Well, that’s always been the case with Skid Row, though it might be debatable which came first – the homeless encampments or the aid agencies. And for that matter, there were Hoovervilles in the Great Depression. In any city in America, there are transients milling around the shelters, which is why there’s so much NIMBYism over developing new shelters.

But what’s going on in California probably has more to do with the fact that LA and San Francisco tend to be very tolerant of the homeless encampments and provide generous aid, thus inducing demand. The homeless population is soaring across America for various reasons, but California is a desirable place to be homeless: better aid, better climate, softer police, etc.

Maybe California’s big cities really are more humane and generous, but at this point it’s to the detriment of livability in those places.

It sort of depends on where you are, but in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the homeless problem is noticeably worse than almost anywhere else in America. It’s bad.

An ex of mine lives in a pretty posh part of LA (Crestview). She works constantly and really hard to afford to live there. Now there are people literally shooting heroin on the street outside her home and to take her toddler to play at the park, they’re basically walking around the bodies of people high/sleeping.

I mean, I’m as anti-drug war as they come, but that’s no way to live and the police really should clear it out. Even in the poorer parts of most other cities, that’s not something you see.

Maybe you don’t care, but the OSI definition does.

In fairness, they didn’t release anything open at all.

Basically credit card theft.

Over twenty years ago, when I was pretty young and inexperienced, I answered a newspaper ad for IT/programming at a so-called “startup.” It sounded great.

My first day was in someone’s living room-turned office and I didn’t actually have any real idea what the business was. I was told it was a financial company, but it was taking off like gangbusters. Relatively quickly, within days actually, we moved into a very nice class-A office building. The owner was a remarkably charismatic man and being in his presence made you feel warm and understood and like you had a world of possibilities around you. I felt like a badass: I had a good-paying job, worked in a beautiful and prestigious office, and had a boss who made me feel great.

I found out, however, he was basically just running a scam. Between about 2-4am, he would have TV spots running, selling naive housewives, unemployment breadwinners, alcoholics, etc a “system” to earn huge sums of money very quickly. His system? You find people selling notes. You find people who want to buy notes. You introduce them and take a commission. A huuuuuuge commission.

Was that illegal? I don’t know. I kind of doubt the people in the ads were real, but my paychecks were clearing.

I learned that when his sales people (who worked late at night, when the infomercials ran) took orders, they would record everyone’s credit card info. Then, the owner directed us to automatically sign them up for things they didn’t ask for – recurring subscriptions to his membership-based “note marketplace” website. This was before the Internet was so mainstream, and many people buying this package didn’t even have a computer.

If people tried to place an order, and one credit card was declined, he’d just have them quietly try another card we had on file for them, without asking. If anyone complained, they’d obviously just refund the whole charge to avoid pissing off the credit card companies, but he was really just hoping no one would notice.

I quit pretty quickly and got a “real” real job.

That still does touch on the problem. The RCS group was formed in 2007. Let that sink in.

I think if you try to have regulators come up with standards for things like airdrop or location sharing, it’s going to be a bad time.

RCS you can just regulate as a telecom feature. It’s contained. It doesn’t touch things like finance (which vary by country).

I honestly get it. Apple has been excruciatingly stubborn to adopt RCS.

I think in the past this was excusable because RCS has been such a moving target. First it was the carriers disagreeing about how to implement, and dragging their feet, then Google got tired of waiting for carriers and sort of bypassed them. But even then RCS is messy when it’s part carrier, part Google, etc. Even Google Fi doesn’t support RCS if you want its text-from-computer function working! Then came e2e encryption, which has been haphazard.

At this point though, it is starting to solidify. Apple should implement it, and if Apple drags their feet, regulators should intervene. Don’t rule out that happening in the EU, either.

I actually think that you’re hitting on something that would be a good idea, but probably a redesign of Lemmy (or something new entirely).

Communities should work more like hashtags. If you “subscribe” to politics or technology or whatever, you should be able to get posts from across the fediverse with that label, instead of just what’s on your local instance. Then, you should be able to subscribe to moderation decisions like you can on Bluesky.

Combine those two things and you’ve made something powerful.

Honestly, that’s fine. Good for Reddit.

It’s just not a place for me anymore.

I’d say I slowed down my usage, as I looked for alternatives. But yeah, once Apollo stopped working, I cut out Reddit cold turkey.

I’m tempted to say it’s better, but, unfortunately, in many ways it’s not.

What Reddit had, most of the time, was semi-canonical communities. There was /r/python, /r/linux, /r/privacy, etc. The diaspora of Lemmy is a shadow of all of that. Surely, there are a dozen or so (at least) /c/python communities on Lemmy, but is there a single one that’s anywhere near as active as the Reddit one? No. Not so far, at least.

And unfortunately, I can say as an instance admin, the lemmy moderation tools are just flat bad. We had to turn off open registration and enable email verification, not because we would otherwise need it, but the Lemmy moderation tools are 100% reactive and only operate on a 1-by-1 basis. If a spambot signs up 100 fake accounts, I have to go and individually ban each and every one of them. There’s no shift+select, ban.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad to be here, and Lemmy’s great, and there’s far less toxicity (so far). All I’m saying is, (1) there’s work to do, (2) don’t gloat.

I wouldn’t say I use my phone for productivity, but I do just play and consume content with it when I’m board. So for me, the biggest screen I can fit and hold is the best one.

The added battery life is just gravy.

You can certainly make the argument that phones (and computers) are slowing down. It used to be a revolution every year or two, now it’s very incremental.

I would not say though that you can effectively use a 10 year old phone. There are some old networks out there, but major networks shut down 3g.

You might have seen Joanna Stern’s attempt to use an iPhone 4 on YouTube last year (if not watch it for some amusement). Even if the battery on that device were fine, the device was really pretty unusable.

Also: even if the battery were easily replaceable, replacements will only be easy to find for the most popular older phones.

And has a shit ton of casing.

Oddly enough for me, my laptop battery has aged much faster than my phone one. And they’re almost exactly the same age.

I remember the sealed battery covers. They sucked. They maybe worked for light splashes but modern phones are fully submergable. And I remember the wireless charging things behind the battery cover. Those sucked too. Plus you have all the plastic bulk to encase the batteries.

That’s fine and all. And you should be able to replace the battery.

I just don’t want the compromises that I suspect are required to get to one that’s easily swapped out like in the 2010s. I don’t want to lose MagSafe, water resistance, or capacity. For me, those are more important than easily replacing the battery.

I suspect this plays into why small flagships are mostly a thing of the past.

The maximum a phone will ever last is probably ~10 years, because that’s about how often 2g, 3g, lasted. By then it certainly isn’t getting any software updates and on the Android side, security updates won’t even last 5.

So the maximum lifespan of a phone is, reasonably, 5 years. That’s taking into account software updates, and other wear and tear.

During that time, if you use and abuse the battery, you might go through 2 batteries, which you can have serviced.

So I’d say it’s more akin to a timing chain that’s a pain in the ass to replace. Most car owners would not try to replace a timing belt, much less a timing chain.

As long as they’re reasonably replaceable, I don’t see it as a big issue for longevity. I’d rather have a bigger battery (less plastic casing), wireless charging w/ magsafe, better water resistance, etc.

If the battery is toast 3 years in, I can just replace it, which I’ve done on other devices (including my last Pixel). It’s not much more inconvenient than taking a car in for an oil change. Besides, on my 18 month old phone, capacity is at 95%. These days batteries often last as long as you’ll need them.

I see the much bigger longevity issue on the software side. Many phones (especially budget ones) only get 1 major OS upgrade and very infrequent security upgrades.