The voice of three generations.

OEMs only recently started offering 5+ years of security fixes. Two years was common until just 6 years ago. Apple got a lot of crap for not supporting older models but the truth is they supported longer than anyone else and only cut support when the hardware literally couldn’t take it. Yet everyone ignored that most android makers might not even release a single update much less more than the two years worth needed to cover a phone for a two year contract.

I don’t like saying that because I can’t stand apple devices. But it’s what happened. Then the EU started getting involved. They hated all this ewaste caused by people constantly upgrading. IT security people were speaking up too because phones were a complete risk with people using them for work but not getting updates that stopped them from being owned. It was getting bad for OEMs from multiple angles and they needed to act before the US government made them. And all those factors are the only reasons we are just now seeing all phones come with 5+ year plans.

As right to repair laws get integrated into new releases we will actually be able to take advantage of these 5+ year plans because we will be able to replace the batteries that are normally useless after three years.

I wish most phones had a battery saver option that would stop charge at 80% unless you manually overrode it each and every time you wanted to go over. This would dramatically cut down on the need to replace batteries.

But here is the rub. Even if you convince the majority logically that their phone is still good at year three they are going to upgrade at year two when the phone is paid off. The people that use phones as an identity and brand marker are still going to upgrade as fast as new devices come out.

And devices are going to continue to come out yearly. If you don’t ship a new flagship product each year then shareholders will revolt. There must always be something new for the customer. Technology moves fast. If you are an OEM not releasing then you are an OEM that isn’t keeping up.

All these forces of market, psychology, legal and repairability and more fight each other to create a situation where most people will upgrade in two years or less. Only a small portion of people will ever try to get 5+ years out of a device. Even the population trying to get 3 years will be two standard deviations out of the majority. Even if the battery is replaceable and the security patches keep coming.

Never make it without a ton of subsidies…

Read the room

Egypt didn’t use slaves to build the pyramids. They used paid skilled workers. We have their living areas and pay receipts. You are working with outdated information. Cathedrals cover a 1700 year period and multiple labor strategies. I’m sure some were built with slaves but the majority weren’t and slavery was all but absent for the majority of the period unless you count serfdom, but serfs didn’t have the skills to build them so they don’t count.

Literally true.

Socrates -> Plato -> Aristotle -> Alexander

Sagan -> NDT -> ?

Fortunately we are alive to see the original and the successor. Unfortunately NDT has become a greatest hits jukebox and hasn’t produced anything new and noteworthy in a long time. I’m looking forward to the next generation. I’m definitely cautious of what the generation after that does.

A calculator for RFM

It’s not doctors that need to know. It’s the insurance companies. They wrote the policies that pay doctors based on the BMI metric. Until those policy changes happen nothing will change.

Insurance companies quietly control so much and most people don’t realize it.

I started a Facebook group called New Music Only. Nothing older than a fortnight is allowed. It allows others to share brand new music they haye found and it forced me to go to YouTube and start hunting for recently uploaded music so I can supply material for the group.

I’m sorry that whoever down voted you didn’t see what you were doing.

Are instances federated or rag-tag islands?

I’m leaving the drama typo. You made it too good to take away

Partly. Except the time different Mastodon instances were not federated much or at all. If you wanted to go follow someone on Mastodon you had to know the exact server they were on. In an environment like Reddit and Lemmy where you’re there for the communities instead of the people that isn’t an issue. But if you want to go follow some specific podcaster you need to know the instance because there’s no guarantee that whatever instance you happen upon is going to be joined up with the one there on.

Everyone was busy running their own servers and not trying to tie everything together. It was a thing that could be done but a thing not enough were doing.

I’m on Bluesky. I have seen a drama increase in followers in the last few days since Twitter let blocked people see content that were blocked from.

It’s a big blow to Twitter that people are finding someplace, anyplace , else to go.

I had to decide if I was going to Mastodon or Bluesky. I picked Bluesky because after reading Mastodon’s integration problems with itself I wanted nothing to do with it. It couldn’t scale unless each instance played nice and in the years since it went live they had refused to do that and showed no signs of even moving in that direction.

When I lived in the Tidewater area I practically made a hobby of going to places with okay food and entertainingly bad service. We were always on a mission to find the worst food. We found it at one of the “Steak Seafood Pasta” places on the Blvd. Everything came from a microwave and the freezer section of some supply company.

An average sized amount to think about.

I misread the headline. I thought 3D printers were evolving into crabs.

I have it a test with some operators from the search bar instead of using the form and it did exactly what it was supposed to. I’ll keep this on hand. Thank you.

You know what I miss? Search engines that honored Boolean operators. I am often looking for niche results and being able to -, ! and NOT is incredibly useful. But that’s just not a thing anymore. I know part of it is that SEO includes antonym meta data that ruins this but it would still be helpful on occasion.

The more fine-tooth details you put in it the easier it is to exploit or get exceptions. It’s how you have a tax code where 10% tells you what to pay and 90% tells you how not to pay it.

But the only thing I would change would be a software patents should be dramatically shorter than hardware patents given the life cycle of software.