My average time on a smartphone is now at 4 years, feels like it's going to 5 pretty soon. [Last upgrade was for USB-C. Next upgrade will be for on-device LLM. It's wild how approximately 0% of what Apple has done outside of the USB-C connector has mattered to me in the last 10+ years - low-light photography is probably the only other thing that comes to mind. ]
I've had two battery replacements since 2015. One of them was required, the other was mostly optional (battery had dropped to 90% on my iPhone - which was probably sufficient).
USB-C - that was an awesome requirement that it was unclear whether Apple was ever going to do.
User Replaceable Battery? Zero desire, particularly if it reduces water resistance on the device. Dozens of things I've wanted from a phone - being able to replace the battery has never even entered my mind as something I wanted.
Your cycle is 4 years, and you’ve had two phone batteries replaced in 11 years? That’s 2/2.75 phones.
Ok, one was optional, and let’s round up to 3. So 1/3 of your phones. Kinda sounds like you would benefit from replaceable batteries.
Regardless, those 4-5 year old phones likely went to ewaste immediately or soon after you were done with them because the cost of replacing the battery was less than their resale value after 4-5 years.
That’s a pattern our planet literally can’t handle. Wars over digging up minerals using slave labour then putting them in phones for 3-5 years just to send them to have children get chemical burns stripping the metals out of them.
My last computer lasted me 11 years, with two battery replacements along the way. My phone should do the same, just as easily.
What really annoys me is Apple EOLed the iPhone 8 and then came out with a virtually identical SE version. Of course they soon discontinued the SE too…
Maybe they updated the CPU slightly but screen and camera were identical.
I would have kept my iPhone 8 if they kept updating the software. Yet somehow they can manage update the SE software despite looking the same as the iPhone 8…
I know there is a cost and overhead toward supporting old platforms. But for the premium on these devices and the level of waste generated, manufacturers can still do better…
I’d prefer no new features and only security updates… perhaps I’m weird.
Look doesn’t matter but they seem to be supporting exactly the same feature set as before.
They aren’t trying to support all the flashy stuff done on newer models… Hence, it seems like they could have easily made it work on the older models but chose higher profits instead.
Not weird. The last few os updates have made my phone laggy and slow. I want security updates, i don’t want new features that kill my battery life and usability.
Apple had been switching their various iOS devices to USB-C for several years before the EU decided to mandate it, so I don't know how you can assert that them switching the iPhone to USB-C was because they were forced to. It looks more like the EU just had lucky timing and told them to do something they were already doing.
Apple fought it the whole way, commissioned studies to show it was a bad idea, etc etc. This after they had a decade prior been subject to the same thing with micro USB and skirted that agreement by shipping more unnecessary cables.
The sensible thing for them to do is fight regulation, even if their underlying strategy is going towards a compatible goal. They do not want to set a precedent that they can be bullied into changing their product roadmap based on the whims of government.
> subject to the same thing with micro USB
And thank goodness for that! Micro USB is a disaster, they did their customers a favor. When I was still rocking Android phones back then, I kept a box of Micro USB cables on hand because I was having to toss them so often.
Laptops, the ipads. Phones and airpods came after the eu law. Debatable, but it seems to me like they consider the ipad in the same class as a laptop, so it got grouped with those. Otherwise why did it take 5 years between the first ipad with usb-c and the first iphone?
The iPhone had by far the biggest ecosystem of Lightning accessories, the biggest base of users with Lightning cords. It was a foregone conclusion that a bunch of people were going to be angry about losing their Lightning accessories and having to buy new cords, and another bunch of people were going to be happy to switch their last non-USB-C device over. Apple needed to find the crossover point where the latter would outnumber the former.
I very much miss the ability to never use my phone on a charging cable. Just swap the battery on an external charger and go. 5 seconds to charge to full. It was freeing and simple
I always wanted an internal battery of like 1 minute, so I could hot swap batteries. Then the battery capacity would be largely irrelevant. What would be cool is to have a large case that could charge the battery multiple times like with ear buds. The magnetic wireless charging blocks that just stick on the back of the phone are pretty fair compromise though.
> I like the awkwardness of the default prefix key.
I am 100% in agreement with you. It takes all of 5 seconds to add:
unbind-key -T prefix C-b
set-option -g prefix C-s
To your .tmux.conf on your local laptop (where I use tmux 99.99% of the time) - without worrying about conflicting on that once-in-one-year event where you start up tmux remotely.
The only (deal breaker for me ) weakness of zellij - doesn't support copy/paste from the keyboard (from the screen/scrollback) and doesn't support multiple copy/paste buffers.
I do that roughly every 60-90 seconds with tmux - so, until the zellij developers relent (they suggest the "proper way" of copy paste is to pipe the data into a text editor and use that - but has the downside of not supporting system copy-paste buffers.) - no options other than to stick with tmux (or fork zellij - but that seems a bit much....)
It does - and we spent an hour or so reading through the code and affordances to see if there might be a possible path.
The general response is that this user behavior, selecting/copying/saving-in-named-buffer is a very "tmux" like usage pattern the Zellij authors don't want to encourage in Zellij. Instead -they suggesting bringing your preferred Text Editor (emacs, vim, etc...) and doing the select / copy /paste in that.
The problems for me are - (A) I know how to select/copy/paste very well in tmux. Don't have the faintest clue how it's done in a text editor, (B) No (easy) ability to have multiple named buffers if you use a text editor, etc...
This is also the dealbreaker for me, I use copy / paste from the scrollback buffer all the time. And also quick search through the scrollback buffer. I don't want to first pipe all the output to an editor or pager or something; that messes with the terminal colors, indentation, and it's an extra step, making the whole process slower and more tedious.
But I guess Zellij people don't use the keyboard so much for copy pasting. A lot of people just use the mouse.
Do any of the open weight models from smaller labs exist if they can't distill from the SoTA models that are throwing billions of dollars of compute into pretraining?
I’ve been wondering the same. And I think pretty much all the impressive small lab models were guilty of it, right? At least there is still larger players like DeepSeek and mistral to provide a bit of diversity in the market
“Very likely yes”, I reply to an account that <1yr old with mostly comments in AI topics many of which violate the HN guidelines (including the one I’m responding to).
Strange gatekeeping response. Yep i comment on topics i'm interested in. Forgive me for not being on the platform for more than a year yet. That's a cute attitude
Another thing that multiple generation of MacBook Airs used to do is constantly be running (sometimes quite painful) amounts of electricity through your wrists if they accidentally touched the metal.
Not sure if the Apple Silicon devices have the same issue - but it was consistent through at least 3 different generations.
"Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year."
13 million impressions? And how much did they pay to reach their audience? I'm absolutely gobsmacked that any organization is willing to walk away from 13 million impressions a year and very interested in know how many impressions/year they get on their top-ten outreach platforms if 13 million impressions/year (presumably for free ???) is something not worth the effort of dropping onto X.
I'm a lifetime EFF member and have given them money multiple times, but this article is also clearly missing:
1. Are they spending less to get content promoted?
2. Are they posting links outside of twitter back to twitter less often?
3. Are they linking links to twitter in all their site traffic like they used to?
4. Is their site traffic in general the same as it used to be?
There is no analysis - just flat contextless numbers clearly designed to make it sound like "X is dying, we're taking our ball and going home" in a sour grapes sort of way.
disclaimer: anti elon, very pro-LGTB+, pro-EFF aside from weird political snipes
> disclaimer: anti elon, very pro-LGTB+, pro-EFF aside from weird political snipes
I'm actually with you on basic philosophy but the weird political snipes undercut everything they're doing and I can't support any nonprofi who stonewalls questions about what they're doing with my money.
> We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.
Given that social media posts are not free, in the sense that someone or something has to put some effort in to format the message for that particular site, I can see how a simple cost calculation would show that it is no longer worth it.
They are posting the same content in virtually identical format to other twitter clones.
The whole process can be automated, the marginal cost is nothing.
I hope they ran the numbers and did some cold surveying/analysis/postmortem before deciding that.
What is worse is those aren't shitty ad impressions. Interested people will be following maybe even expecting to see them. In addition and ironically also other interested people will be algorithmed in to their orbit.
E.g. I read more of a blogger I like because I follow him on LinkedIn over following RSS feed.
> Interested people will be following maybe even expecting to see them.
But they won't. That isn't how modern social networks work, and X definitely isn't an exception. The chronological feed of people you follow is long gone.
I was recently at a brown bag at work - regarding enablement of AI in the workplace (it was awesome - all over the roadmap) - and one of the audience asked the speakers (a very diverse group of people) how on earth they keep up with all the developments in AI?
All six of the speakers immediately said Twitter was realistically the only place you can keep up with the conversation. Having an extensively curated list means that anytime anything breaks (and often a few hours before) you are going to hear about it on X/Twitter.
I would love to know if there is anything even close to the reach of X. It has a lot of problems - but if you want to track breaking news, I can't think of anything else close to it.
You can still stay pretty up to date (at least in AI) without even being on X, since everything distills out to every other platform anyway. Between /r/LocalLlama and the ThursdAI and Latent Space newsletters, I'm at most only a few days away from whatever the latest hype is.
I absolutely agree with your sentiment - but it is often the case where you will get into the office at 9:00 AM - and everyone is talking about the biggest release/development that morning - and by lunch it's kind of old news and people have moved on to new thing - and so by the time you are interesting in talking about the thing that happened last week - implications, use, whether it's legit or just hype - people have all moved onto the new thing.
HN is a nice consolidated view - and I pull up the home page 2-3 times a day (and have done so for 10+ years every day) - but, there is a firehose of information coming in on X - particularly if you have a very highly curated list - and some people are insanely high signal - Karpathy for instances always seems to zoom in on important things.
> but it is often the case where you will get into the office at 9:00 AM - and everyone is talking about the biggest release/development that morning - and by lunch it's kind of old news and people have moved on to new thing
That's literally just gossip. The same dynamic existed with episodes of Friends and Game of Thrones.
Everyone gathers around the water-cooler and discusses the newest happenings, but that's not science and it's not engineering. You're not passing around serious white papers and looking over peer reviewed publications and datasets, it's just... gossip. It has the same value as gossip and is completely optional.
The big issue with this approach is that it will destroy your sanity for things that are often a big bag of hype with nothing underneath. I often find HN to be better because things that get on the front page are vetted beyond 'someone on twitter hyped up a thing'
HN is still great but it’s in decline, I still hear about AI developments on r/LocalLlama and X sometimes weeks before they make it here if even at all.
And all the commentary here is negative, skeptical and mean. It’s like Slashdot when Apple started ascending and everyone was complaining that iPods will never catch on.
> things that get on the [HN] front page are vetted beyond 'someone on twitter hyped up a thing'
Interesting take. I'm not aware that anyone is doing vote rings or vote buying very successfully (considering that my own blog also makes it at an expected rate, and I know there isn't a group of friends voting that up) but I kinda assume that this is a thing for some of the bigger launches where they are hoping for conversions. Beyond a defined group coordinating their posts or votes, though, surely HN's front page can't be seen as vetted beyond "oh this looks trendy/hype"? People don't vote only after trying out the product or reading the full article. In many cases that would mean voting after it has already disappeared off of the front page for good
I had to reluctuntaly create an account on twitter after years because of the exact same reason. AI research discussion is more active there than anywhere else. I've tried to use nitter's rss feed to stave off of the platform but it was limiting.
Well, Twitter has a lot of separate spheres. It's pretty easy to curate just tpot (the part that concerns itself with the Bay area, venture capital, and so forth) by following the right people and then engaging with posts that are on-topic.
Even when it was Twitter drinking from the firehose didn't really make your life better. I don't need a two sentence breaking update from a Miyazaki baby to stay on top of this stuff, and quite frankly if they can't bother to make a blog post or press release it's probably just noise any way.
I very much appreciate the sentiment - and agree that random crap (particularly some of the insane dependency chains that you get from NPM, but also Rust) in which you go to install a simple (at least you believe) package - and the Rust/NPM manager downloads several hundred dependencies.
But the problem with only using the OS package manager is that you then lock yourself out of the entire ecosystem of node, python, rust packages that have never been migrated to whatever operating system you are using - which might be very significant.
How do you feel about Nix? It feels like this is a nice half-way measure between reliable/reproducible builds, but without all of the Free For all where you are downloading who-knows-what-from-where onto your OS?
Solved with direnv. Also - in my .bashrc in all of my (many) clients:
$ type uvi uvl uvv
uvi is a function
uvi ()
{
uv pip install $@
}
uvl is a function
uvl ()
{
uv pip list
}
uvv is a function
uvv ()
{
uv venv;
cat > .envrc <<EOF
source .venv/bin/activate
EOF
direnv allow
}
reply