I've never used a Blackberry but it was much more efficient for me to input text (an essential task for a communication device!) on non-iPhone-style phones with physical buttons.
Nothing useful to add except, god I miss my Bold 9700. Every time I slip on this stupid touchscreen keyboard and make a stupid typo on this stupid phone I howl inwardly and wish pain and endless torment upon everyone who took us down this path away from light and goodness. Grumble grumble
The fun part for me is that an old dumb phone could replace, like, 50% of my smartphone usage, if I could use Telegram on it. We even still have 2G networks with no plans to shut them down. So, a J2ME Telegram client has been on my list of potential future projects for quite some time.
It did, and some of the things it was more effective at.
I remember BlackBerry OS 4.x (?) had a built-in password manager app and this was in the mid-2000s. By comparison this was added to iOS 18 in 2024.
What it wasn't good at was things like games and toxic consumer rich media bullshit. The industry saw dollar signs with iOS and Android and never wrote apps for the ecosystem.
Remember the days when Instagram was iOS-only?
But here we are, resigned to typing on glass for the rest of our lives because some hippie burnout thought it was a good idea.
This would potentially be true for a lot of tech in the last five decades or so. When it gets cheaper to make the things people need and want without those needs and wants changing, you can get away with paying people a lower real wage for the same productivity. Couple that with the fact that the workers themselves also have typically grown more productive from the same tech, allowing companies to undercut competitors and capture more market share until everyone else catches on. I figure capital has benefited enormously from recent tech, very possible it captured the majority of the excess money produced.
I don't think that's possible to analyze for most technologies. How could we determine the effect of, say, OLED technology specifically on workers' real wages across the economy? Even doing the same for a particular seller's margin, say LG, would be difficult and wouldn't tell the full story. If you have an idea of how to do that for something let me know.
We'd probably want to use a measure of worker productivity itself as a proxy for technological improvements and look at various measures like real wages in relation to it rather than restricting our analysis to any one technology.
I can talk to them. I can talk to the Venezuelan refugees, who came here not because they are "political refugees" like some claim but because there was a famine in Venezuela.
Destabilizing the country and/or installing a US puppet or just allowing the power vacuum to fill itself is likely not to the betterment of their people.
Gun ownership isn't a terrible example honestly. I would have been probably 8 or so when I was allowed to traipse around in the woods near my dad's house with a BB gun, following extensive safety teaching of course. We would go out in the yard and shoot a shotgun and a rifle around that same age. People are probably not careful enough with guns right now in America given the stats, but it's not at all unreasonable in a rural context for a relatively young kid to be trusted with use of a firearm, even for short unsupervised periods. The real thing that a parent has to do (beyond still waiting until an appropriate age) is to extensively drill in the safety habits and proper use and know their kid well enough to determine whether they're ready for that responsibility.
Maybe the analogy here is you can buy only one kind of gun. That gun can load any ammunition. It’s easy for children to get their hands on anything from bb’s to BMG50. The gun has parental controls to allow selecting which ammunition the gun will accept. It’s up to the parents to decipher the difference between all the types, and the out-of-box default is all types are allowed.
Some commenters admonish parents for trying to use these parental controls at all. “Just be good parents and instruct your 6 year old not to use hollow point, 7.62mm, or fmj”
I think a car analogy would work better. I live in a civilised country and nether I nor my kids have access to guns ..
For example Nintendo:
The kids have access to the family car. It will allow anyone to drive it when they select a destination by speaking while sitting in the car.
The car is unlocked by default.
No way exists to limit destinations to their friends or relatives. "Drugs" takes the kids to the nearest drug dealer. "Alcohol" drives the kid to the nearest store and allows the kid to buy alcohol without any ID check.
Sure, but do you understand that it's perfectly reasonable to be able to buy a toy gun and not have to explain gun safety to them?
Or would you recommend that all toy guns have the ability to be dangerous and all parents should train them because of the prevalence of guns in society?
- Perhaps we have different ideas of the appropriate age to wean kids off of toys and teach them to use real (and sometimes dangerous) things. Today's discussion is about guns, but the same could be said for boats, motorcycles, woodworking equipment, etc. I would like my children to be well rounded and well equipped when they become adults. However, I acknowledge that this may not be normal anymore: Many families seem to be content with their teenagers playing games all day long (ironically, games with guns!)
- It sounds like you have the gun in a "toy" category. For my kids, guns are absolutely not in the toy category. They are tools, used for hunting and protection, and access to these tools comes with guard rails and significant responsibility. I would rather my kids never get used to guns as toys.
- This is bigger than just personal decisions: In my state, teenagers used to be allowed to work on construction sites in the summers. By the time they graduated, many of these guys had real skills they could support their family with. In our rush to protect kids, this kind of work is no longer taught in classes or available as summer work for young people. We have made it increasingly hard for young people to "grow up"!
> For my kids, guns are absolutely not in the toy category. They are tools, used for hunting and protection, and access to these tools comes with guard rails and significant responsibility.
The same is true for cars. Are you also against toy cars?
> By the time they graduated, many of these guys had real skills they could support their family with. In our rush to protect kids, this kind of work is no longer taught in classes or available as summer work for young people. We have made it increasingly hard for young people to "grow up"!
This is a totally different issue from access to games. Why couple the two? Are you implying one cannot be taught those skills if they have access to games?
> Are you implying one cannot be taught those skills if they have access to games?
Nah, I think games can be very valuable, especially communal, in-person games. I don't mind access to games at all... I think I look at the various forces around children and teens today, and it feels like we've taken away a lot of the things that were very valuable for development because they might be dangerous, and replaced them with replicas that are safe but lack some of the value and experience that came with the dangerous thing.
As an example, hunting games are safer than hunting, but hunting games do not teach you to be patient and still for hours, they do not teach gun safety, they do not teach you to stick it out when things get cold and uncomfortable. They do not teach you how to do something useful with the animal after you shot it, and there is no real cost to being sloppy and injuring but not killing an animal that is now suffering in the woods.
I'm sure you've heard people talk about the "infantilization" of young adults. What factors do you see behind this? How would you suggest we teach young people how to do hard things?
> I'm sure you've heard people talk about the "infantilization" of young adults. What factors do you see behind this? How would you suggest we teach young people how to do hard things?
I've heard of it but haven't seen any kind of consensus on it - or even whether it exists.
If it does, though, games hardly seem relevant. People were addicted to TV long before they had access to video games.
How big are your feet? Because the shoe horn you just used to squeeze your barely veiled disdain for parentting "choices" that aren't like yours into this thread about user-adversarial parental settings by major game system manufacturers was massive.
This thread was a follow-up to squibonpig's comment about the parental responsibility and the value of giving young people access to things that are dangerous when it's done with proper guidance. I agree with him, with the caveat that "the internet" is dangerous more like a city at night than a gun.
My overall response with this stuff is to think about the lax parenting typical in the 80s or so and compare it. Kids much younger were allowed to run amok outside, and crime rates are much lower today. Are the same instincts that perhaps rightly perhaps wrongly compel people to keep a closer eye on their kids in the real world being applied to the digital one?
Except it's still sitting idle in warehouses while datacenters get built. They aren't running yet. Unlike with fiber, GPUs degrade rapidly with use, and for now datacenters need to be practically rebuilt to fit new generations, so we shouldn't expect much reusable hardware to come from this
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