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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Depends on how we define “best”. USB-C has the same weakness of micro USB of having “tongue” in the port. This is poor design and leaves ports prone to failure of this tongue gets damaged. I’ve seen this happen more than once with either from folk aggressively jamming charger cables in slightly misaligned or just wear & tear. Lightening on the other hand is a much more robust port design. The “tongue” is the cable with a hollow port. 1st party lightening cables are pure trash, which is itself a ewaste matter, but we’re talking port design.

    Now every other aspect of lightening is inferior to USB 3 (important to note USB-C ≠ USB 3) , but by my needs it’s the “better” connector.

    I don’t see how USB-C is objectively better at the charger end, unless we’re meaning the reversible nature at both ends which is… it’s good but it’s not “wow” (and neither is it “wow” with lightening).

    I’m happy to be proven wrong, and I’m not going to get pissy if in 3-4 years my next phone is an iPhone with USB-C, it’s just the merits seem over-egged and I’d wager for the average, non-technical, user the benefits are minimal and potentially cause some minor confusions.






  • I disagree. You need dynamic pricing but it needs to be manageable. Let’s say you start a cycle on the washing machine then a few minutes in the price suddenly jumps to an extreme high - that’s not manageable.

    Giving users some warning throughout the day of price shifts actually meets the point of dynamic pricing better, too. The point is to get more power used when there is excess and less when supply is struggling. That doesn’t happen if people don’t get the chance to plan, even if that planning is only 30 minutes notice.




  • The energy company I’m with in the UK offers this type of dynamic pricing. I’m not on that tariff, but the setup is a great idea.

    The pitch is that they give you notice , sometimes half hour sometimes more, of price shifts. Then you can chose to maybe do you laundry later or sooner depending what’s going to be better. One of their use cases is even to have a rig where an electric car battery can supply energy to the house. You charge your car when power is cheap / free, run your home from the car’s battery when it gets high.

    They even have an API that some people use to automate tasks to take advantage of the price shifts.

    Done well it’s excellent, but definitely needs an ethical mindset behind it. Fortunately in the UK, Octopus Energy is nothing if not ethical, but they are very much notable by this difference!


  • Thing is… the main alternatives are often missing key features. Signal does not let me backup or export my messages & media, that’s a problem for me personally. Telegram and fb messenger are not e2ee by default, and make being so difficult to use. Whatever Google is currently pushing will be demised next month and replaced with something inexplicably more convoluted. Matrix isn’t straightforward enough for mass adoption.

    For its many… many… well documented issues WhatsApp provides a very good messaging service that is well polished. For most people that’s what they care about.

    We’ll have more success getting people to try new things when they at least have feature parity and ideally offer something new / different to WhatsApp in the UX.



  • The USB C thing is daft because we already had a de facto standard. All smartphones connected to a USB-A charger. Requiring USB-C forevermore stifles innovation for whatever in time would supersede USB-C.

    There’s also the small matter or ewaste. Mandating that the phone end must be USB-C but saying nothing of the charger end has ended up with most OEMs interpreting it as USB-C both ends. So people are either getting cables that don’t work with their chargers which get wasted or they go buy new chargers causing their old ones to be waste.

    As an aside lightening is also a more physically robust design (setting aside transfer speeds etc… which mean nothing to most users), so kinda sucks that all phones will be required to have the tongue-in-port design which is a weak point.

    I also wonder when Apple will stick two fingers up at this and go portless and just have wireless, which Androids would then copy, then we’re in a far worse place heh.

    Great intentions, execution that delivers little to benefit or, at worst, detriment.

    Fair point on the cinema example - didn’t think that one through!





  • I was put off when looking at a Fairphone and checking what spares they sold to find almost all of them sold out… think it was the FP2 or maybe 3 at that point…

    FP really needed to have their house in order way sooner. FP4 looks ok, but their “we’ll try our best” update schedule isn’t… great…

    I think they’re learning though and expect they’ll get it nailed. Just a shame they didn’t come out with such a solid proposition as Framework in the laptop world!