Technology

That doesn't match my experience with phone hardware. Everyone i know has a bunch of old phones that've been handed down to kids and even more sitting in junk drawers, because they all still work. Yes a couple of them have cracked screens, but even with those the only reason why the screen wasn't repaired is because people wanted or already had a newer phone.

Software is a totally different matter though. The OS and apps stop getting updates at some point even though the hardware is still totally capable of doing what most people want their phone to do. And even worse, many companies don't allow a phone to revert to an older OS version, so the company pushes out an update that slows the phone down and then there's no way to fix that.

The HARDWARE isn't designed to fail, because the SOFTWARE is designed to let the company force the device to fail at whatever exact moment the company later decides on.

That’s an awesome domain

The first step toward meaningful change begins with us. We must abandon our craving for glossy (and therefore glassy) devices, and instead embrace hardware that may not be as immediately pleasing to the eye (as it is the case with e.g. Fairphones or the PinePhone), but is built to be slightly more durable, somewhat repairable, and capable of outlasting even today’s limited commitments to software updates.

Fairphone and PinePhone being only mentioned anecdotally for being too pretty, and I guess not as sturdy as the author wants, is quite weird for an article about reducing fragility and improving repairability.

The main issue is the lack of software support. They keep making each new Android version more bloated so you can't update more than once or maybe twice. If it wasn't for that, you could keep using the same 5G phone until they shut down the 5G network as long as the battery is replaceable.

I wish Android was more like Debian where it's lightweight, uses stable versions of software and runs well on old hardware.

There are tons of rugged smartphones out there, also some brands that focus on easy to repair phones.

The fact that they're not well known kind of shows that the majority of the market doesn't really care about those things.

It's why I buy budget phones. Expensive phones break easier so far. They have a nice design? I wouldn't know, it doesn't leave its case ever.

I've recently learned that the device Sun first made Java for was, well, almost a smartphone in idea. So those Java phones and now Android are not a perversion of the initial intent.

I also think that, if you only compare various places in reality and various casinos by the amount of endorphine per minute spent, you'll choose casinos (OK, maybe brothels).

The reason you don't choose a casino is because you know that in average the casino always wins. That's a knowledge of how casinos work.

The reason you don't choose a brothel is because you know that many people working there are disadvantaged, and because you can control your impulses. That's also a knowledge of how brothels work.

This means, that if we make an analogy between casinos, brothels and the computer industry, including smartphones and the web, the user has to know how it works to make the right decisions.

So the commonly repeated point about grandmas and casual users is simply wrong. There's no way they don't get deceived by the other side profiting from their ignorance, other than learning how things work.

So - I think we need a global social network. We have siloed services because it doesn't bring profits to make such a global service, and the one Sun, Netscape, Macromedia (yes) and many universities made in the 90s has gone obsolete. The Internet itself allows to make a global Facebook. But instead of solving the problems of technical debt and adoption for that, it's simpler to use a centralized service which was relatively easy to launch initially.

From Facebook (or others) you ultimately need 1) search of 1.a) contacts, 1.b) groups and 1.c) posts, 2) storage of 2.a) contacts, 2.b) groups and 2.c) posts, 3) universal forward identifiers of 3.a) contacts, 3.b) groups and 3.c) posts.

With cryptography and #3 you can use untrusted services for #1 and #2.

If they can be untrusted, services for #1 (indexer crawling the network and answering search requests in a standardized way, similar to RSS, maybe just with RSS ; the crawler service and the search result storage can be separated too) and #2 can be contributed to their respective pools like with SETI@home or other projects.

There is the question of a financial incentive to providing such a service. That can be done with using, say, (maybe number 4), a pool of billing services. A user makes a payment and before requesting a search service or a storage service, requests a billing service on which they are registered, providing it with the identifier of a resource they are going to use, that billing service and that resource interact in the sense of payment in background, giving the user a token with which they request the service itself. To pay for used storage or a heavy search request (or a request above a threshold).

Well, that looks ugly, maybe some other way is possible.

Those search results from search services and objects fetched from storage services are presented in a native application similar to Facebook, perhaps.

Contacts would be just PKI certificates or something, with a valid certificate for a registrar domain someplace in chain.

So you'd request in DNS (or someplace else, I dunno) pool.search.nihilsoc.org for a bunch of uniform indexer services, pool.store.nihilsoc.org for a bunch of uniform storage services (if we don't have a paid service saved, probably even encrypted on some available storage service), pool.relay.nihilsoc.org of a bunch of notification servers similar to IRC (except not used for chat directly, or maybe even that), pool.billing.nihilsoc.org to pay for services requiring it. It wouldn't matter much which ones you'd hit, because every post, contact and group identifiers would be global, containing parent identifiers and such.

It would supposedly be seamless for the user. You search for a group on a few indexers, you get a few lists of results showing on which storage services it's present and how much of it, you deduplicate those and you ask those directly by global identifiers, check signatures yadda-yadda.

Seems very archaic, I dunno why nobody is doing this, probably because things seeming simple are complex.

OK, about smartphones and casinos - just like the way to fight gambling lies in knowing that the casino always wins and there's no luck, the way to fight enshittification lies in users caring what they use. Yep, technologies and systems involved are complex, then maybe those should be made simpler for users to understand. Simpler inside, like OpenBSD, not simpler outside, like ChatGPT.

And there is me using a 2019 (dying) device which I heat up with a termux command to get it back in working state 😁

For the curious the device is a Poco F2 Pro, known for IMEI and charging flex issues, the termux command I use to bring alive my IMEI, Wifi and USB data transfers is:

for i in $(seq 1 32); do sh -c 'while :; do a=$((a+1)); done' & done; for i in $(seq 1 32); do yes > /dev/null & done

This paired with fast charge will heat the SOC and make it work like the 1st day without an issue lol.

Quite happy with my fairphone running /e/OS. So far I've not needed to replace anything, except for the battery which was getting weak. So I bought another battery, and I'm keeping the other one as a spare battery.

Still use my iPhoneX from 2017, and it still get updates 😊

I'm honestly quite happy with my Samsung XCover 6 pro:

• physical headphone jack
• notification LED
• removable and replaceable battery
• rugged and without a screen that bends around the edge of the phone
• relatively recent and quite powerful imo
• some samsung's default apps are surprisingly good
• two extra freely mappable physical buttons
• gps and all the other stuff
• dual sim
• good battery life
• it's an enterprise device
• you can get it new for 350€, if not less

Only drawback: utterly dogshit camera. It looks to be interpolated. 50MP never looked that much like 8MP

Can't wait for this to get LOS/EOS support

The global smartphone screen protectors market size was estimated at $49.73 billion in 2022and the global protective cover market was anticipated to reach $21.89 billion in that same year.

That's insane, are screen protectors really twice the market size of phone cases??

I mean phone durability has become a lot better. I use my iPhone 14 Pro without a case, and I have dropped it a few times and more than once it has flown across the room. Just last Saturday it fell on concrete from like 4 feet high. It’s good as new.

It is also the consumer who is mostly at fault anyways. There are many durable phones out there, none of them sell like the shiny sleek phone. Do people really want devices that are more durable? If so, why aren’t they buying them?

Software side too: Linux's deliberate choice to not have a stable driver interface is detrimental to atomic distros with the usually shitty proprietary vendor drivers. Causing you to get no updates after a few years or get a new device.

Which is why i think BSD would have been a better fit for Android.