Neither of those are dumbphones and neither resolve 90% of the problems I mentioned. I wasn't trying to get away from walled gardens or chase additional privacy, I was trying to get away from the most distracting devices ever created and to intentionally not have 24/7 access to a web browser.
My path was iOS -> LightPhone 3 -> GrapheneOS -> iOS.
The LightPhone was the right level of capability for the distraction free goal I had but it wasn't capable enough to resolve all of the things I mentioned.
The phone with GrapheneOS was an attempt at compromise. The idea was something I had enough control over that I could (in code) limit my usage on. In reality it didn't limit my usage and had issues with things like banking apps and RCS, so I was basically using a more irritating iPhone again. I went back to iOS.
I am a similar age to Geohot and I have tried to escape smartphones to a dumb phone. It didn’t work. So many things that used to work without a smartphone don’t anymore and people don’t realize it.
• Surface parking in my city is all by QR code. Where there are machines, they are broken because no one cares.
• Social groups are on iMessage or RCS. RCS is not nearly as backwards compatible with MMS as it seems and you WILL get dropped silently, eventually.
• Some restaurants literally don’t have print menus (they’re expensive! QR codes are cheap!).
• Rideshare, bike rentals, etc. are all dependent on apps. Taxis are not reliable or available.
The list of tiny cuts goes on and on. When you have a smartphone you don’t realize the affordances that made it possible to be without them are disappearing.
I’m sure you can do it in a smaller place but you have to be dedicated and willing to suffer in a city.
> The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power.
This nerd sniped me a bit. Your calculation on the amount of CPU power is too low, because of the change in IPC, but for the things we have benchmarks for, it isn't multiple orders of magnitude off like I expected. Looking at Cinebench 2003, prime95, and a few other benches, I get somewhere between 300x and 850x faster for the modern CPU over the Pentium 3.
For me, the biggest change in performance in my life was going from spinning disks to SSDs. That change felt bigger than any other leap by a long shot.
More recent Claude models tend to do these new longer lists. I think they've trained it on more varied sentence structures to give it a less monotonous feeling when reading, which worked, but now it has this tendency to go for "punchy" in a way that becomes grating.
> A thing. Another thing. More thing. But this thing. Four things, one common thread through time.
Sure, LLMs learned them from somewhere, but when you use it a lot you see that it has very specific, very repetitive writing patterns. This article makes little effort to adapt the writing away from those patterns.
It is like a code smell, when you see it, it is obvious.
> Hesiod felt it. Plato theorized it. Polybius mechanized it. Sallust prosecuted it (while guilty). Ibn Khaldun put it on a timer. Five civilizations, twenty-one centuries, one diagnosis. The only thing missing was proof.
> For most of history, “too many assholes ruin everything” remained a vibe. A well-documented, five-civilization vibe, but a vibe. Then, in the twentieth century, it became math.
> Sallust, it turns out, was doing game theory in a toga. He just didn’t have the notation.
> That’s not my characterization — it’s the title of the paper. And the researchers defined the term with clinical precision
> That single belief turns out to be a genetic marker. Everything else travels with it.
^^ that one in particular is a VERY strong Claude-ism
> Now, the finding inside the finding
> The study is not a catalog of monsters [...] It’s a measurement [...] with polling-grade precision
> Political violence wasn’t rhetorical; it was a body count
I like Scott Miller but he doesn't work there and "insider" information after layoffs is almost always part of a PR game by one side or the other. Again, not saying he is wrong, just that a tweet from someone secondhand really doesn't do it for me as evidence anymore.
> The thing is, every time you take a swing on one of those big IPs, you take a risk.
I think the entire content production industry, no matter the medium, is aware of the risk/reward of rerunning existing IP vs creating new IP. There's a reason we get retreads of retreads elsewhere, existing IP is lower risk, higher reward, pretty much always.
Halo is a good example - they fumbled with Infinite. It just wasn't very good. Yet the remake of Halo: Combat Evolved is getting a ton of attention from the fanbase and broader gaming community. If the next Halo is good, that fanbase will come back around.
> I think what they want to do is make the next WoW. Low-risk, customer lock-in, people identifying themselves with their consumption of the IP to an almost ludicrous degree. You see that already in some ways with Fallout 76.
This is what they now want from Mojang and Minecraft. Asha even called it out in her letter.
I actually think this is the wrong diagnosis of this situation. The studios in Microsoft gaming appear to have been given a lot of room to take risks under previous leadership, build passion projects, etc. while letting big franchises sit on the side. Those things ended up being anywhere from abject failures to small successes - where some players and critics loved them - but most don't seem to be commercial successes.
In the meantime we haven't seen a new Quake, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Perfect Dark, Fable, Banjo, Conker, or the myriad of other mainstream IP they owned in decades. Most of these franchises have lost a ton of value after sitting on the shelf for so long without releases.
There's no real evidence in here that the IDTech team or the "coders" were specifically let go. I'm not saying it didn't happen but the article is just raging at the idea of it happening without presenting any evidence of it.
I can't help but think the industry will be better off in a few years after this Xbox "restructure." That's a lot of knowledge and talent that's no longer stuck in 14 layers of middle management hell.
> Again, what Flock is doing is decades old. It doesn't even look like you dispute this fact.
Scale and level of effort involved matter. How many cameras were reporting to the Motorola database in 2000? 2010? Flock today?
How easy was it to type in “white Chevrolet Tahoe at [intersection]” until you see the one you want, get its license plate and run through the rest of the database?
Who was able to do that? How easy was it?
The sum of many small changes can create a meaningfully different result that we need to evaluate different than the thing that came before.
In the US, up until the mid to late 2000s, the majority of ALPRs were mounted on the police cruisers. Even when they moved on to installing them in fixed locations, they had two major limitations:
• There were few of them
• The databases were managed by the jurisdiction
To my exact point, by increasing the number of readers and SaaS-ifying the process to enable jurisdictions to opt-in to information sharing, you have meaningfully changed what the technology is capable of and how it can be used.
One of the things that is really interesting to me is when people don't update their opinions of some thing when the level of difficulty and cost associated with that thing change. A few decades ago, if a police officer wanted to find the whereabouts of some individual, they would have to do some serious leg work, even with ALPRs, potentially watch many hours of videos, etc.
With Flock that can be reduced to a mere search query across many locales (maybe not even their locale!) with effectively no effort spent.
When the cost changes so dramatically it effectively changes the balance of power and that is something we should, at the very least, deeply consider.
Again, this is already happening. Hospital side care providers use systems which optimize for expected payout value. That increases payout totals and insurance costs for everyone.
The ACA tried to make health outcomes a part of the calculation for everyone involved but it is hard to compete with the all mighty dollar.