From the sounds of it, the Pixel phones have the widest support across the different options here, so the Pixel 6 might end up being my first Android phone purchase in a while.
This thread has encouraged me to give this a go!
1,063 karma · joined February 9, 2019
This thread has encouraged me to give this a go!
I’m kind of surprised just how big this space of DeGoogled Android is right now. Far bigger than 6+ years ago when I last looked into it.
In fact I hope once I become familiar with everything that I can start contributing to some of the open source projects in the de-Googled space.
If I’m going to become a user of some of this stuff, seems like a good use of my time to also help move it forward.
It sounds like LineageOS for MicroG might be the friendliest way to ease into this for me.
I’m interested in moving away from Apple and big tech in general, but I don’t know how practical that is yet.
And I loved my Snow Leopard Macbook like crazy. At the time, MacOS felt like the best Linux distro available.
Sure, I could make Ubuntu look and work however I wanted, but I didn't have time for that. MacOS wasn't perfect, but it was pretty close. Losing customization is a small price for "just works".
Last year, after fighting with weird OS bugs on my newest 2019 Macbook Pro, and fighting constant frustrations and issues in Windows 10, I realized that they no longer actually "just work".
I was putting up with an inability to make things work _better_ based on an outdated notion that things work well to begin with. And when they don't, it's a black box that I can do nothing about.
So, cue the XPS 13 with Ubuntu (that I since replaced with Manjaro) and I have something that takes a little bit more work, but actually _works_ once I do. I get to now be in charge of what does and does not work, with my time being the limiting factor. Time that is valuable, for sure, but a small price to pay for not putting me at the mercy of a tech company that may or may not even fix the things that I need fixed.
It's still not perfect. Nothing is. And I look forward to an M(2+) Mac at some point for iOS development.
But for now, Linux has progressed enough, and Windows and MacOS regressed enough, that Linux is now the side of the line on which I fall.
For example, I had several heated discussions about some COVID mandates with a friend from Indiana. Specifically, I worried about the denial of health procedures deemed non-essential, and the lack of ability to buy things like garden seeds in Michigan for a time.
He insisted I was blowing things out of proportion, that this was all for the greater good, and that I was selfishly harming others for my own gain (despite me personally not caring to buy garden seeds or needing any kind of medical procedure).
Months go by, my friend visits Michigan this summer (which is fairly well back to normal as of today) and he complains to me for 20 minutes that one McDonald’s location still has its lobby closed due to safety concerns, and was still on reduced hours.
Turns out, neither of these conditions lasted long in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
It occurred to me that, no matter what I said to him about the specific conditions in Michigan that bothered me, he wasn’t viewing them through my lens. He wasn’t even hearing most of the specific things I was arguing about.
He only viewed it through the lens of his own experience. Had he been unable to use the lobby of McDonalds in Indiana for more than a month or so in 2020, apparently, he would have been livid. But he didn’t, therefore anyone else with any kind of a different experience was wrong.
On the opposite spectrum, I know people who haven’t been affected at all by the virus who argue it may not exist, those who had a rough battle with it and therefore think it’s 100% fatal to everyone, and everything in between.
And it’s not just COVID, it extends to all things politics, economy, just about everything.
I wonder if the real problem is a sheer lack of ability to empathize, or relate to things outside of one’s own experiences.
I can’t help but wonder if it’s a defense mechanism. Real empathy, I argue, is painful, because it usually means relating to multiple, sometimes mutually exclusive, wants or needs, and realizing there is no one universal solution.
People seem to look for comic book heroes and villains in everything, and are uncomfortable anytime they find human beings with nuances and differing experiences in their place.
In fact I dare say the GPU has been the single most failure prone component of every computer I’ve owned for the past 15 years.
Which only further illustrates the point that putting something expensive and unreliable into an already expensive device seems risky.
An economy in which there are a large number of job openings, with fair pay, that are in such legitimate demand that they offer training and other incentives, AND receive a sufficient number of capable applicants, yet never end up being filled.
It’s not that the positions aren’t really needed, or that the job listings are an excuse to hire cheaper, less qualified labor. The jobs just go unfulfilled, and actual business opportunities get left behind.
I don’t get it, but it’s a real phenomenon that doesn’t get enough attention.
Glad I’m not alone!
Haven’t acquired any myself yet, but I’d like to. In fact I’m glad to hear you’re having fun with the C64 since I figured that would be my first one.
Recommendations?
The lisp machines are really cool, and I believe the MSX has been mentioned.
However one that I keep coming back to with fascination is the Sharp X68000, a Japanese computer based on the Motorola 68k.
It used hardware very similar to late 80s and early 90s arcade games, and in fact has excellent ports of things like Street Fighter 2.
But the whole aesthetic of it, along with what it could output for graphics and sound - as an outsider, it looks like it was way ahead of the US and UK computers of the time (the closest contender being the Amiga).
Would love to pick one up and try writing some code for it someday, although I expect I’ll need to brush up on my Japanese.
Seems false equivalencies, lack of nuances, and straw man arguments only matter some of the time.
“The year of the Linux desktop” always feels like just a couple of bad big tech decisions (and an absence of good decisions) away.
But ultimately many of us have strong feelings on many things, yet still possess the empathy to care about the well-being of those we disagree with.
In my experience, bullies may use a certain external “vector” to bully others, but they do so because of their own internal issues that they choose to deal with by inflicting pain on others by exploiting those vectors.
In some cases this might be anti-LGBTQ, in others it might be classist, or really any place someone can find and exploit a weakness [1] in someone else.
At that point, it doesn’t matter if the person you’re bullying is somebody “on your side”, because it’s not really about the surface issue to begin with.
Unfortunately it makes situations like this even harder to deal with, because it’s not just a matter of trying to impart empathy on the bully.
[1] which is not to imply any identity is necessarily a weakness, but rather may be something a person struggles with personally and therefore provides an opening for someone else to exploit.
In fact I hope that more artists start recording and mastering for this from the start going forward.
That said, as a layman non-audiophile who doesn’t know the technical engineering details, I can’t help but wonder if the biggest win for me is an apparent lack of compression.
I don’t mean “bitrate and file size” compression, but rather the “take the soft stuff and loud stuff and cram them together” compression.
The thing I’ve hated about music from around 2010 onwards is just how much all the instruments and vocals blend together, especially in rock and pop music where all of the drums become as “snappy” as the snare and none of the instruments sound distinct. Everything sounds crisp, to the point that nothing sounds crisp.
At times, and with some albums, it actually becomes exhausting to listen to.
I noticed immediately with Apple’s Atmos mixes I have to crank the volume up a couple extra notches, but when I do I hear everything more distinctly, much like many of the albums from the 70s, 80s and 90s before everything had to be compressed and made louder.
But, like I said, I don’t know what I’m talking about or if there’s anything to this, but I’m so far getting more out of the average Atmos mix than I am of the average stereo mix.
Then the question becomes, if the artist intended for everything to sound one way but I enjoy it more the other way, who’s right?
I can’t speak to what my IQ is, or whether I learn faster than others, but I can, at the very least, say that I’ve put effort into everything I know.
So when something needs to be built as a Vue.js component, or we need new build scripts in our local environment, or a SQL query is slow, I learn what I need to and I do it.
Everyone else just throws up their hands and says “welp, I don’t know JavaScript” or “I don’t understand this old SQL”, as though they were born with the knowledge they have and will never gain any more than that.
So I’m not sure how much of this is normal over Reddit’s whole.
But I did notice a shift in the political boards to a mean-spirited alt-left attitude.
Whatever, politics are needlessly divisive right now.
But as I got more into other subreddits, the same attitude seems to be there too.
Make an objective statement even remotely pro-Apple in r/gaming (which I would reasonably assume to be platform-neutral)? Instant dozens of downvotes, with no replies, or if lucky, a reply calling me an Apple sheep.
Wander into a cutesy dog subreddit and someone posts a picture of a dog eating a hot dog? Too bad, that post will be downvoted to hell along with a lengthy post about the nitrate content of most hot dogs.
There’s just a weird pack mentality sweeping across boards that I would expect to be somewhat forgiving and neutral.
And yet I’ve not once heard it referred to as “tank man” until this incident with Bing.
This isn’t so much a call to action against Apple’s fees.
It’s pointing out something that I’ve felt building over the last couple of years out of Apple, which is an attitude of hubris, contempt, and a “taking for granted” of Apple’s developers.
The WWDC spiel of how much they value us has become trite and transparent.
They do produce some really nice tools and APIs. I can’t knock what they provide developers.
But often times the attitude beneath the veneer is a precursor of things to come, and it’s becoming noticeable that Apple’s culture seems to care less about its developers now than before.
You might say “sure, but so what? Developers are part of the means to an end of selling stuff”, and you’re not wrong.
But one of the things I loved about Apple circa 2009 was their respect for their user. It was palpable and magical, even.
Then, learning Cocoa and Interface Builder coming from Eclipse and Java, that same respect seemed to permeate their dev environment as well.
That seems lost. Following some of their tech leads on Twitter exposes some rather vitriolic feelings towards people in general.
Customers, be they users or devs, deserve respect. Apple used to be great at giving that respect. I fear it’s slipping away culturally, and is worth calling out.
It looks terrible. It literally looks like nothing more than what it is - a cheap plastic knob glued to a touchscreen. Made to look even worse by having an empty center exposing more touch screen.
Add to that, I don’t see any reason why a volume knob is any more or less deserving of a physical control than climate controls or radio station presets. That is to say, volume controls are plenty deserving of a physical knob, but so is everything else you might do in the center console with similar frequency.
Which is to say, further more, that they are admitting that physical controls are better for frequent adjustments like volume, but instead of handling that properly, they’re just saying “here’s a big touch screen for everything... but we’ll relent and give you this lame ass pasted on knob for volume and volume alone”.
The new iPad Pro is so tempting. It could be my one true device for short trips if I could write and deploy code comfortably on it.
This is also, AFAIK, the biggest thing that differentiates Apple’s platform from every other mobile and game console app store regarding fees and whatnot.
In general, my biggest problem with Apple is their heavy handed approach to content. Whether it’s policing political content in a one-sided manner, or telling companies like Amazon they aren’t allowed to inform customers of other means of purchasing content, these policies seem more abusive, anti-customer, and anti-choice than anything else.
(That said, as a user, I would also love easier app side loading support, I just don’t think I’d like the consequences of that coming from a court ruling).
The biggest benefit I see from the low code movement is, what I hope, will be a trend in bespoke apps where devs like myself spend less time building a single user experience and more time architecting a cohesive system with bespoke “low code” tools on top, that can help enable non-engineer power users to then work within that business-specific framework to craft the screens and user experiences that the masses then use.
Essentially a way to keep the devs doing more actual engineering and architecture work while the more accessible things like “move this button” or “create a screen that shows this data we already have” can be made more accessible to more people.
That said, I think general purpose low code solutions meant for all businesses and industries will be more for the MVP / rapid prototyping stages for the most part.
But I could well be proven wrong!
This product aside, though, I find it funny how the whole “reactive widget tree that gets rebuilt when data changes” and “everything is just nested objects with properties, no XML needed” trend felt like “backlash” against the UI Builders, Visual Basics, and Glades.
And yet now we’re building visual tools to control all the nested reactive component frameworks very much in that same vein.
The number of poor reactions is very small, but pretending like they don’t exist or failing to address ways to overcome them only further fuels the fear in those hesitant to get vaccinated, and furthers the divisiveness in an issue we should all be working together on.
Which makes sense if you’re a politician or Dr. Fauci, but doesn’t make sense if you just care about the health and safety of everyone and want to get this damn pandemic over with already.
Forcing or shaming the hold outs to get vaccinated won’t do this, but giving honest confidence in the vaccine to people will.
Also, if vaccination doesn’t change the risk enough for you to drop some of the other precautions, that also lowers the perceived value of the efficacy of the vaccine as well.
Things like Repls often turned me off if they left me feeling like the things I was running in them were contrived and ephemeral.
Even if I was producing some cool graphic or something, there was always this nagging feeling that I wasn’t making something “real” that could be saved off and shared. Almost like the difference between messing around with a dry erase board vs learning how to draw with a pencil and a sketch pad.
But at the same time, PHP was instrumental to my learning how the web worked, in part because of how easy it was to find shared hosting that easily mapped PHP files to web routes 1:1. I can’t imagine I would have learned much if my first step was installing Apache, then mod PHP, then mod rewrite, then setting up htaccess files and directory permissions and then realizing that I didn’t get the PHP with GD graphics installed.
Maybe this is an “everyone learns differently” thing, or maybe this is a “the right answer is somewhere in the middle” thing.
Put another way, if going out feels like a big hassle, and getting vaccinated doesn’t remove enough of the rules to make going out NOT feel like a hassle, then there’s no reason to change one’s “going out” habits. And if there’s no incentive to change one’s “going out” habits, then there’s no reason to go through any process or procedure that only perceivably benefits you if you leave home.
I will be getting my vaccine soon myself.
But the world has changed. If I was isolated and nervous to “put myself out there” pre-pandemic, then I’m nearly agoraphobic now.
Nobody I work with wants to return to the office, nobody wants to return to having fun outings (at least not outside their own social circle).
There’s literally nothing for me to return to doing. I’ve built up a relatively solitary life with my dad in the last 12+ months, and everything outside of it is gone.
If you feel that you have so much to return to that the idea of rarely going out, forever, sounds unrealistic, then I would consider yourself lucky.
I intend to get vaccinated just to be safe to anyone I might come in contact with, but to your point, even once I get vaccinated, I honestly see no trigger to change my behavior. I highly doubt I’m alone in this.