Wiredfire

So say we all.

Depends on how we define “best”. USB-C has the same weakness of micro USB of having “tongue” in the port. This is poor design and leaves ports prone to failure of this tongue gets damaged. I’ve seen this happen more than once with either from folk aggressively jamming charger cables in slightly misaligned or just wear & tear. Lightening on the other hand is a much more robust port design. The “tongue” is the cable with a hollow port. 1st party lightening cables are pure trash, which is itself a ewaste matter, but we’re talking port design.

Now every other aspect of lightening is inferior to USB 3 (important to note USB-C ≠ USB 3) , but by my needs it’s the “better” connector.

I don’t see how USB-C is objectively better at the charger end, unless we’re meaning the reversible nature at both ends which is… it’s good but it’s not “wow” (and neither is it “wow” with lightening).

I’m happy to be proven wrong, and I’m not going to get pissy if in 3-4 years my next phone is an iPhone with USB-C, it’s just the merits seem over-egged and I’d wager for the average, non-technical, user the benefits are minimal and potentially cause some minor confusions.

So fun and games all round for those guys >_<

URGH

Harder to recognise makes it easier to up-sell crappier models to those not close enough to the detail. I was mulling over going AMD with the next laptop (which admittedly won’t be any time soon), this makes me lean more towards that idea.

While I agree, Reddit really is learning “fuck around and find out” the hard way from all sorts of angles. They must be in perpetual crisis mode. Which sucks for the actual staffers, of course

Perhaps as an even more sinister than usual member of the Tal Shiar.

Indeed.

Judging by the comments I would say apparently so!

Conversely I found kbin much better to use on mobile and somewhat confusing on mobile 😅 Great to see work to help it be better to use in any case!

No. USB was on the Android side, split between Mini/Micro/C connectors on the phone side and USB-A on the brick side. There were a gazillion fast charging standards so that you still might have to replace your brick.

It’s the charger side I was talking about here. Androids and iPhones both charge from a USB-A charger. Fast charging has been a crapshoot but I can still charge a phone on about any charger it just might not do a fast charge (which is bad for battery health anyway but that’s another thing )

It was never about connecting between device though? I’m also not sure needing a cable for an Android with micro USB / USB-C and one for lightening is the dramatic issue some have made it out to be. Also I and many have loads of USB A chargers. Do they suddenly become waste? Or do I buy more cables and keep using them? Either way we have waste.

I disagree. You need dynamic pricing but it needs to be manageable. Let’s say you start a cycle on the washing machine then a few minutes in the price suddenly jumps to an extreme high - that’s not manageable.

Giving users some warning throughout the day of price shifts actually meets the point of dynamic pricing better, too. The point is to get more power used when there is excess and less when supply is struggling. That doesn’t happen if people don’t get the chance to plan, even if that planning is only 30 minutes notice.

Ah! I’ll look into that - thank you!

keeping chargers the same will reduce e-waste as people can use USB-C to charge many devices

That’s my point… we already could charge many devices from the chargers we had

The energy company I’m with in the UK offers this type of dynamic pricing. I’m not on that tariff, but the setup is a great idea.

The pitch is that they give you notice , sometimes half hour sometimes more, of price shifts. Then you can chose to maybe do you laundry later or sooner depending what’s going to be better. One of their use cases is even to have a rig where an electric car battery can supply energy to the house. You charge your car when power is cheap / free, run your home from the car’s battery when it gets high.

They even have an API that some people use to automate tasks to take advantage of the price shifts.

Done well it’s excellent, but definitely needs an ethical mindset behind it. Fortunately in the UK, Octopus Energy is nothing if not ethical, but they are very much notable by this difference!

And a top hat!

Reddit was small once. Then Digg has a seizure and Reddit grew quickly.

Now it’s Reddit having a fit and we’re seeing more people dabbling in the threadiverse. It won’t be the same pace though, it has the same challenges as Mastodon etc… to encourage people to take a moment to understand federated decentralised Vs the monolithic services they’re used to… but it’s going to grow. June 30th will be the next influx.

Thing is… the main alternatives are often missing key features. Signal does not let me backup or export my messages & media, that’s a problem for me personally. Telegram and fb messenger are not e2ee by default, and make being so difficult to use. Whatever Google is currently pushing will be demised next month and replaced with something inexplicably more convoluted. Matrix isn’t straightforward enough for mass adoption.

For its many… many… well documented issues WhatsApp provides a very good messaging service that is well polished. For most people that’s what they care about.

We’ll have more success getting people to try new things when they at least have feature parity and ideally offer something new / different to WhatsApp in the UX.

Just replies to another comment to won’t paste again as that’s a bit spammy. But in short USB-A was already a de facto standard for charging. The bit on the end of the phone wasn’t really an issue and I’ve seen little evidence that it was an ewaste issue.

So we’re stuck with USB-C and can’t have whatever will inevitably come along that’s better sooner or later until the EU shift their view.

Basically either has no impact on ewaste or actually generates more waste and discourages further developments in port design.