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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 4th, 2023

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  • Yeah I dont think I’ll ever understand these weird 5g skepticism threads. I do get better battery life on lte than 5g and building penetration means a lot more switching between bands(an issue specifically with my pixel’s radio) but similar issues existed with with lte and 3g when they launched. I guess the difference is LTE already has speeds and latency enough for people to get by.

    And yeah on lte you’re already getting 10-60mbps down so for most use cases you probably dont notice a huge difference in speed while browsing social media, and watching youtube. But having a network with higher speeds and more bandwidth is better for handling congestion. If you live in an area where the 5g is unreliable or your phone has poor support for it then you can just switch to lte while things keep cooking.



  • Personally as an RSS user I dont even want or need it to send me the article. I almost always just click the link and go to the website directly. I think RSS could still exit as just a link aggregate with a preview. The thing that lead to the decline of RSS is that it was competing with social media and news aggregates like google news.

    Setting up your RSS reader takes work. Even the super user friendly ones like feedly still require you to search for different sources that you want to add. In the old school and more pure RSS programs you have to manually find the rss link on a website and add it to your feed.

    In a more open optimistic future of the internet this would be the way we get content. Exploring the web and adding it to our list if we want updates o demand. In the actual modern internet addictive monopolistic social media has to cater to algorithms instead or social media engagement(that often doesnt actually read the source).

    Google not encouraging and getting rid of its rss content certainly didnt help matters but I think RSS is just a living fossil of a potential evolutionary branch that the internet count grown into but didnt.



  • At the time android didn’t have multi-tasking

    Android always had multitasking. Part of the issue with android 1 and 2 was that it didnt have any way to properly manage the task managers which lead to people installing task killers(which had utility in those days) and auto task killers(which due to how android handles caching just lead to a cycle of killing, thing popping up, killing, and etc). My g1 with a swap partition was probably my best android phone at keeping things in memory without auto killing it until I got a phone with 6gigs of ram.


  • The 6 series was when google introduced the tensor which is where the stereotype for worse battery life, worse performance, and less efficient radio come from.

    I have a 6a too and for the price it’s fine, and I think a lot of the battery concerns are overblown, and for a budget phone competing with other budget phone devices tensor was great. That said the things that would make the tensor in the 7 bad are as present in if not more so in the 6a.


  • Part of this is also our fault for how we allowed our browsing habits to change and adjust and make the issue worse. Like how many of us will just search random things even if we want to search in or go to a specific website as a goto?

    In the old days we might search once or find the website through word of mouth or links on other affiliated websites, and then bookmark good website and search there first before turning to google. Now? Lord knows I immediately google even if I know I can go to another website. Instead of browsing websites directly we sit on social media, be it reddit twitter facebook and are spoonfed our content without actually going to the original source or if we do just to the page and never to check. g like rolling stone reviewing air purifiers.

    Some of this is the result of convenient access, some of this is thanks to addictive predatory design, and for those who held out as long as possible the companies in charge of content sites would pivot to cater towards social media and search algorithms and enshitify their homepage making it harder to bother.


  • Top 10 lists have always been popular. Even before the internet you’d see it in magazines and on tv. Honestly if it’s well done I dont think theyre inherently bad especially if it’s clear the list is just a rough list and not a scientific ranking. I enjoy seeing articles listing movies of a type of genre or from an actor or from a director or etc in order to add to my movies to watch list for example.

    The problem lies when its half assed or especially when its unrelated. Like how in the OP link rolling stones air purifiers. Or if you try and look up info on a game that happens to be or have had recently trended and you get flooded by sites that arent even game related.





  • My big issue with amazon these days is that it’s flooded with trash. Like sure if you want some disposable garbage that you dont think twice about or if a very specific item you know is good is for sale on their site you can use them and their return policy is good.

    But otherwise the flood of no-name vendors has become like browsing a more expensive wish.com. So many randomly generated non reputable companies selling the same rebranded knockoffs of knockoffs at various price points. It used to be that at least you could go up in price bracket and get to the actual products but now even that is hard. You can check out products worth over a hundred dollars and it still have mixed reviews and no actual brand recognition . It’s gotten to the point that if its something that matters or is more that $50 I search on big box sites and either order directly for them or find the item and get it off amazon.



  • Yeah and AI is pretty useful for doing certain things. For example my pixel can turn on subtitles for any video or audio playing and even translate it for me on the fly. AI isnt blockchain and it isnt all chatgtp or making images with too many fingers. People are talking about improving web standards as if whatever ai stuff google,MS, and apple are cooking up wont be used in order to enhance various web features.

    Likewise firefox is currently a good browser and does keep up for the most part. I’d understand the criticisms if firefox was suck in 2009, but modern day firefox is fast and works well and they will likely continue keeping up with standards while an independent team works on the open source AI stuff


  • people have been asking for imessage on android for years now and i really don’t know what the issue is.

    Apple wont until somebody makes them.

    The default text messaging app on ios is also stealthily a fully featured chat app that means that less tech savvy iOS users just think their texting is better.

    The blue bubble green bubble issue isnt because ios users hate android users and the color green as much as it’s bad, it’s because big group MMS chains are TERRIBLE. I remember having a friendgroup in the 2010s that had a big mms group chat before we switched to groupme and then eventually telegram(we would have done google messages if google hadnt abandoned it began its not infamous chat sabotage). It was bad. Low quality media, the protocol updated in batches so sending and receiving wasnt as smooth as a chat app, and also you technically could just leave. We eventually switched to a platorm agnostic solution because we had diverse devices.

    Now in the US iphone ownership is like 60 percent. I imagine the ratio is even worse for younger users. So for these users they use default messenger with most people and get feature rich multimedia chat app without even looking for an alternative provider. In some cases I imagine there are users young enough to not even realize what actual text messaging is or if they do there are chunks that think apple just texts better. It gives a perception of quality.

    Then they invite Johnny Android and suddenly the chat degrades back to 2005 flip phone quality SMS/MMS. Now this is entirely apple’s fault and the inability to chat with android users is technically their problem. Or it would be if iphones werent so popular. From their perspective they were having a good time using their default cell phone messanger and the android user broke it. Likewise unless Johnny android is particularly popular or charismatic it’s likely they wont switch to telegram/signal/whatsap/line/etc. They might just leave Johnny Android out of group chats because his presence isnt just green it makes chatting clunkier and worse.

    Johnny android might feel left out even if he isnt being outright bullied and may want to switch to an apple device. Likewise the iphone users may not want to leave the ecosystem and then not be able to easily communicate with their friends.

    SMS fallback I believe started more or less as a way to deal with inconsistent data in the early smartphone days but the unintended consequence of killing off the appeal of third party chat apps on their platform and creating a weird social bubble was a happy accident and apple is never going to give that up.

    Kids beg their parents to buy them iPhones and parents do it so their kids dont get left out or bullied. Even adults are pressured into this and it can be a factor when online dating.