• he/him

Coder, pun perpetrator
Grumpiness elemental
Hyperbole abuser


Tools programmer
Writer-wannabe
Did translations once upon a time
I contain multitudes


(TurfsterNTE off Twitter)


Trans rights
Black lives matter


Be excellent to each other


UE4/5 Plugins on Itch
nte.itch.io/

NireBryce
@NireBryce

but smartphones are fine, actually. midrange, last year's model, two years ago's model? fine. the web gets more and more cruddy, the OS gets more and more heavy, but the phones? they're fine.

they permanently hurt your hand if they're badly designed, which most are, but only recently have smartphones been both so heavy and so large that you have to stabilize them on your pinky every time you want to reach the opposite corner of the screen.

but they were not always that way.

the droid 2 was tiny, probably smaller than the smallest iphone you can find now. It had a sliding keyboard and a removable battery, though suffered a bit in thickness for it.

but instead of practical designs, we got... chocolate bars for everyone. an ergonomic and technological race to the bottom. your phone is now less durable than the aformentioned droid, and to make it durable, you have to make it as thick as the droid 2, without a case.

that's been the case since 2016.

whats the point of thin, impractical and large phones, if we need to bulk them up to make them not shatter the one time we put it down wrong on the table? Or when it slips out of your pocket/bag when you're putting them on in the tile-floored restroom?

especially as people push more and more tablets. If I could get a 6" tablet again, and a phone with a small screen, I'd be set. The screen can go even smaller if you bundle it with a slide out landscape-mode hardware keyboard. If I need extra display, let me use my tablet for that.

Instead, we get the worst of all worlds: your tablet can be an external monitor for only your mac, and only if it's an ipad. no iphone to ipad.

no portable 5" monitors as durable as a phone, either.

it just feels like we've given up on everything that actually is a tool, lately.

even in open source, the tools that get made the most useable are the ones that have attention and capital behind them. I hope you don't mind needing a devops team's worth of knowledge to use the things you want to use for your hobby!

I know some of this is just me getting old, but wow. every time I think about this I just boggle at how much tech puts every other company and person through just so they can sell new hardware you don't need.

relatedly it's pretty fucked up and anti-competitive that the same companies that sell you phones are also the same companies that make phones slower and slower every year through self-inflicted and otherwise optional¹ bloat.

[1]: optional inasmuch as if they did not rush things out the door and then move onto something else, there would be less of this. But, alas, Business.


Turfster
@Turfster

I miss my Sony Ericsson Xperia pro, which would probably still be perfectly fine for daily usage, if it wasn't for the ancient OS (mostly for reasons of "well the fucking web won't run - or won't run safely on this") and lack of space


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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

it doesn't even make sense. we're locked in this pound-for-pound arms race when they could simply just use the same tooling to build the same phones with better features every few years. But the old chips slowly stop being made, because big tech demands fabs change, and fabs only have so much floor space.

good business sense would be squeezing us dry with very little in terms of hardware upgrades.

when I bought a leatherman I bought the one with the largest pliers and the least tools. If I need more than pliers, a screw driver, a knife, or an approximation of a hammer,

I would simply reach into my laptop bag and pull out a larger, cheaper, touch-enabled display, while letting my phone be the compute power. But we can't have that, not selling you two whole new computers every two years where we forced you to upgrade because of bloat, is where the money is.

I still miss my HTC Incredible. 117.5 mm x 58.5 mm x 11.9 mm, even ignoring thickness it was less than half the size of my current phone, which yeah it has a beefy CPU and everything but for fucking what? 99% of what I do with it is:

  • Signal
  • Discord
  • Maps
  • Email

Why do I need an eight-core CPU to run two chat apps (both of which are trash compared to mIRC or xchat, I might add), a map scroller and an email client that's significantly less functional than the one I used to use happily on a fucking Pentium??

not gonna lie, my biggest reason for paying an extra 300$ (well. 150, black friday was everything half) for a larger phone is that the tap targets are too small because everything expects big phones now. it's so dumb. everything is so bad for no reason except that people above them don't notice enough to give them slack to make it work.

i know i keep coming back to this but I'm convinced it's the combination of MBAs being completely insulated from the real world through their entire education and then managerial careers, where people are interchangable and metrics matter more than results

mixed with the fact that those same people overwhelmingly seem to think college grads actually know anything and won't need training or experience, so they hire them and fire their oldest, only to find out that the college grad is clueless, so you do it again because that firing must have been a fluke... but it keeps happening. So you just decide that no one this generation knows how to do anything, but keep hiring them because, well, that's what the boss wants.

the entire concept of on the job training has been obliterated even from some of what we'd traditionally think as the trades. It's so wild and bleak.

in tech it's both more and less noticable, because those people often go home to learn by themselves because their officemates make them feel like idiots, but like two weeks of mentorship would fix two years of bad coding skills, and few bother to even consider the cost benefit there.

Yeah, I've banged on about this a lot too and I think you're dead on. Every job now requires that you've already been doing the job you're applying for for some umpty-hundred years unless you have a degree from The Right Schools. My current job is better than most on that score but only because we have this monster and entirely built in-house legacy system we maintain so everyone has a long learning and ramp-up period, and there's still constant pressure from on high to get people Up And Running faster as if there's some magic shortcut to teaching people the ins and outs of over twenty years of hackjob development (and of course cutting more and more corners there means the hacks get worse...) Not to mention that new people straight out of college are almost invariably walking in with no useful on the job skills because the college courses are also being aimed at what these same MBA dipshits want which bear no relationship to reality!

Also i don't think most computer people realize, but just by using the computer for decades we're way ahead of most people in the field. so having standards this high is even worse. because even the people with experience have to work months to years unpaid just to qualify only to learn the job listing only wanted 2 of 8 qualifications once you get it

Yeah, I'm increasingly of the opinion - and very bad about it myself - that we should collectively at least not be doing unpaid work for large capitalists; if there's an impetus to spend all this effort for what amounts to continuing education we should at least not also be doing it in a way that also enriches the people inflicting these conditions on us, which is why I self-host all my stuff instead of putting things on eg GitHub and use stupid licenses that corporate lawyers won't touch with a ten foot pole. But we can and should have apprenticeship paths into the industry instead of making people pay for the privilege of making rich assholes richer, and that's gonna require labor organizing.

OSS can even do the apprenticeship stuff if it would change it's culture back from where it's drifted and not whine about new hobbiests, but being the para-corporate arm of Capital means it'll never go for that, the code needs too high reliability and you can't risk losing your funding

and like, i love computers! I love coding even if all my skills have atrophed in my illness.

but there's no joy in it, and the reason there's no joy anymore is that to do anything outside of what I know, I don't need to spend time learning useful concepts, instead it takes a week and a half to learn your obtuse command line and config micro-language PER UTILITY. and then it's worthless in two years when someone makes something that better fits your needs but has a completely different, even more obtuse method of operation, but because it's new, you can't build off of 5 years of documentation and it just sucks instead.

yeah. I added a second half in the edit, but yeah.

it sucks that nothing can get better, just faster, because there's no incentive to improve a thing, just write something better with completely new documentation and method of operation that shows the tool was written by someone who didn't know the current thing supports it if you simply ignore the defaults and spend three days configuring it.

due to a lack of mature documentation and a brisk development cycle, the new one takes four days. but hey, the features you want get support until people get bored again.

Yeah.

Yeah, al of this. Gamer braindamage aside, this is my major interest in retrocomputing, we've just abandoned so much technology in favor of usually worse but (easier to market | backed by the right business interests | politically correct | happen to have been in the right place at the right time) versions thereof and they're just left there. I don't need to go on my rant about multics for the third time on this webbing site but one gets the idea that computer science is a dead disciopline, having been completely replaced with a bunch of 419 scammers pretending to be philosophers and architects.

it finally clicked awhile back as to why this is the case: the bigger screen is actually just a sort of capitalist sexual selection of a particular trait that coincides with another important aspect: it makes sense for companies to make smart phones this big because it's cheaper to make larger batteries, and the larger surface area improves heat dissipation. it's just literally cheaper to make things bigger and more unwieldly, plus the number go up so it looks good on spec sheet comparisons, and given how battery technology does not seem like it's going to get cheaper i'm not sure it's going to go back the other way anytime in the near future.

then again i'm the sort of person that thinks javascript has simply gone too far and we should just use html as much as possible, so my opinion is pretty suspect.

(thinking about the Cosmo Communicator) feel like pure shit just want her back

friend of mine has one. its a fully features android phone. it also folds on a hinge with a whole-ass usable physical keyboard. with actually good keys to press. give me that folding phone, industry