Widgets always seems like a cool idea. Tons of helpful little utility apps that are quick and easy for users to view or access and developers to create. Seems great, right?
Then everyone realizes there are only a handful of things that are actually useful and worth the screen space. Clock, calendar, weather, stocks. Maybe one or two more like todo list, post-it note, battery level, search bar, alerts, messages. That's about all I can think of.
From DOS PCs to smart phones, the idea is resurrected again every few years. A company will decide widgets are an awesome idea, create an over-developed "open" widget platform, excitedly add it to their UI, only to later decide that maintaining it isn't worth the effort and it quietly goes away. Then a few years later the cycle starts again with better widgets this time! And so it goes.
At this point it seems like it needs to be some sort of fundamental law of computing: Any device with a GUI will inevitably have some sort of widget capability that is added, removed, redesigned and added again at least once during its lifetime.
Heh. Here's a thread where the most verbose commenters come and write even more. I haven't written nearly as much as I thought: 2,410th out of 774,235 users, 159,634 words, Top 0.31%.
A few years ago, I exported my HN and reddit comments along with my personal blog and private notes into a SQLite database. It was millions of words. I had a vague plan of pulling out long, insightful bits and editing them together into a book of essays. I also thought it would be cool to be able to look up my previous thoughts on a topic. Neither ended up happening.
I've been meaning to do the same thing to train an LLM, but I'm not sure I particularly need a digital version of me. Though it would be interesting to ask it to write a book for me in my own style.
In theory, it'd be the best book I have ever read.
I don't think this is necessarily a good thing. The world would be a demonstrably better place if the average life expectancy had remained around 70, like it was the year I was born.
Every new generation deals with growing populations to one degree or a other. World population has doubled in my lifetime for example. But human society just isn't made to have so many long lived people hoarding wealth and power decades beyond what they historically have.
GenX finally outnumbers the Boomers, but that should have happened a decade ago. The damage they've inflicted on the younger generations is really incalculable.
I think as time goes by, we may have to decide that people over a certain age are to be legally treated the same as those under 18.
Yeah this is bad news from an environmental standpoint.
We can't stop our status symbol consumption and travel lifestyles. This is just more people to feed, which in our current broken system means more consumption and waste at insane scales.
I'm completely bike shedding, but I just want to say I highly approve. Moltbot was a truly horrible name, and I was afraid we were going to be stuck with it.
(I'm sure people will disagree with this, but Rust is also a horrible name but we're stuck with it. Nothing rusty is good, modern or reliable - it's just a bad name.)
That "bloatware" is just alternatives to Google's software and systems, and much of it isn't bad, if not better.
I prefer the Gallery app over Google Photos, the Samsung My Files app is cleaner than Google Files, Studio is a decent video editor, Samsung Notes is a capable rich text editor with pen support, Dex is a usable desktop shell, and more. Anything I don't like - like Bixby, Store, Keyboard, Wallet, Pass and Internet - I can easily replace and even hide them in the Settings. Combined they take up minimal storage.
I'm not sure what people expect Samsung to do, just use whatever Google says to use and not try to innovate?
No I think when people speak of bloatware, they think more about, for instance, the 3 preinstalled Facebook app. Of which 2 of them are systemized, effectively hidden and can’t be uninstalled.
Huh! I had no idea about those services. I just checked my S21 Ultra and yep, they were there. It took like 20 seconds to force stop and disable them, though I'm sure they'll be re-enabled during the next update.
Honestly, I'm not sure I care enough to worry about it. If I've never noticed in the past 5 years, then they weren't adding much "bloat".
When I think of that sort of useless software, I imagine all the OEM crap that Windows laptops come with that usually cause instability and hog resources.
Sure, they weren’t annoying and aren’t taking much space.
It’s more about privacy, when you launch a firewall like pcapdroid and notice all the data these apps send in the background… that’s insane.
Plus, I just gave you 3 apps but there are dozens if not hundreds of them on any third party rom. The list is never complete because it keeps changing with each update. Some can’t be disabled or uninstalled because they break the phone.
Once you get in this rabbit hole, it’s maddening and you start to appreciate stock rom like iOS or pixel.
> I'm not sure what people expect Samsung to do, just use whatever Google says to use and not try to innovate?
To me, the benefit of the S series was "Android on decent hardware". I would have preferred as close to stock Android as possible. I mostly use F-Droid stuff anyway, though of course that means I am far from the average consumer.
They are primarily a hardware company - it seems reasonable to expect them to innovate there, and leave innovation in software to the software companies.
Can you really be "just" a hardware company and still compete with Apple, which is both a software and hardware company? Samsung has its own ecosystem of products and services to manage and unify.
If I'm Samsung and I'm trying to compete in the market against Apple, I want to provide as much as possible to my customers, without needing to rely completely on a third party.
Also, when the OS or app on a Samsung has problems, customers don't blame Google, they blame the company that sold them the phone. If I worked there as a product manager, I'd make the same choices to help the company maintain as much control as possible.
There are tons of avid Trump supporting MAGA Republicans on HN. Over the last decade, they've been happy to jump into threads whenever possible to spout their opinions. There are most likely thousands of people here who voted for Trump and his party in the last election.
Are you going to continue to vote for Republicans? If so, please, feel free to explain your continued support for the Trump administration, the Republican party and ICE. We'd all be very interested hear the rationalizations.
Does the corruption, abuse of power, nonsensical policies and outright lies not bother you? Or are you still convinced it's a "both sides" thing, despite how unprecedented the administration's actions have been. Let's hear it.
That whole "good posture" thing is future physical problems waiting to happen. For 25 years, I've always put my feet up on the corner of my desk (to the left), set the seat as high as possible (or adjust the desk lower) and lean back, arms extended. Basically, I'm positioned like an F1 driver in a cockpit.
No back problems as there's no weight on my spine. No carpal tunnel issues, as my wrists are always flat. No fatigue from holding my body at right angles for hours at a time.
The downside is I look like a total slacker in the office, especially to narrow minded image conscious managers who expect me "to act professionally."
Random geek thing: Apple has used a couple different versions of its iconic "hello" image originally drawn by Susan Kare.
The first one starts with an "h" that has a loop at the top, the second doesn't. If you do an image search [1], you'll see the two versions. Both have been used in advertising over the years, both in print and in TV commercials.
Susan Kare sells a signed "hello" print on her website and I bought one - it uses the second version [2]. When Apple started their advertising campaign a few years ago using the original curlicue "hello" again, I looked at the print on my wall, and noticed the difference.
I emailed Susan about it and she responded that she hadn't even noticed! She couldn't remember anything about why there were the two versions. My Occam's razor guess is that Apple had recreated the original "hello" at some point and the designer decided to skip the loop. When Susan was making the prints years ago, she looked for a nice high resolution copy of it, and Apple hadn't made the curlicue version of it "official" yet, so the second was the nicest copy out there.
(If you look carefully, there's also a "hello" print ad from the 80s that looks like someone at an ad agency just took a go at it.)
Sorry for the long post, but it may be relevant to you.
I would share my personal website which I owned for 25+ years, but AWS deregistered it because of $36.
In case you use AWS as a registrar, be warned: If your account is "closed", they will release your domains. In other words, they make them available as if they were expired. Immediately.
Short summary: I consolidated my domains at AWS years ago just to make it easier to manage everything from one spot. Earlier last year, my credit card I used for auto payments didn't have the $18 I pay for monthly costs. I didn't notice, until my email stopped working because my account was "suspended" due to non payment after a couple months.
When AWS suspended the account, they turned off DNS routing which I managed from Route 53, so not only did my websites stop working, so did my email account (which had DNS entries to route to Gmail).
So I went to log in to pay my bill, but in the time since I had last signed in, AWS had added two factor authentication. But since I couldn't get my email, I couldn't log in. Quiz: How does one pay AWS if you can't log into your account? You cant. How do you submit a ticket? Create a new account, submit a ticket about the old account from there (you still can't pay). And then wait. And then send in a notarized form plus forms of identity. It took over a two months to resolve. Meanwhile, my account went from suspended to "closed".
I put that in quotes because when I was finally able to get my log in working, my account was as it was before with all data and setup intact.
Except for all my domains.
They had been deregistered, despite having paid for years more. AWS cancelled and released my domains without my permission. They actively deleted them from the register list, so anyone out there could buy them.
russellbeattie.com was no longer mine. In addition to the other 6 domains I used.
Because of the SEO of my personal blog, some asshole had added my domain to an "add/drop" service, so it was instantly snapped up and is now used as a scam website. They also have access to all my email, which I've used for everything from Apple to Microsoft to Google and more.
So, I'd love to share my blog with you, but Amazon screwed me so badly it's incredible.
Scott Adams is yet another example of the need to separate a person's work from their qualities as a person. It's just something we have to accept: Bad people can make great things.
An example that I like (that doesn't include WWII Germans) is William Shockley. He was a pretty horrible person all told. He didn't kill anyone, he was just a shitty guy. And yet the world owes him a debt for accurately describing how semiconductors work at the atomic level. Silicon Valley basically wouldn't exist without him.
Adams is like that as well. His work was funny and insightful, his politics were abhorrent. He will always have an asterisk next to his name in the history books because of it.
(Not that anyone will care about Dilbert in another decade or so. Much of it today is already about a moment in business that is long past).
Then everyone realizes there are only a handful of things that are actually useful and worth the screen space. Clock, calendar, weather, stocks. Maybe one or two more like todo list, post-it note, battery level, search bar, alerts, messages. That's about all I can think of.
From DOS PCs to smart phones, the idea is resurrected again every few years. A company will decide widgets are an awesome idea, create an over-developed "open" widget platform, excitedly add it to their UI, only to later decide that maintaining it isn't worth the effort and it quietly goes away. Then a few years later the cycle starts again with better widgets this time! And so it goes.
At this point it seems like it needs to be some sort of fundamental law of computing: Any device with a GUI will inevitably have some sort of widget capability that is added, removed, redesigned and added again at least once during its lifetime.
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