So I was little confused until I realized the source was a libertarian outlet. If it wasn't obvious from the piece, the popup asking for donations to fight "socialism" should be the nail in the coffin. This explains the extrapolation of data and drawing broad conclusions from it. They seemed to have enter the article with a bias that disability only means physical and that most if not all mental disability is a personal failure. It further fuels this by finding a professor who makes the claim that a large part of the student body is just making up disorders. They of course assume that doctors are widely handing out diagnoses without proper scientific backing. Which is a huge leap to make. There is a similar positive and negative stereotype that children en masse are taking Ritalin and other ADD meds to pass classes.
It reminds me of the transgender "debate". That the medical establishment is someone acting contrary to science. That all of these people with years of training are part of a conspiracy to hurt children. Not surprising that this sentiment is popular amongst libertarians and applied to other students. It's disappointing to see so many echo it's sentiments without critically thinking about the piece.
On your latter point, see the Cass Review. The authors established that the medical guidelines are indeed insufficiently informed by scientific research and that the evidence base is very weak. Clinicians in that space may not be intending to cause harm but there is no reliable evidence that their interventions are helping. Also, whistleblowers have expressed these concerns including that this subfield is too ideologically driven.
This would be ideal. The cable model was inherently flawed; it was just a series of local monopolies that poisoned it. Give consumers a choice. But considering everyone operates like Disney anymore and is highly protective of its IP I doubt this world will ever exist without direct government intervention.
Honestly the biggest problem was/is copyright law. Make everything older than 10-14 years public domain and streaming services would have endless amounts of content always available. Independently operated streaming sites would be all over the internet.
The problem doesn't appear immediately; it appears over time where the market has been consolidated into only a couple companies and then they can raise prices as much as they want because there is no alternative. This is what cable was like for a long time. Part of subscription fatigue is the constantly raising prices of these services that used to be very cheap. Netflix having WB content isn't a bad thing, the problem is ownership because it will not be available elsewhere.
This isn't true. It's far more secure to lock the boot loader and block root than it is to leave them open. This is a basic security measure from the OEM. They didn't just wake up yesterday and go "let's mess with those nerds."
Somebody said "easier" and you said "more secure." Then, your argument that it was more secure (which nobody was discussing) is that it is "basic." Then you added an irrelevant strawman with a slur in it against the person you were arguing with.
Yes, it is more secure against the user. That is not a desirable characteristic for the user, it is a desirable characteristic for the controller of the operating system.
I disagree. The answer to your counter is in the same comment that you're countering. It's easier to let the owner alone unlock it, rather than lock it to everyone and then control it remotely (at least for updates). At the minimum, they could have used the same mechanism to support owner unlocking.
Also, this isn't a 'nerd' problem. The economics of smart phones would be much saner if phones weren't so deliberately anti-recycling. Thus it affects all consumers. Framing this as a 'nerd vs corporation' fight is misleading at best.
I'm growing less tolerant of the use of security as a convenient excuse for these big companies to restrict their customers on their own devices. There are always alternatives that don't involve infringing on consumer rights. And most of the time, that alternative is rather trivial. But the OEMs just ignore it and never mention it while excusing themselves. That's intentional gaslighting.
> It's far more secure to lock the boot loader and block root than it is to leave them open.
And you completely neglected an important part of my question. They didn't just lock the boot loader and the root. They also put measures in place to retain remote control of the same. Why not share that control with, or simply transfer it to the owner? Please don't argue with me that this is harder than what they've done for themselves.
We all know the answer for that - profits - something they can't ever be satisfied with. As an engineer, I know that such extra privileges can be made foolproof. It can be designed to prevent normal users from accidentally messing it up, while power users and service professionals can easily navigate their way to a full customization. I know this because I still retain that control on my laptop. There is absolutely no reason why it has to be different on a phone.
But OEMs won't consider it, talk about it or even entertain public discourse about it. Instead, they spend plenty of money on projecting the consumers they exploit as too naive and incompetent to take care of a device they paid dearly for. This is an absolutely vile and reprehensible corporate behavior that gets excused only because they captured their regulators.
> They didn't just wake up yesterday and go "let's mess with those nerds."
Of course not! Instead, they just woke up yesterday and decided "let's screw our entire consumer base". What you've demonstrated here is another example of their dirty tactics. Frame this as a fight between them and the 'nerds' and pitch the consumers against each other. Let's just end the charade that this sort of overreach hurts only the nerds. It truly harms all consumers. People who are old enough to remember service shops and repairmen know what I'm talking about. But these crony capitalists have been at it for so long now that there is an entire generation who doesn't know what's possible with user serviceability. That's the sort of leaching that they've inflicted upon the society.
And, security is never an honest or acceptable excuse for restricting user freedoms. Anybody who argues that information security and user freedoms are mutually exclusive is out to sell techno snake oil. Yet another reprehensible behavior that needs to be reined in.
I think this is living in fantasy land. Normal people aren't hyper concerned about boot loaders, sideloading or custom ROM's. There was an uptick many years past simply because this offered new functionality, but anymore there really isn't any reason to outside of small things like removing the Google Search bar from the home screen. But the amount of effort versus the result does not balance out.
Normal people just want to buy a phone and use it and they can do that today. They don't want the added complications. There is a reason Amazon is so popular and massive. The goal should be to add simplicity and not add complexity if want something to be popular.
As opposed to corporations extracting an insane amount of wealth from the struggling public? Such shallow dismissals ignore the fact that ordinary people know how exploitative these companies are and that they are interested in resisting - if only they knew how.
> Normal people aren't hyper concerned about boot loaders, sideloading or custom ROM's.
I have been guilty of this too. But let me say this. We on HN have been quite contemptuous towards 'normal people', especially regarding their technical competence.
Besides, you pretend as if everyone needs to know all those stuff to take advantage of it. Back in the past when mechanical watches and repairable automobiles were common place, we all took advantage of their serviceability, despite that only a rare few of us knew how to service it. We just paid those independent experts to do it for us. Everybody knew some basic economics to realize how this was in their favor. The argument that serviceability has no use to the majority is a disingenuous and harmful, all by itself.
> Normal people just want to buy a phone and use it and they can do that today. They don't want the added complications.
Just go ahead and ask these 'normal people' whether they prefer a serviceable device or one that suffers deliberate obsolescence in less than 3 years and forces them to buy an entirely new one.
> There is a reason Amazon is so popular and massive. The goal should be to add simplicity and not add complexity if want something to be popular.
Look at how many of these 'normal people' actively try to avoid the likes of Amazon. Their insane wealth allows them to manipulate the market in their favor. People learned this well during the post-pandemic hoarding epidemic.
So please stop pretending that essential features and freedoms are too complex to be worth it. People can take advantage of them even if they don't know how to do it themselves - like by paying independent professional servicemen. And at least in the current smartphone market, its complexity is entirely the contribution of the OEMs. Also, one of the reasons why the old PCs running windows 10 doesn't have to be junked immediately (due to win 11 requirements) is because it is so easy to install an up-to-date and modern OS on it.
Security, convenience etc are false arguments against user freedoms, and are most often the result of the deliberate choices by the OEMs. They're are just consumer gas lighting tactics.
Like pareidolia humans are great at seeing patterns that don't exist. Nobody should on that platform is an extremely common phrase. So you'll probably hear it more than once. However that doesn't mean there is a conspiracy.
To be fair though the switch to wireless earbuds and headphones helped advance that market quickly. That applies to all of the companies in the space. It's also been so nice to not have to deal with tangled wired earbuds or headphones. Removing the jack was a band aid that needed to be ripped eventually, and Apple just happened to be the ones to do it. There is a reason the industry followed. Even when they didn't have their own product to offer.
Seems like bad software design to make release versions an extension of betas. The "we'll fix it after release" attitude works in some cases, this is not one of them. At some point OS teams need to hold back releases to ensure stable releases and not just hope everyone will get the message to not update until a few versions later.
If the goal was to move everything to Settings, sure. But Settings seems to be for the most common settings the average user will want to look at whereas more detailed options are elsewhere. It's a way to easily funnel users away from more impactful settings to system stability. In this view Windows 11 release solidified that pretty well.
The character repeat and cursor blink rate settings were already in Settings but it just opened up the older windows forms. This just gives them a new coat of paint by putting them in the Settings app.
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