So excited for this! No other smartwatch comes close to the UX of pebble OS. Tiny touchscreens are demonstrably a bad idea.
Garmin and Casio have plenty of button-only devices, but they seem to not really understand how to make a UI flow well. They all feel kludgy and arcane to use. Whereas pebble was a very simple layered menu system without any over-complication.
> You can express your own religious identity and explain your beliefs, but you can't call your coworkers infidels if they disagree, or try to ban them from saying things that contradict its doctrines, or insist that the organization adopt yours as its official religion.
The issue with this is that it enshrines denial of identity in the same place as religion. If a trans colleague identifies a way that you disagree with, does this give you free pass to misgender them and deny their identity? That is cruel, and you would be denying a colleague their right of self-determination. This is bullying.
I'm not saying you should be stricken down for needing time to adjust to their pronouns and chosen name; I'm saying you shouldn't be cruel to them by denying them their identity, and that such cruel behavior should not be protected in society.
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I would turn this entire discourse about "wokeness" on its head, especially the discourse from the pg's and Musk's of the world, and assert that they don't actually care about the way the ideological wind is blowing; They're afraid of the collectivist nature of it.
That many less-powerful people can band together in pursuit of social justice against them, entrenched titans of capital, those capable of steering mainstream discourse, can provide a counter-argument to their power structures, is what _really_ troubles them.
If you believe that making false claims of an opposite-sex identity is a harmful lie, then being compelled under threat of punishment to, for example, refer to a male as "she", is also a direct and targeted attack.
Being trans is identity, but being transphobic is ideology. Being a transphobe does not alter your identity in any way, nor change how you are referred to in society. Denying someone their identity and disrespecting someone in a professional setting is toxic and hostile.
If you want to be an asshole at home, you're free to do so insofar that it is legal. But if you want to be an asshole at work, that should not be enshrined in the same way as religious belief as pg suggests.
Unless you think it should be allowed, but what level of assholery is allowed? Is assholery against trans people the only assholery allowed? Is it okay to be an asshole to disabled people too? To women? To someone of a different color?
Trans is also an ideology. It's the belief that each person has a "gender identity" which may or may not align with their sex, and that this "gender identity", rather than sex, is what makes someone a woman or a man or, somehow, neither.
By the same logic as you are presenting, it is toxic and hostile to impose this ideology upon others. If believers of this ideology want to use "preferred pronouns" and such, they should of course be free to do so.
But others who do not hold this ideological stance, including those who oppose it for whatever reason (e.g. because they see the concept and implementation of "gender identity" as fundamentally sexist), shouldn't be forced to pay lip service to it, any more than atheists should be forced to pray at work.
You call this refusal "assholery", but presumably that is because you are a believer of this ideology - including the belief that to reject it is "transphobic" (which is roughly equivalent to the religious zealots' cry of "heretic") and therefore, per this belief, reprehensible?
Let me put it another way. If you start a new job and introduce yourself as "Bob" and someone says, "haha no you're Herman. Hi Herman" and they continue to call you "Herman" at work from then on, then they're being an juvenile asshole to you. They're denying you your identity as Bob. Gender identity (including one's chosen name) is the same way.
This is not the same, because a man who introduces himself as a woman is not actually a woman. He might want everyone to pretend that he is, but it is not the reality of the situation.
It's more like if he introduced himself as being a young child or a dog. No-one should be under any obligation to play along with Bob's claims to be an infant or a canine when he is neither.
Look, I don't usually make a habit of engaging with throwaways so this will be my last reply. Feel free to take whatever internet victory points you like.
I would ask, when denying people their self-determination, does it start and end with trans people, or is there more? If someone is raised as a Muslim and converts to Christianity, do you deny them that? Who is the arbiter of who gets to decide who gets self-determination and who doesn't? I doubt billionaires, nor politicians, are the best authority for that.
Also, keep in mind that you're railing against one of the smallest, and most persecuted, minorities on the planet. Why do this? Were you harmed by a trans person in some way, or were you just told to do this by someone on social media? Have you met a trans person and talked to them about their experiences?
> The drawback could be as simple as “higher cost to manufacture” or “higher risk of consumers using incorrect/third party batteries”
This wouldn’t be an issue if we had some kind of standards around batteries for cellphones rather than making unique batteries for every single model.
If you could just buy a “Type B” format phone battery for a phone this would eliminate the issue. It would be similar to the charger market, where different manufacturers could compete. This is _toward_ the market economics that capitalists so love, unless they’re benefiting from market capture of proprietary parts.
One-off designs are wasteful and drive up costs and drive down quality.
I’m under the impression (probably created by Apple) that anything not tailor made by them is worse. I can charge my phone with any 5V source and the right connector but it’s always slower than an Apple charger. Why, I don’t know. Could be that the phone just recognizes the Apple charger and refuses to charge full speed otherwise. But is there anything that could be done about that? It’s malicious compliance at worst or just a lowest common denominator standard at best.
I use third party batteries and the phone refuses to reliably gauge their health (understandable) which makes them objectively worse. The list goes on. It’s bad for the wallet and the environment but people still want to pay for complete tailor made ecosystems and I’m not optimistic that it can change completely via regulation. USB-C standardization lets me charge with a third party charger in a pinch but it still doesn’t rid me of Apple’s monopoly on good iPhone chargers!
You will continually get better at not just writing the right code, but at interpreting requirements into the right code. You will learn the edges and corners where bugs will hide. And sometimes you'll write them anyways, because that's life. You'll fix it in the future.
In this trade, a lot of orgs put a lot of emphasis on "sprints" and "deliverables", but you really have to look at software development as a continuum. Optimizations and bug fixes are a part of this continuum, and any good team has space for these things in planning.
Not all teams recognize this, however, and I would recommend discussing with the other engineers on your team how you can work together to advocate for this. No sprint can be 100% features. Software requires upkeep. Bugs are a natural part of this.
The framing of this article is absolutely ludicrous. I'm no Apple apologist but this is genuinely a good feature that puts power to control who gets access to contacts back in iPhone user's hands.
"The city is helping citizens install locks on their doors to keep burglars out! That's going to really hurt all the new small-time crooks who might just be starting out!"
My reading of the article is quite neutral, it gives the pros and cons to that changes for all concerned parties.
The author even acknowledged that they like the new feature.
What if there are less challenges to the current social networks? is that not a more likely outcome, if the equilibrium settles toward stasis and lack of growth? I like my privacy, but I worry the cost for the collective is very high. I worry we'll be less likely to access all the many others ways in which social networks and algorithms and incentives might work, without the helpful pressure on incumbents...
One of the largest problems that needs to be solved in the space of social networking is flagrant disregard for privacy. Worrying that granting users the ability to protect their privacy may stymie the rise of new companies emerging to abuse their data in order to compete with existing problematic social networks is kinda nuts.
I’m not going to lose any sleep from making things harder for data theft startup. The incumbents will have to destroyed in a different way, on another day.
Do remember that in your example the city previously gave out crowbars to everybody in the city.
Like Apps can only do what Apple lets them. If they were doing something people didn't like; it was because Apple let them. Sure, it's good that Apple now is doing something but they're just filling in a hole they dug.
Even if a social app starts off as a scrupulous player who’s acting responsibly with your data, doesn’t mean they are going to stay that way.
It’s very common for companies that gain some traction, but aren’t on the path to be the next unicorn to get sold off to private equity firms who try to extract the most the value for the least effort. That often involves selling any all data to a data broker.
Personally, I’d treat most apps/companies as if they could be burglars, and only give them access that I need to get value out of the app. I don’t really want to be friends with my landlord or my doctor on the socials anyway.
GrapheneOS has this really awesome feature that I wish would come to mainline Android: Contact and Storage scopes.
Essentially, it works very much like the feature Apple has introduced for these things, but importantly, it makes apps believe they have full access to these resources, while still maintaining a limited scope through the OS.
I doubt Google would ever adopt this (due to their less than privacy-friendly attitudes) but it is absolutely technically possible, since GrapheneOS has it today.
Google routinely adds privacy features to Android and many of the GrapheneOS privacy features are inherited from or expanded upon Android. It doesn't matter to Google because they can still grant themselves any permissions they want by default on stock GMS Android ROMs, while limiting access to third party apps. (Most people don't know/care that you can deny certain permissions from certain system apps including GMS even on stock Android and this behavior isn't guaranteed anyway.) Contact Scopes is GrapheneOS exclusive for now but it's not unlikely that Google would add something like that, especially now that iOS has it. They have accepted several security patches from GrapheneOS already.
Any ETA on F-Droid, Accrescent, and/or APK releases from Github (for Obtainium)?
I know it's a non-trivial ask, and is planned, but seems important that software against censorship be hosted on a less censorship-friendly platform than the Play Store.
That said, thank you so much for doing this important work! I've often thought that I should start or contribute to a project like this, considering the direction of the world seems to be bending towards censorship and autocracy on the internet.
Android at least does show a little browser badge on PWAs. (Or is this a feature of certain launchers? I'm not sure). iOS should do the same, once Apple is done pretending PWAs don't exist.
Garmin and Casio have plenty of button-only devices, but they seem to not really understand how to make a UI flow well. They all feel kludgy and arcane to use. Whereas pebble was a very simple layered menu system without any over-complication.
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