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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • My experience is dated, but figured I’d share it in case no one else has any input.

    I owned a few Motorola Android phones before and after the Google involvement. I think my most recent purchase was 2015.

    At that time, they were extremely “pure android” with very few additions beyond the stock experience. The things they added were way ahead of their time - I still think those devices had the best “always on” display implementation to this day, and they did it way before it became a norm.

    Their software and update support was rivaling Google at the time, and most other manufacturers were still in the days of 2 years of updates if you’re lucky.

    They just stopped making phones it seemed like. I ended up moving towards Pixels over the years, but Moto is the one company that would tempt me to switch back. That or maybe HTC but they’re dead.

    Hope you get a more recent answer - I didn’t even realize they were still making phones to be honest.





  • There’s isn’t enough physical space for three sensors on a smaller phone especially if it’s the size of the iPhone mini

    I wouldn’t go as far as to claim that “more cameras” is the complaints being made here. Sure, telephotos make sense as things that take up more space. But most people are using them for like 1 in 50 shots or something. I have an extremely hard time believing that someone would genuinely notice the difference unless they’re an extreme case or they’ve been told the other ones are better. Within reasonable effective focal lengths, these are pretty negligible in the sizes we’re talking about.

    If Apple couldn’t make a smaller phone sell particularly well, I doubt anyone else could.

    I hard disagree with this. Apple is literally the worst company to try to make this shit work. Apple’s core selling point is the status symbol of it all. People trying to show off having the flashiest phone are not going to buy a product being touted as a half baked smaller and cheaper version of something else. Their entire marketing was about it being mini. Apple customers are not the core audience for something like this, and Apple marketed it as exactly what people disliked about small phones.

    around or less than 5% of total iPhone 12 and 13 sales

    I find it more surprising that this was below expectations than I do that only 5% of people bought a smaller phone. I doubt much more than 1 in 20 people really is after a smaller phone. I’m sure they exist, but based on the people I know and the number of people I’ve heard interested in smaller phones, I’d estimate it more like 1 in 20 to 1 in 40. It’s not for most people by any means. But 1 in 20 is still a decent number of people.


  • They have to understand that the cameras on the biggest flagships occupy a lot of space and it isn’t feasible to bring it to a smaller form factor.

    Not… Really… Sure it makes some difference, but the much more constraining factor is the money. Cameras arent that big, but they’re one of the priciest pieces of hardware in the device.

    The problem is more that they keep trying to sell small phones at cheaper price points. So they end up with much worse screens, socs, and cameras so they perform like shit. People don’t want a small phone because they don’t care about their phone. People want small phones because the standard size is fucking huge. They need to make a high-ish tier small phone instead of low tier small phone that performs like the 50 Walmart shit.



  • I can understand that Valve doesn’t want to give false impressions that a game runs perfectly when there are imperfections as mentioned

    Idk, I disagree with this. It means that games are being labeled as “not verified” because of things that don’t really hamper what people would care about - the keyboard popping up for naming your character or seeing “A” in a green circle isn’t going to make people be like “oh no, this doesn’t work well on my steamdeck, I’m not playing it”. Does it look unprofessional? Sure. But that’s not what people care about when looking at the ratings for compatibility. They just want to know if it’s going to run well.

    These systems are all about trust and evaluating the right metrics. Having the right button icons matters to Valve but not the player. Once players play games that aren’t verified and they run fine, and they play games that are verified but still have performance hitches in some places, etc, the rating system loses its credibility and then it’s meaningless.

    On top of this, developers are already shunning the verification and just not bothering. Some of the things they ask for don’t directly affect the playability of their game. It’s an extra hoop for the developer to jump through, and if people don’t trust the badge, there’s no point in chasing it. Valve is literally undermining their own system from both sides by doing this.

    There’s already people in this thread touting protonDB being a better evaluation. It’s exactly this that will happen and will continue to happen and continue undermining their rating system until Valve aligns their verification system with what users actually care about.


  • I’d actually bet it’s something different…

    It’s less that you game on a steam deck because it’s portable, and more that because it’s portable you can game. There are people here and there that are like “yeah, I have a steam deck so I use that instead” but the sentiment I see more often is “I wouldn’t be able to game at all if it wasn’t portable - I can’t sit down for that long, I only have time on the train, I need to be near my kids” etc.

    And this changes the dynamic. It’s less that these people have “desktop gaming” and “portable gaming” and are choosing to play the AAA games while portable. They only have portable gaming. And they choose to play the same good games everyone else is playing. The only gaming they do is on their deck. And they’re not going to be like “oh, why play a good game like BG3 if I can play a shitty portable game like xyz”.

    These are just people’s primary gaming devices now. And if they can, they will choose to play the same good games everyone else is choosing to play. It doesn’t matter if it only runs OK, playing a good game with OK graphics is still better than playing a shitty game.



  • I had a programmer lead who rejected any and all code with comments “because I like clean code. If it’s not in the git log, it’s not a comment.”

    Pretty sure I would quit on the spot. Clearly doesn’t understand “clean” code, nor how people are going to interface with code, or git for that matter. Even if you write a book for each commit, that would be so hard to track down relevant info.



  • As an introvert, as much as I feel weird aroind people, I feel even weirder video chatting with people I’ve never met in person. In that situation, I have no idea how to read people and the expectations are way harder to try to meet. This makes meetings even worse until I meet them.

    While I agree that forced in person work daily is insane, the OP is complaining about meeting people in person once after many years, which feels equally as ridiculous. IMO even for widely dispersed teams, meeting a few times a year seems ideal.



  • I’m actually shocked to find how many people agree with the OPs sentiment, but maybe there’s something about the demographics of who’s using a FOSS Reddit alternative or something. I’m not saying everyone is wrong or has something wrong with them or whatever, but I entirely agree with people finding this valuable, so maybe I can answer the OPs question here.

    I’ve been working remotely long since before the pandemic. I’ve worked remotely for multiple companies and in different environments. I am extremely introverted and arguably anti social. I tend to want to hang out with many of my friends online over in person. But that doesn’t mean I think there’s no advantage at all. To be honest, when I first started remote work, I thought the in person thing was total bullshit. After a few meetings my opinions drastically changed.

    I’ve pushed (with other employees, of course) to get remote employees flown in at least a few times a year at multiple companies. There are vastly different social dynamics in person than over video. Honestly, I don’t understand how people feel otherwise, especially if they’ve experienced it. I’ve worked with many remote employees over the years and asked about this, and most people have agreed with me. Many of these people are also introverted.

    I think one of the big things here is people harping on the “face” thing. Humans communicate in large part through body language - it’s not just faces. There’s also a lot of communication in microexpressions that aren’t always captured by compressed, badly lit video. So much of communication just isn’t captured in video.

    Secondly, in my experience, online meetings are extremely transactional. You meet at the scheduled time, you talk about the thing, then you close the meeting and move on. In person, people slowly mosy over to meetings. And after the meeting ends, they tend to hang around a bit and chat. When you’re working in an office, you tend to grab lunch with people. Or bump into them by the kitchen. There’s a TON more socializing happening in person where you actually bump into other people and talk them as people and not just cogs in the machine to get your work done.

    I find in person interactions drastically change my relationships with people. Some people come off entirely different online and it’s not until meeting them in person that I really feel like I know them. And then I understand their issues and blockers or miscommunications better and feel more understanding of their experiences.

    Maybe things are different if you work jobs with less interdepencies or are more solo. I’ve always worked jobs that take a lot of cooperation between multiple different people in different roles. And those relationships are just way more functional with people I’ve met and have a real relationship with. And that comes from things that just don’t happen online.

    Im honestly really curious how anyone could feel differently. The other comments just seem mad at being required to and stating the same stuff happens online, but it just doesn’t. I do wonder if maybe it has to do with being younger and entering the workplace more online or something. But I’ve worked with hundreds of remote employees and never heard a single one say the in person stuff to be useless. And I’ve heard many say exactly the opposite.



  • But administration officials made clear it was the first step in what could be a wide range of policy responses meant to stop low-cost Chinese electric vehicles… from flooding the U.S. market and potentially driving domestic automakers out of business.

    As much as I do not enjoy being spied on, it seems they’re just banning them on the presumption that they might spy.

    On the other hand, it sure would be nice to be able to fucking afford an electric car. I give exactly zero fucks about the US automakers. If they’re going to keep up insanely high prices, that’s their problem.

    So essentially we’re restricting American’s access to electric cars, under the guise of danger of a fear we have, in order to protect businesses from having to adapt. Glad, as usual, that the needs of the 1% are out weighing the needs of the entire fucking country. Again.


  • Most of the success of a social network has nothing to do with “X software is better than Y software.”

    Literally this. Most social networks are just less-featured versions of Facebook.

    Twitter was originally Facebook with no media posts and character limits. And kind of cool that you could SMS it, but hands down just worse software that ended up taking off.

    Instagram was originally Facebook but images only. Then they added video. It’s just less software, but also took off.

    Snapchat was Facebook but you could only send pics/video and only directly to friends. And they just removed persistence so all your shit gets deleted. Literally just missing timelines and comments. Blatantly worse software. Popular as fuck, especially with zoomers.

    Social media has never been about better software. Arguably Google+ had the best software in many ways (probably the most feature rich, but UI was objectively a problem), it’s fucking dead. Social media seems to do better when it has worse software.


  • It seemed to me like Reddit basically drove off half their content creators AND Lemmy didnt really steal too much of Reddit’s userbase (around 1%)

    Yeah, this has been my experience as well. Reddit likes to say “all the shitty people left and went to Lemmy”, and they seem half right - a bunch of people did leave. But most of the content of reddit is extremely stale now. And most of the shitty people that left reddit didn’t go to Lemmy, they just fucking left.

    Sure, some Lemmy instances have attracted garbage, but most of the threads here are like 1% of the amount of posts but 80% of the content I care about so it just feels more efficient. Less garbage to trudge through, especially in the comments.