Yeah, I see your point: I want the best camera on the go, therefore I buy Pro, but then complain about weight. Human nature I suppose 😂

I wouldn’t worry too much either way. We won’t get back the plastic pop off backs of yesteryear. While “removable batteries” get the most clicks the rules aren’t really regulating phone design, but try to reduce e-waste and force OEMs to plan for recycling batteries. The part about removability is a soft “should”, while there are hard “must” quotas for circular battery usage and recycling. Apple will probably need to stop their practices of DRMing batteries (which they already partially did in the EU, as far as I know, I switched the battery in my old 12M, before gifting it and iOS didn’t raise any warnings about the battery). But implementation of non-binding EU rules into national law is susceptible to interpretation and OEMs will lobby heavily. IP68 rating is here to stay, so is adhesive, I can imagine you don’t need special tools, but still need to release some screws and adhesive before swapping the battery in the end.

Not really surprising. All corporate social media follows an initial trend, which steeply drops off after the first few days/weeks. Doesn’t mean Threads is doomed or anything.

Twitter wasn’t really “popular”, especially outside the US (and Japan, if I remember correctly), no matter how much so called “journalists” amplified its content. Even the most favorable estimates (which will be completely wrong, considering how many sock puppets and bots there are on any given platform), put Twitter’s MAU at a quarter of Instagrams’, which itself isn’t even the biggest social network. This speaks volumes to how interested the general population is in a text-first social network, compared to an image centric one.

Instagram’s large user base and the exclusivity/scarcity narrative, which is customary for new social networks forever (Threads was touted as so evil, it was banned in the EU! This was definitely not meant as a cautionary tale but felt very gimmicky to me) will have helped Threads acquire a lot of curious Instagram users, who quickly lost interest in a wall of uninteresting text and returned to their algorithmically presented pictures.

I believe a lot of engagement on Twitter to be completely fake, crediting it in part to bots and in part to an outrage fueling algorithm. When a lot of famous Twitter users migrated to Mastodon a few months back, the first thing they noted has been the much lower engagement, partially due to the smaller user base, but also due to much less bots. A lot of them are still looking for a new home, but cannot get rid of the dopamine hits of a “viral” twitter post and Zucc might just have the stuff for them.

Threads will stay around and probably split or assimilate the negligible small user base of Twitter in time, while truly federated platforms like Mastodon or Lemmy will have trouble on boarding (and retaining) comparable user groups, since they are missing the outrage farming algorithm and the fake engagement.

The 14P (~200g, if I remember correctly, feels even heavier) is one of the heaviest phones I ever owned, especially compared to my 12 before it, but even compared to my Xs, which already felt heavy at the time. In the past I always agreed with statements of „just make the phone thicker“ for more battery, or to hide the bump. But with the 14P I cannot agree: just make the bump smaller an reduce weight.

My TV hasn’t been connected to the internet except for very specific updates I preemptively researched what they included. Otherwise it’s a „dumb TV“.

Destiny 2’s migration from battle.net to Steam on the other hand …

I’m hosting on DigitalOcean and buy the URL somewhere else (GoDaddy in my case). If DO becomes to expensive under load I’ll move to AWS. Have done this with a few other projects the same way: start out and tinker, finding a good setup on DO and move to AWS for price efficiency.

haha, I have the same experience tbh, but I still get the obvious “I don’t want to update my drivers or fiddle with settings and controls, I just want something that works”, responses. I don’t even recognize these topics as “pain” anymore, but this probably just shows how high my tolerance has become in the last decades.

Totally, this means even more pain one has to like a little.

I always compare self hosting to PC gaming: it has some very specific benefits, but you don’t even comprehend, how many downsides you will encounter you cannot even start to anticipate. If one doesn’t like the pain a little bit theses hobbies aren’t any good and I totally understand everyone giving up on them.