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.

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.

Yeah, Thinkpads are still usable, though I don’t think most people would want to run an x230 today. It might be usable on Linux with XFCE. But Windows? Eh…

Either way, what’s stopping phones from lasting longer isn’t really batteries. You could take a phone in for a replacement battery every 2 years and it would still be unusable before too long because of software updates.

I do think requiring OEMs to provide security and software updates for at least 5 years would be a sensible regulation. Maybe even 10 years for devices over $1000.

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 3G 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.

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.

I don’t really see the benefit anymore. My current device lasts ~40 hours on a charge, so I seldom find the need to swap anything out. Even if I did, those little USB battery packs that charge multiple devices are more practical. On a long flight, my wife and I just share one and it works on the Switch and tablet too.

Sealed devices have way better water resistance, less plastic makes the batteries themselves bigger, and wireless charging (especially with magnets) will be challenging to add to a battery that’s also the back cover.

I’m sure I’ll be in the minority on this, but, I don’t really have any interest in a removable battery, especially if it involves other compromises on size, capacity, and features.

“Our pricing is $0.24 per 1,000 API calls, which equates to <$1.00 per user monthly for a reasonably operated app,” the Reddit worker said.

This reminds me of the “average user” Comcast would talk about when they introduced price discrimination metered billing. Just include the long tail of lurkers and signups who almost never use the service, and you can claim that the Apollo users (who are power users) are just outliers who should pay more.

Ultimately for me this is a reminder that when there’s a for-profit business ramping up to an IPO, it ultimately has to decide what the products are. Reddit tried to make itself the product with Reddit Gold, but clearly not enough people were paying for it, so it has to make users the product. It’s hard to “monetize” users through someone else’s app, so they’ve basically decided that for app users, if the developers figure out how to sell a very expensive service, more power to them, otherwise fuck 'em.