higher than the US (14%). Not as much ethnic diversity nationwide, but some of its cities are extremely diverse. 43.2% of Sydney is foreign-born, the 3rd highest percent of any city in the world, with there being Chinese, Indian, Lebanese, Fijian, Korean, Nepalese, Ghanaian and several other communities located inside it.

Canada is another very safe place (murder rate is 2.0 per 100k) and 23% of residents are foreign born. It's also somewhat ethnically diverse as well, with 30.2% of the population being visible minorities. There's also linguistic fractionalization between Quebec and the rest of the country. 49.0% of Toronto is foreign born, the 2nd highest percentage in the world, and Vancouver's not far behind at 42.5% (4th highest in the world).

So Singapore, Australia and Canada are 3 examples of diverse countries with incredibly little violent crime (Singapore actually has slightly less murder per capita than Japan). That's not to say diversity can't result in conflict, but those examples do show that it doesn't have to result in it, and that diverse, peaceful societies can and do exist.

Yeah an attacker may be able to use their own personal dual SIM Pixel phone to bypass the SIM lock screen for a stolen SIM card that they don't know the PIN or PUK code to using a similar technique, but like you said, I'm almost certain that it wouldn't actually let them use it to send and receive texts (and if it does, then that's really an issue in the SIM card's OS, considering anyone could just modify AOSP to ignore the SIM lock screen and then put that on their own phone.)

Even still, being able to bypass the SIM lock screen would still be a bug, just not a vulnerability. Google doesn't pay bounties for non-security related bugs to the best of my knowledge, but I can't help but feel this is still not an ideal way to design the system. It likely is fine today, but as strix_varius said, these kind of assumptions are what led to this vulnerability in the first place. Vulnerabilities do pop up from time to time in otherwise well-designed systems, but this lock screen bypass never would have been present in the first place had better design practices been followed. As krajzeg said [1], The whole process and the nature of the fix doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in the security of Pixel/Android in general.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33545685

That's incredible, thanks for sharing! Looks like it's still working on supporting some APIs (claims to currently support about 70% of Web Extensions APIs), and so far both the Firefox and Chrome NoScript extension don't appear to work for me on iOS, but that's awesome that they're working on adding support for Chrome and Firefox addons. I'll definitely keep an eye on this project.

From the study you linked:

> Our study has limitations. First, detection of an interaction effect requires a large sample size. The present findings require replication with a larger sample of trials designed to test the interaction. The trials from which the data were extracted were not designed to test this hypothesis, but do provide a ‘first look’ into this question using all available data. Given the wide confidence interval around zero for the interaction coefficient in the present study, it is possible that our finding represents a type II error. Although none of the sensitivity analyses were suggestive of possible interaction effects, future studies may nonetheless still reveal an interaction that we failed to detect in the data available to us...

⁣

I'd be very cautious about saying "CBT is not effective for lessening mental health symptoms" due to a single study. From the American Psychological Association [1]:

> Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a form of psychological treatment that has been demonstrated to be effective for a range of problems including depression, anxiety disorders, alcohol and drug use problems, marital problems, eating disorders, and severe mental illness. Numerous research studies suggest that CBT leads to significant improvement in functioning and quality of life. In many studies, CBT has been demonstrated to be as effective as, or more effective than, other forms of psychological therapy or psychiatric medications.

⁣

From the NHS [2]:

> Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can be as effective as medicine in treating some mental health problems, but it may not be successful or suitable for everyone.

⁣

From the Cleveland Clinic [3]:

> Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a structured, goal-oriented type of psychotherapy (talk therapy). Mental health professionals, including psychologists, therapists and counselors, use it to treat or manage mental health conditions and emotional concerns. It’s one of the most common and best-studied forms of psychotherapy.

⁣

I'm not at all suggesting that we blindly trust those organizations, rather just cautioning saying it is no more effective than a pill placebo due to one study.

⁣

A different study that reviewed meta-analyses came to quite a different conclusion [4]:

> In our review of meta-analyses, CBT tailored to children showed robust support for treating internalizing disorders, with benefits outweighing pharmacological approaches in mood and anxiety symptoms. The evidence was more mixed for externalizing disorders, chronic pain, or problems following abuse. Moreover, there remains a need for a greater number of high-quality trials in demographically diverse samples. Similarly, CBT was moderately efficacious for the treatment of emotional symptoms in the elderly, but no conclusions about long-term outcomes of CBT or combination therapies consisting of CBT, and medication could be made.

>

> Finally, our review identified 11 studies that compared response rates between CBT and other treatments or control conditions. In 7 of these reviews, CBT showed higher response rates than the comparison conditions, and in only one review (Leichsenring & Leibig, 2003), which was conducted by authors with a psychodynamic orientation, reported that CBT had lower response rates than comparison treatments.

>

> In sum, our review of meta-analytic studies examining the efficacy of CBT demonstrated that this treatment has been used for a wide range of psychological problems. In general, the evidence-base of CBT is very strong, and especially for treating anxiety disorders. However, despite the enormous literature base, there is still a clear need for high-quality studies examining the efficacy of CBT. Furthermore, the efficacy of CBT is questionable for some problems, which suggests that further improvements in CBT strategies are still needed. In addition, many of the meta-analytic studies included studies with small sample sizes or inadequate control groups. Moreover, except for children and elderly populations, no meta-analytic studies of CBT have been reported on particular subgroups, such as ethnic minorities and low income samples.

>

> Despite these weaknesses in some areas, it is clear that the evidence-base of CBT is enormous. Given the high cost-effectiveness of the intervention, it is surprising that many countries, including many developed nations, have not yet adopted CBT as the first-line intervention for mental disorders. A notable exception is the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies initiative by the National Health Commissioning in the United Kingdom (Rachman & Wilson, 2008). We believe that it is time that others follow suit.

1. https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/patients-and-families/cog...

2. https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/talking-therapies-medicine-...

3. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/21208-cogni...

4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3584580/

edit: formatting

> Bike commuting always seemed to me like a niche white thing

Hopefully someone can find some more recent data on it, but as of 2009 [1] the demographics of cyclists in the US mostly matched up with the demographics of the overall population, with a couple of exceptions:

white:

  - % of bike trips: 79%

  - share of population: 75%

black:

  - % of bike trips: 10%

  - share of population: 12%

hispanic:

  - % of bike trips: 8%

  - share of population: 15%

asian:

  - % of bike trips: 3%

  - share of population: 4%

So only hispanics were notably underrepresented, with white, black and asian people being pretty close to their share of the population, and while there was a minor overrepresentation of white people at the time, it was trending toward racial parity (in comparison to 2001 data), and over a decade later I wouldn't be surprised if it's even closer.

For income level, the poorest quartile was overrepresented (31%), but the other three quartiles were pretty close (21%, 23%, 25%).

So with cycling being far less common in the US compared to other countries with safer infrastructure (0.6% of people bike to work in the US [2] compared to 27% in the Netherlands [3]), you're not going to see many cyclists, and since white people make up a large percentage of the population, if you see a cyclist, there's a fair chance that they'll be white. But as the country becomes more diverse (and hopefully more people begin cycling to work), hopefully that perception will fade, and hopefully the trend toward racial parity for cycling continues.

1. https://grist.org/biking/2011-04-06-race-class-and-the-demog...

2. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/05/younger-worke...

3. https://www.government.nl/binaries/government/documenten/rep...

(edit: formatting)

> Within two years most apps will probably stop supporting iOS 15 so you’ll start having issues.

Some might, but I don't think most will, and I feel overall there's a fair chance they may not run into many problems. Let's look at the top 20 apps' iOS requirements for their latest app version: - ZOOM - iOS 8.0 - TikTok - iOS 10.0 - Disney+ - iOS 14.0 - YouTube - iOS 12.0 - Instagram - iOS 12.4 - Facebook - iOS 13.4 - Snapchat - iOS 12.0 - Messenger - iOS 11.0 - Gmail - iOS 13.0 - Cash App - iOS 13.0 - Amazon Shopping - iOS 13.0 - Netflix - iOS 14.0 - Google Maps - iOS 13.4 - DoorDash - iOS 14.0 - Spotify - iOS 13.0 - Widgetsmith - iOS 14.0 - WhatsApp - iOS 12.0 - Venmo - iOS 13.0 - Google - iOS 14.0 - Google Meet - iOS 13.0

So 7 of these apps can have their latest version run on the iPhone 5S (iOS 12), which released nearly 9 years ago and hasn't received a major update in almost 4 years. None of these apps require the latest version of iOS, and only 4 of them require the second most recent version of iOS.

However, many if not most of these apps will allow you to download an older version if you aren't running the latest iOS version, and it will often continue to work. Realistically, most people probably won't care if their Gmail app is running an old version if it still works.

> It’s obviously served you great, but it might be time.

If it becomes an issue, they can upgrade at that time if they feel it is necessary. I don't see any reason to upgrade prematurely though.

Yes, in theory their device will be insecure once it stops receiving updates. In practice, I'm aware of exceptionally few people who have been infected by a virus on an unsupported iPhone. They can disable JavaScript in the browser if they want to be extra secure (not that that mitigates all vulnerabilities, but unless they're notably rich, famous or powerful, they're probably unlikely to be targeted.)

>Imported goods get a lot more complex though.

True, it definitely is trickier, but it can be managed to some degree.

> The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act has a provision built in to protect trade competitiveness: a ‘Carbon Border Fee Adjustment’ imposed on covered fuels and ‘emissions-intensive trade-exposed’ (EITE) goods that cross our border in either direction. These goods include products like steel, aluminum, cement, glass, certain chemicals, and some agricultural products. Goods that fall under this EITE classification and are imported from a country that does not have a carbon price equivalent to ours will have to pay a surcharge to make up the difference. Conversely, domestic EITE products exported to any country will get a refund for the carbon fee paid.

> The simplest approach, administratively, is to levy the carbon tax “upstream,” where the fewest entities would be subject to it (for instance, suppliers of coal, natural gas processing facilities, and oil refineries).

Include other highly polluting industries with that, and while you may not get 100% coverage, it would definitely cover the majority of carbon intensive products and services and lead to a drastic reduction in emissions.

CCL estimates that the annual administrative cost of a carbon tax in the US would be about $4 to $5 billion per year, which is about 6.8 percent of revenues in year one ($15/ton of CO2e year one, rising by $10/ton each year), but as revenues grow along with the fee, it drops to only about 1.7 percent by year 10.

> Apple laptops became the dev machines of choice because they embraced the OSS community in pretty big ways. Right now the water feels tepid.

You could triple boot Windows, MacOS and Linux with Intel Macs. A Mac was a great choice because you could develop for and support all 3 of those platforms (plus Android and iOS). Aside from having bad GPUs, expensive storage, and little modularity, they were great machines for development.

Now, with no Linux or Windows support, not so much (unless you don't need to use anything but MacOS.) Unfortunately, if you need to support MacOS or iOS, you don't have much of a choice. Just really unfortunate that what used to be possible with one machine may soon require two. So long as Apple supports any Intel Mac, many Macs will be able to get OS updates thanks to the OpenCore Legacy Patcher [1]. I'm not sure when Apple will drop Intel Macs though. The last Mac to use an Intel processor released in 2020, so there will hopefully still be quite a few years left of support for Intel Macs for the time being.

1. https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/START.htm...