Hah, my curse is calls always finding weird ways to drop. Then I moved to a place with no cell service, because I’m apparently a wireless masochist?

There’s some slight technical reason for it, but I think they swung a bit too far in the asshole direction with blocking too many.

The LTE rollout was completely botched from the start. LTE voice is technically supported on all LTE chipsets, but early on the voice spec changed. Early phones used LTE for data and 2G or 3G for voice.

Complicating matters further, AT&T and Verizon both have separate and slightly tweaked versions of the spec, as they didn’t want to wait for it to be finalized, and of course they’re both different in different ways. It’s also why T-Mobile allows so many devices. They just rode their very fast for the time HSPA+ network until LTE was finalized, got generic hardware on the network, and flipped the power switch.

To top it off, AT&T was sued at one point for 911 not working due to a handset bug and they got very controlling at that point to avoid future lawsuits.

VoLTE is ostensibly VoIP over cellular data at its core. All phones have to talk with the correct SIP signaling on VoLTE for voice calls to work. With 2G and 3G, the circuit-switched method of signaling was much more standardized (although not necessarily simpler, WCDMA at its end spanned literal volumes of books.) This made it so phones and networks were more easily compatible for basic things like voice, 911, etc.

Now, on top of Verizon and AT&T thinking that rolling their own flavors of LTE was a good idea, every phone maker also had their own idea about how the VoLTE SIP signaling was supposed to work. Due to flaws in the LTE spec, carriers going rogue, and companies interpreting things wrong, it has turned quite literally into a clusterfuck.

TL;DR: It took a long time for LTE to standardize enough across product lines, and there are a whole bunch of phone models that don’t talk the language quite right. So carriers chose to ban rather than make workarounds or work with the vendor to roll a software fix to the phone.

You think Thunderbird is insulated? Their latest big drunk UI lift seems to have somehow made it even less intuitive.

You have a preferred mobile app to access the service you’d recommend?

Recently tried MS Office apps for the first time in 8 or so years. Somehow they made them less intuitive than even ribbon days. They use a dark pattern save dialog that makes it easy to accidentally save to OneDrive, and if you have OneDrive disabled or uninstalled, there’s an always present icon in the title bar of the main edit window that says “autosave off” even though autosave is on.

Went right back to LibreOffice after one document and one spreadsheet.

Point the ticket using the value of a cryptocurrency.

First they have to integrate Google Meet with it so they can have three Meet clients.

My best guess is that I know one of them uses Facebook. Apple phones. Facebook, Uber, and a few others have had pretty deep access to APIs not accessible to other software companies. Sometimes they’re caught like when Uber was caught using a screen scraping API. Sometimes they aren’t. The other guess that glues it together is that Facebook has indeed scraped audio to text for a long time. It was almost 10 years ago that I had the EE conversation.

Google and Meta pay Apple money to gain access to their user metrics. It’s likely symbiotic relationships. Facebook once had hooks directly in iOS. Likewise, the little mic/video indicators the OS displays when they are “active” are completely software-controlled and can be overridden.

At a time, I worked at a company that had(has) deep access to other aspects of iOS. Apple always required the source code is available to them so they could inspect it. I doubt that has changed. It also means they would be complicit. External tools wouldn’t really be able to figure this out. For someone to black-box this they’d need a jailbroken iPhone and some specialized tooling or MITM decryption capabilities.

Not to sound hyperbolic, I’m connecting dots with no evidence, it’s pure speculation. The compute seems to be there and with no regulation in source code, anything goes, if you want money bad enough. Especially with the mad dash every tech company has been on for the last 20ish years to harvest everything they can, ever since smartphones became powerful and commonplace enough.

It’s surprisingly easy to use adtech without voice and make a connection to serve a targeted ad. Had a friend ask me about what I was drinking. They were on my guest wifi network. They searched for it. Next day, I’m getting ads because of geoIP pinned my IP address as having an interest.

Also had someone that lives off the grid with no active network or devices watch a DVD of a movie and the entirety of their Internet connectivity was two cell phones in the room. They started seeing things related to the movie. They’re older and not constantly on their phones. The phones just sit somewhere in the room.

Had a discussion with some tech friends a few years back and remarked that keeping awake to do this would take a lot of power. The EE mentioned running audio recording would take basically nothing. I expanded from there, the device uploads audio for off-phone translation to text, or queues batch jobs to process locally when power is high enough or on charger. Etc.

It is 100% probable that code runs on phones and just ships off amalgamated text frequency charts or entire conversations and the user won’t even notice the battery dent.

That being said, I can’t find even in the greediest capitalist money-claw that the person giving a go would not think, “well, I can’t trust my own device anymore…” and maybe go: “yeah, I shouldn’t do this.” Maybe I’m too optimistic though.

Certs have existed a long time, are never implemented correctly, and the expiration cycle that is supposed to bolster security just causes pain as a result.

Certs should just be redesigned to have a kill switch. CRLs were supposed to handle that, but are rarely implemented or implemented correctly.

Certs are also used in so many places where they may not be suited to the task, but because they exist, they’ve become the de-facto standard.

A temporal expiration system seems flawed from the beginning anyway. What, you don’t trust your system anymore just because time has passed? Time is always passing. Are we all secretly racist against clocks now?

Have you seen how American corps code? 80% is GM release ready to go.

Made a joke when 6x CD-ROM drives came out that 6 in German is sechs. Sechs drive, sex drive, hurr-durr.

I was in middle school.

LLMs have improved my education, work life, and general knowledge search. I get more time to spend living my life and less trying to find one dude’s stacked change post from 2009 that fixed my problem.

They allow me to access information the way I learn and operate in a way that textbooks, college education, video courses, or online classes have never allowed me to do in my entire life.

That being said, the general AI buzz and buzzwords need to die, the real positives need to be celebrated.

Really curious to see how the modem stacks up, but I also guess reviewers given demo devices were told to not talk about or play down the modem performance, rather than fix the problem.

Hold on now, let us not start using logic when referring to computer programming here. It’s all magic and bumbling around on a keyboard.

I’d like another choice, both platforms have become terrible metric-collecting, dark-pattern-infused data-harvesting trash. (iPhone users, don’t believe the commercials claiming privacy.)

Because they love and believe their corporate daddies they so worship, especially in the US.

Smartwatches are a really interestingly sad storyarc.

I got into smartwatches early on with Pebble. It was the correct balance of battery life to functionality. Then Big Tech accelerated to, “let’s run a phone OS on a watch” - which came with terrible battery life and sluggishness. Still, the OG Moto 360 was actually “not bad”. The LG Watch Sport added a SIM card slot and a cellular modem. Now we’re cooking with gas! I’d trade off bad battery life to have a parasite phone on my wrist. Also Google acquired and killed Pebble, because of course they did.

At the time of the LG Watch Sport, T-Mobile also released DIGITS, which made it so I could cobble together a parasite SIM card that receives my calls and texts on the watch and build out what “modern smartphones + smartwatches” do without the high bill and vendor lock-in. It also had cellular antennas built into the strap, so you couldn’t replace the strap, but you at least had decent RF.

Apple’s watch came out, and showed promise, but to this day suffers from a few critical bugs that they’ve never completely fixed.

Bugs, namely:

• A dependency on keeping iMessage turned on to send/receive SMS from the watch. The watch can’t do any messaging directly, it has to use Apple’s cloud via data. A watch is a perfect use case for simple text messaging!
• The biggest: there’s a continual glitch where WiFi calling and/or cellular calling will get screwed up. You won’t know it until you’re away from your phone and suddenly have to place a voice call, and can’t. This is a core feature of having cellular on a watch. There is no way to resolve this other than backing up the watch and resetting to factory defaults and then restoring. This will happen every few months, you won’t know when it happens until you need the feature.

Then they all started throwing health features into the smartwatches. Likely to try and vendor-lock you into a platform. I tried some Withings watches for a while, and their hybrid (what I always call “dumb-smartwatch”) was a refreshing take back to the Pebble days with a bit of style. Unfortunately, Withings saw the sweet sweet candy of medical industry money, and their smartwatch line has really stagnated while the app rots on the vine.

I’ve been maintaining periodic cross-links to maintain health sync so I’m not vendor locked in to one set of data, like Samsung->Withings or Garmin->HealthSync->Somewhere else or the most convoluted at one point was like Samsung->Withings, Withings->Fitbit (with a donor old Fitbit used just to get the app up but then not carried) then Fitbit -> whatever health app I was using at the time. So that whole thing is a topic itself, that getting your health data around is a complex chore that nobody should have do deal with. Yet the vendors make that health data so constantly in your face! Time to sit, time to stand, time to breathe, time to drink water, DANCE PUPPET DANCE! On Apple’s platform, their health app does make cross-sync easier-ish, but also in a lot of smartwatch forums, there are many posts of duplicate data or data from the wrong user cross-syncing, so something is funky there too.

Samsung had one good smartwatch as far as I’m concerned and it was the OG 46mm Galaxy Watch with cellular, running Tizen. It had great multiday battery life, cellular capability, enough storage to put a few playlists in it, the physical rotating bezel to select UI items with a click where each click meant one menu (throwback to the old BB 8700g what what!), all the notes of being a device on your wrist that lasts a few units of time and works on its core function. It even had a barometric pressure sensor on-watch so you could see if a storm was coming without Internet.

It seems, especially with Big Tech all having AI hardons now, that they don’t know what to do with the watch lines now. The chipsets really haven’t accelerated like they should. Qualcomm took entirely too long to get their watch chipset power requirements down. The 3GPP spec for 5G IOT is mostly finished but that doesn’t mean chips exist, there will be many years until the chips start showing up in watches. They also also really haven’t nailed down thermal issues. I was once at cell edge on GW 5 Pro, and 10 seconds into placing a voice call, the modem became too hot and the watch went into thermal throttle mode where it sleeps everything until it cools. How could that ever be depended upon?? (That was actually the line for me giving up on caring about a watch with a modem. If you can’t call 911 for more than 5 seconds, what’s the point?)

Then, since carriers have always forced vendor-lock for pairing of smartwatches now, and smartwatches no longer have SIM card slots, you can only use Verizon post-paid or AT&T post-paid to pair a watch, forcing expensive post-paid plans (except the weird outliers like Visible + Apple Watch, or Fi with Samsung watch) and now they’re raising the rates to $15-20/month for a watch that might use 20KB of data a month!

Now Google’s watch can’t even be repaired? These companies want this tech to die.

Instead they could have been looking at/heading towards wrist cuffs like something out of Death Stranding that fully replaces the need to carry a pocket computer. Which they would hate, of course, because then you’re not buying 5 devices, you’re buying one.

Garmin might be the only company doing smartwatches right these days. They focus on their core functionality and iterate. They tried LTE, realized it stunk, and gave up. They have solar charging to boost battery life, low-power tech like memory-in-pixel transreflective displays, and great multi-day battery life. They don’t have all the bells and whistles of other brands, but, they seem to actually want the product line to succeed…and they’re not trying to nickel-and-dime users with monthly fees.

While you have to look elsewhere to do it, yelp or a browser answer the hours question.

No, none of them have a lot of local compute, not enough ram or cpu.