241–250 of 267 posts
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Many work on GrapheneOS
Which is based on Android, a Google product. What if I don't want to run Android or iOS? What if I want to run something that isn't Linux based?
As a T1 diabetic, I wish that we weren't tying things like medical devices to smart phones. It's just one more failure point.
What's the alternative though? A smartphone is a device you can pretty much guarantee people will keep with themselves and in good working order. It's less of a failure point then any bespoke interface device and more durable.
It's not that far fetched that if your phone dies, you can't unlock your car, you can't pay for the bus, your insulin pump now lost its controller and you can't call anyone.
> A smartphone is a device you can pretty much guarantee people will keep with themselves
It's a device that many will keep, some might not, some will forget it, and seeing the state of some phones, you can't assume that it will be in good working order. Many apps will also require a relatively new phone, what if you can't afford a new phone?
Learn to say "no". It's freaking easy. I do have a smartphone, and every time someone asks me to install something on it, or ask for my phone number for "accumulating bonuses", I say simple and dry "no" looking into their eyes. When there's a queue behind me, they'll just show loading icon on their face a couple of seconds, and then proceed, because of pressure. Otherwise, when there are no more people, they feel lik…
We could all be a bit more humble about the onerous “tools” we’ve built . I have a lot of sympathy for the elderly, and the ridiculous rituals they go through just to book an appointment, fill a subscription, buy tickets to a concert, order groceries. The McDonalds app is 15+ screens to order a burger. Compare that to walking in a, “hi, how are you, I’d like a Big Mac meal with a Coke, here’s my money, thanks”. Let’s…
Agreed Btw (not sure what you were suffo) but you can still order via a human at most if not all McDonald's in the UK. You just need to go up to the counter, smile and wait a few seconds for someone to come over, and pay cash. Pretty effortless But I don't go in there for other reasons such as poor value, long wait times, wrong orders and fed up staff
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Not achieve a societal norm but facilitate everyday tasks with the many, MANY things that are THAT much easier with a smartphone. Now I get the author’s point, but there’s preferring to be off-grid (which I also tend to be), and there’s purposefully handicapping yourself then complaining about it later. Look, if you run a blog, post your articles on places like HN and actually interact with the World Wide Web on a fr…
Where is the logical tie between interacting with the web in general, running a server or whatever and not being allowed to complain about being pushed into the Google/Apple-duopoloy, remote attestation and similar things? o_O
If not having a smartphone ticks some weird box for the author, hurray them! However, let’s not pretend this has anything to do with privacy, protection or morals. This is just a self-congratulating blog post. It’s the LinkedIn humble-brag adapted to a different audience. Again, it’s theatre.
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Often there technically are other options but this is still like saying you don't need to participate in society and can move to a cabin in the woods.
What’s the problem? Are you saying that people who live in cabins are doing something wrong? I used to live in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. It has its downsides, but there were plenty of positives as well.
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What’s the problem? Are you saying that people who live in cabins are doing something wrong? I used to live in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. It has its downsides, but there were plenty of positives as well.
You can't see a difference between will and constrain? Force-feeding for example is torture, despite how much one may like eating.
I do think we need rules that require businesses to accept cash, and to have alternative flows that don’t require smartphones for ordinary transactions (like buying food) or financial management. I also think we need to break up the duopoly and ensure that FOSS based devices can gain a foothold.
Unless more people go without smartphones, voluntarily, the friction in daily life is only going to increase for those of us who don’t use them. That means accepting a little bit of inconvenience from time to time, but you make up for it in other ways.
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I don't think he's complaining about having a lot of apps, or the ability to have a lot of apps. He's complaining about being required to use apps for hundreds of small interactions every day that don't, or shouldn't, require an app. And he's correct. Companies are doing this not because they think it's better, but because they believe that if they can worm their way onto your device, and insert their cloud service (…
We’ve had smartphones for a decade and I don’t think I have 100 apps on my phone even if you included the ones that came with my phone. And daily I maybe use 4-6 apps at most.
- Rent payment/contracts app
- Rent deposit app (for some reason a different app)
- Maintenance app
- Community notices/amenities app
- Dry cleaning app
- Package app
- Pet concierge app (reserve the dog park, etc.)
- Apartment building parking/valet app
- App for the company that owns the building so you can use amenities at any of the other company buildings in town
- Another company app so you can reserve a guest suite at another company-owned building in another city
- App to unlock your apartment door if you lose your fob
- App for the restaurant in the lobby
- Internet company app (Man, that place had great internet. I miss that the most.)
- Satellite TV company app
- City parking app
From a technical standpoint, almost all of those apps could be consolidated into one app, but that's not how the real world works. These days companies outsource each little function to a different provider, and each of those providers has its own app.
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Just because you don't need to interact with all of them today does not mean that interaction isn't required when needed.
Right, but “two or three out of potentially hundreds” doesn’t mean the same as “hundreds”. That’s the hyperbole the parent was pointing out.
"I have a hundred things to do today" doesn't mean that a person has 100 things on their list for that day.
Outside of tech bubbles, people talk like that.
It's like how the Bible uses the number 40 as a shortcut for any very large number. 40 years in the desert, 40 days of rain, etc… It's not a calendar, it's an illustrative euphemism.
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Ads are aspect that worries me least (it is simple to block it in entire home network). Tracking weakening safety, privacy and in massive scale allows social engineering by state. Just look how unhealthy most people react on politics. "Divide and conquer" was never more achievable in massive scale like today.
>Just look how unhealthy most people react on politics I think that's more due to civil unrest and its resulting polarization more than anything. Bread and circuses still works just fine today. But the bread is growing thin and evrn the circus can't distract from drastically more expensive gas, groceries, and rent. Also doesn't help that the circus chose to forgoe long term idyllic control for maximizing short term p…
Statistically, no matter who is on charge, debt is rising.