Google is no better. My family mostly uses iPhones, and on a big extended family vacation, I suggested we use Google Photos to create a shared album to document the trip. Everyone installed the Google Photos app on their iPhone so they could contribute... which resulted in all of them having their email accounts disabled.
What happened? Google Photos on the iPhone backs up all your photos by default, and, like Microsoft, Google "shares storage" between email and photos. The minute Google Photos was installed, it started backing up photos until the paltry free tier was reached, at which point it disabled the associated gmail account since it was "out of storage".
Talk about an anti-pattern; I spent a good chunk of time on that trip helping people get their storage back so they could send email again.
I'll never recommend Google Photos to anyone ever again.
> The minute Google Photos was installed, it started backing up photos
Just to be clear: It will ask you before doing it.
If you refuse, it will ask you again and again and again. Sometimes with a slightly different prompt. Until you accidentally say yes.
But it does ask you.
Even though I agree with your overall conclusion that people should avoid google photos, this moment should also be a learning experience for your family to be more careful what they agree to. Popup fatigue is insidious, we all need to remain vigilant!
I've lost count the number of times by wife has accidently agreed to store all her google photos on the cloud then filled up her account. The prompts are very good at making you ~seem~ like you need to do it.
To be fair, Google sends out multiple emails notifying that you won't receive new emails unless you upgrade or clear things out. If they read their emails even somewhat regularly -- which I acknowledge isn't a given for many people -- they'd know what's coming.
That isn’t the problem. The problem is Google photos pushes you to back up your tens of gigabytes of photos to your free Gmail account repeatedly until you say yes just once. At that point it fills up your email account with your photos and then disables your email until you pay them. Making statements about how often they warn you this is happening isn’t very helpful. No normal person would think of that as a consequence of using Google photos.
Apple also by default backs up your apps to the cloud.
But it backs up the WHOLE package / folder / whatever terminology they use, including cached and redownloadable data. So if you have a game that has 10GB of cached data, it WILL upload that. Edge for me was >3GB.
And then they have the following user-hostile 'features':
1. They offer a paltry 5GB. Hasn't changed since inception, but app sizes have ... tripped? I have 2GB of health data now.
2. They don't tell you that you're backing up data that can be retrieved elsewhere.
3. The popup when storage is full shows only 'buy more' or ignore (no link/mention to disable individual app like described above)
4. No way to backup to a NAS
5. No way to backup to a computer automatically. You have to provide you passcode every time.
The Apple backup strategy is purposefully broken. I’m already paying for 50GB of iCloud and it often claims that it cannot backup my iPhone despite having multiple gigabytes free. It turns that that during the backup process it operates on a file level, so if you happen to have a large file it will require both copies of the file to fit within your storage limit before the backup can complete. And guess what, several third party apps I use store all their data in a single multi-gigabyte SQLite database that’s written to every day.
As for cached and downloadable data, I have long ago turned off backups for many apps where the data is stored on a server anyways. Backing up these apps never makes any sense.
That's on app developers (I suspect mobile game developers are not the most competent of the bunch). My entire iPhone's backup is 4.6 GB, and my YouTube downloaded videos alone are way more than that.
> That's on app developers (I suspect mobile game developers are not the most competent of the bunch). My entire iPhone's backup is 4.6 GB, and my YouTube downloaded videos alone are way more than that.
While it's the app developers that need to make the change, it should be enforced by Apple. After all, that's why there is a walled garden, and that is the premium we pay for when using Apple.
But for Apple to enforce this means less popups on screens telling people that storage is full, which means less sales.
Drives me insane that to see my existing Google library and shared albums I must allow Google photos access to my phones photos - at which point it turns auto back on.
>I'll never recommend Google Photos to anyone ever again.
I try to pry myself away from Google. I've given up the Google Maps app, for the arguably slightly-less-worse Apple Maps. I'm now 95/5 Firefox/Chrome, but I still need Chrome for some things that simply do not work well on Firefox. Gmail is nearly impossible, if I had 6 months I might try to host my own email... but I don't even know how to avoid it. I can't NOT HAVE email, ISPs don't offer that as part of their internet service anymore. You can't host it without jumping through spam hoops meant to keep everyone but Gmail out of email. And I try to use DDG, but it's just abysmal compared to Google search in its heyday... even now, Google search is often slightly better.
All of it's just some tarbaby trap, and now that I'm stuck I can't get unstuck.
It is small, but if you look at their competition it's still competitive.
Only Mega offers more for free (20GB).
Microsoft offers 5GB.
Ente.io offers 10GB.
Proton.io offers 2GB (if you jump through some time-limited hoops, most of which defeats the purpose of using a privacy cloud, you get a whooping 5GB free instead)
Filen.io offers 10GB, but you can get 30GB if you do a similar dance to proton and spam your referral code everywhere.
It does seem ridiculous that over 20 years ago, gmail was advertised with a real-time allowance ticking away increasing, which started at an incredibly generous 1GB allowance and you could watch it tick up in real time faster than you could fill it with mail.
People designed "gmail-as-storage" apps to take advantage of this.
20 years later and we get a pathetic 15GB for mail, photos and everything else combined.
The limit used to cost a whole dollar of hard drive space (plus redundancy), sometimes more than that. If they kept that up with adjustment for inflation then 100GB would be the free tier today, not a $20/year tier.
TBF that's a little bit apples-to-orchards, since publicly routed e-mails have certain expectable size/frequency characteristics compared to, say, all the videos someone possesses.
> it started backing up photos until the paltry free tier was reached
How could everyone fill their 15 GiB quota when IIRC by default it only backups the camera roll with lossy compression? Also I've never heard of accounts getting disabled for filling the quota.
FYI I am notoriously bad at taking photos (as is constantly explained to me by family and my partner) and my Phone has 130GiB of Photos and Videos on it as we speak.
Fair enough, I was thinking actual photos. Still, the whole extended family present had that much stockpiled on their phones? Still sounds unbelievable to me IDK.
I know, but that's still thousands of photos at original quality, let alone with the default compression, for each member of their extended family present, not just some of them. I barely know a couple people stockpiling more photos than that, let alone an entire family.
I own the Pebble 2 Duo and the answer is "almost none". It basically just tells you how long you were still/not moving much in the evening, as you'd expect. It's a pretty good proxy for what time you went to bed and got up, and that's about it. It can't actually tell if you're asleep.
There are also (currently) no sleep metrics on app itself; you can only see them on the watch, which doesn't show much besides the sleep duration and an abstract representation showing where you might have woken up in the night.
It's been a long time since I used my Pebble Time Steel, but I remember the alarm feature to wake you up when you were in a light phase of sleep worked very well. I didn't do any sleep tracking personally, but the watch seemed to be able to tell.
From an old Kickstarter:
"Pebble Health tracks when you fall asleep, wake up, and how much deep sleep you’re getting (that’s the really good stuff). Smart Alarms determine your optimal wake-up time based on your sleep cycle, so you’re less groggy and more energized to tackle the day."
Microsoft was successfully sued by the EU for creating vendor lockin with their proprietary file formats. It is for this reason that the "X" formats (docx, pptx, etc.) are "open" and thoroughly "documented", e.g.:
However, the formats are incredibly complicated, because they evolved from earlier formats that represented nearly the entire in-memory state of the editing software. To a first order of approximation, the .doc format _was_ Microsoft Word.
Source: I worked at Microsoft during this time period and helped document the XLSX format.
Eric has made it clear that the Pebble 2 Duo was always going to be a limited run because it was made mostly of leftover components and there's no reasonable path towards making new copies of those components.
> Pebble 2 Duo is sold out! We are not making more.
Out of curiosity, what's the downside of color? The screen on the new watches is also substantially larger. AFAIK there's no discernible battery life penalty for the color watches (even with the larger screen).
It really is, I wish there were a version of the Time 2 that had a BW screen. I did manage to snag one of the Pebble 2 Duos before they sold out and I love it. The contrast and reflectivity is unbeatable.
I used a super-cheap Chinese smartwatch (Amazfit Bip S) for years and recently switched to the Pebble. The Bip's battery lasted forever and it did check a lot of feature boxes, but overall it was clunky to use and not in any way hackable.
I switched to a Pebble 2 Duo recently and while the features are comparable on paper (multi-week battery life, reflective display, basic health tracking, etc.), everything is just nicer on the Pebble. The software is thoughtful and fun and there are tons of third-party apps, so it can do all kinds of things the Bip could never do.
There really isn't a huge market for this kind of thing; most people, including nerds, want a watch with a brightly colored screen and tons of health metrics and service integrations. I imagine Pebble will stay a boutique brand this time around.
If there is market for long lasting watch, I think it is if it looks like a traditional round watch. Or if it can work as outdoors watch. Garmin is moving from transflective to AMOLED for better colors, and there might be spot for rugged, long-lasting, cheap watch.
I think Eric has more-or-less implied that they will probably make a Pebble Time Round successor (no doubt with worthwhile battery life this time, given how much more the Duo is)
A simple test for aphantasia that I gave my kids when they asked about it is to picture an apple with three blue dots on it. Once you have it, describe where the dots are on the apple.
Without aphantasia, it should be easy to "see" where the dots are since your mind has placed them on the apple somewhere already. Maybe they're in a line, or arranged in a triangle, across the middle or at the top.
When reading "picture an apple with three blue dots on it", I have an abstract concept of an apple and three dots. There's really no geometry there, without follow on questions, or some priming in the question.
In my conscious experience I pretty much imagine {apple, dot, dot, dot}. I don't "see" blue, the dots are tagged with dot.color == blue.
When you ask about the arrangement of the dots, I'll THEN think about it, and then says "arranged in a triangle." But that's because you've probed with your question. Before you probed, there's no concept in my mind of any geometric arrangement.
If I hadn't been prompted to think / naturally thought about the color of the apple, and you asked me "what color is the apple." Only then would I say "green" or "red."
If you asked me to describe my office (for example) my brain can't really imagine it "holistically." I can think of the desk and then enumerate it's properties: white legs, wooden top, rug on ground. But, essentially, I'm running a geometric iterator over the scene, starting from some anchor object, jumping to nearby objects, and then enumerating their properties.
I have glimpses of what it's like to "see" in my minds eye. At night, in bed, just before sleep, if I concentrate really hard, I can sometimes see fleeting images. I liken it to looking at one of those eye puzzles where you have to relax your eyes to "see it." I almost have to focus on "seeing" without looking into the blackness of my closed eyes.
Exactly my experience too. These fleeting images are rare, but bloody hell it feels like cheating at life if most people can summon up visualisations like that at will.
Watching someone clearly just transfer what's in their mind to a drawing is just jaw-dropping to me.
Like they'll start at an arm and move along filling the rest of the body correctly the first time. No sketching, no finding the lines, just a human printer.
I think I have it as well. But my theory is that we might have imagination but it is only accessible to subconscious. It is as if it is blocked from consciousness. I have ADHD as well, might be that this is protection mechanism that allows my kind of brain to survive in the world better (otherwise it would be too entertaining to get lost in your own imagination). As a kid I used to daydream a lot.
I'm a 5 on the VVIQ. I can see the 3D apple, put it in my hand, rotate it, watch the light glint on the dimples in the skin, imagine tossing it to a close friend and watch them catch it, etc.
It's equally astonishing to me that others are different.
I don't need to close my eyes, it doesn't make much of a difference, and I see what my eyes would see. It doesn't look like a TV unless I imagine a TV and put the image on the screen.
I can see I my head with ~80% the level as seeing with my eyes. It's a little tunnel visiony and fine details can be blurry, but I can definitely see it. A honeycrisp apple on a red woven placemat on a wooden counter top. The blue dots are the size of peas, they are stickers in a triangle.
It not just images either, it's short videos.
What's interesting though is that the "video" can be missing details that I will "hallucinate" back in that will be incorrect. So I cannot always fully trust these. Like cutting the apple in half lead to a ~1/8th slice missing from one of the halves. It's weird.
I absolutely do. For example, when I'm playing D&D, or listening to a podcast of other people playing D&D, I can "see" a fully realistic view of what is happening in my head. With the apple test, I can see a nice red apple, with the little vertical orange streaks, three blue dots arranged in a triangle, and I can rotate the apple in my head and have the dots move as you would expect from a real apple. I have a very vivid imagination
There are people who actually "see" a full-ass movie in their head when they read.
These are also the people who get REALLY angry when some live-action casting choice isn't exactly like in the book. I just go "meh", because I kinda remember the main character had red hair and a scar and that's it. :D
After reading your first sentence, I immediately saw an apple with three dots in a triangle pointing downwards on the side. Interestingly, the 3 dots in my image were flat, as if merely superimposed on an image of an apple, rather than actually being on an apple.
How do people with aphantasia answer the question?
I guess it's a spectrum with varying abilities. If you ask me, I can see a red apple - or a photo of a red apple precisely. It's not in 3D though, I cannot imagine it from other angles so I cannot image the dots around it. But if I were to sit in a quiet and dark room without any distractions, and tried concentrating super hard (with my eyes closed), then I would be able to see it as other can. Perhaps even manipulate it in my mind.
Then maybe, at least in my case, it is my inability to focus my imagination when my senses are already being bombarded with external stimuli. But I cannot speak for anyone else.
I found out recently that I have aphantasia, based on everything I've read. When you tell me to visualize, I imagine. I don't see it. An apple, I can imagine that. I can describe it in incomprehensibly sparse details. But when you ask details I have to fill them in.
I hadn't really placed those three dots in a specific place on the apple. But when you ask where they are, I'll decide to put them in a line on the apple. If you ask what color they are, I'll have to decide.
I'm pretty sure I don't have aphantasia. I don't see the apple either; it doesn't occupy any portion of my visual field and it doesn't feel similar to looking at an image of an apple. There's more of a ghostly, dreamlike image of an apple "somewhere else" whose details I only perceive when I think about them, and fade when I pay less attention. But the sensation of this apparition is a visual one; the apple will have an orientation, size, shape, and colour in the mental image, which are defined even if they're ghostly, inconsistent, and change as I reconsider what the apple should look like.
For me the hard question to answer is whether I have aphantasia because people describing “actually seeing” things like with their eyes is an absolutely wild concept.
To answer the question I imagine an apple with three dots in a triangle, closely together. There is no color because there is no real image, it’s just an idea. As other have said if prompted the idea gets more detailed.
That said, when I tried to learn building mind palaces it has worked. I can “walk through” places I know just fine, even recall visual details like holes in a letterbox. But again, there is no image.
How fair is it to ask people to self report whether details existed in their original image before or after a second question? Does the second question not immediately refine the imagined image? Or is that the point, that there’s now a memory of two different apple states?
Edit: This iDevice really wants to capitalise Apple.
There's no apple, much less any dots. Of course, I'm happy to draw you an apple on a piece of paper, and draw some dots on that, then tell you where those are.
oh just close your eyes and imagine an apple for a few moments, then open your eyes, look at the wikipedia article about aphantasia and pick the one that best fits the level of detail you imagined.
So my mind briefly jumps to an apple and I guess I am very briefly seeing that the dots happen to be on top of the apple, but that image is fleeting.
I have had some people claim to me that they can literally see what they are imagining as if it is in front of them for prolonged periods of time, in a similar way to how it would show up via AR goggles.
I guess this is a spectrum and it's tough to dealineate the abilities. But I just looked it up and what I am describing is hyperphantasia.
For me the triggering event was reading about aphantasia, and then thinking about how I have never, ever, seen a movie about a book I've read and said, "that [actor|place|thing] looks nothing like I imagined it" Then I tried the apple thing to confirm. I have some sense of looking at things, but not much.
It's a great aspect to evaluate (fiction books/movies), thanks for mentioning it. I think it's much easier to use as an evaluation tool than techniques like the apple example. One of the tests, for example, is to recall a book that you have never seen a movie adaptation of and try to remember the characters and scenes. For me, in these cases (when I try to recall), the characters appear faceless, while places are more detailed, but they usually remind me of some real places I have encountered before in my life.
It's interesting that if non-aphantasia people are so common, I wonder why so few paintings have scenery based solely on imagination. I even remember asking a person who paints (not in the context of this condition) how hard it was for him to paint something not directly before his eyes, but from imagination, and why he didn't do it more often. I recall that he definitely did this (painting from imagination) rarely or not at all, and the question really puzzled him
I also have a Playdate! I think it's a Sharp MIP rather than TN LCD. MIP is actually pretty popular in some places -- particularly smartwatches where battery life matters more than bright colors; Garmin, Coros, Pebble etc. all use MIP displays for the lower end models.
The thing about MIP is that the viewing angles are just not that amazing. I have had a Kindle and a Kobo, and they look like paper no matter how I hold them. My Playdate however needs to be positioned at a pretty specific angle with respec to the light to get the best contrast.
My colleagues and I were using the term years before that book. I always assumed he used the title because it was already recognizable slang.
It was just one example of a long tradition of collective nicknames for employees of computer and software companies. For instance, Digital Equipment Corporation employees were "digits", Wang employees were "wankers", and so on.
I had to use public chargers for a while when my house was being worked on and it was pretty miserable. They were frequently broken, and lines were common.
The real problem with public charger lines is that there is no social protocol for them yet. At a gas station, it is fine to pull up behind a car currently fueling to indicate that you would like to fuel at the pump next. Charging stations, however, are not built with pull-through spots. There's no place to form a queue at all, so people park nearby, circle, and sometimes snipe a spot when it isn't their turn (because who can tell whose turn it is?).
I mean, it's not like I've never had to use public chargers. They just didn't have lines when I was there. Also, haven't encountered a broken charger. (Seattle area.)
The thing that actually bothered me the most is needing a different stupid app for every one of the ~5 different networks to pay, instead of just inserting or tapping a credit card. But this is mostly an occasional-user problem; the pain probably falls off dramatically once you've already registered for everything.
What happened? Google Photos on the iPhone backs up all your photos by default, and, like Microsoft, Google "shares storage" between email and photos. The minute Google Photos was installed, it started backing up photos until the paltry free tier was reached, at which point it disabled the associated gmail account since it was "out of storage".
Talk about an anti-pattern; I spent a good chunk of time on that trip helping people get their storage back so they could send email again.
I'll never recommend Google Photos to anyone ever again.
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