tuxxi
Joined 8 years ago
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11
Member since
Jun 1
Recent submissions
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Yea, that’s a big factor in the “coolness”. But IMHO the root cause of this in/out group mentality is a feedback loop:
* android phones offer fewer meaningfully distinct features (or as another commenter said, apple catches up)
* people don’t see value in android due to lack of distinct features in flagship phones
* majority of android becomes cheaper models
* iPhone market share increases among rich and influential teens
Just my 2c :)
Comment · 3 years ago
As someone who used Android from day 1, and recently (about 1 year ago) switched to iOS, I think all of this comes down to the trend of unification and same-ness in smartphones over the years.
All of the reasons I liked Android from the start — replaceable battery, SD card, headphone jack, diversity of of hardware options, customizable software/launchers/default apps, rootable — have been slowly one by one removed in flagship phones over the last 5 years.
Sure you can still get a low or mid tier phone with some or all of these, but all the expensive Android models (read: good build quality, software support, acceptable perf and battery life) have slowly become more and more like an iPhone, yet without any of the small things that make iPhones good to use: excellent build quality, extended support, ecosystem…
So android isn’t cool with teenagers, but it’s mostly because Android devices just suck now.
As an allegory: when I was a teen, PCs weren’t “cool” compared to Macs (remember those old ads?) But in 2023 PC gaming is more popular than ever, so PCs are cool with the youth.
Teens today will buy a PC so they can play CS or League with their friends, something they can’t really do well with a Macbook Air. Would you buy a $1000 android phone when it’s just a worse iPhone?
Comment · 3 years ago
NVIDIA employee in software, opinions are my own.
This is exactly it, NVIDIA is continuously “understaffed” and many ICs end up splitting responsibilities across different projects at different places in the stack. In stark contrast to many other large companies where an SWE team might have several entire other teams of 10+ engineers just to support the tools, build systems, test runners, etc.
Engineering groups are more fluid and individual contributors get moved around a lot (relative to other companies) according to demand. And management groups don’t really have “fiefdoms” the same way they can at huge companies… possibly due to the controversial matrix management employed here.
Comment · 3 years ago
typing without capitalization can help to create a more informal, somewhat playful tone. same goes for slight misspellings or abbrs instead of spelling out the full word. its just another way to add a small amount of “tone”.
Comment · 8 years ago
while I agree with your sentiment-- that we all spend too much time ruminating on the (albeit interesting) ideas of others, rather than with our own thoughts-- I'm not sure that we ever really had "creativity" to begin with.
for the entirety of human history, we've been growing by collecting and synthesizing the wisdom of others that come before us: standing on the shoulders of giants. we are surprisingly incapable when working alone. for instance, there are numerous examples of eruopean explorers starving or dying of easily preventable causes in the Americas, in the very spaces where natives had been living for tens of thousands of years. they weren't stupid, they just didn't have the foresight, or cultural knowledge that the natives did. [0]
There's the idea that "everything is a remix" [1], popularized by Kirby Furguson. he essentially states that we don't have much (if any) original creative thought, and that most "creative" ideas are just remixes of other ideas. this goes back all the way to prehistory and especially applies to traditional myths passed down orally through generations: see the numerous flood myths prevelant in almost all societies.
what I'm getting at is that we are not inherently creative beings, we don't do especially well when coming up with completely novel ideas. what we ARE good at is learning, synthesizing, and remixing.
so I'm not entirely sure that our "moth to an interesting article" behavior online is really that bad for us, I think its more the state that we are in when we do that - skim, go 'oh that's neat' and move along.
[0] The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich
Comment · 8 years ago
Just curious - what are the notable cases that you're referring to which burned credibility of our institutions? By "our", I assume you mean NATO countries (or even just the USA).
I haven’t tried this in about a year, so maybe the tooling doesn’t have these issues now.