> almost everyone who says they want a smaller phone will just buy a larger one anyway
The problem is that smaller phones are usually fundamentally flawed in ways that aren’t about the smaller screen. Whether it’s a worse CPU, worse camera or smaller battery, people are almost never making their purchasing decision based on screen size with all else being equal. I don’t think we can conclude that most people who ask for a smaller screen don’t really want one because many just don’t want a slow phone that takes worse photos and dies by midafternoon.
I think there needs to be a recognition that bigger screens aren’t only about the bigger screens. They’re also about giving phone designers more internal space to cram in components and a larger battery.
The iPhone minis were the first one to not sacrifice on those things, except for battery life compared to other iPhones. Same great display tech as the normal sized iPhone of that year, same SoC, same camera.
Even with the smaller battery, iOS is so aggressive with background tasks anyway, the iPhone 12 mini was my first iPhone and I got better battery life with it than any of my Androids I used over the span of a decade, even giant ones like the Nexus 6P, despite obsessively trying to install background task killer solutions and whatnot that were supposed to save on battery.
There was very little sacrifice with the mini iPhones, for the first time in modern "small" smartphones
> But what's missing is a shared cultural experience
This is my problem with the proliferation of streaming platforms when it comes to movies and TV. We’ve arguably got more and better content than we’ve ever had. But I find myself far less motivated to watch it. I used to watch content anticipating the conversations I’d have with friends and colleagues. Now, whenever we try to talk about it, it’s 30 seconds of, “Have you seen …?” “No, have you seen …?” “No.” Until we give up and talk about something else.
It’s made me realize that the sharing it with others part was always my favorite part of listening/watching and, without that, I can’t really become emotionally invested it the experience.
> It’s made me realize that the sharing it with others part was always my favorite part of listening/watching and, without that, I can’t really become emotionally invested it the experience.
Perhaps this is a factor in the rise of reaction videos where people consume the content with you and react to it. A somewhat shallow experience, but someone pretending to genuinely like the same music video as I do is - in the vastness of the internet - slightly better than consuming completely alone.
I find that I've mostly made up for that part by participating in online discussions.
But that leads to a different problem -- When Netflix drops an entire season of something, I feel like I have to have time to watch the whole thing, or I don't watch at all. Because I don't want participate in the online discussion having seen less than everyone else.
I end up watching the shows that drop one episode a week far more often than whole seasons at once.
Im the complete opposite and never watch anything that is on-going because I hate waiting around for every episode and having series drawn out over months. And even after they have completed there is usually little fanfare or noticed that a season is complete and so it is only a 50% chance I will watch it at all even if I am interested in it because all the talk about it has since died and it is forgotten about because it was going on for months already.
I didn't mind what Andor did as much though for season 2 releasing 3 episodes at a time. If it had just been 1 episode at a time I probably wouldn't have seen it until a year or two from now after all discussion was dead.
Lets be real most entertainment has a short shelf life. Something gets its 5 minutes of internet fame before the world moves on.
Everything depends on the memes and social media buzz.
With the recent surge in mindshare around language models and generative AI in general, one of the ideas that keeps coming up is unique content and experiences that are either tailored to the consumer or are at least unique for that person in some way.
But I wonder if this is missing something that you've touched on, the function of cultural artefacts as a means of connection (and perhaps trust building) through a known shared experience. Whether it's watching a TV show, reading a book, listening to music, playing a game, all of these activities essentially have two functions. The first is the thing itself (I'm enjoying this book, song, game, etc.) but the second is the opportunity to _connect with others_ around that, which only really works when some majority of the thing is known by everyone.
This doesn't say that there isn't value in unique experiences, except that these unique experiences are always unique _in the context_ of a shared and known thing.
Roguelikes are perhaps a good example of this. Every run is unique to a player and essentially unique across all players (seeded runs aside), but you can always talk with others about the specific events that happened in any single run because everyone understands them in the context of the game as a whole. The 'crazy thing that happened in my last run' still works because other people know how rare the event or combination of events might be, so it's still a valid shared experience but also unique.
Another more lightweight example might be the amount of NPC dialogue in Supergiant Game' Hades. I believe there's something like 80,000 unique lines of dialogue in the game, so players can go a long time without hearing the same thing again, and unless you play for a long time you might never hear certain lines that other people will have heard.
As for your example about conversations going nowhere when there's no shared experience, perhaps there's even an argument that the connection aspect of the experiences is actually the primary function even if we think it's a secondary function.
Tangential point related to generative models, but perhaps there's even a third function at play, which is that the the _process_ of creating the work may have been its own value for the creator, but this is more about the value of spending time and energy making a thing for yourself or others to experience (to connect over).
Another thing missing from generated content is the connection to the author. Media isn't just about experiences, it's also an exchange of ideas. Ideas the author communicates to the reader/viewer/player, and that you then discuss with other people who shared the same experience.
When people say "literally 1984" they don't mean an amorphous story about an inescapable dystopia, they mean very specific ideas Orwell packaged in a story. A large part of what makes Breaking Bad compelling is the endless stream of ethical choices and their consequences in the eyes of the authors. These things are thought-provoking when consuming the story, and can be further digested by discussing them with others who experienced the same story.
I don't want AI generated slop, I want stuff that humans have made, it gets me out of my bubble. If I only watch/read slop generated for me based on my historic interests I'm afraid I'll enter a downward spiral of navel gazing insanity
What you describe is and has always been everyday life for me. Finding people with shared interests is pretty rare. Even then, there's usually minimal overlap.
Internet improved this but it won't last. Communities are temporary, they all die at some point. I just got used to enjoying things alone.
You should be enjoying your own company the most, then may come others. Communities do not have to die at some point, unless you mean it in the same sense as "well, we all die at some point". You can preserve chat history of communities, but Discord these days would be pretty shit for that, I would say.
You can always watch it with them. Especially if it's great enough to re-watch, or plan to finish watching together (or is old enough to re-watch anyway).
I watch movies online with some friends and my girlfriend (separately), and I am 30 years old. I never liked going out to the cinema, and now I have immobility issues, so that is even less more likely, plus all my friends are abroad, so... :(
Finding friends within walking (or at least biking) distance can certainly be a hard problem (even for people in full health), but seems to be so ridiculously important for our well-being, that it's probably worth striving for.
I agree. A change of environment (to a more positive one) can save your life. I have experienced it first-hand. I have psychiatric co-morbidities (which is exacerbated by MS) but a change of environment can do wonders. The people there do not even have to be your friends (in the beginning), it can still have such a positive impact on one's mental and even physical health.
At this point YOU have to watch the content of the people that you want to mingle with.
However, the "standard" of shows that you watch is higher (for you, as its more curated for your).
Therefore, you do have to struggle with more subpar shows.
Not sure what to do with that.
> Now, whenever we try to talk about it, it’s 30 seconds of, “Have you seen …?” “No, have you seen …?” “No.” Until we give up and talk about something else.
Outside of dedicated assignments for book clubs and schooling, this has always been the case for literature discussions.
Unless a specific piece reaches critical mass. Most people have an opinion on Harry Potter, A Song of Ice and Fire or 50 Shades of Gray. Granted, if they aren't an avid reader it might be an opinion based on the movie adaptations instead of the books, and for some their opinion only reaches as far as the reason they haven't engaged with that specific title yet. But those are still opinions you can engage with
I've had some luck with lists on imdb of things I'm interested in. It's not a slam dunk but some are good. Much better than flipping through 10000 possibilities on netflix.
When TV came to American homes in the 1950s, it was a revolution in our national shared consciousness (for better or worse). Obviously there are problems with this - it gives the advertisers and businesses enormous unchecked power to shape society. But we've likely never seen so many people so deeply in sync with the dominant cultural messages.
When streaming became the norm, that dynamic was destroyed. We lurched back to private media consumption (for better or worse). There is no shared cultural narrative to tune into at 8:00 each night. There's millions of disparate voices, screaming into the void 24/7. More freedom and diversity for sure, but nothing coherent you can point to as a culture.
> It is a video game. It was remastered but not recently. It received a sequel and was adapted into a television series.
This might be pedantic, but the sequel was remastered and was released for Windows in the first week of April 2025.
In the context of the PC versions of the original game, it has been remastered and remade, in that the PC version development started after the release of the original remaster of the console version for PS5, which was itself a remake of the PS4 remastered version of the original PS3 version.
I think the original comparison to Oblivion was fair and accurate.
Early 2000s to early 2010s here... I agree with GGP that we have more content than ever, but I don't agree that it's better. There definitely seems to have been a fall off in quality the past 10 years or so. The few good shows nowadays end up standing out even more than they did back then not because they're better but because the average has dropped.
They're much more limited though. Heard of the series, but it's not Must see Thursday because I'm not in an office and know I can pretty much tune in whenever I want.
The zombies are just a backdrop, the real story is focused on just two people, and it’s really heavily centred on their relationship and personal choices.
You can just use "they/them" if you don't know their gender. Much less offensive than calling someone an "it" (unless it's something they've specifically requested)
All three of those tools immediately felt, to me, like the wrong approach the moment I first experienced Docker. The notion that production infrastructure should be mutable and we use automation to make changes to it just introduces so much more state than is necessary. Immutable infrastructure eliminates so many sources issues.
And I think that's where the comment you're responding to is coming from. Once you've experienced Docker/K8s and, to a lesser extent, IaC tools like Terraform, it's hard to see yourself ever going back to tools like Chef in the same way that tools like Chef made it hard to see going back to a world where we configured servers manually.
Docker, k8s, Terraform etc are nice. I make extensive use of them too. But in my opinion they can't be used for everything, because mutable infrastructure is a reality of the world that must be accounted for at some point. For example, at my employer we have on-prem k3s clusters running on bare metal servers. Chef is a perfect tool to manage those, because they are by their nature not something we can treat as stateless, immutable configurations.
It seems to me that this is kind of like abstraction levels in programming. If you can use a high level language with lots of powerful tools, you do. But some people have to live in the world of C or even assembly, because (as James Mickens said) you can't just place a Lisp book on top of an x86 chip and hope it learns about lambda calculus by osmosis. I view IaC tools in the same way: if you can use Terraform or Docker, great! But someone has to use lower level tools to provide the environment in which those things exist. And that's why people shouldn't look at Chef (or other similar tools) as outdated, any more than assembly is outdated just because Lisp exists. They still very much have a strong use case that won't ever go away.
...in a way supported by Apple. But OpenCore [0] makes installing the latest OS on older Macs relatively simple. You lose out on some features that your hardware doesn't support (e.g. Apple Intelligence), but most of that is unnecessary at best.
Especially since it fits nicely into a mental model that includes !*, !^, !$, !-2 and such. ^something^somethingelse is also useful.
And the sudo !! pattern is something I do even when I realize that I need root ahead of time. There’s something about hitting enter on a command that makes me realize I’ve made a mistake, so doing that before I’ve granted root permissions is helpful. Up/ctrl-p are more awkward to use this way.
I also like typing `!:` (in zsh) and hitting tab and getting some helpful hints:
$ !:
& -- repeat substitution
A -- as ':a', then resolve symlinks
P -- realpath, resolve '..' physically
Q -- strip quotes
a -- absolute path, resolve '..' lexically
c -- PATH search for command
e -- leave only extension
g -- globally apply s or &
h -- head - strip trailing path element
l -- lower case all words
p -- print without executing
q -- quote to escape further substitutions
r -- root - strip suffix
s -- substitute string
t -- tail - strip directories
u -- upper case all words
x -- quote words, breaking on whitespace
A number of years ago, the company I worked for got acquired by Intuit and I ended up in a lot of meetings with the people in charge of Quickbooks. And I can tell you that you’re not looking at Quickbooks the way they are.
One of the key takeaways that I had was that Intuit viewed accounting as a three-way market where the professional accountants were the most important factor when it came to the product design. Customers generally don’t care what software gets used and will pick whatever their accountant recommends. As such, only certain workflows prioritized ease of use and being intuitive. Business owners want to go in and see reports on how their business is doing, but when it comes to actually doing the books, they don’t care. And accountants see the unintuitive parts of Quickbooks as a moat. They’ve put so much time and effort into learning to use such a poor UI, that they see a lot of their value in skillfully navigating that “bad” UI. There’s a ton of hidden tricks that have evolved over the years and get passed from accountant to accountant and they’ll scream bloody murder if Intuit tries to change them. It was funny to hear how much effort was being put into replicating weird interaction patterns from Quickbooks Desktop when they were creating Quickbooks Online and trying to migrate customers over.
My advice to you is to try to find professional accountants who will let you observe them using Quickbooks or Xero. I can almost guarantee that they’re using those products very differently from the way you do. And don’t assume that just because Quickbooks UI sucks, making a better UI will make you successful. Having worked with them, the people in charge of Quickbooks Online are very talented and plenty capable of making a more intuitive UI. The choice not to is intentional and based on a lot of history and strong relationships with their professional accountant community. There will always be some small business owners who try to go it alone, and they really do need more intuitive accounting solutions. In general, I thought Wave was pretty good at targeting that segment the last time I looked at it. But the money there is tiny. And if you want to be hugely successful, you have to understand accountants and why they choose Quickbooks.
Appreciate the thoughtful feedback. You're right that accountants play a huge role in software adoption, and we’re spending a lot of time talking to them to understand their workflows.
That said, we think the landscape is shifting. AI and automation are changing how accounting gets done, and the next generation of software won’t be about preserving unintuitive workflows. It’ll be about eliminating unnecessary manual work and giving both businesses and accountants better tools.
QuickBooks has deep roots, but businesses today expect more than just accountant-approved tools. They want real-time insights, automation, and software that works for both them and their accountants.
> I manipulate URLs every day, both for work and private usage
Zen/Arc are actually much better for this use case, albeit after an adjustment period for people who’ve become accustomed to the way Firefox/Chrome do it.
The idea is that URLs are out of your way when you don’t need them and front-and-center when you do. Instead of simply focusing on the URL bar when you CMD+L or CMD+T, it brings up a modal dialog in the center of the screen where you’re free to do everything you can do in a normal location bar and more. It’s modeled after the command palette design in code editors or application launchers. So, for example, not only can you edit URLs, but you can search for commands instead of hunting for them in the browser’s menus. As an example, I’d never memorize the keyboard shortcut to take a whole-page screenshot because I don’t use it enough. But the other day I needed it, so I typed “CMD+L, screen” and it was the second result. Task completed in under 2 sec.
It took a few days to get used to, but now I never want to go back to the sort of location bar that Chrome and Firefox use. It just takes up space that I’d rather devote to the sites I’m visiting. Even the tab pane is easily toggled to get out of my way when I don’t care about it, which is especially useful when I’m tiling websites. I’ve developed a fondness for keeping documentation open in one panel alongside the website I’m developing, which means recapturing the width I lose from the tab pane is valuable.
I highly recommend pushing through the awkward phase where you’re sure you’re going to hate this browser design. Because once you get past it, you’ll wonder how you ever thought the old way could be better.
> it brings up a modal dialog in the center of the screen
Incredibly tiny modal dialog. I just tried checked one, and it fit 65 characters. Compared to firefox right now, after 112 characters the URL bar is slightly over halfway filled.
Yup, as I was told in another comment, it requires changing to "Multiple Toolbars or Collapsed Toolbar" instead of changing the URL bar setting, which is not exactly obvious. Posted from Zen for now ;)
As someone who just upgraded from an intel to M4, I feel this. But I do wish I had known about OpenCore [0]. Ironically, I learned about it while on a bit of YouTube binge of Mac videos in preparation for my new one arriving. As much as the ecosystem has moved on from Intel, I think I'll be able to keep using my old MBP for a while longer if I can keep it on the latest version of MacOS.
The microphone also can't be covered with a $1 plastic camera cover off Amazon. It's so easy to solve the camera issue if you care about it, but there's really nothing you can do about the mic.
You can do it even cheaper with some painter's tape!
For the mic, perhaps you could disable it by plugging in an unconnected trrs plug into the audio jack. I'm not sure how low level the switching of the microphone source is when you do this, so maybe it's not a good method.
i tried that with some sugru on an old phone (samsung s10e) and it does a really good job of blocking the microphone.
if you have a case on your phone its a lot less destructive too since you can just stuff the sugru into the microphone hole in the case. the case i was using was soft rubber so it was easy enough to pop out the corner of the case to be able to use the microphone for a call.
that wasnt my daily phone at the time though so im not sure how well it would work in reality. i could see myself forgetting to pop out the case when i get a call and the other person just handing up before i realised what was going on.
it also doesnt work on every phone. i tried the same thing on a pixel 5 but blocking the mic hole did nothing, but that phone uses an under screen speaker so maybe there is something similar going on with the mic
The key to this implementing this sort of policy without hurting poor people is to introduce a corresponding tax credit or stimulus payment (potentially means tested) such that driving a normal vehicle a normal amount comes out even and poor people can actually come out ahead if they make more responsible choices. You want people to feel it at the pump so it affects their decision making without having it be punitive.
Sounds like it’d hurt poor people unless they make what you call more responsible choices. A difficult part about being poor is you often don’t have as many options. There is a lot of reasons why that turns up, but it’s there all the same.
The ability to buy a car with a loan is very widespread. It's easier than cash if you're poor, isn't it? And with a loan you can balance vehicle cost against gas cost easily.
The key to an inefficient government is taking money and redistributing it.
How much does it cost to execute this whole plan? You end up taking a large percentage just to run the program with little to show for. It does make for great political campaigns.
The problem is that smaller phones are usually fundamentally flawed in ways that aren’t about the smaller screen. Whether it’s a worse CPU, worse camera or smaller battery, people are almost never making their purchasing decision based on screen size with all else being equal. I don’t think we can conclude that most people who ask for a smaller screen don’t really want one because many just don’t want a slow phone that takes worse photos and dies by midafternoon.
I think there needs to be a recognition that bigger screens aren’t only about the bigger screens. They’re also about giving phone designers more internal space to cram in components and a larger battery.
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