If 90% of students have a good experience but the 10% of students have a similar experiences to the poster there, then I still think Lambda is another ethical disaster of a start-up.
"It's better than a typical USA student loan" is a very low bar.
Between smarts, motivation, and time most people cannot "simply self-teach". There's a reason education is such a massive industry, and entire professions exist around it.
> No, but you can expect none of them to have been lied to.
The CFPB report really doesn't make this obvious. All I've seen in this thread and in the CFPB statement are claims with nothing to back them up. The worst I've seen is "100% cohort", which doesn't seem to condemn the whole program.
> The defense is he's a fraudster, but incompetent?
The defense is I'm having a difficult time finding actual evidence of fraud.
If 90% of students aren't _scammed_, but 10% are _scammed_, there is an ethical disaster. But at this point it's clear you either have some actual financial incentive/relationship with Lambda School, or you just don't want to be wrong. Either way, I don't think engaging any further will be fruitful.
Shutting down discussion of a topic that otherwise has merits because you got offended by the idea is how we got here.
If you don’t like it you’re not forced to offer a valid rebuttal. You have the option to disagree or not. But taking the easy way out by shutting down the conversation just makes the situation worse for everybody. Nobody was on a high horse until you went there.
I think that's probably it. I.e. it's a nobody-cares issue. Looking at the older posts, there's some serious issues with lzip too (looks like corruption-related) that got a less than stellar response from the author.
Just quickly tested lzip vs zstd -9 on a 100 megabyte text file. zstd is almost as good but many times faster. I wonder if the lzip author's work got obsolete.
I skimmed the manual of lzip a bit. The author likes to talk a lot about how everything is done correctly in lzip and there's this line line "The lzip format specification has been reviewed carefully and is believed to be free from design errors. " If you type lzip --help it talks about how it's better than bzip2 or gzip.
Maybe they are right but ugh comes off real arrogant.
1. both lzip and xz are using lzma compression library internally, so there is no difference in their compression ratio/speed
2. lzma compression is LZ + markov chains, while zstd is LZ + order-0 entropy coder (similar to zlib, rar and many other popular algorithms)
markov chains are higher-order entropy coding, i.e. one using context of previous data. it's slower, but sometimes gives better compression. but text files don't get any benefit from it. OTOH, various binary formats, like executables or databases, get significantly better compression ratio. in my tests lzma-compressed binary files are ~~10% smaller on average.
so, many claims that zstd and lzma provides the same compression ratio, are based on testing on text or other files that don't benefit from higher-order entropy coding. of course, I imply maximum-compression setting and equal dictionary size, in order to make fair comparison of compression formats rather than particular implementations.
(I'm author of freearc and several LZ-based compressors, so more or less expert in this area :)
Seems like the usual story of some lone maintainer maintaining a popular project and losing their time and energy.
The post doesn't spell it out but I wonder if they implied there's a suspicion that the person doing the pressuring there is also another sock puppet of JiaT75 as some scheme of getting access to xz. That would seem particularly cruel; take advantage of a tired maintainer with mental health issues to use their project to smuggle security exploits to the world.
Regardless, be nice to people who are doing "unpaid hobby projects" your work depends on. Reading the thread made me sad.
> The post doesn't spell it out but I wonder if they implied there's a suspicion that the person doing the pressuring there is also another sock puppet of JiaT75 as some scheme of getting access to xz
You can get the user's e-mail by clicking the "Reply via e-mail to" on the page. It matches the <firstname><lastname><number>@protonmail.com of the other sockpuppets, and the PGP key for the account was made 1 day prior to their first communication on that mailing list.
The backdoor targets OpenSSH. The reason it's added to xz is that because of a complex dependency chain, it ends up being compiled to build OpenSSH. As far as I can tell, the payload doesn't get deployed into anything else.
It's worrisome for sure.. the original maintainer mentions longterm mental health issues, "but also due to some other things"
My worry would be "other things" they didn't mention can include deliberate acts of sabotage by said unknown agency. Devs can have health issues or other problems come up with themself or family in their personal lives, but also intelligence agents can tamper with people covertly in different ways such as deliberately causing various kind of accidents or contaminations/poisonings.
In any case; they could only have to disrupt the developer's life for a few months to persuade them that they need to step down to put one of their confederates at the head of the project, I begin to worry for All developers' safety now if you are the sole maintainer of a key project critical system daemons may link against.
Doubt the target is archiving software itself - presumably the reason these libraries got picked is because they already have high penetration across many layers of the stack which would ensure the backdoor has wide coverage.
Dunno, seems too amateur. An intelligence agency should be able to come up with more plausible sockpuppet names and email addresses even if in this case it didn't matter.
Ah I see, I wondered where the heck is a reply e-mail, I didn't see any reply email spelled out anywhere and didn't notice the button, I thought maybe the archive site deliberately wanted to hide the email adderesses.
Kinda looks like everyone in the thread might be sock puppet? ...except for the xz maintainer. Oof.
Assuming the original maintainer wasn't in on the con, someone should check on him. Apparently, he already got issues and being gaslit, manipulated and deceived on this level for years, considering the potential consequences and harm caused/barely averted, the unwanted attention, possibly police investigation following... all that may be a bit much.
He replied that he is in holiday and will check in after Easter. And that he and Jia's GH accounts are inaccessible. More details too, but that's the crux as I understand it.
I'm trying to think to myself if I was running a project and had a canary, what would be the threshold to kill the canary on a voluntary enquiry.
If it was CIA and they sent me: "Please give us all information on XYZ so that we can organize an assassination on them. This is voluntary and you don't have to give us that information. This is just pretty please."
I think I would kill my canary even if the request is technically voluntary and I wasn't compelled to give out any information. But that was a joke scenario because I couldn't come up with more realistic scenarios.
And then I guess if your threshold is too low, you'll kill your canary on something that might be a nothingburger.
I don't think the CIA exactly sends you a note asking for data to be dropped off at their Google Drive. It is more likely you receive an offer to license data you have from a company that is relatively obscure with a financial incentive.
NetHack did this when Fandom was still called Wikia. Luckily, the new forked site won search engines over easily and nethackwiki.com easily comes on first results if you search for NetHack stuff.
Unlike NetHack, the Minecraft Fandom site is probably a lot more lucrative in ad revenue.
I randomly was checking on Fandom's wikipedia page and noticed: "On October 3, 2022, Fandom acquired GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, Cord Cutters News, and Comic Vine from Red Ventures."
I had no idea they've been collecting sites like infinity stones. I guess ads pay handsomely? Ugh.
> I randomly was checking on Fandom's wikipedia page and noticed: "On October 3, 2022, Fandom acquired GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, GameFAQs, Giant Bomb, Cord Cutters News, and Comic Vine from Red Ventures."
I wonder, if this person's main method of applying has been online forms where you click the "upload resume", he puts this resume in and then everything fails from the start because the ATS is unable to read it. It looks like the text in the resume is not text but an image.
I read some posts back this year that most publicly advertised positions get bazillion applications, most of which suck, so you have to assume a computer program is going to filter your resume first, unless you've been referred in.
I don't like his resume that much, I think it's a bit too embellished but if I needed a person with his kind of experience (based on the resume), I would talk to them. But if I also had 2000 other applications in front of me, I am not going to read them one by one without using a helper tool to filter them.
Resume format is definitely a big reason here. I used to have a resume that looked like this – two-column, made in Adobe Illustrator, fancy icons/fonts. I applied to 150+ places with maybe 5 callbacks. I switched over to a super basic .docx template and got 3x the callbacks.
Resume aside, the job search process itself is also insanely outdated. Companies still force you re-enter your resume on their hiring portal and then have recruiters manually review resumes. We're building something like a "common app for tech jobs" here at Simplify (https://simplify.jobs/) to help candidates find roles that actually fit them and recruiters effectively process inbound. Praying for the day companies stop using Workday as an ATS....
Disclaimer: I am the founder (we’re also YC backed!)
@mikeyan320. Curious, how is simplify.jobs handling the labeling/disambiguation of skills and platforms? I've been working in this domain for a few years and have identified this problem as a significant obstacle. I open-sourced struct-ure/kg, a knowledge-graph of IT skills and platforms, as a possible solution: https://github.com/struct-ure/kg. I'd welcome your thoughts on the subject.
When I was applying, I had a situation where sometimes the ATS system would show me as Geoff and other times as Geo, with no clue why.
Obviously, that's not a fatal issue, but it was indicative of other problems with my résumé, and I saw those in the auto-generated job histories.
Pixelmator Pro just released a feature where it can open PDFs to show you the internal structure. I opened my résumé and sure enough "Geoff" is in two text boxes, despite being a single chunk of text in the source document. :-/
"ff" can be a ligature,ff. It is possible their system doesn't like the Unicode character. Even if isn't ligature character in PDF, the renderer could make it. Decomposition errors are common, as are not handling Unicode.
It's not a ligature, but you're definitely onto something. I checked again, and all the characters of my name are individual paths, except for the f's. I put a space between the f's, and now they're two separate characters as well. I double an n, no grouping. I put in a double f elsewhere, the grouping happens for those.
It's amazing to me that the PDF ecosystem is this broken after thirty years. I'm boggled that there isn't a commonly-used way to add structured data to a PDF to enable it as a machine-communication standard as well as a human one.
Edit to add: I found a "disable ligatures" option in Pages. Setting that didn't fix the "f" grouping. :-/
To be fair most ATSs are really bad at parsing information in very unexpected ways.
I used to have a pretty basic resume with two columns, basically plain text describing job experience and education in reverse chronological order and a narrow side column showing experience in languages and frameworks in a progress bar style to indicate proficiency/experience.
Some of the application software of the “fill everything in regardless of resume” variety offered to upload resume and then auto populate, which is essentially a preview of the ATS parsing capabilities.
It was perfectly capable of parsing the experience in languages etc, but would consistently fuckup the plain work history.
Even recreating the resume in a simple no frills Word document would help.
In these cases I was lucky I could manually input everything, but it did leave me very unimpressed.
Any good resume submission system should be capable of OCR.
But what is this guy? Sounds like he's a designer, a communications specialist, team leader, and project manager. Just all over the place. I'm not sure what I'd hire them for.
Because I don't think a resume submission system should be doing OCR. There aren't that many text formats out there: between Word, PDF, and some form of plain text (just actual plain text or something like markdown or readme), that probably covers 99% of resume formats. Why on Earth would I want to run resumes through OCR when all those other formats can easily have their text extracted?
Even if I'm sending it in PDF, I at least want it to be such that in case the document I've uploaded does wind up on some HR mook's plate, they can actually select, copy, and paste text from it.
No, but text is text. It is perhaps easier for the designer of the document to just put some text from photoshop rather than tweak the document, but it’s absolutely user hostile.
Are they actually good though? (the ATS systems) I've only recently learned how important they are in general and I'm not familiar with their capabilities.
I would think that even with OCR, this resume might be confusing because the years and contact information and stuff is kinda spread around.
If someone has has good insight how well/not well they work, I would appreciate if you commented about it.
There will always be some edge cases where it can't identify or interpret something, but they're pretty good. It doesn't matter where something is located in the document, it can pull stuff out like an address or phone number based on format and stuff.
And yet they don't. When I was applying some systems got my name wrong. They would chop off two characters. I assure you, that's not how it looked in the PDF.
If they're expecting text, then why even submit in PDF? Wouldn't a Word document be better? At the very least, if a system has limitations or and expected rigid input, then it should provide that information to the submitter. I'm sure there are terrible systems our there, but I'd be surprised if the average ones aren't decent at OCR.
A word document is also a binary format (unless it is an xml monstrosity) not too different from pdf, but more proprietary. Plus one vould embed an image on word.
100% agree. this thing is WAY too stylish. just put the information so that a computer can read it in. the annoyance factor is probably enough to reject him in some cases.
I would not blame the software. I'm pretty sure that images are not generally used as formats for resumes.
I mean, at what point do you think it gets ridiculous? When it's a video instead of an image? When it's in Sanskrit? (Computer translation is a thing, after all.) When it's a video in Sanskrit?
Or maybe is it more reasonable to say, look, this is some text, submit it in a standard text format? And an image is not that, even though OCR is a thing.
I agree that what you said is more reasonable but most jobs are not for technical people. Even somewhat technical graphics designers might go over the top and craft a visually appealing resume and use a picture format.
Why blame anyone for this? Just use OCR where possible. If the application instructions specify a text resume sure. Having a picture resume in a .docx makes little sense but a PDF is both an image and text format. Not to mention a lot of people design their resume or have someone else make it and print it for them and scan it when applying for jobs as an image pdf.
Shit happens. Tech is supposed to make life easier not harder, despite of humans' failures not because humans arr cooperative enough right?
Why bother with OCR as you still find enough people without it. And if you don't get enough applicants that you need automation manual review will happen. So still you don't need OCR.
2000 applications is quite rare. A posting is "hot" on indeed above the 50+ applicant mark from what I have seen.
If you have under 150 resumes there is no reason why a human can't skip+prioritize a few times and read in detail the top 50 or so.
A liberal 4 minutes per resume is 15/hr,120/8h. You can't spend or have someone spend one day reading resumés? In my earlier example of 50 resumes, that's less than half a day, a morning reading resumes to decide who you will follow up over a call in the afternoon.
Corporate laziness is such an epidemic. Honestly, why shouldn't ML replace this part of your job then? Let ML do the interview and hiring too. This middle ground where lazy keyword oriented algorithms and heavily biased humans (goof luck if your last name is washington!) is the worst of both worlds for everyone but the managers and HR people cruising their way lazily to retirement.
One thing that is worth keeping in mind is that if a team is hiring they're probably understaffed, which likely means that they don't have much spare time. Hiring should be a high priority in that case but it's often a struggle to even get a small amount of time to focus on it.
That's what managers are for, this is what they do, not the team. They're supposed to delegate actual work to their team and spend time on this sort of a thing so that their team has the right people and resources.
I got the advice to imagify all the text in resumes, because some recruiters would 'upgrade' the text before sending it to companies. Next thing you know, you have 5 new skills for things you've never heard about that somehow happen to perfectly match whatever $random_corporation$ needs.
Sounds like a "winning move" did not exist from the start for this poor fellow. Either your director fires you for speaking the truth or you possibly become accomplice in fraud. All you can do is cut your losses. If they go into that zoom meeting I hope they won't toe the company line. Getting fired, or losing the customer seems like the least worst option.
It's actually not clear to me if the director is also their boss. It's written as if they are but not spelled out anywhere I can see.
The least losing move was probably to indicate that the “more political” statement provided by the boss seemed to be false, and ask for supporting information and/or to work together to find a defensibly true statement that was suitably politically acceptable.
Now, if the boss is committed to outright fraud, this is still going to be a problem, but it lets you separate out that case and puts you in the best armed position if you need to go above or around them in the org on the issue, and does as much as you can to avoid the firm committing fraud and to avoid yourself being an active participant if that happens.
> if you need to go above or around them in the org
In this case, the whole company has around 10 employees, so I assume there isn't much in the way of management. I understood "director" to be the big boss, maybe sharing his position with one other.
Or not lie and possibly not get fired? Surely better than lie and having the sword of Damocles hanging over his head for a long time, either because of part-taking in fraud or (indirect) blackmailing from the boss expecting more lies or other dishonest actions as a consequence.
Could be a winning move, but it's also common for whistleblowers to end up under some bus at some point. Turning against your director (and colleagues, etc.) will most certainly cost you your job. A lawsuit for disclosing secrets is also likely.
Cover your ass with clear paper trail. And even then, I would prefer losing the deal getting fired. Whistleblowing is really the last resort nuclear option, IMO.
After my iPhone dropped into a pool last month I commandeered and wiped a Google Pixel 4a I had used as a work phone in the past. Oopsidoopsie, it went out of support last month and no longer has guaranteed security updates.
This phone was released in 2020. Mine is barely used. I was a bit WTF when I found out.
From an older article I found off Internet, Google justifying this policy:
"""
In response to an email asking Google why it stopped supporting the Pixel 3, a Googles spokesperson said, “We find that three years of security and OS updates still provides users with a great experience for their device.”
"""
Mine is still usable because you still get app updates and it's not like it stops just working but it's a bit uncomfortable to use out-of-security-updates phone. Waiting until the new iPhones get out next week.
Why can't companies support their products for a longer time. I've heard the best way to reduce e-waste is to keep using the stuff you have as long as possible.
The excuse has been driver and firmware support from the vendors. Google has extended security updates to 5 years for the newer Pixels. That's fairly decent, given that each one is only on the market for ~1 year.
Obviously the cycle has to be longer for companies that keep older phones on the market as a lower cost option.
> Google has extended security updates to 5 years for the newer Pixels. That's fairly decent, given that each one is only on the market for ~1 year.
Apple has been supporting iPhone models for 6 years without any fanfare about it. iOS 15 supported the iPhone 6S, which was 6 years old at the time. iOS 17 that just got announced will only now drop support for the iPhone 8 released in 2017, 6 years ago. At certain points 7-year old phones have received all updates.
Google's excuse about driver and firmware support does not and should not apply to the Pixel, which is a first-party device. I applaud Google for getting better here, but the linked article and the general reality of the Android ecosystem continuing to be a shitshow is really inexcusable in the face of their primary competitor doing the right thing for over a decade, quietly and competently.
> Google's excuse about driver and firmware support does not and should not apply to the Pixel, which is a first-party device.
The SoC/Modem at the heart of the (pre 6) pixels is not first party, though.
If qualcom says "yeah, we're not going to bother backporting $newIssueFix to the kernel fork we used during chip development/bring-up" then there's not a _lot_ that google can do about it unless there's a contractual agreement in place.
Apple has been using "first party" chips for their phones since the A4 processor (~ iPhone4) which is why they're able to keep compiling new OS/Kernel for their older hardware so long as the device is performant enough to actually run it.
It's not a coincidence that google has been investing _heavily_ in making most of android super composable; large chunks of the HAL and system level components can be updated even if qualcom/mediatek ... etc don't do the work to get a newer kernel working.
> there's not a _lot_ that google can do about it unless there's a contractual agreement in place.
1. They should have a contractual agreement in place.
2. Google is one of the world's largest companies and one of the largest tech companies, they're also one of Qualcomm's largest customers alongside Samsung (who is also an Android-based handset manufacturer) after Apple started making their own basebands. They have /significant/ market leverage.
It's excuses. Where there is a will, there is a way. The problem is that there isn't a will. Apple cares about device longevity and quality, Google does not. It's market segmentation in action. There is no reason anybody that can afford an iPhone should ever buy an Android device, because Google and their partner companies don't respect you as a customer. Consequently most Android devices are sold to people who can't afford an Apple device, otherwise they wouldn't submit themselves to this mistreatment.
Not really. QCM is in a position of power here. Where _else_ is samsung/google/apple going to go? This is slowly changing, but QCM modems are still in a league of their own... and they know it.
> Apple cares about device longevity and quality, Google does not. It's market segmentation in action.
This is a tenuous point at best. Apple isn't exactly rushing to make repair of their devices easy / accessible which is essential for a product to have a long life. Google doesn't have a lot of say over what other OEMs do w/r/t their hardware support.
-----
My whole point is that it's not a happy/meaningless coincidence that as soon as an OEM moves away from QCM for the CPU, the promised support period grows.
> This is a tenuous point at best. Apple isn't exactly rushing to make repair of their devices easy / accessible which is essential for a product to have a long life. Google doesn't have a lot of say over what other OEMs do w/r/t their hardware support.
Apple absolutely repairs their devices or replaces them for customers at reduce/no cost and recycles the components. They have an entire program for this called AppleCare. Millions of devices have been repaired by AppleCare. The only thing Apple is bad about is allowing independent third-parties to do repairs.
Google is stating here they won't even do first-party repair, nor will they supply parts for third party repair. This is not even in the same ballpark. You are making a false equivalence to try to distract from the fact that Google is uniquely bad here and has no respect for their customers.
> The SoC/Modem at the heart of the (pre 6) pixels is not first party, though. If qualcom says "yeah, we're not going to bother backporting $newIssueFix to the kernel fork we used during chip development/bring-up" then there's not a _lot_ that google can do about it unless there's a contractual agreement in place.
"You support it for 6 years or give us code, else we will take our million chip order to competition" should be enough
This only works if the "competition" is willing to sell to you (like Apple or Samsung won't) or is roughly on-par with Qualcomm's performance and power consumption (which MediaTek absolutely is not). Otherwise your billion dollar company gets laughed out of the room.
I don't know why there is this concerted effort to stick your head in the sand and pretend that such things cannot be the subject of a contract if the parties involved want them to be.
I severely doubt that if you offered qualcomm a trillion dollars they could not support the hardware for another 3 years. In fact it would be much less than a trillion dollars in practice.
What you're fundamentally saying is, qualcomm isn't going to do it out of the goodness of their hearts, and google is not willing to write the check to make it happen, and that's still on them.
> What you're fundamentally saying is, qualcomm isn't going to do it out of the goodness of their hearts, and google is not willing to write the check to make it happen, and that's still on them.
So QCM should just get to name their price and google should pay it?
Willful misreading of a comment is extremely impolite on this site.
I said that this wasn’t a “not available at any price” situation, it’s a matter of figuring out a cost that works.
Google (and other phone vendors) want to pay zero ($0), and the law currently allows them to externalize this cost onto their customers and society at large (e-waste going into landfills, unpatched OSs promoting malware, etc) instead. And they do.
> "You support it for 6 years or give us code, else we will take our million chip order to competition" should be enough
QCM has:
a) YEARS of RnD -> Patents on cellular tech.
b) YEARS of experience making the modems (on both ends of the link!)
compared to the other players in the space.
Where is google going to go here?
Can't do huawei because sanctions. Can't do MediaTek or Samsung because their modems are inferior in almost every way (speed, bandwith, power consumption ...).
Intel never was a serious player and I don't think they're in the space at all anymore.
> Can't do huawei because sanctions. Can't do MediaTek or Samsung because their modems are inferior in almost every way (speed, bandwith, power consumption ...).
Google has been using Samsung modems since the Pixel 6.
> Google has been using Samsung modems since the Pixel 6.
"This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
(with apologies to Douglas Adams!)
The various google/android/pixel discussion forums are _full_ of "the p6/7 is a regression compared to p4/5" threads. I can confirm that I get much more reliable connectivity with my p4 compared to my p6 and my p7 is only marginally better than the 6.
Regardless, my *whole point* is that it's not a coincidence that we start getting "extended support periods" when QCM isn't supplying the CPU. Up until ~2020 (when the p6 would have been under development) there was no serious competition in this space and that's why google and pretty much every other android device used QCM. Now that there's a second option that's even remotely close to QCM in performance, the OEMs are taking it ... and we're getting extended support as a result.
Samsung will have "won" when even QCM has to capitulate and starts offering extended support.
sadly nobody cares about the ways in which android generates its copious e-waste streams with its own planned obsolescence, the “but the e-waste!” deflections stop the moment you suggest that maybe android vendors should be legally required to provide first-party parts supply and software updates. All the communism and “it’s what’s right for the planet” vanishes in a poof of fanboy.
nobody really cares about cables generating e-waste or whatever horseshit, it was always about finding a way to use the legal system to resolve the arguments the android fans couldn’t win in the marketplace of ideas, and sticking a thumb in the eye of their fellow man.
Not to excuse Google but I think their main problem is that Qualcomm stops providing support for their chips pretty quickly which makes it much harder to run newer versions of Android that have newer kernels. Apple controls not just the OS but the chips as well so they don’t have to work around that problem.
>Google's excuse about driver and firmware support does not and should not apply to the Pixel,
Until very recently, Google did not own the SoC, so it shouldn't be surprising that Apple is better at support given their vertical integration. At Apple, if the hardware isn't working as expected for a SW team, they send an email to a manager and it gets fixed or someone gets hammered by senior management. But the relationship between Google and a chip vendor isn't so smooth; that's just the nature of organizations.
Google has made a smart choice by trying to bite off the SoC and try to be more vertical. It will make support much easier for them in the long run.
They can't claim an end of life date that's after the end of that SoC firmware contract if the SoC could have an issue that requires a fix. Plenty of hardware vendors ship updates for serious issues when they can after their published EoL date for good will reasons, but the EoL date is largely self fulfilling as corporate customers replace anything EoL to avoid risk.
When u consider the software cost the Android phones are definitely NOT cheap. A few years ago the Android phones software support were absurdly short and they are almost disposable. Some phones' updates are even dead on arrival as they are not even updated once.
It's better nowadays as Samsung is providing even longer support than Google itslef
Android vs Apple is Samuel Vines' Boots Theory of Economics played out with handheld electronics:
> "The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
If you can afford an Apple device, there's nearly no reason why you'd submit yourself to the mistreatment of being an Android customer, consequently those who buy Android devices, especially the bottom-dollar ones that never receive a single update post-purchase are those that can't afford better in the moment. Exactly like the cheap boots vs good boots in this classic allegory.
That comparison is valid only if you had lots of suppliers and basically a single criterion, such as "feet dry" or in case of Apple "status". However, there are a lot of other reasons why you'd not want bo bend over for Apple's arrogant golden cage treatment. Main problem here is multiple instances of market failure all over the place: Qualcomm being a quasi-monopolist, made worse with patents. A phone being so complex that it cannot be made from scratch like a boot basically out of a cow. Apparently there being a place for only 2 App Ecosystems. General enshittifcation etc. etc.
Those are all a part of (but not the complete reasons) /why/ there is this segmentation in the market, but the segmentation is clear. Apple offers a superior product, treats their customers better, and is so expensive it is out of reach for many many people. Android offers a cheaper product, offers sometimes no updates at all or any assistance to customers, and is available to the masses.
Vines' theory doesn't try to analyze /why/ things are the way they are, it's an observation of the higher cost of being poor. I am simply pointing out that the allegory extends to mobile phones, apparently, because there is a higher cost to being poor when your device gets security (and other) updates for half the length of time or less, or is made with lower quality and less powerful components, so has to be replaced more often.
A base model iPhone is $800, a typical base model Android phone is around $200. That base model iPhone will get full iOS updates for 6 years, and security updates for 8 years, and is made of high quality components, and apps on the app store will generally work on that device for its entire lifespan (~8 years). That base model Android phone may never receive an update after release, but is generally guaranteed at most 1 year of updates, it is made with the cheapest components available as a low-margin device, and there are many apps on the play store that won't work on the device on the day its bought because it's not powerful enough, it will require replacement in roughly 1 year when it can no longer be updated (or more likely becomes broken, with no support). Over the same 8 year span that the iPhone base model user spends $800, the Android base model user will end up spending $1600 to maintain a phone with updates.
Of course, there are flagship Android phone models as well. But even in that case the story is worse for Android, because you'll spend $1000 on an Android phone instead of $1200 on an iPhone, and you'll get 3 years of updates and no support, vs ~8 years of updates and support. In time-adjusted dollars, the iPhone is actually cheaper than Android, but it has a higher entry cost in the general sense than the Android phone. It's matching nearly identically to the allegory, which is why I pointed that out.
The fact all modern devices, technologies, and our society in general is going to hell in a handbasket doesn't really matter in the context of what I am saying, but yes, I agree, enshittification ruins all.
Well they may have been pushing updates to those older phones, but I wonder if we can call that "support". Supposedly they were pushing updates that intentionally slowed down older models to encourage people to upgrade[1]. Let's not pretend they were just doing good to do good.
> Google has extended security updates to 5 years for the newer Pixels.
It's not really 5 years. For example, if you buy a Pixel 6a today, a product that is not yet discontinued, you'll get less than 4 years support.
Unless you accept Google's misleading framing of "from when the product was first sold", rather than the more reasonable "from when a consumer bought it, unless they bought it after it was discontinued".
"When the product was first sold" is a meaningless date to a consumer who chooses to buy a product and this framing needs to die.
I got a 4A recently (2 yrs ago now?) since it is supported by grapheneOS. My previous phone lasted 13 years, I intend to use this almost as long, or until there is a major hardware failure(failure with mainboard - not battery or screen or fixable issue). Next one might be a pinephone or fairphone if it is any good by then.
> I've heard the best way to reduce e-waste is to keep using the stuff you have as long as possible.
Of course. It's always been "reduce, reuse, repair" before "recycle". But there's a reason corpos want you to focus on the least efficient way to reduce waste and ignore the others.
It’s a great reason, but the even better reason is that multiple generations of pixels have emergency call issues that at this point they must be refusing to fix on purpose.
> Why can't companies support their products for a longer time. I've heard the best way to reduce e-waste is to keep using the stuff you have as long as possible.
Because they are not legally required to.
If law was "support it for 6 years since last sold device or open source everything including vendor drivers" then we'd get that support.
> “We find that three years of security and OS updates still provides users with a great experience for their device.”
Terrible non-answer. It's a great experience for the first three years and then the experience becomes much less great, which was the whole point of the question.
>Why can't companies support their products for a longer time.
I work for a semiconductor company on Android. The answer is simple; money. There is no revenue from the consumer market to support software updates on Android for longer than the required period and it costs money to perform this support. Android changes rapidly, and it takes reasonably skilled, hard to find people to perform software support for security sensitive systems. The work is not sexy and is thankless.
I can guarantee you if someone figures out a way to charge the user a fee for security updates, vendors and OEMs would jump on it. But Google has no such program that I am aware of and OEM's/vendors aren't in the position to market one.
It's particularly interesting because I feel like Google's biggest competition is Samsung, who now say they support phones for 4 major version updates after release. So if you had a Galaxy S20 instead you'd still be in support with, I think, one more update in the pipe.
Lots to dislike about Samsung's efforts to wring a little extra money out of their phones, but it's amusing that their platform support is better than the people who make the platform.
Try lineageos, I have two pixels from 2016 as backups just like you and they are up-to-date with the latest security patches.
I know absolutely nothing about phones/android and was able to get lineage to work in a few hours, and now it's 15 minute every couple of months to keep everything up-to-date.
My experience with Pixels has had them last about two years, plus or minus a few months. Always used a case, and the phones did not expire from direct accidents but thinks like the charging port failing (yes, I used a non-conducting tool to try to clean lint out). I loved the stock Android on my OG Pixel and Pixel 3 but the only thing worse than the phone needing replacement was it needing replacement after the extended warranty was past.
But you’ve got vendors like Sony who put key functionality of the phone behind an erasable firmware block, so if you ever unlock the boot loader your $1600 android cameraphone takes pictures like a 2010 budget POS. And they’re not the only ones who do stuff like that.
Yes, you can simply not buy Sony because of this behavior, and you can simply not buy samsung because of their spyware, and can not buy huawei or other chinese vendors. And by the time you count up all the android vendors you shouldn’t buy from the conclusion is obvious: it’s simply a better support model to just buy an Apple if you care about device longevity.
But since we all live on this same planet together, we need to do something about e-waste, and android is just fountaining devices into landfills with planned-obsolecence 1-2 year device cycles. This is something that - if you really do care about e-waste - needs to simply be outlawed. You sell the device, you support it for 5 years from the last year it's sold.
Mine is a Pixel 4a. The Google comment from the article was talking about Pixel 3. Both phones had the same 3 year support, so it applied to my case too.
Remote: No preference, as long as I don't have to move away from Bay Area.
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: I'm a backend/SRE and low-level coder type: Python, C, Rust, Golang, Haskell, AWS, Terraform. I've worked with all layers of the stack but I'm at my strongest in this stuff.
I also know some Machine Learning engineering: I know PyTorch, and I've implemented some recurrent neural network implementations in AVX2+Rust code, and hand-written gradient calculations for them. I also made a LLaMA implementation from scratch. I've followed the open source movement on AI and know most of the developments that have been going on. (Links to projects in the CV)
I'm a software engineer of around 7 years of experience, although I've been coding since a young age. My professional experience is in AdTech and I worked at Pinterest doing some billing pipeline work.
I'm looking for work that is interesting in some way, either in the coding department or the product is something unique. Or in an area I'm less familiar with: e.g. mobile development so I can learn.
For example, if you are doing something like err let's say: writing compilers, embedded coding, machine learning engineering stuff, research projects, teaching, FinTech. Or e.g. Haskell or a Rust job because they seem something very rarely hired for.
I can't imagine every programming practitioner is going to switch to AI tools even if they get a lot better than they are now. There will be contrarian people making new languages and writing in them. Some of them might catch on and become popular.
Also, it seems that the AI tools don't suck that bad even for made-up toy languages. Maybe it'll struggle if the new language is using lots of unconventional ideas.
ChatGPT will not innovate for you. If I'm a researcher for new programming languages, I can't imagine it would be all that useful for me in the research part. Maybe in the implementation part. I certainly wouldn't stop research just because AI is suddenly a thing.
Also, it seems like finetuning is pretty cheap, I expect it might not be very difficult to add knowledge about a new programming language to an existing foundational model made for code. The tools to do this will get better and more accessible.
I think my hotter take is that new programming languages that are really nice for humans are perhaps also really nice for the AIs. So LLMs being a thing wouldn't necessarily change how you design programming languages.
And my even more hot take is that I think the impact of these tools is waaaaay overestimated for now.
If some absolutely, obviously amazing programming language is suddenly invented that is only usable with AI assistance that could change things. I am not holding my breath though.
"It's better than a typical USA student loan" is a very low bar.