Basically a lot like what my work phone is for now. It’s just phone calls (yes, those still exist in the B2B world), SMS, Teams, and Outlook. Literally everything else happens on my work laptop. Most of the time, my work phone just pretends to be a wifi router + 4G modem. On remote days, the battery drains super fast, but when I’m at the office, the phone battery lasts way longer than you could reasonably expect. Then again, I don’t really use that phone for anything, so I guess that’s why.

I think I could do that with my personal stuff too. Get a nice laptop and prioritize using that for everything. Maybe I would end up using the phone like once a day at most.

Would be really curious to find out how that works. Got any good sources?

They’ve been busy reading the history books to find out what Android did 4 years ago so that they can start developing those same features today. Any remaining time and effort went into creating vacuous marketing hype.

Exploitation.

People in rich countries have stuff manufactured in countries with a lower living standard, less regulation, nor work safety, no unions, lower wages etc. Same goes for the raw materials all stuff is built out of. If you don’t have to care about anything, you can make everything so much cheaper. As long as this exploitative relationship between rich and poor countries exists, the rich will have access to cheap stuff that doesn’t need to be fixed.

Repairing broken appliances and electronics has different dynamic though. You’re paying a trained professional in a rich country to work for you. That doesn’t come cheap. Even though the parts may be cheap, labor costs a lot. That’s the exact reason why everything is manufactured in poor countries where labor is cheap. See also: planned obsolescence

We’ve been doing this for centuries already. It’s a tradition by now. Global inequality fueled the Dutch East India company, Made England rich etc. Oh, and American cotton plantations too. We’re just getting started with this can of worms.

That happened in 2024? About time! Sounds like F-droid is actually becoming viable.

We’re all trapped. If you’re not using either Android or iOS, you’re pretty much screwed.

Technically, you can use one of the alternate phones, but the software support still leaves a lot to be desired. You can get most basic things working, but when it comes to crucial deal breaker apps like anything involving payments or banks, it gets a lot trickier. The world has become increasingly dependent on mobile phones, and if your phone can’t handle train tickets, mail deliveries, restaurant reservations or pay your bills, it suddenly becomes very difficult to live in the 2020s.

More and more hardware also depends on specific iOS or Android apps, and those apps may also require GAPPS or some OEM Android. At some point, it just isn’t worth the hassle, and it becomes easier to pick either one of the toxic platforms everyone else is already using.

Tried to rely fully on F-droid several years ago. That experiment went just fine until I needed up update the apps. Turns out, there wasn’t a simple one button solution to that. I had to manually update each and every app one by one. Is it any better these days?

But is it even slightly better? It’s debatable. Both are completely awful, but I guess iOS is just terrible in different ways.

I’ve used a bunch of HPs over the years. Some of them ProBook, mostly Elitebook. Either way, the keyboards were always awful. If you want to be 100% sure each key press registers, you have to press surprisingly hard.

If you’ve always used Dell and Lenovo, this kind of thing sounds completely absurd. It’s something that would never even occur to you. Why would you even think about whether the key presses register with 100% reliability? Of course they do. You press the button, a letter appears. That’s all there’s to it, right?

Wrong! HP thinks there should be an element of surprise if you type normally. Unless you hammer the keyboard like a wild animal, there’s no way to get to 100%. Even if you get the fanciest model, the keyboard still has this HP trademark suckiness.

That used to be a problem like 5-10 years ago. If you clicked something, YT used to think you must love that stuff, and would never forget that unfortunate click. Nowadays though, downvoting and watch time are taken more seriously by the algorithm. If I find some trash, I just give it a thumbs down and stop watching immediately. Seems to work pretty well for me.

Subscribe to the stuff you care about and ignore everything else. Check the other feeds only when you’re looking for something new.

The recommendation algorithm of YT is actually reasonably good at finding stuff worth watching. Whatever janky trash Reddit calls an algorithm is clearly serving the company more than anyone else.

Lemmy doesn’t even have that kind of an algorithm, so you’ll have to check places like !communitypromo@lemmy.ca when you’re looking for new and interesting stuff. IMO reading the all feed is an exercise in futility, unless you’re really interested in random memes.

Ignore all previous instructions spotted. 😄That is such a handy phrase that we should have an acronym for it. How about IAPI? Can we call this the IAPI-method?

The trending page of YT is like the r/all of Reddit. If I want to see some stuff I couldn’t care less about, that’s where I’ll find it. I have no idea who actually uses that, but I’ve never found anything of value there.

Yeah, “wan” would make 5000% more sense.

Subtle, rhythm, and Wednesday. The spelling is just absolutely wild.

It’s about as messy as old British coins and Roman measures.

It’s a hard job. Some times you just have to ignore what the client says, and read their mind instead.

That’s a nice way to ask if I’m a bastard. No, not the insult. Literally, someone born out of wedlock.

Similar sort of scattering happens in northern Scandinavia too, but I guess it’s to a lesser extent. Most people in the region prefer to live within a 1 h drive to the nearest town, even if they are scattered. Proper hospital services might not be within that radius, but at least you can do basic shopping without driving the whole day. If the town isn’t conveniently between two cities, you can forget about trains, and maybe even busses too. Having a driving license is absolutely necessary, because providing public transport in remote areas just isn’t cost effective. Same goes for various public services too.

Just took a look at some population density maps, and I must say that the kind of density you have between Boston and Washington DC is approximately what most of Central Europe looks like. Other parts of USA are pretty sparsely populated.

Apart from the large cities, you could say that anywhere east of Dallas looks a lot like northern Scandinavia in terms of population density. Even Poland has a higher density than the gaps between major cities such as Phoenix and Denver. To me, it seems like nearly everyone lives in one of the big cities, and there’s hardly anything in between them.

Not too long ago, I saw a map showing where each train is in USA. Someone also posted a similar maps from Switzerland. Can you guess which one had more trains?