Hi all,
I was considering buying my first smartwatch (I normally wear a basic Casio), but the only good-looking and not distracting models I see around are old refurbished Pebble models (Steel etc.). Do you think it would still be possible to use one well today, and use its features even though the parent company died long ago? I saw that the community is still quite big, but have no clue if that reflects into actual usability for a normal user. I am still quite sad that Fitbit bought and killed the best smartwatch around.
A small update: Thanks Lemmy! I found a great job in a green/electricity related business
Telegram has had crypto focus since ~2020, to the point of spamming me in chats with "sponsored" (official!) messages to buy their shady token a couple of years ago, and spawning a grey market to buy and sell usernames with crypto auctions.
Signal tried including an own crypto token for in-app psyments as well (of this bunch, it's the only company I have some compassion for - they need to make money somehow, and didn't want to compromise the core model) but the backlash was insane and they either hid it really deep in the app, or just gave up entirely
It is the 202* (brainless) CEO red flag. Don't make money? Try speculating on crypto and saying it is your new core business
Proudly tested by teams at
- Tesla
- Signal
- Discord
- Telegram
- tens of others I have forgotten, but which also miserably failed
Further proof of how isolated these CEOs live from the real world
Similar here lately :)
I don't use socials apart from occasionally Mastodon (which is interestingly not addictive, thanks to the chronological/honest UX!) and Insta, which I open in the browser to check what people write me and log out from afterwards.
I also use YT in the browser, because the app is such an offensive blend of addiction patterns. Sadly Chrome for Android (willingly?) removed Chromecast support from web-based YT (...it was there years ago, iirc?)
Also, I disabled notifications for non-urgent apps, and took a redundant online/offline approach to essential things (e.g. calendar, notes and so on) to be sure I don't need to pull out my phone all the time. Nonetheless, I find myself using it a lot more than it used to be, which is quite sad
Naive question, how did you battle your phone addiction in simple terms?
I found myself using my phone a lot more after the pandemic (from 1.45-ish to 3-ish daily) and I hate myself - less than 1h would be more than enough for healthy usage in my case :(
Although I am not experienced with iPhone prices, shouldn't a non-official replacement cost somewhere between $30 and $50? I tend to repair my Android phone batteries every 2-3 years at home, and alongside light software mods they become impressively more usable in the long run.
Dear lemmy,
This is my first post here after switching from the alien platform, so I am very pleased to meet you! The community seems still small but very welcoming, so I hope you can help me shed some light nonetheless.
As a long-term ("hobby" at first) programmer, and now finishing my Master's, I have been deeply concerned (if not a bit too anxious, ngl) about what's going around lately and what I want to do in the future. With the environmental crisis going broader, and the nasty evolution of SV companies to greedy giants, I am struggling to find a good alternative.
I am a CS grad from a large European city, with fairly good resumé (several unis, a couple of scholarships, good grades, a couple of FOSS projects + short internships), and I would be looking to find my first job (sigh, i know) in the next six months or so.
I first started studying CS naively thinking I could make a good impact through my code (and after a long while in the Linux/FOSS community), but this seems to be getting extremely hard with most corporations getting even greedier lately.
The first big issue is that I feel a bit more concerned than usual about the ethics of the work I do, even if it means earning a bit less. Money is less of a problem also because as long as I can live in a queer-safe place, and have decent quality of life and healthcare, I do not care about hoarding too much. In all honesty, not requiring a car is a priority, which means requiring a central, well-connected place, but also keeping transport expenses a bit lower.
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My first "red flags" were raised when I did some projects with consulting companies. They initially came to me selling themselves as a golden place to "work on interesting projects with clients" - a claim which, don't laugh, I first believed due to know knowing what they were. There's no way to put it, I hated that kind of work so bad. Not only were the work ethics and communication absolutely terrible, but it felt like all I was taught was professional lying. Literally, I felt like I produced the worst quality material of my life and was told to sell it like gold to the naive companies in front of me.
Then I tried startups - young, lively companies, they said. The first group to welcome me were the endless VC-funded "ethical fintech" startups, and people I met there were the shallowest, most elitarian, and greedy I ever met - to the point nobody even cared about honesty and friendship if it did not mean immediate utility and networking. Not to mention the long working hours, and all-encompassing "no WLB" culture because "we're a big family", with toxically positive management all around and hiding issues under the rug. Personal issues I had with some managers were hidden and never addressed. I left.
Of course, Big Tech does not look good either. OpenAI, Meta, and Tesla are horrible companies, and Google and Apple seem to be following them on the same track.
At least 95% of my friends from similar background (praised by the same scholarships, etc.) went to either defense projects (think "using AI data to spy people" kind of projects), consulting, finance, big-tech, or (unethical) fast-growth startups.
In the risk of being overly dramatic (...isn't the whole post already?), I was a bit saddened to see how nobody of them cared the least about "what are the consequences of the code I am writing?". One of my friends offered me even to refer me for a high-paid HFT job in London on a tech I was working on, trying to comfort me by saying that "when they pay me so much money, you stop thinking about what you do".
And in some cities, like the one I live in right now in Germany, it feels like there is no escape from the greedy, aggressively competitive, "LinkedIn startup-bro", mentality.
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University let me survive on my concerns quite happily, and I never felt the pressure to be greedy or give up ethics throughout these years. It feels so weird, after years of happiness, to be all at once to be "the one off". The thing is, I never became more demanding about this, but maybe due to personality, or maybe due to my background, I just felt like privacy and human rights are a no-go in all the work I've been doing.
My question is simple: is there any way to start a career in "good" tech, contribute to creating positive impact, and not feel guilty about what I am doing in daily life? I have (entry level) experience mostly on embedded/firmware/kernel dev and in full-stack web/app design and development, so say e.g. Fairphone or Signal would appear as rare examples of ethical companies out there - though they don't sadly take entry-level candidates.
A good middle ground would also be a job that does not make good impact, but at least does not worsen the situation: e.g., working at Texas Instruments, ARM, Intel, or some other chip company would sound like a fairly ethical and harmless choice.
Also, because I am happy to move anywhere in Europe or the UK, is there any city that has more of an ethical than of the usual competitive, SV-copycat culture all around? I get this idea that Berlin and Amsterdam must be slightly easier places to find ethically conscious companies than other towns, but I do not know the scene there in much depth.
Thanks for reading! Hope the wall of text was not too annoying to parse :) ~R