tal

I loath them because I don't have pockets

This is especially an issue for women, who often have more form-fitting clothing that either doesn't have pockets or have very small ones that don't work for phones.

I think that the usual solution for "women carrying things" is that many are gonna carry a purse -- if someone's pre-menopause, they're gonna need pads or tampons anyway, so can put it in there. Problem is that the phone breaks this. Even if women have a purse, women don't always carry their purse all around the office or house or whatever, but don't want to miss calls.

My mother got a fanny pack just for her phone (which isn't even all that large).

At one point in the past, it used to be common for women to wear a bag on a belt accessible through a slit in their skirt.

https://pieceworkmagazine.com/a-brief-history-of-the-pocket-in-womens-fashion/

The first examples of pockets began to be inserted into men’s clothing at the end of the 1600s. Before this construction development, illustrations show that men used small pouches, which hung from a belt around the waist. These separate pouches could be concealed inside of a coat or tunic. The words pouch and pocket are related, through the Middle English/Northern French word pouche, originally describing a small bag.

For women, pockets remained an accessory that tied around the waist and was accessed through an opening in a skirt’s seam. The full skirts of the 1700s allowed these pockets to be easily hidden.

The shift by women to pants kinda killed that option.

I think that the solution is gonna be some women's clothier figuring out how to make an appealing way of carrying a phone.

Lara Croft runs around with thigh holsters. That way, the carrying system is clearly distinct from the body, doesn't mess with the body silhouette, which I assume is why women don't want male-style large pocket, non-form-fitting clothing. So maybe something like that would work. Dunno how much of a chafing issue that is.

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EDIT: Drop bags are kinda in the neighborhood of what I'm thinking of too, though I'm thinking lower-slung and smaller:

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Just leave it plugged into the headphones, don't even take it off. I mean, I have 1/4 inch audio hardware, and I've got 1/8 inch headphones that have a 1/8 inch to 1/4 inch adaptor that just lives on the end.

I totally understand people who want to use wired, TRS headphones. They're inexpensive, widespread, aren't going to become e-waste when their battery dies, aren't going to become obsolete when radio protocols move on, are lightweight, don't suffer from radio interference etc. I have a bunch of TRS headphones and like them. Only downside is that they need some power source if you want to do ANC, but it's not like one has to have ANC.

But...I think that a lot of people are treating it as a "we live in a Bluetooth world or a wired headphones world, and which we do depends on whether there's a TRS jack on the phone itself".

I'd also add that if you have a USB-to-TRS device acting as your DAC, you can swap in others, aren't stuck with the on-phone DAC. I had a phone that had an extremely obnoxious tendency to, when charging in the car, play noise back through the headphones jack (and thus to my car's aux jack and through the speakers). Was fine on Bluetooth. Problem was that the manufacturer had failed to stick the proper filtering circuitry in the power supply for the DAC and was spewing noise from USB power into the audio output, probably because you couldn't see a problem when the phone was running on battery and filtering circuitry for the DAC uses up space in the cramped confines of the phone. (In practice, USB power can be amazingly dirty -- I was astonished watching some people with oscilloscopes look at the power lines on USB.) Anyway, the noise was appalling. If you use the built-in DAC, you can't really change the thing out. With an external DAC, you can stick a reasonable one in.

I don't know how the ones I linked to above perform. But I'm confident that if they are a problem, there are other DACs out there. Whereas with a built-in jack, you get the DAC that the phone manufacturer provides, and clearly some are willing to ship their phones with an inadequate DAC.

I'd kind of like to see someone set up a rig with intentionally-dirty USB power and a bunch of USB audio interfaces and USB-powered devices with an audio output and then see how much noise leaks through into the DAC's output.

EDIT: I also had a (purely analog) audio mixer at one point that used USB power and also leaked audible -- not as bad as my phone in the car -- noise from the USB power source into the audio. Solved that by moving it from my computer's USB output to a dedicated USB charger. I'm sure that there's still leakage and if I were doing pro audio work with that hardware, I'd still be looking at it, but at least it isn't easily-perceptible to me any more.

I also had an inexpensive USB audio interface that leaked a little audible noise into its output, one of these:

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It wasn't terrible

I used the thing for years

and on that, moving the USB cable around would adjust how much audible noise was making it out the DAC's output, so it was definitely unfiltered noise coming in from USB power.

I think that it might be underappreciated how bad the DAC situation in home electronics is. I haven't seen people trying to measure and quantify it. I have seen lots of people going to great lengths to measure frequency response on headphones, whether or not a digital data cable has (probably completely unnecessary) shielding, and worry about the encoding of their music and sometimes even its encoding for wireless transmission to headphones over Bluetooth. But "how much junk from the power source is leaking into the DAC's output" seems to be a curiously un-measured area.

The judge wrote that he “does not aim to suggest that AI is inherently bad or that its use by lawyers should be forbidden,” and noted that he’s a vocal advocate for the use of technology in the legal profession. “Nevertheless, much like a chain saw or other useful [but] potentially dangerous tools, one must understand the tools they are using and use those tools with caution,” he wrote. “It should go without saying that any use of artificial intelligence must be consistent with counsel's ethical and professional obligations. In other words, the use of artificial intelligence must be accompanied by the application of actual intelligence in its execution.” 

I won't even go that far. I can very much believe that you can build an AI capable of doing perfectly-reasonable legal arguments. Might be using technology that looks a lot different from what we have today, but whatever.

The problem is that the lawyer just started using a new technology to produce material that he didn't even validate, without determining whether-or-not it actually worked for what he wanted to do in its current state, and where there was clearly available material showing that it was not in that state.

It's as if a shipbuilder started using random new substance in its ship hull without actually conducting serious tests on it or even looking at consensus in the shipbuilding industry as to whether the material could fill that role. Meanwhile, the substance is slowly dissolving in water. Just slapped it in the hull and sold it to the customer.

EDIT: Hmm. Actually, I thought that the judge was saying that the lawyer needed to use AI-generated stuff in a human-guided role, but upon consideration, I may in fact be violently agreeing with the judge. "Actual intelligence" may simply refer to what I'm saying that the lawyer should have done.

I assume that the author specifically wants a smartphone.

3.5 jack.

They exist, but it'll constrain your phone choices a lot.

I'd just get a USB-C-to-1/8"-TRS adapter. If you want to charge while playing, you can get one with passthrough.

Without passthrough:

https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Adapter-Female-Samsung-Devices/dp/B08Z3B5QL3

or with passthrough:

https://www.amazon.com/ZOOAUX-Headphone-Charging-Earphones-Compatible/dp/B094Z6149B

Can probably just leave the thing plugged into your headphones.

Why can't we go back to small phones?

The iPhone SE is dead,

Is there any chance that you chose to lock yourself into a very small walled garden with a vendor who might make decisions about product that you might not agree with?

Apple is the only one making iOS phones, and Apple doesn't seem interested in small devices anymore, so that door is shut.

Right. You stick yourself in that garden, you are gambling that the vendor is going to come out with the product that you want.

There are still a few niche companies working on smaller devices, like Unihertz, but those phones almost always have low-end hardware and limited software support.

Well, size is kind of a constraint on what hardware you can put in the thing.

If what you mean by "limited software support" is "apps are going to be optimized for the bulk of users and will probably feel small if the great bulk of users are using larger screens", well...I mean, yeah.

The iPhone 3 SE you have:

4.7-inch (diagonal) widescreen LCD Multi‑Touch display with IPS technology

1334-by-750-pixel resolution at 326 ppi

Memory 4 GB LPDDR4X RAM

https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?nYearMin=2022&nRamMin=8000&fDisplayInchesMax=5.5

Let's grab one from that list:

https://www.gsmarena.com/ulefone_armor_mini_20t_pro-13298.php

Size 4.7 inches, 53.3 cm2 (~63.1% screen-to-body ratio)

Same screen size as your phone.

Resolution 720 x 1600 pixels, 20:9 ratio (~373 ppi density)

30 pixels narrower, but 266 pixels taller than your phone.

8GB RAM

Twice the memory of your phone.

Can buy online in the US:

https://www.amazon.com/Ulefone-Armor-Mini-20T-Pro/dp/B0DJ74TQXT

And it was released October 2024, so it's pretty new.

Now, you may not be able to get an iOS phone that fits your hardware wants, but them's the breaks when you go with a platform that has only a single vendor making hardware for it.

I don't regret my time on Reddit. I enjoyed it a lot, though it did kind of feel like I was in a bit of a backwater after development switched to the new interface and updates for the UI stopped coming in.

I also expected Reddit to shift to their monetization phase at some point. I just hoped that whatever they did wasn't going to be something that I didn't like. As it happened, they killed the third-party apps, which is something that I wasn't going to put up with if there was any reasonable alternative. I have never used the official app, and don't intend to do so. But I don't think that I "fell" for anything -- I got use of a service that made me happy for a long time.

You're correct. Not all software will be able to usefully run under such a restriction.

But I think that a very substantial amount probably can.

Assuming "Lemmy" is including all Threadiverse software, Lemmy/mbin/piefed, then probably Reddit, which is the closest analog.

Given that a lot of Python software I see already by convention runs in a venv, which is at least somewhat-isolated from the rest of the system...I wonder how much harder it would be to make it the norm for most Python software to run in an isolated sandbox, without broader filesystem access. Like, kinda follow an Android-like model, where there's an application-private directory and permissions that mostly make the app keep to itself.

I do run some Python software in firejail. But it'd need to be a norm for how the software is distributed. Can't require a bunch of technical work on the part of end users.

I think that he's probably correct that this is, in significant part, going to be the future.

I don't think that human moderation is going to entirely vanish, but it's not cheap to pay a ton of humans to do what it would take. A lot of moderation is, well...fairly mechanical. Like, it's probably possible to detect, with reasonable accuracy, that you've got a flamewar on your hands, stuff like that. You'd want to do as much as you can in software.

Human moderators sleep, leave the keyboard, do things like that. Software doesn't.

Also, if you have cheap-enough text classification, you can do it on a per-user basis, so that instead of a global view of the world, different people see different content being filtered and recommended, which I think is what he's proposing:

Ohanian said at the conference that he thinks social media will "eventually get to a place where we get to choose our own algorithm."

Most social media relies on at least some level of recommendations.

This isn't even new for him. The original vision for Reddit, as I recall, was that the voting was going to be used to build a per-user profile to feed a recommendations engine. That never really happened. Instead, one wound up with subreddits (so self-selecting communities are part of it) and a global voting on stuff within that.

I mean, text classifiers aimed at filtering out spam have been around forever for email. It's not even terribly new technology. Some subreddits on Reddit had bots run by moderators that did do some level of automated moderation.

I don't think that it would likely accomplish much politically.

Let's say that you're someone who is teetering on the edge on voting for a Trump-favoring candidate. Are you likely to be affected much by a video like that to not vote for him?