I am typing this comment on a Pixel 7. I have had it for nearly two years and I have never experienced these symptoms.

The only app I can think of that doesn’t load in under a second is Asphalt Legends - and that’s because the app takes a week to load on anything.

I am very satisfied with this device, and doubt I’ll be upgrading to Pixel 9. I have no reason to upgrade.

What would be the point? Reddit doesn’t make any content. They’re just a platform. If they go ahead and paywall subs, those subs are going to have a tiny potential subscriber base. Therefore, they will be less attractive to post to (smaller audience, fewer upvotes etc).

About the only place I can maybe see it working is AskHistorians. And you pay the Historians to answer the questions. Which would of course reduce the amount Reddit takes from the paywall. Doesn’t seem worth it, to me.

Even then, I think the Historians would rather reply in a new free sub with wider readership than take $20 for putting in three hours of work responding to something. They do it because they’re passionate. Not for money.

This works for us:
Step one: Keep your instance civil. No tolerance for horrible people (racists/bigots etc).
Step two: Maintain a vibrant local set of communities free from nastiness.
Step three: Let your users engage with the noise of the fediverse as much or as little as they desire.

We don’t bother with telling our users who or what they can access, and don’t immediately ban visitors based on their home instance. Will that scale to millions of users? Probably not. But that’s a problem for future Nath - maybe.

After middling success putting a modern take on simple rock beats, they renamed the band to The Wiggles and specialized on childrens entertainment.

Through a combination of record companies wanting nothing to do with them, and a willingness to tour in the wake of the World Trade Center attack when nobody else would, the new band becomes wildly successful and gets to keep all their own money and not share it with a record company.

(True Story)

The biggest problem I see with this is the scenario where calls are recorded. They’re recorded in case we hit a “he said, she said” scenario. If some issue were to be escalated as far as a courtroom, the value of the recording to the business is greatly diminished.

Even if the words the call agent gets are 100% verbatim, a lawyer can easily argue that a significant percentage of the message is in tone of voice. If that’s lost and the agent misses a nuance of the customer’s intent, they’ll have a solid case against the business.

I did phones in a different century, so I don’t know whether this would fly today. But, my go-to for someone like this was “ok, I think I see the problem here. Shall we go ahead and fix it or do you need to do more yelling first?”

I can’t remember that line ever not shutting them down instantly. I never took it personally, whatever they had going on they were never angry at me personally.

Then again, I do remember firing a couple of customers (“we don’t want your business any more etc”) after I later became a manager and people were abusive to staff. So you could be right, also.

Surely opinions on this are going to vary wildly? Lemmy is full of people installing graphene and de-googling, while I’m happy with stock Android on Pixels with a custom launcher. Samsung, Sony and Asus all have serious devotees as well.

There’s also different responses depending on what you want in a phone. Some people want smaller than 6", others must have a 3.5mm jack. Some want SD storage. The camera is vital for me, but most of my colleagues don’t really care about the camera.

How would you sift through all that for a “best” one size fits all phone?

If it was that big a deal for you, why would you use a phone OS by that same company?

SMS is hot garbage:

1. The first “S” stands for short. If your message is over 160 characters, you are sending multiple messages. The implementation of SMS is a hack on the carrier network in the first place, and joining multiple messages, particularly across carriers is a complication to this hack. Sure, 99.99% of messages are delivered just fine. But if the message doesn’t arrive for some reason, there’s no acknowledgement of this. The recipient just doesn’t get it.
2. SMS is easy to spoof. If I have even basic carrier access, I can send a message to your dad from your number.
3. SMS is not secure - at all.
4. I can initiate a number port on your number, and while that port request will likely fail, it’s possible that I can receive messages that were destined for you in the short term.

But sure. It works for anyone on any phone.

The neat thing about Android is that you have the choice to do that. None of us understand why you want to use sms over rcs, but we love that you can.

£1,212 is more like $1,500 US dollars. Which is nuts.

Asking $12/yr for software seems like pulling teeth to some.

That may be your problem. We don’t ask for anything specific. We simply make a post with how much the service costs and how much users have donated. Users are smart and can take things from there.

For our instance, the users have in fact donated and keep us running. I’m not sure why you’d think users are unwilling to donate.

The author has a MacBook and has discovered that the new Apple Silicon is terrible for games. Particularly 32-bit games. It turns out Valve hasn’t re-made these 10-20 year old games to compensate for Apple’s hardware compatibility changes.

Somehow, that’s Valve’s fault and a sign that they’re going down the drain.

It isn’t a monopoly though. Even ignoring the Blizzards, Epics and GOGs of the web, any developer can host their game on their own Web site and market it completely independently of Steam and keep 100% of their takings.

The monopoly on storefront argument holds water in mobile land where side-loading a game is not possible/easy. In the world of computers though, I don’t think the same standard applies.

the days of being remotely excited by phone design are way behind us. This looks like an iPhone 4 with a pixel 6+ camera bar. Meh.

I actually love Civ IV, myself. I’m sure Leonard Nemoy is a huge part of why.

My wife, with a PhD applying for jobs 15 years ago:
“You’re stupidly over-qualified for this entry-level job, we fear that you will leave us as soon as you get a better offer.”
or
“You have the qualifications for his role, but you lack previous experience.”

It’s a bit early to say “for life”, but my cateye rechargeable lights are six years old at this point and going as strong as the day I bought them. My biggest worry at this point is that micro USB cables will start to get rare before the lights are a problem.

I’ve actually changed bikes twice in that time.

Tech is short-hand for technology.
So, technology companies and technology workers.

I don’t know if this is still the case, but we trialled LastPass enterprise around 10 years ago. They didn’t have an API. They had no intention of ever introducing an API. So, the script could spin up a database, but couldn’t store a break-glass su user into the vault without actually giving it to a human, first. Some enterprise solution. 🙄