We were afraid that AI will take over and take away our freedom, but I think some companies have done a great job at ruining their products, and our lives as well.
I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
11–20 of 206 posts
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#12Agreed. Looking forward to when I get my new phone: https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#13So, back to land lines with analog phones? Serious question, do any phones exist that can fully owned by the user? For a period, I was excited about the Ubuntu phone because of the fact that I could have full control over it. Sad to see that project terminated. I'm also interested in "dumbphones" that can use CDMA or GSM networks.
Look up Librem 5. Doesn't exist yet, but might soon.
I was just looking at that. I also learned that the Ubuntu OS is still community driven and has ports for several common phones, like the Nexus and OnePlus One phones.
https://docs.ubuntu.com/phone/en/devices/devices https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#14So, back to land lines with analog phones? Serious question, do any phones exist that can fully owned by the user? For a period, I was excited about the Ubuntu phone because of the fact that I could have full control over it. Sad to see that project terminated. I'm also interested in "dumbphones" that can use CDMA or GSM networks.
I suggest to everyone I know to try going a couple of weeks without a smart phone. You can still stay in touch over calls/sms, but is much easier to distinguish useful screentime, as in the time I'm working on a computer versus fluff screentime when I'm feeling awkward or mindlessly scroll feeds. It helped a lot with being present, not being bombarded with notifications and actually valuing communication.
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#15Increases in complexity up the barrier of entry to any advanced system, but lately it seems like things are made with the intent to make that barrier impossible to overcome within the lifetime of the hardware. The right to repair and open hardware standards are something we need to organize and push for if we want to see improvements. After all it's been demonstrated time and time again that we can't trust black box…
I think we are going more and more into the direction of renting almost everything. If you use ebooks like Kindle you don't accumulate a book collection. Same for record collections. Devices become useless once the connected cloud service shuts down. Eventually we'll probably have cars that get obsoleted quickly. I bet the same will happen for household and other robots once they get more powerful. You will have to pay monthly rent to use them.
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#16>In 2016, when I got a new phone, the default setting changed and I would just wake up to my device stating, "Tinder has been updated. Deal with it". I turned off auto-updates on my phone. So this happened. Last year or so I traveled to SF and tried to call an Uber home after a long day of walking around. My phone had 5% battery left. I opened the app and there it was... The maps and everything showed up, but then it…
> I was so worried the phone would die before the car arrived.
I've had my phone die well before the Uber arrived and it wasn't a problem, it showed up at the place I requested.
Once the ride is initiated the drivers phone becomes the primary client. It seems quite flexible with devices going offline (as it should, mobile networks are unreliable).
> use some of the apps nowadays that wouldn't work when you haven't updated them for a month.
This is a worrying trend but I don't think it's really that bad yet. My primary phone died recently (famous Nexus 6p bootloop) and I used my old Samsung S3 with stock Android circa 2014 and I was surprised how many of the apps still functioned properly without updates (including the ancient built-in pre-Chrome webview Browser app).
... basically my expectation these days was that they wouldn't work. But in practice 99% of my phone use is SMS/Messengers + Maps + Browsers, and they all worked perfectly fine, web standards don't advance that quickly at all, and the messengers are all using simple protocols where they had no problem.
So it's typically the edge case 1-5% 3rd-party apps like Uber that are of concern.
It's really not hard to develop APIs that are versioned. This is becoming a standard best practice among mobile/web app developers (via SemVer standard). And there's no excuse for a big company like Uber to not support ~1-2yr old apps.
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#17Also these updates drain the battery all the time and there is no way to tell them to please stop.
At least on Android you can install "greenify app" but for that to work properly, you need to have root and for that you have to unlock the bootloader (for which you have to wait 14 days and also void your warranty). I mean wtf, it's my phone but the design is such that a shit ton of crap always needs to run in the background (looking at you google play services) and dozens of useless apps that are always connecting just to show me more push notifications.
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#18>In 2016, when I got a new phone, the default setting changed and I would just wake up to my device stating, "Tinder has been updated. Deal with it". I turned off auto-updates on my phone. So this happened. Last year or so I traveled to SF and tried to call an Uber home after a long day of walking around. My phone had 5% battery left. I opened the app and there it was... The maps and everything showed up, but then it…
I've uninstalled around 10 free to play games and apps that Windows 10 installed without asking in the past 6 months, so I'm not sure those slashdot people should be using windows as a good example of having control either despite that 30 years of backward compatibility. :)
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#19You know, you could have even stopped at the car analogy, because modern cars are actually doing this and it's fucking terrifying. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374464
I can certainly imagine the dashboard becoming real estate for ads.
Re: I've never felt less in control of my own hardware
#20>In 2016, when I got a new phone, the default setting changed and I would just wake up to my device stating, "Tinder has been updated. Deal with it". I turned off auto-updates on my phone. So this happened. Last year or so I traveled to SF and tried to call an Uber home after a long day of walking around. My phone had 5% battery left. I opened the app and there it was... The maps and everything showed up, but then it…
Plus it uses your data, which for some people costs money.