Pretty much every project. Initially your pace is great. You're knocking out features quickly. Everyone is upbeat and enthusiastic. Then you have to put it all together. You discover scenarios that the specs don't cover. You need more info from business about validating certain combinations of inputs. When you get that, you find contradictions with some other stuff you thought was already done. You need to store another field that they forgot about, or thought was just common knowledge. So now you need to alter the database. Combinatorial complexity. It's the essential problem with software systems. If business people don't understand it, tell them to read Brooks. If they still don't understand, tell them to read it again.
> Combinatorial complexity. It's the essential problem with software systems
After using OpenBSD for a while, I fully adopted the “write less code” approach. Create the simplest solution and leave “features” out until you need them. Nice to have should be practically banned.
That is the one of the larger issues with poor quality. However even if there are no security issues poor quality can make your customers mad enough to go elsewhere and badmouth you to others looking at your product.
That's also what I buy with Apple now. When I was using Android I'd buy a cheap "Moto G" for maybe $150 brand new. Never understood dropping a grand or more on a mobile phone.
Cameras of flagships are still significantly better than a $150 Moto G. If you are using a smartphone in place of a camera and like good-quality photos, it's worth the money. That said, flagships can last many years as well.
I update pretty frequently, but all the older devices get used by family members, etc.
The camera is probably the least important thing on the phone for me, but yeah if photos are important to you then that might rule out the cheaper tiers of phones.
Yeah, people have different needs. One of the nice things with GrapheneOS on Pixels is that you can even pick up the latest Pixel 10a for ~400 Euro (and older models even cheaper) and it will still have what Google calls a flagship chip, but more importantly all the nice security stuff like the Titan M2. For a mid-range phone it also has pretty ok cameras.
I hope that a few years down the line there will also be great midrange Motorola phones with GrapheneOS support. But they have to start somewhere.
Tbh this is up to Qualcomm more than anything. Pessimist in me says that they’ll gatekeep the security features to higher chips in order to max out profits.
I keep my phone until the security updates stop. I buy top of the line phones because cheaper one suck. I tried a cheap phone and it used to lock up all the time. These phones are crappier than my obsolete top of the line phone. There has got to be a middle ground between 1K flagship phones and cheap sub-$200 phones, but I swear I can't find it.
I just keep buying phones with way more features than I desire just so that having too many apps open at once or going to the wrong Javascript laden web page doesn't slow my phone to a crawl. I just tell myself that at least I only replace my phone every 5 to 7 years. If it wasn't for work, I'd keep them longer, but the OS has to be patched for work stuff to be on it.
> There has got to be a middle ground between 1K flagship phones and cheap sub-$200 phones, but I swear I can't find it.
The Pixel phones are precisely that, and they are the only phones supported by Graphene for now. The a-series is a particularly good value and I am posting from one.
I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who thinks smartphone prices are just absolutely crazypants right now. I can't envision paying more for a phone than I would for a (gently used) workstation-class laptop.
Over decades of buying Android devices, I have yet to pay more than $300 for one. The one I'm using was actually free in exchange for buying a year of T-Mobile prepaid credits. No, it never was the fastest thing on the planet but it makes calls and runs the apps I want.
Have you priced a workstation class laptop recently? They’re over $3000 even with a paltry 32GB RAM
Miniaturization costs, and I would expect a flagship phone to cost at least as much as an equivalent CPU/RAM/storage laptop. The cost of miniaturization, modem, camera and OLED more than balances the bigger screen and keyboard/trackpad.
Also using Moto G-series phones for a decade or so now. Seems I have more junk (gambling apps, linked in, etc.) to scrub off them each time though.
I could see myself splashing out on a more expensive phone if it were less locked down - so probably never. However I don't play games and as a Gen-Xer my laptop is where the rest of my digital life lives; it makes sense that those for whom the phone is their primary device would prioritise it more (especially with somewhat predatory financing).
The only reason why I've decided to pay 500+ (for the first time in my life) for a flagship device was for a better camera and storage, as I wanted to have good quality photos of my kids.
That said, I will keep on replacing the battery until the circuit board itself turns into ash
The 1990s called, they want this "problem that it might not be too late to solve" back.
Sorry, cash is all but dead in 2026. I use cash about once a month to pay my barber, because he doesn't take any form of electronic payments. That's the only need for cash that I have left. That and the quarter I keep in the car to unlock a shopping cart at Aldi.
It's getting harder to do. More and more places are going exclusively cashless. I was at a college football game last Saturday and all the concessions are cashless now.
My barber is actually an inconvenience, because I need stop and get cash, which I otherwise almost never carry anymore.
This is the real answer. Nature only cares that the old already mixed their genes. So, from an evolutionary biology perspective, it's good to clear out the old stock at the end of every generation. Nature already got whatever it was gonna get out of us at that point. To allow that set of genes to stick around actually yields negative returns, ie - less chance of producing improvements, at that point. (Again, just from the perspective of "Mother Nature" so to speak. Obviously the animals themselves would rather not die.)
Mother nature has no perspective. There are no improvements either, only things that are and are not. Everything is dependent on local context at the present point in time and framing whether it is "good" or "bad" (e.g. one could frame our intelligence as good or bad given how it resulted in anthropocentric climate change that may doom us in time, while 'dumber' species have existed for millions of years without wiping themselves out).
What works today may not work tomorrow. What didn't work yesterday may work today. Evolution is not linear. It tends to happen in bursts almost like a dam busting loose. A constant cycling between periods of genetic diversity (i.e. big resetting just happened, no winners taking all quite yet), and what is known as allele fixation (a winner emerged, oh god no...).
>What works today may not work tomorrow. What didn't work yesterday may work today.
All the more reason for variety. Which stops happening when only one set of genes is mixing. (Assuming that set of eternal genes would have any motivation to mix at all.) If you want a higher chance at producing the genes most resilient in a given context, aging and death are a necessary part of that process if you're stuck with sexual reproduction. You need motivation, and you need maximum mixing.
It's linux, you can do everything in the terminal. I've never understood what purpose a "desktop" serves.
Want to start Firefox? type "fir<tab>" in your terminal and hit enter.
Want to see your files? Type "ls" and hit enter. Learn just a tiny bit about pipes, wildcards, and utilities and you can leave those mouse-pushers in the dust.
Do you adjust audio settings in the terminal? I've been moving away from using my mouse but anything related to audio or display settings intimidates me.
> Learn just a tiny bit about pipes, wildcards, and utilities
Or I could use a desktop on expend my limited mental energy on things more relevant to me. It’s far easier for me to remember things in a visual or spatial manner.
These days I can say the same, I used to enjoy trying to minimize my mouse usage and fiddling with tiling window managers but now I just can't be bothered.
And the weird thing is that the type of mental effort required is not even a useful one per se, it's more like a strain (to me) than something that makes me sharper.
Still some things are easier in a GUI while others in a CLI, just depends on their nature and how often do you have to engage with them. But after a while navigating windows by Alt+Tab (Alt+`) or the mouse is fine really. I don't care to reach for Super+PgDown/PgUp when I can move my mouse to the corner of the screen and scroll to change the workspace.
If I want to start a program I can click its icon in the taskbar, if I want to see my files I can click the file manager in the taskbar, and since these actions are done with the mouse I can simultaneously lie back in bed while eating trifle with a long spoon.
But you can just use the browser with an adblocker for Youtube on the phone, which also allows you to play audio in the background for free e.g. for playing music, what's the point in using the app at all?
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