- seabirdYup, it's time to let go. The forces that eat away at quality software are running an indoctrination campaign with budgets in the billions of dollars to ensure that people don't remember what quality software is. You can do right in your own work and with your own people but most peoples' experiences are going to suck for the foreseeable future.
- Even if they fix the keyboard, iOS as a whole can't really be fixed. This is a single symptom of a much larger problem. So much is broken, poorly implemented, or so laughably tasteless that it hurts my head to think about how it's positioned and accepted as a "premium" product. I understand that most people notice so little about the design of their surroundings that it's basically impossible for them to understand that this junk is inflicting thousands of tiny psychological cuts daily, but it makes me so very very sad that this is acceptable to so many people.
- As mentioned, keyboard input is offensively broken. Whiffed inputs, the entire text selection/cursor manipulation model sucks (not being able to select in the middle of a word is inexcusable unless you have Stockholm syndrome for the bandaids), the cursor manipulation is broken, keyboard gets stuck open or closed, etc. etc. I'm convinced the input design for this phone is a CIA psyop designed to drive you to madness so they can recruit you as a sleeper cell.
- Passcode inputs are also broken. Trying to enter your passcode at easily achievable speeds results in dropped inputs.
- Above point wouldn't be a big deal if it weren't for fingerprint scanning being given up for Face ID, which is complete dogshit that constantly fails-to-passcode trying and failing to scan my ceiling, or my face when it's against a pillow in the morning. It's also completely worthless when I'm unable to fully point my face at the phone (working on vehicles or in some other enclosed area) or am trying to use the phone completely off of muscle memory.
- The gesture navigation system is a fundamentally bad idea. I'm an average-sized man and reaching over to the left hand side of the screen to make back inputs requires me to shift my fingers on the back of the phone just to make the reach for the input. This is on a base-model iPhone 16, which is already a touch too large for many hands to deal with this input system. The hitboxes for navigation inputs are too small and many of the inputs are often shared with actions in apps, resulting in taking all sorts of actions you didn't want to. Android style 3-button navigation at the bottom of the screen solved this many years ago. As an aside, the 60 FPS screen on an $800 phone as a "fuck you" push to upgrade to an even fatter pig of a phone that suffers even more from the bad navigation is funny.
- The GPS is fucked up, at least on the iPhone 16. It takes forever to find its bearing, after which it usually holds onto it until losing its mind again at the most inconvenient time. The only phone I've seen with a worse GPS is a Unihertz Jelly. Being in the same league as a $150 niche night market special is shameful.
- I have a frustrating number of calls get dropped. I don't know exactly where this issue comes from but it's noticeable, I run into it a couple times a week. My previous S24 on the same carrier never dropped calls under the same circumstances, so I know not having this issue is possible.
- The flashlight implementation sucks. Being able to tap it off with screen input is incredibly frustrating when I'm fumbling around trying to do something in the dark. And of course, it turns the screen on so you can make this accidental input every time you turn the flashlight on with the assignable side button. Being able to adjust the brightness is something I've never found any use for and mostly just serves to annoy me when I accidentally turn it down with another unintended input, but maybe somebody somewhere gives a shit about this, I guess.
- The split notification/settings menu is incredibly annoying. The settings menu is already a reach on the smallest mainline models, the notifications menu basically requires whole-hand movement. 20% of the space in the notifications menu is taken up by a fuckoff huge clock that you can't configure the size of. The lack of notification icons results in me having to actually unlock the phone and check things instead of just being able to know at a glance (I know they wanted to distance themselves from the roached Android notification tray look but I don't care).
- Liquid Glass looks like shit. So does a lot of the rest of the phone but I don't really hold some moron designer's bad visual taste against a product unless it affects the usability of the product. And of course, it affects the usability of the product. I actually laughed out loud having a literally unreadable lockscreen clock after the iOS 26 update, with the factory-provided moon background to add a little more salt to the wound. It reads poorly and is tacky to boot.
- This is pretty minor but the constant nags about iCloud are very funny. These assholes just couldn't resist hounding you for 99 cents more after you bought their $800 fuckup. It's like getting nagged about a Sirius XM subscription in a Lamborghini.
Individual points may be taken care of, but the disease is terminal. The iPhone's success at this point is driven by network effects, marketing, and its posturing as a premium product. Grown adults have an emotional attachment to the brand and the lifestyle statement. Android vendors are aping this stuff now. The memories of quality software and the ability to recognize it is being actively erased from the collective memory. Hoping that any of this is going to change at this point is just pissing in the wind.
- I've been using an iPhone for the first time in 10 years, and it confuses me as to how Apple has somehow managed to make them as opaque and arcane as they are today. Most interactions with the phone are noticeably and negatively affected by bizarre UI decisions. With how much it frustrates me, I can't imagine what it would be like trying to learn it as an elderly person.
- 50mg/ml disposable vape liquid tasting better than the freebase stuff is a crazy take. I haven't met a single person who was there before the modern disposable trash that doesn't think it's markedly worse. It tastes like gas station vape juice circa 2012.
Good reusable systems have been around for 10 years now. Disposables sell well because people like to think that they can quit whenever they want without having to abandon an investment (never mind that the investment in a refillable system is literally cheaper than a single disposable vape in many cases).
- Enthusiasts want small trucks. Americans don't want small trucks. They don't want a single-cab S10. They wouldn't even want a double cab S10. What they actually want is a minivan but they're too far into not-cool territory to be a consideration so they look to the mid/full-size SUV and/or truck segment. It is true that you can't really make a small truck in the US any more, and that automakers do like it that way, but it wouldn't change anything even if you changed the CAFE requirements.
- It's not 3.5 tons, it's the footprint (track width * wheelbase).
The emissions standards reward larger vehicles that generally start around $35k-$40k. Americans just love going immediately underwater on a $100k Grand Wagoneer.
- >and any proposed solutions split along various ideological lines
To massively oversimplify for the sake of brevity, the actual solution is create an economic and social environment that's conducive to the greatest number of people being able and encouraged to engage socially and in-person, instead of the endless scrolling on Instagram or having their social activity consist almost entirely of talking over Discord that became mandated during COVID. That shouldn't be controversial unless you presuppose that those who are struggling are all maladjusted incels who deserve what they got, and not generally normal people in a soulsucking environment. It's why I find comments like the one I initially responded to so gross. The reality of this situation is so obvious and so dangerous that I have to assume that those participating in the mudslinging are writing off an entire demographic for the sake of not having to back down on participating in a moralizing political trend that is losing steam.
- >But rarely is the answer that young men have a crisis of self-selecting bad role models, putting less (or no) effort into their appearance and education, holding gross sociopolitical beliefs, and not developing the emotional and household maturity an adult woman expects. And they simply aren't willing to change that. What is anyone supposed to do about that, exactly?
- bad influences - slob - not disciplined enough for education - insane politics - emotionally stunted - slob again
This imagined incel reprobate comes up every time this discussion happens, which is fairly often now that the whiffed messaging and slipping numbers among 18-29yo men (including young black and Latino men) in 2024 somehow has the DNC and progressives scratching their heads. The fuckup you are describing is fairly rare. People imagine that man to feel better about how ineffective the current progressive messaging towards that demographic is. Log off of Discord and 4chan and you'll find plenty of young men that don't listen to manosphere shit, do take care of themselves, went through higher education, held fairly progressive political beliefs until quite recently, handle themselves emotionally exactly the way society has asked, and take care of their living situation just fine, but still feel like their three options are work, work, and blow their head smoove off.
While you're busy swinging at the air, a significantly more dangerous cohort of crypto-deathcultists is forming. They don't not have a girlfriend because they're a freak that says and thinks awful things about women. They don't have a girlfriend because they can't really afford it, can't imagine anybody would want them, and even if they did, in a hyper-atomized post-social-media world that experienced a massive overcorrection in regards to what is appropriate courtship behavior, have no idea how to get started. They just don't really think much about them at all, positive or negative, not because they hate them and want to actively disregard their needs and wants, but because it's effectively like worrying about what an astronaut in space is thinking about right now. And for them, that's all good, maybe even great! They got the little they were owed and Good Men make do with what they have, which is often a reaffirming "yeah dude this life shit sucks lmao" from their buddies, and a generous serving of either infinite distraction if they want to stick around for a bit or self-destructive risk-taking if they don't. The only delusion required is that despite society's massive investment in them that was made in hopes that they would continue society, they in particular don't strictly need to continue society because it would be a good thing that could possibly make them happy, and they're obviously not OWED good things. Nobody is.
To be clear, in some perfectly equal world, this same thing could be happening to women, or men could handle the current situation the way women do. This is not one of those worlds. With the way people in the US are currently socialized, men don't like dealing with dead weight (this unfortunately often includes displaying perfectly reasonable emotions) and women don't like dealing with overly emotional manchildren (this unfortunately often includes displaying perfectly reasonable emotions). Men nut up, women have a lot of platonic friendships that they're emotionally intimate in. Shifting this will take generations, you and your children and their children will be long dead before this ever happens.
Men who are alone and running on fumes can't be lightly brushed aside just because boogeymen like Andrew Tate exist. If you don't let off the throttle on that idea we're just going to keep getting husks of men that are entirely indifferent towards tearing at the fabric of society with a net-negative contribution.
- Are you talking about direct object pronouns? At least in the case of Spanish, lo/la is the pronoun for a masculine or feminine noun. It would obviously follow that it's the pronoun for a man and woman, respectively, the same way they would be the pronoun for any other masculine or feminine noun. I don't see how addressing men and women (as a noun) the same as you would any other noun in the language (save some irregularities) means that the cart is pulling the horse.
- Yeah man, I know that it's traditionally called gender, and I know that German has a gender and case system. I don't understand what the link you've posted has to do with my point, I'm really not sure what there is to misunderstand about what I'm saying.
To come all the way back to what my original comment was about -- a German speaker is not ascribing any sort of sociological femininity to words like Freiheit or Bundesanstalt, nor any sort of sociological masculinity to Anschluss or Wein, nor any lack thereof to Sicherheitsrelais or Volk. The objects in the language have a grammatical gender, not a sociological one. It would be interesting seeing research on what sociological gender speakers of a language with a gender system choose for an object they're personifying (especially inanimate ones), but I don't think a German necessarily thinks "I'm personifying this key, and it's a man because the noun is masculine". Does anybody here have any anecdotes?
- Except there's no mandate that "a male" and "a female" are of different noun classes, nor are the nouns for man/woman abnormally privileged in most cases. I know Dutch has fused masculine/feminine nouns into a "common" gender, leaving the language with effectively only the common and neuter genders. If I remember correctly, a similar thing has happened in Swedish and Danish. Some languages have various concepts of animacy driving the system. Some languages have shitloads of noun classes.
You can adjust your language depending on the biological gender of who you're addressing in English, but English doesn't have grammatical gender in any meaningful way. The concepts are largely orthogonal.
Calling it gender really is just a bad, misleading name in the grand scheme of things.
- A lot of languages assign nouns to a noun class. They are (usually) not ascribing a biological gender to an object. "Gender" is a horrendously bad name for the concept.
- Everywhere is in a downturn. ZIRP is over, this isn't limited to automotive. Just because you're not going to be hired within a few days of looking doesn't mean that everything is doom and gloom. Automotive software engineers aren't working for poverty wages.
You don't outright lose years of experience writing C and C++ just because you learned Ada. You're not going to leave a decade of C experience off your resume just because it wasn't the primary language in your last position. Ada isn't for frontend web development where new "technology" gets chewed up and spat out every year or two. It shines in firmware. There's plenty of vendors that haven't moved past C99.
Chalking up a hypothetical appreciable Ada marketshare in automotive as "niche stuff only used in the auto industry" doesn't make sense in that it sees plenty of use in aerospace, defense, and medical. The point of me bringing up AUTOSAR is that Ada is nowhere close to the pigeonhole scenario that AUTOSAR is.
In the world where you only have Ada experience, and you're not a bad programmer, but HR departments are giving you grief, just lie on your resume. Fuck em. We both know that it's not a major adjustment, so brush up on details before you're interviewed and if they asked what you used C/C++ just say you're not at liberty to speak about it. Nobody is going to hit you with anything along the lines of whether or not it's true that monads are just monoids in the category of endofunctors.
- In respect to both points, Ada provides decimal and binary fixed point representations as a first class feature of the language, and in the event you must use floating point, SPARK provides the capability to prove that you're not running into rough edges. It's actually one of the most immediately noticeable features of the language for a firmware developer coming from C, and I'm a bit surprised you don't know about it.
Of course I know that you can do all of this stuff in C. I did it for years. I just don't think there's any sort of honor or expression of skill in getting your balls busted by this stuff being an afterthought, it's just annoying. I know your response will be "get better", and I did, countless people have, and we all still appreciate that these nuisances can be taken care of by the language.
- The Patriot failures were the result of floating point error. Ada provides facilities specifically to deal with this, while you're left rolling your own in C/C++. Of course Ada won't save you from human bugs, but it's silly to say that you're no better off with a language giving you everything it can to avoid them than one that is a notorious fuckup dispenser.
- I'm near Detroit which has a huge amount of auto industry, and engineering pay is good across pretty much all disciplines. It'll pay for a happy life and then some as long as relentless title climbing and job hopping isn't your definition of happiness.
Ada is not some exotic thing that requites SF comp. If it's such a major adjustment coming from C/C++ that it's actually causing you trouble, you have other problems.
It's comical bringing up the automotive industry considering that its responsible for AUTOSAR, which is simultaneously widely hated by engineers and completely useless outside the industry.
- Everything I've heard about it was that it was pressure from contractors because they didn't like training or finding Ada talent.
I get that there's more tools for C++ but first class formal verification support and a language that's generally designed to save you from yourself seems like something you would stand your ground on. Ada is supremely good at killing people and/or keeping them un-killed, there's a reason you still see it kicking around in defense and aerospace despite the common perception that it's a bygone relic.
- Where in my comment did you get that I think culture is a barren plain of consumerism?
Some styles of dance and music, which are a component of an overall culture, are totally centered in large cities. Music is a bizarre thing to bring up -- bumfuck nowhere Midwest smalltown is the origin and inspiration for plenty of music that is listened to well outside of the geographical region it's from. Hardcore punk has plenty of representation from gutted Rust Belt locales, and Midwest emo is straight-up named after it. They do arise and perpetuate themselves in isolated locations, all around the world.
Of course there are cultural aspects that large cities will have and more rural areas won't, as well as the other way around. Neither are lacking culture by virtue of lacking the other's culture.
- Different than what's in a city, and generally not as enjoyable if you're just passively consuming it. Lots of motorsport (auto manufacturing was huge in the area, very long tradition of it), fishing/hunting, local music (some styles represented better than others, but that goes for everywhere), hobbyist heavy industry. There's definitely plenty of other stuff going on that I just haven't heard about. Pretty often I run into situations where I'm talking to somebody about a new interest and they say "yeah, there's actually plenty of that going on, look into/talk to X, Y, or Z". Not so much culinary or visual/fine arts stuff happening, so if you're looking to participate/collaborate as far as that goes, I can tell you off the top of my head that the area would be a bad fit.
If you're looking to be involved in culture for just a few hours at a time by going to a restaurant or show and not being involved much past that, you're going to be painfully bored here. I don't think doing that is a moral shortcoming or anything like that, but there are a lot of people that are doing that, don't realize it, and misinterpret the lack of opportunities to do so outside of a large city as that place just not having any culture at all.
- Is there no culture, or no "culture"?
When you talk to people from a major metropolitan area about culture outside of a major metropolitan area, they're very often not talking about culture. They're talking about entertainment, and a specific kind of it.
I live in semi-rural Michigan and the idea that there's no culture here is just kind of absurd. The culture just doesn't consist of having a constant stream of touring musicians and restaurants for you to spend money on.