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The Dollop is an American history podcast. Each week…
Both that and Behind the Bastards are podcasts on history stuff. Dollop trends more towards comedy while reading about terrible things to lighten the mood. Dave reads to Gareth (most of the time) who hasn’t heard the thing before, and plays off his reactions.
Basically, because we don’t own our devices. We are allowed to use our devices by the good graces of the manufacturers that charge a premium for them.
This really needs to change. I remember the preinstalled app antitrust suit(s) in the early 00s. Those need to happen again, but likely the EU will have to as the US is entering a dark age, and the US will continue to have inferior everything to the rest of the world for the foreseeable future.
Have they…have they ever used a Google product? I dunno, like google’s old SMS app, or Allo, or Hangouts, or Talk… There will be a new Google messaging app to conflict with Google Messages in no time. Probably also called Messages, or farquad fandango turtle trumpet, or whatever other goofy name they come up with.
They do, just for some reason not effectively. Like, blocking the VoIP providers that allow scammers would dry all that up.
Weird thing is, this just drives more people to not use voice calls. They’re killing their own racket. (Although long-term, likely phones will be all IP with no carrier-managed services.)
Over the years I’ve found, in the grand scheme, unless the CEO murdered your family, who cares? I didn’t buy Sony products for a couple of decades, right now I don’t even remember why I stopped. I think it was around shit warranty handling. Meanwhile, I was removing viable options from my purchase pool.
More recently, I’m just trying to make my purchase decisions like I’m a business. Does the item at a given price fill the needs of the role? Does buying the year-old model at heavy discount fit the need? Avoid the top-tier release-day buzz, buy at a discount, use the tool as long as possible. These techniques collectively will stifle all the “economy” they’re trying to make a profit from.
Vendors that are truly terrible will lose customers. One person’s soapbox won’t affect them, however, despite best efforts.
Also Ford’s CEO: kills sedans in the US several years ago.
https://fordauthority.com/2024/06/ford-ceo-jim-farley-says-company-lost-billions-on-sedans/
Everything mobile manufacturers have done since smartphones finally became popular in 2007 seemed like temporary solutions due to moving so fast. It’s clear now that it was all an attempt to paradigm-shift compute into leased property.
It really needs to end, along with the terrible disposable hardware designs. Even if we were not in a climate crisis, it is about as bad as the US was in the 1950s throwing trash everywhere.
On some level, especially now, want to find an alarm clock or an mp3 player or even a camera? It’s getting harder and harder. Old phones with their battery removed or replaced are perfect for those roles.
Similar history including gentoo and distcc to speed up openoffice and x11 compiles with a pile of old computers.
Put linux on a PC laptop and it just so happens the NVMe controller in conjunction with the kernel driver has some glitch that causes the hard drive to fall off the bus forever. No big deal…
It’s great seeing a bunch of nvme nvme0: I/O (number) (I/O Cmd) QID 10 timeout, aborting then reset controller then removing after probe annnd data loss. Didn’t have the patience to figure out the bug in the driver right now. Maybe someday.
Most of the software updates you see are a result of CI/CD processes. The industry claims it makes good design patterns to get features our faster and more reliably. In reality it is just a rushed shitstorm that results in half-assed Friday releases that aren’t fixed until the following week.
I’ve long turned off auto update of my apps. Too many times I’m on a trip or other scenario where my tool is meant to be a tool and not some tech bro’s rented wet dream, and the tool is broken.
But here’s the kicker. CI/CD exists for another reasons or so:
- Frequent updates tend to reset review rankings in app stores. Not only does it offer plausible deniability to the app company, but it also screws with the review scores in their favor, as well as other rankings.
- Great way to help nudge along planned obsolescence. All that pointless rewriting of flash storage on a daily basis.
- Psychological manipulation, it gets notifications in your face to try and increase app engagement, which ensures it is fresh and running gathering user telemetry to sell as a side-hustle, as well as direct-interaction telemetry and getting more ads in your face.
It’d be better if we all just went back to landline phones some days. Modern tech is too noisy, abusive, and intrusive.
They are blind and lost. Nest hasn’t had a feature update since they acquired them 10 years ago. Their thermostats don’t even have a “its freezing outside and the air conditioner shouldn’t run” feature. Fi rots on the vine. Their camera service is terrible and they just raised the rates. Garbage company anymore.
There’s some slight technical reason for it, but I think they swung a bit too far in the asshole direction with blocking too many.
The LTE rollout was completely botched from the start. LTE voice is technically supported on all LTE chipsets, but early on the voice spec changed. Early phones used LTE for data and 2G or 3G for voice.
Complicating matters further, AT&T and Verizon both have separate and slightly tweaked versions of the spec, as they didn’t want to wait for it to be finalized, and of course they’re both different in different ways. It’s also why T-Mobile allows so many devices. They just rode their very fast for the time HSPA+ network until LTE was finalized, got generic hardware on the network, and flipped the power switch.
To top it off, AT&T was sued at one point for 911 not working due to a handset bug and they got very controlling at that point to avoid future lawsuits.
VoLTE is ostensibly VoIP over cellular data at its core. All phones have to talk with the correct SIP signaling on VoLTE for voice calls to work. With 2G and 3G, the circuit-switched method of signaling was much more standardized (although not necessarily simpler, WCDMA at its end spanned literal volumes of books.) This made it so phones and networks were more easily compatible for basic things like voice, 911, etc.
Now, on top of Verizon and AT&T thinking that rolling their own flavors of LTE was a good idea, every phone maker also had their own idea about how the VoLTE SIP signaling was supposed to work. Due to flaws in the LTE spec, carriers going rogue, and companies interpreting things wrong, it has turned quite literally into a clusterfuck.
TL;DR: It took a long time for LTE to standardize enough across product lines, and there are a whole bunch of phone models that don’t talk the language quite right. So carriers chose to ban rather than make workarounds or work with the vendor to roll a software fix to the phone.
The S22 US version used snapdragon 8 gen 1 (in the US) and the chip was prone to performance issues. It worked, but it was rough, ran hot, and ate power for lunch. I’m not sure if that was a year that the international variants had an Exynos, but their performance is generally worse.
So seeing a simpler phone with basic android seem to do fine versus a flagship with super bloated Android on a first gen apps processor makes a lot of sense, really.
LLMs have improved my education, work life, and general knowledge search. I get more time to spend living my life and less trying to find one dude’s stacked change post from 2009 that fixed my problem.
They allow me to access information the way I learn and operate in a way that textbooks, college education, video courses, or online classes have never allowed me to do in my entire life.
That being said, the general AI buzz and buzzwords need to die, the real positives need to be celebrated.
Offline maps are the way to go. I made a habit of having all of the US always stored in my phone just in case something bad happened. Only takes 12GB or so. Cell service can be spotty in large parts of the country so you can’t depend on Internet maps.
Then it paid off. Plane lost an engine mid-flight, had to emergency land 850 miles from where I needed to be, and off I went by rental car with map in hand…er…cupholder.
I think you give the idiots in charge of the corps that can’t see beyond a 3 month window of time too much credit. It is just the natural progression of unchecked and unregulated Capitalism that will always lead to this place, regardless of the industry or technology.
Don’t get me wrong, I want to blame them too for their evil plot, but they’re too dumb to have contrived the whole narrative.
Example with the cloud:
- Look over past decades, storing your data in servers has been a thing for decades. Companies have tried time and again to get the concept to stick in various forms, and it always waxed and waned. (Reverse-example right now is AI, since people barely want it, and having it in the cloud is even creepier, manufacturers are trying to make people comfortable with cloud-executed AI queries, and otherwise releasing limited subsets of compute that run locally on the phone.)
- Voice recognition tech like Voice Command (predecessor to Siri for those super young) started on phone-only. Then Siri used to run on the cloud until phones became powerful enough to run more commands locally and they moved more commands to the phone.
- Apple used to synchronize SMS messages between iPhones and other Apple devices in a secure local method on your local WiFI network. Then, as they sold more types of devices, it made it evolutionarily (made up word) necessary to move that logic to the cloud. They probably didn’t pre-think that all this would be clouded, they just got there out of need to sell a new toy, and suddenly screw the alleged privacy they purport to worship.
The reality is, a lot of these cloud techs have been held up by:
- Lack of fast enough Internet bandwidth to make it doable, nobody is going to spend 4 hours a day uploading photos somewhere
- Lack of fast local compute, hilariously, local compute can do most things now, but in the past, the local compute wasn’t fast enough to be able to parse/process the data to send to the cloud
- Lack of local storage, again, prepping data for cloud transport and having local caching be performant requires enough throwaway space on the local machine that users don’t become frustrated with the latency of remote disks in a datacenter
- Lack of metadata for trust verification like FaceID, fingerprint, GPS geolocation, and other security functions so the company could avoid fraud
- Lack of quality mobile cameras and recording devices making the input content garbage
Once these problems ended up being solved, it wasn’t some visionary with a big plan executing. It was just another Business Weenie being paid 9 figures having the same idea 300 other people had, and it just sticking this time because the technological environment is different.
(Replace Apple examples with Google, Microsoft, Cisco whoever as necessary.)
Ironically, Google’s new creepy Circle to Search feature gets to override the screenshot denial lockout that Google themselves created.