All I want from a phone is to make and receive phone calls from people I know. I don't want texting. I don't want photos. I don't want apps. I have a dumb Consumer Cellular Link II burner phone if I need to receive an SMS.
I had high hopes for the PinePhone but the one I got can't even reliably make or receive calls so it sits in my desk drawer.
Will someone please sell me a simple phone that works without any smart crap?
For me use or mention of AI is a signal the manufacturer either doesn't care about quality or doesn't know or care that it's no longer special. It's plastic.
> So many "best practices" are truly repugnant like ...list of things
I have my own love/hate relationship with many of the things you list and I currently share many of your preferences. However I didn't always see things that way. Best practices start as informal approaches to address the problems of the day. After achieving a modicum of success they'll get enshrined by others as languages, features and cultural artifacts giving rise to new problems.
I find the broad tendency of unthinking "best practicification" more troubling than any particular "best practice".
Take OOP as an example. Stroustrup's early C++ presentations argued OOP meant more than "slow graphics" since people at the time were struggling to build graphical user interfaces for machines without much memory. The idea of melding state and behavior made it easier at the time to build complex user interfaces with imperative languages. But OOP isn't a silver bullet. Many attempts to apply the OOP ideas to other domains met with failure.
Fortunately we now have more powerful machines and better tools available to us.
As for me I've seen LLM based AI produce bland summaries¹ for a few years. Occasionally they generate something funny². But they cannot yet write anything I would spend my time or money to read.
I use SourceHut¹ to serve git for a few private projects.
I wanted to use their pages service as well to serve an SPA but their https://srht.site/limitations prevent SPAs from contacting external services I need.
I get why they do that but I need my SPA to let users login to their databases and there's simply no way to do that while adhering to SourceHut's policy.
Fortunately pico.sh², codeberg³ and GitLab⁴ (not GitHub) don't have that restriction.
I experimented with each of them last year.
All of them worked reasonably well.
Eventually I settled on GitLab which had the nicest CI/CD of the three at the time.
> Many will cheer the likely disappearance of political fundraising texts and robocalls around election season. But not all “unknown sender” messages are created equal.
Sorry but I do not pay for cellular service in order to receive unsolicited texts.
My daily driver is a dumb Consumer Cellular Link II (which uses a castrated Android under the covers). It's turned off most of the time. I don't use or want apps on it. My laptop satisfies those needs. My texting is limited to rendezvous with my family. A silent ringtone effectively blocks all unknown callers but I can't easily block unknown texts.
Apple is doing the right thing here if this feature works as described. Although I won't be switching any smartphone, I would immediately upgrade to a dumb phone that segregated texts this way and I hope to have that option in the future.
Yes this shift to React is really annoying. Github also stopped working on older browsers.
My leisure laptop is an older macbook with firefox 78.15.0esr and a little over a year ago I stopped being able to view github files and issue discussions with it. I can still view READMEs most of the time but now I have to use chromium or another computer to actually read code without cloning the repo.
I know they could easily generate JS for older browsers if they cared to set the esbuild target.
> I want to like zed. I keep trying it. ... Ultimately though none of the rendering speed improvements or collaboration ideas make a difference to me.
I feel this way as well. I've tried to incorporate Zed into my workflow a few times but I keep getting blocked by 30 years of experience with Emacs. E.g. I need C-x 2 to split my window. I need C-x C-b to show me all my buffers. I need a dired mode that can behave like any ordinary buffer. Etc. etc.
Sadly the list is quite long and while Zed offers many nice things, none are as essential to me as these.
> It took a few days to produce this library -- it would almost certainly have taken me weeks to write it myself.
As mentioned in another comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44162965 I think this "few days" is unrealistic given the commit history. I think it would be more accurate to say it allowed you to do something in under one month that may have have taken two. A definite improvement, but not a reduction of weeks to days.
Many tools make lesser developers more productive (to a point) but they fail to improve the productivity of talented professionals. Lots of "no/low" code things come to mind. But here's a tool that made kentonv 2x productive at a task that's clearly in his wheelhouse. It seems under the right conditions it can improve the productivity of developers at the opposite end of the spectrum.
> It took me a few days to build the library with AI. ...
> I estimate it would have taken a few weeks, maybe months to write by hand.
I don't think this is a fair assessment give the summary of the commit history https://pastebin.com/bG0j2ube shows your work started on 2025-02-27 and started trailing off at 2025-03-20 as others joined in. Minor changes continue to present.
> That said, this is a pretty ideal use case: implementing a well-known standard on a well-known platform with a clear API spec.
Still, this allowed you to complete in a month what may have taken two. That's a remarkable feat considering the time and value of someone of your caliber.