I remember back in the day when they had to pull Cobol programmers out of retirement to update mainframe software because of Year 2000 and they got paid a bundle for it.

Similar thing for customization of older SAP systems after SAP changed the language used to Java but those systems were still done in the old language.

So I expect that freelance senior designer-developers are going to get paid A LOT of money to come fix things in a few years’ time, especially since in places with high AI adoption this is going to be way bigger in terms of size, complexity and seniority of expertise needed that either mainframe code updating for Y2K and updating customizations in old SAP systems.

Those things are mostly a problem due to limited number of sales and thus lack of economies of scale, as they’re mostly the kind of cost that are global rather than per-device hence the more the sales the less their impact in the device price.

That’s the vicious cycle of “not enough sales for cheaper prices via economies of scale leading to higher prices leading to fewer sales” for hardware startups without massive upfront investor funding and the reason why, say, a Fairphone or Jolla Phone are a bit more expensive than one would expect.

And then somebody changes the auto-formatter settings and all of a sudden every single file changed and committe appears as having most lines changes and you loose the ability find the real code changes between a version before that and the current version.

Guess how I found this out …

Standardizing code format via that path only works well if you start it really early in the project and never change it after that.

(Also, it doesn’t solve the problem of different software design styles)

Anybody who has worked through the life-cycle of large projects knows that as time passes and the software gets adjusted and expanded, code just accumulates problem and brittleness - especially because multiple different people change it and they tend to each do it their way, often without full understanding of the code base - not just at the code level but also at the software design level - and eventually that code gets so hard to change or fix that a whole new system has to be built from the ground up.

In my experience this happens maybe at around 5 - 8 years of age of a codebase.

So I expect we’re headed for a spectacular industry-wide explosion because using AI code vastly accelerates this because for just about anything but small projects that can entirelly be generated in one go, AI isn’t consistent in coding style, much less software design.

Throwing software engineers at it right now only works if they end up spending even more time reviewing and ajusting the AI code than they would if they did the work themselves, since having AI coding is pretty much the equivalent of outsourcing to a pool of random junior developers.

All the right wingers are hard at doing so, as are the “center”-“left” mainstream parties though in a more dilluted way - essentially the conquests of the post-War period are being destroyed, same as in the US but starting from a higher basedline in Europe so there’s more to destroy before reaching the bottom.

Shit, even the “fringe” “left” has a large subset of parties led by people whole detached from any single global and consist ideology (such as the older ones like Socialism, Social Democracy or Anarchy) who grew up only ever knowing Neoliberalism and thus whose idea of being “left” is the Neoliberal “moral liberalism” (mostly commonly known as Identity Politics) that very explicitly excludes the greatest, most widespread and most suffering causing inequality of all - Wealth Inequality - which is probably why the Far-Right is gaining massivelly from the fall of the mainstream parties than those “left” parties, since even the Far-Right lies are more appealing to the Working Class than the upper middle class well-off scion of well-off parent’s idea of “equality” that these parties defend.

(I was actually a member of such a “fringe” “left” party for a few years and was thoroughly dissapointed)

And yeah, I’m terrified.

Most Android phones nowadays fail at

Switch to a degoogled OS like GrapheneOS or LineageOS

either because they’re not unlockable or because neither OS supports that specific brand and model.

Not saying the rest isn’t correct, it’s just that “most” in there that in my experience is wildly optimistic.

An Oppo A5M 4G costs around a bit over $150 in AliExpress and that’s including the VAT for Europe (which will be the VAT of whatever country they imported it into, normally around 20%).

This thing has a 1080p 7" screen, which judging by the pictures is more than that Commodore phone.

Electronics are expensive for these things but that’s when you’re aiming for heavy use such as gaming, and that means larger/higher-density screen, more CPU/GPU power and bigger battery to feed those all the things as well as more memory and storage, which are the most expensive parts. LTE modules are comparativelly cheap nowadays, as are stupidly high resolution cameras and good DACs.

The only reason I would see for this to end up in the expensive electronics range is if they’re aiming for it to run heavier AI models locally, which might very well be the case since judging by what others said the CEO of the company which bought the Commodore brand is AI-bro.

I’m on the Engineering side and $400 buys you parts for A LOT more phone than that, especially with that screen size.

Are they planning on having the phones individually hand-assembled by Degree holding Electronics Engineers in the US - hence the manpower costs are insane - or is it a situation of putting a jet engine on a small car (tons of memory and a big processor on something with a far too small screen to be useful for most things, especially gaming)?

I bet the price bares no relation to the actual product manufacturing costs.

You’re either paying a massive markup for that Samsung brand mark or your idea of a phone starts at the upper-middle range.

If you look for it there are plenty of recent phones with recent chipsets at around 250 EUR, they’re just not processing powerhouses with 8’’ HD screens and 256GB Flash but rather run some recent low-end chipset with less storage, less memory and smaller/fewer cameras.

Here’s an example from a big store chain in Portugal which is around $187 including 23% VAT, chipset is Qualcomm Snapdragon 6s 4G Gen 1, which according to this was launched in September 2022, so less than 4 years old.

You can get this one for $157 via AliExpress (shipped from France, 23% VAT included).

The entire system in the US is made to keep as many people as possible teetering at the brink of absolute poverty and scared shitless from that happening (since what follows that is mostly homelessness or prison, both dealth with in the most inhumane way imaginable), since that makes it much easier to exploit those people to the max.

The point of the Social Safety Net was to stop that, but whatever little of it ever existed has been torn down in the US (and is even being torn down in other countries as mainstream politicians there have aped American “liberal” politics)

Road speed has definitely increased since 2009 exactly and by so much that the trend of falling pedestrian deaths in the US completelly turned around???

Also I’ve actually lived in 3 countries of Europe since 2009 and beyond a handful of larger cities (such as Paris) closing a handful of streets and making them pedestrian only, pedestrian infrastructure has barelly improved in that period.

Absolutelly, Europe invested in much better infrastructure than the US, especially for pedestrians and cyclists, but that long predates 2009 - in fact Europe always had much more pedestrian-friendly infrastructure than the US, even in the most car friendly countries in Europe.

Methinks you’re trying too to exculpate the huge increase in average car size in the US.

Such differences remained steady during that time frame, so whilst they explain the actual baseline levels, they don’t explain the change in trend that happened in the US but not in Europe.

(What you suggest would only make sense if in 2009 the road infrastructure design, driving standards and average speeds became much worse in the US and kept getting worse, something not really supported by observation of those things)

The most logical conclusion is that something changed in one place that did not change in the other.

The biggest change that happened in the US but not in Europe in that time frame was the in the US the prevalence and size of light trucks increased massivelly but not at all in Europe. Further, as we see in this study such vehicles are far more dangerous to pedestrians, so this specific change that happens in one geographical zone but not the other does seem to be the most likely explanation. Certainly this is a lot more logical than an increase in mobile phone use whilst driving (as that also happened in Europe) or the better road conditions in Europe vs the US (as that didn’t change even though the rate of pedestrian deaths in the US reversed its trend and started climbing up whilst in Europe it remained on a trend of slowing falling down)

They’re a “me, me, me”, “don’t give a shit about endangering the lives of anybody else”, anti-social choice of vehicle.

Those are core character traits of people who are Fascists, though, granted not all people with those character traits are Fascists.

Personally I do believe that the spread if that mindset and the increasing immunity from consequences for being like that towards others is one of the things backing the rise of Fascism.

That said, I do agree with you that “Everything that’s bad is Fascism” just devalues the word and reduces its impact.

The danger from higher kinetic energy comes from the longer break distance and time to stop: given the same driver reaction time and distance to the pedestrian, a heavier vehicle will take longer to break to a stop and thus have a higher velocity when it collides with that pedestrian than a lighter vehicle.

This is not to deny the difference that a higher front makes, just pointing out that kinetic energy does in fact make a difference, though of course as you point out not because of any “higher energy transmission on collision” or such, but rather indirectly because the vehicle is more likely to collide at a higher speed because it takes longer to break.

I couldn’t find info on this for explicitly for light trucks, but here’s some for trucks.

A higher kinetic energy means the vehicle takes longer to stop from the same speed (that’s true even with better brakes and better tires, because if you try to reduce the energy faster than a certain rate the vehicle just starts skidding) which in turn means collisions with pedestrians happen at a higher speed, which is more deadly.

I couldn’t find a page of info for specifically light trucks, but here’s one for trucks.

This is not to deny the effect of higher fronts and hence lower driver visibility, just to point out that kinetic energy too matters.

That also happens in Europe and yet you don’t see a similar increase in pedestrian deaths.

What did not happen in Europe but did in the US during that time frame was the invasion of roads by personal tanks.

That sentence is a self-issued Certificate Of Stupidity.

I’ve been gaming for over 3 decades.

For the last couple of years (a decade at most) my experience is that most AAA titles are oddly unsatisfactory compared to many Indie titles - for example I get more fun from playing something like Valheim than I do playing God Of War.

Further, almost “infinite replayability” titles (the kind that you play until you’re fed up and then come back a year later and they’re fun again) are either Indies or old titles - things like Factorio, Rimworld, Valheim, The Sims, Oxygen Not Included, Project Zomboid and so on.

I get the impression that most modern AAA titles are made to be “experiences”, which in practice tends to make them oddly constrained and linear in terms of gameplay (something which sometimes is compensated with extra grindy gameplay), which personally I find not really all that fun.

Anyways, all this to say that at least for this old salty dog of a gamer I don’t quite see how I can be pushed to a pure game subscription model given that there are A LOT of indie titles and old games which are a lot more fun than the kind of titles that would end up as subscription exclusives.

Yeah, the weakness of the “this is all a massive conspiracy to force consumers to rent all their computing power” theory is that old computers work just fine as long as you don’t try and install a newer Windows.

We’re maybe 2 decades past the point were you had to upgrade your PC every 5 years for it to be suitable for everyday computing usage. There are only two things pushing PC hardware upgrades nowadays:

• OS support time limits and the ever expanding bloat of newer OS versions (which is nowhere as much a problem if your OS is Linux)
• Games

Now, for Games, all attempts at getting gamers to have their games hosted in servers and playing on light PCs - most notably Stadia - failed miserably.

As for OS, how successful has Microsoft been at getting people to actually upgrade to Windows 11, especially since hardware prices shot up?

I think it’s far more likely that people just keep on using their aged hardware more often than not with no longer updated OS versions, than it is for them to actually start paying subscriptions to use remote computing power to browse the web and read their e-mails, especially since that still needs some form of local hardware so doesn’t totally solve their problem with expensive hardware.

I’ve had that happen to some hiking boots once - one day their soles just turned to powder - but that was 2 decades after I got them and they had seen heavy use before that.