Do you mean the nuclear power that the free market companies very explicitly said wasn't worth doing? That one? Why are we pleading the government to use a horrendously expensive technology that even the free market hates?
Well, because that's never the correct choice. There's a big big filter on people actually posting there. Any easy problems with obvious solutions never make it to there.
Think about it, how fucked does your relationship have to be to post on Reddit for advice?
Someone has a chart somewhere that shows responses in that subreddit getting more and more anti-conciliatory over time. I think it’s online misanthropy (measured by Reddit responses) increasing over time rather than it being objectively never the correct choice.
Considering that "the community" is now filled with vibe coding slop pull requesters, and non-coders bitching in issues, the filter that not-github provides becomes better and better.
Of course, that mostly goes for projects big enough to already have an indepedent community.
Not to contradict you, but there's another important aspect to 'community' besides the bad contributors and the entitled complainers. That's discoverability. How do you discover a project that may be hosted anywhere on the dozens of independent forges out there? Searching each one individually is not a viable proposition. The search often ends on the biggest platform - Github.
I'm not trying defend github here. The largest platform could have been anyone who took advantage of the early opportunities in the space, which just happens to be Github. But discoverability is still a nagging problem. I don't think that even a federated system (using activitypub, atproto or whatever else out there) is going to solve that problem. We need a solution that can scour the entire code hosting space like search engines do (but collaboratively, not aggressively like LLM scrapers).
Ideally this should be something search engines handle - but they do a poor job in specialised areas like code repos.
It's helpful to have a github mirror of your "real" repo (or even just a stub pointing to the real repo if you object to github strongly enough that mirroring there is objectionable to you).
One day maybe there will be an aggregator that indexes repos hosted anywhere. But in many ways that will be back to the square one - a single point of failure.
The Fediverse seems to dislike global search. Or is that just a mastodon thing?
I don't think I ever find new software through github's own search. I find them through the software's website or some other means like a search engine.
That was solved by forums, tech mailing lists,... If you were interested in something, you hang around the communities and almost everything that was interesting enough will pass by.
Do you hang around every forum or mailing list that discusses the solutions to problems that you may potentially encounter in the future? The type of problem I'm talking about isn't one that can be foreseen years in advance.
Word of mouth: What if it's just some random script a guy created in a weekend? I have my code used by others in such a manner.
Package managers: Same problem as above. You missed the point of free software.
Search engines: They do a disastrous job of indexing anything on a forge. You might as well yell at the clouds instead.
LLM of choice: I'm not taking this seriously.
> Does anyone seriously use GitHub search to discover new projects?
I don't even understand the point of such questions. None of the solutions you proposed are any better solving what I described than the insufficient method I wrote about.
Many wired headphones have a little control thingy with buttons on the wire. Four pin aux connectors support control signals. If your headphones have a detachable aux cable I suppose you can just replace it with cable with controls.
Do computers come with such jacks? I can't seem to recall having seen one. However, all my pcs understand vol up/dn play pause/prev/next from my BT headphones.
The touch functionality is useful until it isn't. My Pixel Buds will activate touch controls randomly and unnecessarily all the time when I'm trying to use them in bed, from the contact with the pillow or sheets. Drives me nuts.
But also, I don't think it's either/or for most people. I use both wired and wireless headphones all the time depending on the use case. Wired sounds far better and is more reliable, wireless is more mobile. Different use cases.
Hah, just shows how out of touch I am. Has ANC disappeared as a wired earphone feature? I keep meaning to shop for a new all-purpose pair with ANC, duplex audio, and either USB-C input or an adapter for that. But, I keep procrastinating. I don't have any headphones that work with my phone since the analog port disappeared.
I can point to the shelf with my Sony wired ANC ear buds, which I bought years ago specifically for ANC during air travel, in the era when I would use my iPod and later an iPod Nano. The ones I have are the second pair, bought after the first was accidentally left on a plane. I think they were different product generations, a few years apart. These are so old, they are purely stereo headphones. Microphones for duplex audio hadn't become pervasive yet.
These stick in my ear with little silicon flanges and have a part that sits outside with the microphone. Then there is a small control module sitting at the junction of left and right ear wires, which holds a AAA battery and has a power switch and a pass-through audio button (which always seemed more gimmick than utility to me). In their active mode, they also don't demand much of the source device.
I bought a tiny lapel clip Bluetooth receiver that has buttons and a headphone socket. Charge over USB, pair with phone, turn any headphones into Bluetooth. If the battery runs out, plug the headphones straight into the phone.
However, the noise cancelling gap is real. I'd kill for wired IEMs with an inline battery + buttons, and noise cancelling mic & circuit in the earpieces.
Closest is the Sony cans, which have wired mode (ie: they have a tiny jack, so you can use them passively) but I don't think they cancel noise when using them that way
I have some Sony headphones from a decade ago with a detachable cable. Noise cancellation works just fine when wired, and you get better battery life since the Bluetooth part isn’t active. The only time you can’t use noise cancellation is when it’s charging (Micro-USB, doesn’t do audio over USB in case you were wondering).
Re: noise canceling... recently got a pair of IEMs (Etymotic ER2XR) with good foam tips and their isolation blows away any ANC I've ever tried. The only thing is noise from touching the cable but that was solved with some ear hooks to put the cables behind my ears.
Maybe a bit clunky but there exist some very good and tiny DACs/dongles now (and have seen a couple creative cases/riggings that present the jack in a good/manageable way)
Probably an exaggeration? But I hope that tapping for pause isn't critical for anyone's daily life.
I use wireless headphones and in fact never use this feature (I have it disabled). Too unreliable when there's a large screen with a big pause and skip button within reach.
Or ever do anything in parallel with listening. I’ve been working in my garden and went to a shed that’s like 15 meters away from my home only to notice that I’ve forgotten to take my phone with me - music never stopped.
You are right, in the past we never skipped a song or adjusted volume, just went with what came out of the factory and what was playing at the time. Those buttons on the device itself were for show.
Many have a small box on the cord with those controls, and you could argue that's handier since it's closer to where your hands naturally are at any given moment.
if the phone is in your pants pocket then its fairly trivial to change the volume just by using the buttons on the phone
even some of the cheapest in-line remotes that only have a single button will let you change the track by double tapping it
if you dont have an in-line remote then theres also the option of using a key remapper app (probably not on iphone) to let you change track by long pressing the volume buttons
Have batteries actually ever FAILED in wireless headphones? Sure, they degrade and charge becomes lower, but I've never had them outright fail. A headphone that lasts my 2-3 hours of commute/daily use is completely useable, even if it's original charge lasted 5 hours.
Cables do fail though, completely. They become unusable.
In my entire life time of using headphones/earbuds since school with the PSP, ALL wired options have failed after 1-2 years for purely mechanical cable reasons. Not a single wireless failed for electronic reasons. The did fail for me dropping them and stepping on them reasons, though.
My sennheiser earbuds are now down to 15 minutes of battery life. Less if it's a cold day. Sure, they're not completely dead yet, but they're effectively useless. And it's not like I can easily replace the batteries. Most wired earbuds or headphones at a similar price point have replaceable cables.
Shure sells wireless earbuds where the BT / battery sits outside the earbud itself and can be user-replaced. You can even attach them to good ol' 3.5 mm cables! And, since the connector on the earbud is standard, you can actually attach either other-brand earbuds or other-brand BT adapters. Other brands probably have something similar.
I have a pair or Shure IEMs I bought as wired over a decade ago. I've converted them to a lighting cable when I bought my iphone 7, then switched to BT when that cable failed.
Sure, the IEMs are bigger than airpods or similar models, but I find it's a good compromise. I wouldn't go back to wired headphones while at work, and certainly not while on the go.
I also have that model, and even though the battery still seems to last for ages, I was wondering if it was replaceable.
Does Sony sell a replacement, or do you have to go through a 3rd party? Is everything held in place with screws, or do you need to mess around with glue and whatnot?
Every order of magnitude of difference constitutes a categorical difference.
The ability to create spam instantly, fitted perfectly to any situation, and doing that 24/7, everywhere, is very different from before. Before, spam was annoying but generally different enough to tell apart. It was also (in general) never too much as to make an entire platform useless.
With AI, the entire internet IS spam. No matter what you google or look at, there's a very high chance it's AI spam. The internet is super duper extra dead.
And even if you figure out a reliable way to detect AI, guess what, USERS USE IT TOO for legitimate content, so you can't even use system like this. It's horrid
I tried to build something: https://github.com/YM2132/PR_guard which aims to help in these cases. It's not perfect but with stronger AI detection tools (Pangram) it could be improved although the issue of cost then arises and who pays for it.
I get unreasonably angry when I read this statement, or similar ones.
If you mean "portions of the web I go to or my email inbox", you may be right.
But for the rest of us that hang out in one or multiple private spaces, sometimes with connections between them, the internet is better connected and easier to find people, groups, information, and interests than ever before.
No, it's more like Netflix not allowing you to watch on non-Netflix branded devices or browsers. Or banning you for connecting the wrong TV to a valid device.
Or Microsoft banning you from O365 for not using their browser, or the correct monitor, or the correct mouse or.....
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