I think this comes close to the probable near-future outcome, but is missing an important element.
Over the last several decades we've seen an enormous transfer and consolidation of wealth from many people into a much smaller number of people. I think AI is going to dramatically accelerate this.
Fully open source, locally-hosted AI models are currently lagging far behind their commercial counterparts (in adoption if not capability). The web had a free-for-all period run by free software where it was able to gestate and gain traction before the walled garden era took over. Application development likewise had a long period of time where independent developers were able to build and distribute software (for free or otherwise) before the app store model took over; now, a significant portion of software development needs to be authorized by a third party before it can be distributed to potential users.
We did not get that same gestational period for AI. It went from theory to commercial product astonishingly fast. There are daily threads on HN now comparing how much everyone is "happy" to pay for their favorite commercial AI each month.
Developers are paying companies for the privilege of writing software.
The developers that, for whatever reason, refuse to get on board this train are going to be quickly outcompeted by the rest. Maybe they have been already.
It's likely that by about 2028 or thereabouts, we will see a landscape where just a few commercial entities will have captured the process of software development. If you want to make money making software, you will have to pay one of them to do it.
The people in those commercial entities might wholly be the property (with human rights refactored/disrupted), or indentured servants, of just the members of the alignment team of whichever AI company hits recursive self-improvement first, who live like new emperors.
Flock is absolutely designed to facilitate and encourage this kind of abuse. They have extensive data sharing built in to their system while promising agencies that the users "own" the data.
My local police department just recently got a grant for these and is in the process of setting them up, and I'm working with a number of local technologists and activists to shut it down. We are showing up at every police commission meeting and every city council meeting and keeping actively engaged with local press. I spent almost three hours yesterday having coffee with a police commissioner and I have meeting requests from a number of other local officials. There are similar efforts ongoing in other cities across the U.S.
Immediately after setting up the system -- before all of the devices were even fully online -- our local PD began sharing access with departments in non-sanctuary states. When we asked questions about it, they hid that section from their transparency page. We are cooking them publicly for that.
Flock is VC-funded commercialized mass surveillance.
You can get pretty close to this with VirtualBox, which is one of two reasons I'm still using it.
I have multiple VMs running on my laptop. I can attach an external display and resize the VM windows. When detaching the display, the windows all resize back down automatically. With shared clipboard and a few other niceties, each VM feels pretty close to a native experience.
I have single-application VMs (e.g., the one that hosts my daily-driver browser environment that I'm typing into right now); those run a lightly customized openbox environment and the application is full-screened inside the VM. Those really feel like a Qubes-like experience, like a native application but inside a VM.
I also have purpose-specific VMs. For example, anytime I get started on a new contract, I spin up a new VM for it. All credentials, dev tooling, files, etc. for that project are contained inside that VM. I typically set it up so that there are multiple virtual desktops on my host environment, but a single desktop inside the VM; alt-tab switches tasks inside the VM but not the host environment. So, it's easy to switch "into" the project VM, work there for a while as naturally as I would if everything were native, and then switch out again as needed.
I really really want to swap all of the VirtualBox bits out with QEMU or KVM, but those aren't quite as polished just yet -- despite VirtualBox's numerous and sometimes work-stopping bugs, and the ever-looming threat of Oracle's litigation team.
The author didn't really ask for a code review, though a lot of people imagining themselves in the position of technical hiring manager are already taking care of that.
Anyway: I don't think homework assignments are a valuable mechanism for filtering out candidates. Setting aside shoulds and shouldnots and the ethics of it and everything else, it simply provides a really poor signal for the value of a potential candidate.
Especially today, when something like this particular assignment could just be pasted into any of the popular LLMs and returned as completed within a couple hours.
If an organization wants to hire developers that can take vague project descriptions and convert them into code that may or may not do whatever was in the heads of the people that wrote the project description, then (a) that's a bad practice, but (b) it would be better for everyone involved if you handled this over a video call. If your staff are too busy to do a small pile of video calls with potential candidates over a couple of weeks, then they are too busy to properly onboard a new candidate and you should probably just pack it in. (i.e., they are not too busy to do this.)
If the goal is to hire somebody that knows IMAP, SMTP, POP, etc. inside-and-out and can crank out RFC-compliant code without using any of the third-party libraries that already exist for this sort of thing, then the assignment description should have asked for that.
Homework assignments are an unfortunately common practice, but worst of all, most of them are carelessly designed.
> Especially today, when something like this particular assignment could just be pasted into any of the popular LLMs and returned as completed within a couple hours.
That would have been significantly more in line with what the interviewer was looking for and would have produced better results. It’s a take home test. Use the tools at your disposal.
I'd think it's more along the lines of "candidate can work with ambiguity and can self direct and use tools at their disposal to accomplish something". Things they explicitly asked for which the candidate completely failed to deliver on.
Conversely, if you can't handle some straightforward feedback to a candidate that took the time to interview you without violating decorum or hurting their feelings, then how can I expect you to be a good manager or supervisor? How are you possibly going to be able to handle minor personnel conflicts or provide guidance during the training period? It comes across as a complete lack of basic managerial skills.
Okay, but basic interpersonal skills are a prerequisite for anybody in a senior or team lead position, or any position that will involve code reviews.
I'm sympathetic to how awkward it can feel to provide honest feedback to a candidate, but look: we're all people here. I think we forget that sometimes when we're assembling hiring processes. As a candidate, you need some kind of feedback mechanism that allows you to improve even if you're not a good fit for a particular organization. And if you're involved in the hiring process in any way, you ought to be equipped to handle that.
> you need some kind of feedback mechanism that allows you to improve even if you're not a good fit for a particular organization
"Need". That is a strong term. I disagree. It would be nice, but it is not a need.
This topic has been discussed ad nauseam on HN. In most companies, there is specific company policy that prohibits providing feedback to candidates. There is literally no upside for these companies to provide feedback to candidates that they reject (except Fake/Feel-Good Internet Points, only redeemable on HN forums). Really: There is no way around it, no matter how many tears are spilled about it on HN.
This is simply a defense of bad policy couched in unnecessarily dehumanizing language.
There is widespread resentment of this and many other common hiring practices in the tech sector, and that is further impacting both the quality of candidates as well as employee motivation and satisfaction. The upside for companies is higher quality candidates whose first experience with the company is a hiring process that makes the candidate want to work there.
I broadly agree with this being an unfortunate outcome but you do understand that making candidates who failed your interview want to work at your company is fundamentally limited in how much it actually helps you. Yes, yes, I know some of them may come back and pass the next time, or they tell their friends about how you were super nice and gave them great feedback, but this is pretty rare. If you're doing this, you're doing it out of the goodness of your heart, not because it helps your recruiting pipeline. And, even though I agree with the idea of providing feedback, assuming that people will have positive feelings when you tell them why you didn't accept them is misguided. I have friends who I know personally that have gotten interview feedback and not taken it well. Of course I tell them to shut up and stop poisoning the well for everyone else, but the point is that this is largely not the picture you are presenting it as.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. Providing constructive feedback to a candidate is unlikely to have a direct positive impact on the relationship between that specific candidate and that specific company. It's more of ... whatever the opposite of the tragedy of the commons is. A policy that, if improved, would broadly improve the quality of many candidates for many companies.
Companies have been optimizing for candidates that are an immediate ideal cultural and technological fit. They are all competing for candidates that are the idealized developer, with perfect social skills, a brilliant CV, and deep technical experience that is an exact match for whatever the company is doing at the moment.
That's fine and rational and all, but a necessary consequence of this is that that pool is quite small and there are lots of companies competing for those people. Meanwhile, there are a lot of very good candidates who are underemployed because they aren't getting the opportunity or resources needed to become those idealized employees. This is a game theory outcome where both parties are optimizing themselves into a losing position.
I've been employed in this industry, off and on, for a long time. I assure you that companies didn't always behave this way. There has been a clear, obvious, and severe decline in the hiring experience, and these policies are hurting the entire industry.
It's generally socially frowned-upon to go on a couple of dates with someone and then ghost them. It happens, but it's not considered good practice. We recognize that it's cruel but also leads to a more cynical, detached, overall worse dating experience for everyone. Saying "I don't think this will work out, you seem nice but you're not what I'm looking for right now" is difficult and awkward, but it's also a necessary skill that needs to be maintained. Sometimes people don't react well, but that doesn't make it less necessary: it closes a feedback loop that ultimately allows earnest people who are looking for relationships to learn and grow and become better candidates for the next relationship.
I agree, but my point is that the tragedy of the commons here is more divorced than usual. Companies can barely understand that doing layoffs hurts morale, and that connection is really easy to demonstrate. Trying to convince them that taking on some liability for a slightly better applicant pool seems difficult.
> In most companies, there is specific company policy that prohibits providing feedback to candidates. There is literally no upside for these companies to provide feedback to candidates that they reject
This is the long and short of it.
In the US at least, discrimination laws are expansive. You can -very- easily end up saying something that violates this and putting your company at risk, no matter how good hearted you were attempting to be.
How do you "accidentally" end up saying something that implicates you in discrimination on the basis of legally protected characteristics - what are some examples of that?
This has always felt like an excuse used by people who who just don't want to be caught in their own lies when asked to come up with a real, non-discriminatory reason.
The other comments gave good answers. A lot of people think it means saying something horrible and racist or something, but not at all.
As one pointed out, there's a "well you said it was X, but person Y who got hired did that too. And they're a different race or gender or religion, so that leads me to believe discrimination."
There's also you trying to be helpful, saying something along the line of "well you hesitated a bit and sounded unsure in your answers", only to find out they have some disability that caused that and now have admitted you're discriminating based on it.
Maybe you'll say "well, if I had known, I wouldn't have noticed it or cared." And a lot of candidates would likely say as much up front. But they don't have to tell you about it at all. See how that creates a weird dynamic?
Is it common? Probably not. But it obviously happened or else such rules wouldn't exist. It's one of those things that the bad actors ruin it for everybody. Bigots are never going to admit their reasons - good people will. But bad people will always try to take advantage, regardless.
I think it's more of a case for legal and HR being conservative and super defensive. Not sure if you've ever handled a contract with an internal lawyer, but in my experience they often go for crazy suggestions that the other side would never accept for the sake of protecting the company as much as possible. Might be the same here - HR/legal being super protective and the hiring manager not caring enough to fight back.
> How do you "accidentally" end up saying something that implicates you in discrimination on the basis of legally protected characteristics - what are some examples of that?
Say you say it was for failure to meet a specific performance standard (because that is the documented reason); then the ex-employee has a starting point for an discrimination claim by looking for evidence that trnds to support the claim that people who differ on some protected-from-discrimination axis who failed to meet that standard were not fired. No reason given, no starting point. In theory, this policy helps make false nuisance claims more work and less likely, but a substantive reason for it is that HR knows that they cannot eliminate all prohibited acts by managers that would create liability, so making it harder to get a starting point for gathering evidence is important to prevent valid claims from materializing. HR policy does not exist to protect employees from unlawful treatment, it exists to protect the company from liability for such treatment. Sometimes thise two interests align, but when it comes to information about firing decisions they do not.
There’s similar things that can be done with other prohibited reasons for dismissal, loke retaliation; but the idea is any information you give makes it easier for them to make a case against you.
This is also, in reverse, why, as a departing employee (whether departing voluntarily or not), you should never participate in an exit interview or, if you must as a condition of some severance or other pay or benefit, never volunteer any information beyond the bare minimum necessary; one significant purpose of such interviews is to document information useful either for potential claims against you or to defend against any potential claims you might have, including those you have not yet discovered, against the company.
Part of it is, if anything can be taken slightly out of context to imply something discriminatory, there are those who will abuse the system and sue. At a large enough scale this can become a real problem. If the company policy is "never say anything" there's nothing to be taken out of context, reducing the chance of a lawsuit.
I bet you this comes back to insurance, as many things do in the corporate world. Sufficiently large companies probably have insurance coverage for discrimination lawsuits, or at least employment disputes in general. The coverage probably costs less if you have a "no feedback" policy.
Who are you trusting as a technical interviewer if you don't already trust them to give negative feedback internally?
Do you not code review? Are you a rubber stamp "LGTM" shop that should just be pushing to main but cargo culted the ceremony because github has it built in?
I worked with this particular "team", in this exact position, for over a year and I cannot recommend strongly enough against it, especially for someone that has just regained their mental health.
Those two people should not be in a supervisory role over any other engineer, ever.
We are self-healing, regenerating, low-power, versatile, autonomous, and most of us have a pretty decent array of sensors built-in, along with some communications equipment that's capable of interpreting the signals from our sensors and transmitting that information to other humans in a remarkable variety of ways. All of these are approximate and relative of course, if someone replies with e.g., "but actually we're not as low power as...", it will be easy to ignore.
Specialized machines can do things humans can't, of course. No single human could have survived as long in the Martian environment as any of the rovers have.
But nobody has yet designed a machine that can do all the things humans can do.
Take the single problem of mobility: many very smart engineers have worked together to develop a set of wheels that can usually move the rovers around their environment without getting stuck or damaged, or at least have a chance of getting unstuck. A human that hasn't climbed a set of stairs in a decade can still outpace the rovers, and do so over more varied terrain, and with less chance of getting stuck.
So, yes, from an engineering point of view, building new robots that can do things and shipping them to Mars to do those things presents a lot of very interesting technical challenges to solve. It's all endless puzzles and little unsung feats of science and engineering -- assuming there is a country left with both the will and the resources and the talent to pursue such things.
But from a human exploration perspective -- our instinctive drive, or compulsion, or whatever it is, that has spread our species across the entire planet -- no machine will ever quite satisfy the desire to have that experience with the sensors we were born with.
My enthusiasm for a human mission to Mars has waned quite a bit in the last few years, largely owing to its most vocal advocate. Still, all the same, I think we should acknowledge that robots are poor substitutes for geologists.
I can certainly agree that humans, regarded as perfected creatures of biological engineering, would make for an extraordinary Mars rover. You can make the case that we even the best among all animals for that job here on Earth (we are that good, a fascinating convo for another thread).
The trouble is space itself is really rough in new and different ways. Even if everything is going right, the radiation is extremely dangerous, both on the journey and on Mars itself. And there's bone decalcification which happens very fast. And life support systems issues become very quickly entangled with all the other engineering issues that can cause cascading failures between systems, so even if you didn't think of (say) engineering failures of how power gets to some component as a life support issue, it can become one due to the interdependence of systems.
> Take the single problem of mobility: many very smart engineers have worked together to develop a set of wheels that can usually move the rovers around their environment without getting stuck or damaged, or at least have a chance of getting unstuck. A human that hasn't climbed a set of stairs in a decade can still outpace the rovers, and do so over more varied terrain, and with less chance of getting stuck.
Yeah, we’ve got great fine motor skills and high dexterity, but are obviously still too dumb to emulate those parts effectively.
There absolutely is a theology of business, and currently it is this: make as much money as possible.
Commercial software existed long before the subscription model consumed everything, and it was, and still is, sustainable. Subscriptions didn't consume the software ecosystem because the alternative is not sustainable; subscriptions took over because they make more money (and often for less effort).
It's fine if you want to describe that as rational decision-making in business contexts, but I have to object if you cross a line into arguing that there are no viable alternatives. There are subscriptions, and then there are less profitable alternatives.
Exacly. Additionaly, you can sell software and include a year support bundle. If you want to have longer support (or extend support), you have to play extra (pear year). That sounds reasonable.
A lot of talented people are struggling right now, but could take the time and energy they're spending on fruitless job applications and devote it to some modest-scale side project with commercial potential.
Worst-case scenario, you get an interesting portfolio project and something to talk about at a future interview. Possibly, you get something that pays the bills and avoids having to deal with everything that's gone wrong with tech hiring.
If you've been laid off from a technical role, you probably came away with enough knowledge to build a competing micro-service.
Few people, even in decently earning roles like in tech, will have the runway to try and make something successful on their own all of a sudden after job loss.
Starting a freelancing practice is more likely to bear fruit, but it's a very different ballgame of overheads than "just" the core job itself, if you want to get the full rewards of being a freelancer.
"Making money is easy, just go out there and make money" is effectively what you're saying.
It takes time to find and execute these ideas. Yes the tech can be cheap, maybe even building it can be cheap, but the time to grow your customer & client base from scratch can be highly varied.
If it were really this easy, you'd have every person on IndieHackers having ditched their jobs already because their ideas have taken off. Yet very few have.
Go out and execute, yes, but it can take many iterations to get anywhere.
Even Pieter Levels has about a 10% hit rate on his projects being successful.
I think you're being pretty dismissive here. That person is talking about someone who currently isn't working and is struggling to find work. "idle bandwidth". Nobody is saying it's simple or easy, but if you're in this field you have the skills to at least try. I've been laid off for 9 months so I understand the toll it takes mentally, but having a pessimistic attitude won't help you in the short or long term.
I'm still daily-driving an iPhone 7, so I sympathize. A few apps have complained about the older OS; so far I've been able to react by deleting the apps.
Smartphones cause a truly astonishing amount of waste (https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2018/12/11/right-to-repair-...: ~151 million phones discarded in the US each year, as of 2018), to say nothing of the various social follow-on effects that are being argued to death elsewhere. I was a very late smartphone adopter and I'm already trying to reduce the amount I depend on this thing; too much of their marketing always struck me as being more akin to new sneakers than life-improving tech.
As a dev I understand the challenges of supporting older hardware. As a conscious consumer, I wish there were another option available in the market, and I haven't yet decided what I'll do when my current device finally needs to be retired.
That article is awfully short on estimating environmental impact.
Other sources on the web say that, including 4 years of electricity usage, an iPhone's total carbon impact is ~175 pounds of CO2, or about 9 gallons of gasoline. Which is roughly 0.25% of emissions from driving a car the average amount for four years.
Imperceptible changes to urban planning to shave off a few miles of driving would have a bigger impact than doubling the lifetimes of mobile phones.
Let's not define "environmental impact" solely in terms of carbon emissions and then do a trivial comparison to some mundane activity.
Smartphones may have a low carbon emission footprint relative to some other things (numbers I found varied widely) and that still wouldn't be a good argument for discarding them unnecessarily.
Their production and disposal has a great deal of other side effects that aren't defined by carbon emissions, including the mining and refining of rare metals. I would very much like to link a comprehensive examination of this here but I regret that I haven't got one in my bookmarks already and search results are being as useless as usual. If anyone else has a particularly great link to share I'd love to see it too.
You're definitely helping me prove my point, what are those other environmental impacts?
Let's imagine we can stop a single car from needing to be produced: that will dwarf all the mining impacts from probably thousands of phones! Cars are soooo much worse along any angle you can possibly imagine, yet people are misdirected from their use of cars to worrying about miniscuke rounding errors from their phones.
Suppose (made up scenario) we can stop a million phones being discarded every week by mandating that camera modules have to be replaceable by third-parties.
We can drop that legislation tomorrow, basically no problem.
Are you gonna say, no we have to wait and do cars first because a car is equal in carbon to 20 phones (or whatever).
Cars are one of the large container targets, but it takes years to change urban environments, to build transportation infrastructure, to change building zones, etc., to prepare the way for people using alternative transport (or none). Unless you can win over your citizens (and politicians who are in lobbies pockets) for a grand plan like 'no more new cars from now on'.
That cars are such a slow mover is the reason that we need to focus on it now, rather than later.
I don't think you hypothetical would change even a tiny fraction of phone replacements, but even if it did, legislative bandwidth in the US is extremely low and should be reserved for the high impact changes. Anything that distracts from the must-do messages is quite likely to be harmful.
We make people jump through all sorts of hoops for plastic straws and plastic bags that have approximately zero environmental win compared to far smaller changes to their car use.
The real problem is the social attitude that cars can not be touched or criticized. That needs to start changing.
Our phones are not the core of climate change, our cars and all the massive environmental damage from mining the necessary minerals for them really are.
The first step when doing optimization is to measure, so that one knows where efforts have significant results.
I am arguing that our efforts should be in proportion to their payoff for environmental efforts as well.
Or more precisely, we should spend our environmental efforts in ways that maximize their returns.
Thus, here I am spending lots of time commenting on how a tiny minor change in driving habits will have bigger effects than large changes in phone habits.
Urban planning in the US responds to the demands of the residents. We should be asking all residents demand alternatives to driving.
Urban planning in the US was a result of the oil lobby. It has nothing to do with the demands of residents except insofar as they were also brainwashed by the oil lobby.
It can't be limited to just the oil lobby, it was a general movement with lots of different proponents, not the least the car companies! In fact the car companies quite a bit more. But the urban planning establishment definitely adopted car-only infrastructure with gusto, without any direct oil or car money behind it.
"Our analysis shows that a 1-year lifetime extension of all smartphones in the EU would save 2.1 Mt CO2 per year by 2030, the equivalent of taking over a million cars off the roads. A lifetime extension of 3 years would save around 4.3 MtCO2. And a 5-year extension would correspond to about 5.5 MtCO2."
The extra global warming contributions come from "manufacturing, transportation and end-of-life phases", and the increasing dependency on remote servers.
Exactly, it's the production of the phones where most of the carbon is generated.
As for the comparisons there, it's hard to make head or tails of the meaning, because the "context" provided is apples to oranges. A million cars versus how many phones? Or a million cars versus how many cars in Europe? Citing a big number does not mean much unless we have something to compare that big number to, and I question the intentions of such "bald big numbers" because I see it so often used to muddy the waters and confuse people on many topics. For example, nuclear advocates will often disparage solar, talking about X million square kilometers without giving any context on whether that's actually a big number or not.
2.1Mt CO2 (over how many years with that "by 2030") versus how many Gt Co2 per year? Seems to be 2.5-3.1Gt/year based on a web search..
And what percentage of total EU emissions are from cars?
These numbers also make the argument that phones are a small rounding error compared to other much bigger actions.
Should we mandate repairability? Of course! It's good! But getting bent out of shape on the impact of phones compared to far more common and wasteful practices is a bad use of our limited amount of time to make drastic action.
And the EU is far better on cars than the US, so perhaps it makes more sense for them to take action on phones, but in the US, our car addiction makes for far better and practical environmental action.
I would argue that not lowering our car use drastically is a tragedy, and that our phone waste is a rounding error in comparison. And that the second tragedy is that so much media effort is spent focusing the public on rather meaningless phone waste rather than something meaningful like car use.
There are a lot of carbon emissions from a variety of sources. Coal fired power generates more CO2 in the US than all US automobiles combined. Does that mean we should completely ignore automobiles and focus on coal power?
Focusing on the "smallest" problem at the expense of the "biggest" is the wrong approach. But ignoring small problems that are easier to fix is also the wrong approach. The author is using a phone that is more than 6 years old and still functions; making it easier to continue using it feels like an easier problem than changing urban planning.
Coal is a dead man walking, not just in the US, but around the world. Systematic market forces have eliminated any financial advantage to coal. China uses it to fill in for gaps in renewables, but has very low capacity factors for their plants.
IMHO we should spend lobbying efforts on the things that will have greater effects, like approving apartment buildings in walkable areas.
I agree with your assessment that we should change what we can and should optimize how we spend our time creating change, but IMHO the best possible outcome of advocating for phone change is that people think "hey yeah let's change this," but then get told "oh so you are OK with that change, how about something far far bigger for small effort?"
We seriously only need to do very small changes to urban planning to effect massive change compared to phones. And those small changes have the effect of growing. And they are necessary urban planning changes, and the longer we put them off the less likely we can have the snowball rolling where we need it to be.
> cannot be pinned on consumer choices. Which is why it would never become the locus of attention.
Can you explain your reasoning here? I think you are saying that we focus all of our environmental action through the lens of consumer choice, which is something that I also think is true.
We can encourage the public to make better individual choices, but a far better approach is to change the system so that the default choice is the best choice.
But when it comes to phones, a lot of the policy action seems to be set on forcing companies to behave in a certain way, which IMHO is perfectly cromulent if the environmental payoff is proprotionate to the effort.
My focus has been on changing the attitudes towards policy changes that broaden the choices of individuals, to allow them to even choose a better path that is not currently available, because urban planning has banned walkable neighborhoods in nearly every part of every city.
I am using it because it's the only impact that I see measured anywhere on electronic waste, and I have spent a fair amount of time trying to figure it out on my own.
If you have a better quantification of species lost, of ecological diversity lost, of land lost, I would absolutely love to hear it, but I have not found anything better despite my research!
Also, the environmental and ecological damage that we are facing from global warming is so utterly massive in comparison to all other ecological damage that we do, that any other avoided damage needs to be placed in the context of halting global warming. Humans will survive climate change, and a lot of other species will survive too, but the dieoff of species from it is so shocking that focusing on the small amounts of mining for phones in comparison to the massive amounts of mining and e-waste from cars seems, well, at best misguided. And if I'm being more honest, I think it's actually quite harmful to environmental action to focus any attention on phones when action on cars is so much more impactful.
> A few apps have complained about the older OS; so far I've been able to react by deleting the apps.
Not about the phone (I have iPhone 12), but I have an app called Trunk Notes which is a wiki reader / editor. It was one of the only wiki apps I found that could work cooperatively with my own markdown vimwiki that I keep on my desktop (and sync via Dropbox or similar).
A few years back, it complained that it would no longer work in iOS version something-or-other and the author apologized because he could no longer maintain it. I never got around to deleting it, and to my surprise it still works to this day.
Yearly phone upgrades are akin to new sneakers. People want the latest thing, they do not need it. Phones have not improved for years in significant ways. There has been no new features. Only improvement has been cameras, but really how good of a camera does your average person need in their daily lives?
I only replaced my iPhone 7 in 2021, with an SE, because it's a work phone and they didn't want to deal with battery replacement. It was (/is) is a perfectly capable phone for the vast majority of people.
I love that Apple locks other people out of using even genuine parts for repairs and servicing, but is happy to collect them from people to reuse, themselves.
Over the last several decades we've seen an enormous transfer and consolidation of wealth from many people into a much smaller number of people. I think AI is going to dramatically accelerate this.
Fully open source, locally-hosted AI models are currently lagging far behind their commercial counterparts (in adoption if not capability). The web had a free-for-all period run by free software where it was able to gestate and gain traction before the walled garden era took over. Application development likewise had a long period of time where independent developers were able to build and distribute software (for free or otherwise) before the app store model took over; now, a significant portion of software development needs to be authorized by a third party before it can be distributed to potential users.
We did not get that same gestational period for AI. It went from theory to commercial product astonishingly fast. There are daily threads on HN now comparing how much everyone is "happy" to pay for their favorite commercial AI each month.
Developers are paying companies for the privilege of writing software.
The developers that, for whatever reason, refuse to get on board this train are going to be quickly outcompeted by the rest. Maybe they have been already.
It's likely that by about 2028 or thereabouts, we will see a landscape where just a few commercial entities will have captured the process of software development. If you want to make money making software, you will have to pay one of them to do it.