There’s a massive cultural thing in the US about the iPhone being the preferred phone and if you don’t have one it must be because you’re too poor to afford one. Obviously this is a result of marketing and isn’t universal but it is a surprisingly widely held view.

Given that, showing up in a group chat as a lone blue bubble marks you out as the inferior group member (in some people’s eyes). It doesn’t matter so much 1:1 but if there are 10 people the odd one out stands out.

It absolutely discusses phone size - in some detail both in the intro and as part of the reviews.

I bought the JSAUX dock (from Amazon). Has been really good. It’s a fair bit cheaper than the official one and there are a load of reports.of the official one having issues.

One more note on learning Rust: what Rust does is front-load the pain. If you write something in another low-level “direct control of memory” language you can often get something going much more easily than Rust because you don’t have to “fight the borrow checker” - it’ll just let you do what you want. In Rust, you need to learn how all the ownership stuff works and what types to use to keep the compiler happy.

But then as your project grows, or does a more unusual thing, or is just handed over to someone who didn’t know the original design idea, Rust begins to shine more and more. Your C/C++/whatever program might start randomly crashing because there’s a case where your pointer arithmetic doesn’t work, or it has a security hole because it’s possible to make a buffer overrun. But in Rust, the compiler has already made you prove that none of that is possible in your program.

So you pay a cost at the start (both at the start of learning, and at the start of getting your program going) but then over time Rust gives you a good return on that investment.

Context: I am an embedded software engineer. I write a lot of low level code that runs on microprocessors or in OS kernels, as well as networking applications and other things. I write a lot of C, I write some Rust, I write Elixir if I possibly can, I write a lot of Python (I hate C++ with a passion).

I don’t think you want Rust. Python is unbeatable on “idea to deployment” speed. Python’s downsides:

• Painful packaging/distribution if you want to get a load of people who don’t have Python installed to run your thing (e.g the GUI program we currently maintain for talking to our hardware)
• Performance under some circumstances. There are some things that are not quick in Python. They’re not always the things you expect because Python actually drops down to C modules for a lot of the number crunching that you might do. E.g. for ML you are basically using Python to plug a load of bits of fast C code together

Rust is good when you need at least one of:

• High speed
• Control over use of memory
• Low level systems programming (drivers etc.)
• Can’t cope with a Garbage Collector
• Compiling to a microcontroller

If you’re doing one of those and so have become expert in Rust, then it is actually excellent for a lot of other things. E.g. you might build your data processor in it, and then distribution is easy because it’s just a single binary.

One option you might look at is Go. You get a lot of performance, you get good parallelism if you need it, it’s designed to be easy to learn, and it also compiles programs to a single binary for easy distribution.

Black Skylands. A friend gifted me a copy on steam after he had a transaction error and got two copies. Thought it might be fun for a few hours but I’ve been obsessed.

It’s an open world exploring game where you’ve got an airship and go from island to island, and it’s a top down twin stick shooter. The mobility is really enjoyable with the grappling hook, the combat is fun with interesting weapons, tech and upgrades and you have an airship!

From that quote I took “that salmon is ok, but this dish that it’s in is overall good”.

There’s also Stormgate coming out later this year from a load of the former StarCraft developers.

What do you mean by Phase 2?

There’s some stuff about the roadmap for most of this year: https://blog.beeper.com/p/state-of-the-app-spring-2023

If it’s dead then it’s no risk, right? Afterwards it’s either working or still dead.

Yeah, it can and should be a warning to studio heads, but as game consumers we absolutely should raise our expectations (and stop buying micro transaction crap). There are plenty of big studios with money who could buy the licence and spend years making the game, but those studios belong to the big publishers who optimise for profit not for game quality.

I’m lucky enough to be able to have a lot of choice where I work - in a software engineer and there are any number of places where I could work and be paid well. Given that I feel some responsibility to work somewhere ethical - not everyone else has the opportunity to decide.

Coincidentally, I’ve been looking at these as I’m due a new phone soon.

The flip 5 style has no value apart from gimmick as far as I can see. It goes in your pocket in a smaller height which might be of use to some people but that’s about it. Same volume of phone, same size of screen.

The Fold 5 style makes a lot more sense to me. You get a phone the same size as a normal one (roughly) but then a screen twice sized normal (roughly). I’m sure not everyone is interested in that, but there’s definitely a practical value there for some.

Which he is now also doing - one time payment to remove ads permanently.

It’s moderately expensive actually at more like $20 (depending on location) but I’m happy to pay it - it’s a great app.

I personally think that a sign of a healthy technology platform is one where some people can make money from it, while the platform itself remains open. To use Linux as an example, it’s wonderful that it’s open source, and it’s great that Red Hat can be a profitable company based on Linux. It’s a good sign and it helps the Linux ecosystem thrive due to RH’s contributions.

For Lemmy there are plenty of free apps - no-one is being forced to use Sync. I’m happy to pay for something that provides some more polish to my Lemmy experience, and doesn’t require anything of anyone else.

Everything else in my life is USB-C now - my laptop, my Steam Deck, my ear buds etc. My wife and I are both Android so we only have to have one charging cable anywhere in the house or our bags.

I agree, but this provides a path towards that. It is Matrix underneath so if we get a proportion of people using Beeper they it becomes easy to transition to using Matrix to talk to those people.

I think they mostly died when GChat turned off XMPP support and became a walled garden.

If Beeper does become a successful business though, there’ll be a full time development team “playing catch-up” with money behind them. It’s interesting if you read this that they’re rolling out features ahead of the message providers in some cases!

They’re also leveraging some existing infrastructure. Beeper is built on Matrix which does a lot of the heavy lifting for them.

See “Password Hashing” here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_derivation_function

It is actually important to have a controlled cost to calculate in the forward direction too.