LLMs have improved my education, work life, and general knowledge search. I get more time to spend living my life and less trying to find one dude’s stacked change post from 2009 that fixed my problem.

They allow me to access information the way I learn and operate in a way that textbooks, college education, video courses, or online classes have never allowed me to do in my entire life.

That being said, the general AI buzz and buzzwords need to die, the real positives need to be celebrated.

Really curious to see how the modem stacks up, but I also guess reviewers given demo devices were told to not talk about or play down the modem performance, rather than fix the problem.

Hold on now, let us not start using logic when referring to computer programming here. It’s all magic and bumbling around on a keyboard.

I’d like another choice, both platforms have become terrible metric-collecting, dark-pattern-infused data-harvesting trash. (iPhone users, don’t believe the commercials claiming privacy.)

Because they love and believe their corporate daddies they so worship, especially in the US.

Smartwatches are a really interestingly sad storyarc.

I got into smartwatches early on with Pebble. It was the correct balance of battery life to functionality. Then Big Tech accelerated to, “let’s run a phone OS on a watch” - which came with terrible battery life and sluggishness. Still, the OG Moto 360 was actually “not bad”. The LG Watch Sport added a SIM card slot and a cellular modem. Now we’re cooking with gas! I’d trade off bad battery life to have a parasite phone on my wrist. Also Google acquired and killed Pebble, because of course they did.

At the time of the LG Watch Sport, T-Mobile also released DIGITS, which made it so I could cobble together a parasite SIM card that receives my calls and texts on the watch and build out what “modern smartphones + smartwatches” do without the high bill and vendor lock-in. It also had cellular antennas built into the strap, so you couldn’t replace the strap, but you at least had decent RF.

Apple’s watch came out, and showed promise, but to this day suffers from a few critical bugs that they’ve never completely fixed.

Bugs, namely:

• A dependency on keeping iMessage turned on to send/receive SMS from the watch. The watch can’t do any messaging directly, it has to use Apple’s cloud via data. A watch is a perfect use case for simple text messaging!
• The biggest: there’s a continual glitch where WiFi calling and/or cellular calling will get screwed up. You won’t know it until you’re away from your phone and suddenly have to place a voice call, and can’t. This is a core feature of having cellular on a watch. There is no way to resolve this other than backing up the watch and resetting to factory defaults and then restoring. This will happen every few months, you won’t know when it happens until you need the feature.

Then they all started throwing health features into the smartwatches. Likely to try and vendor-lock you into a platform. I tried some Withings watches for a while, and their hybrid (what I always call “dumb-smartwatch”) was a refreshing take back to the Pebble days with a bit of style. Unfortunately, Withings saw the sweet sweet candy of medical industry money, and their smartwatch line has really stagnated while the app rots on the vine.

I’ve been maintaining periodic cross-links to maintain health sync so I’m not vendor locked in to one set of data, like Samsung->Withings or Garmin->HealthSync->Somewhere else or the most convoluted at one point was like Samsung->Withings, Withings->Fitbit (with a donor old Fitbit used just to get the app up but then not carried) then Fitbit -> whatever health app I was using at the time. So that whole thing is a topic itself, that getting your health data around is a complex chore that nobody should have do deal with. Yet the vendors make that health data so constantly in your face! Time to sit, time to stand, time to breathe, time to drink water, DANCE PUPPET DANCE! On Apple’s platform, their health app does make cross-sync easier-ish, but also in a lot of smartwatch forums, there are many posts of duplicate data or data from the wrong user cross-syncing, so something is funky there too.

Samsung had one good smartwatch as far as I’m concerned and it was the OG 46mm Galaxy Watch with cellular, running Tizen. It had great multiday battery life, cellular capability, enough storage to put a few playlists in it, the physical rotating bezel to select UI items with a click where each click meant one menu (throwback to the old BB 8700g what what!), all the notes of being a device on your wrist that lasts a few units of time and works on its core function. It even had a barometric pressure sensor on-watch so you could see if a storm was coming without Internet.

It seems, especially with Big Tech all having AI hardons now, that they don’t know what to do with the watch lines now. The chipsets really haven’t accelerated like they should. Qualcomm took entirely too long to get their watch chipset power requirements down. The 3GPP spec for 5G IOT is mostly finished but that doesn’t mean chips exist, there will be many years until the chips start showing up in watches. They also also really haven’t nailed down thermal issues. I was once at cell edge on GW 5 Pro, and 10 seconds into placing a voice call, the modem became too hot and the watch went into thermal throttle mode where it sleeps everything until it cools. How could that ever be depended upon?? (That was actually the line for me giving up on caring about a watch with a modem. If you can’t call 911 for more than 5 seconds, what’s the point?)

Then, since carriers have always forced vendor-lock for pairing of smartwatches now, and smartwatches no longer have SIM card slots, you can only use Verizon post-paid or AT&T post-paid to pair a watch, forcing expensive post-paid plans (except the weird outliers like Visible + Apple Watch, or Fi with Samsung watch) and now they’re raising the rates to $15-20/month for a watch that might use 20KB of data a month!

Now Google’s watch can’t even be repaired? These companies want this tech to die.

Instead they could have been looking at/heading towards wrist cuffs like something out of Death Stranding that fully replaces the need to carry a pocket computer. Which they would hate, of course, because then you’re not buying 5 devices, you’re buying one.

Garmin might be the only company doing smartwatches right these days. They focus on their core functionality and iterate. They tried LTE, realized it stunk, and gave up. They have solar charging to boost battery life, low-power tech like memory-in-pixel transreflective displays, and great multi-day battery life. They don’t have all the bells and whistles of other brands, but, they seem to actually want the product line to succeed…and they’re not trying to nickel-and-dime users with monthly fees.

While you have to look elsewhere to do it, yelp or a browser answer the hours question.

No, none of them have a lot of local compute, not enough ram or cpu.

Very little of it runs local. Basically language translation.

I want a phone that doesn’t blast telemetry everywhere eating my battery. I want a phone that lasts a week between charges. I also want (most) apps to go away and stick to the web so my browser can keep me safe from them.

My favorite e-commerce experience has been at breweries and comedy clubs. Scan QR code, order on web page. Receive SMS to get back to page. Pay on page when done, close tab. Our exchange of information has completed. Maybe they send an email later, maybe not.

Versus apps tracking the status of your colon 24/7.

Even without apps, disable YouTube and use it in a browser. No reason to even have an app.

It’s so weird how Google is incredibly terrible at their own apps anymore. Apple makes their own apps (mostly) shine.

Could just use yelp or a browser for business hours.

The session keys for WhatsApp are stored on Meta servers, so the encryption is meaningless. Meta can read everything everyone types. Yet all of the eastern hemisphere seem to worship it like it’s pure platinum.

IIRC, Threema’s crypto algo is a patchwork cluster of copypasta and prayers.

I think you give the idiots in charge of the corps that can’t see beyond a 3 month window of time too much credit. It is just the natural progression of unchecked and unregulated Capitalism that will always lead to this place, regardless of the industry or technology.

Don’t get me wrong, I want to blame them too for their evil plot, but they’re too dumb to have contrived the whole narrative.

Example with the cloud:

• Look over past decades, storing your data in servers has been a thing for decades. Companies have tried time and again to get the concept to stick in various forms, and it always waxed and waned. (Reverse-example right now is AI, since people barely want it, and having it in the cloud is even creepier, manufacturers are trying to make people comfortable with cloud-executed AI queries, and otherwise releasing limited subsets of compute that run locally on the phone.)
• Voice recognition tech like Voice Command (predecessor to Siri for those super young) started on phone-only. Then Siri used to run on the cloud until phones became powerful enough to run more commands locally and they moved more commands to the phone.
• Apple used to synchronize SMS messages between iPhones and other Apple devices in a secure local method on your local WiFI network. Then, as they sold more types of devices, it made it evolutionarily (made up word) necessary to move that logic to the cloud. They probably didn’t pre-think that all this would be clouded, they just got there out of need to sell a new toy, and suddenly screw the alleged privacy they purport to worship.

The reality is, a lot of these cloud techs have been held up by:

• Lack of fast enough Internet bandwidth to make it doable, nobody is going to spend 4 hours a day uploading photos somewhere
• Lack of fast local compute, hilariously, local compute can do most things now, but in the past, the local compute wasn’t fast enough to be able to parse/process the data to send to the cloud
• Lack of local storage, again, prepping data for cloud transport and having local caching be performant requires enough throwaway space on the local machine that users don’t become frustrated with the latency of remote disks in a datacenter
• Lack of metadata for trust verification like FaceID, fingerprint, GPS geolocation, and other security functions so the company could avoid fraud
• Lack of quality mobile cameras and recording devices making the input content garbage

Once these problems ended up being solved, it wasn’t some visionary with a big plan executing. It was just another Business Weenie being paid 9 figures having the same idea 300 other people had, and it just sticking this time because the technological environment is different.

(Replace Apple examples with Google, Microsoft, Cisco whoever as necessary.)

Hey Google, I just…don’t know how to phrase this to you. Start doing some hard work on the Android platform to make the aging bits better, the dirty bits better, bring back more open-source, bring back more openness. Drop the YouTube crap and have dedicated apps on the phone for Music, Podcasts, etc.

Their current and next couple of years of dev cycles will probably be wasted on “AI” as the rest of the platform drifts and their C suite drools over a GPU-powered fever-dream that can’t even play Tic-Tac-Toe for more than 4 moves without forgetting the rules.

As it stands right now, I know several Androiders that see no reason to even stay with Android anymore and will likely switch to iOS for their next device replacement. I’m not sure I really want to bother sticking around either, although I’d prefer a tertiary alternative that as of yet doesn’t exist. (Speaking of, this dock sounds like something just borrowed from WebOS.)

Make the mobile OS something that can stand on its own instead of the data-mining marketing cesspool it has become, and put it on hardware worth buying instead of the janky Samsung modems.

Sincerely, some rando on the Internet

They’ll probably use another mediocre modem that will again make cellular reception mediocre. Until they fix that problem, there is no reason to take that phone line seriously.

It’s a glitch where the buttons break down mechanically, so it just thinks the user is holding the power button constantly, so as soon as it is off, it’ll turn back on.

GPT is selectively useful. It’s also, as of the last few weeks dumb as a bag of bricks. Dumber than usual. 4 and 4o are messed up. 4 mini is an idiot. Not sure how they broke them, but it started roughly around the time of the assassination attempt. Not sure if it was a national security request or a mere coincidence, but just the same.

I’m even seeing 4o make comically dumb and stubborn programming mistakes lately, like:

GPT: “I totally escaped that character”

Me: “no, it’s the same as your previous response.”

GPT: “Oh, sorry, here is the corrected code.” replies with same code again.

I canceled my sub.

Thank you for the clarification. WHQL is such a pain to set up, I’m sure the AV vendors whined, “but, security! Do we have to test everything every time? That would slow an urgent 0day release!”