Redex

Hosting costs heavily depend on the type of service, YouTube’s costs are very much not negligible, but it is true that for most sites it is very cheap. But hosting costs aren’t the only cost, many sites provide useful reviews, news, or testing that costs them money to produce, which they pay for with ads. Yes, some sites survive using alternative payment methods, but I’m skeptical that this can scale to the rest of the internet. My fear is that we’ll end up in a situation where 90% of the internet is just YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and other giants and people get all of their news, reviews and other information from those sites, which I think is worse than having ads.

Lol, lmao even

I mean, this one is 600€ because it’s from a small, low volume company, is highly repairable and invests in a bit more ethical materials. You can still find decent midrange phones for e.g. 300€. My friend got a Xiaomi, idk which one exactly, for 300€, and its performance is about on par with my Fairphone.

I’m not advocating for you being forced physically to watch ads, I’m saying that as it stands, ads are the payment method and you actively blocking them means you’re not paying for what you’re using. I’m not criticising people for that, I’m simply stating a fact. If everyone on the internet was to use adblockers, most of the web would die out, and first to die would be actually useful sites that provide helpful information that they invested time and money into making, such as news, review sites, etc. Perhaps the threat of adblockers itself is benefitial for the internet as it might force websites to find alternate, better payment methods, but I don’t see what you could replace ads with since people won’t be willing to pay a monthly subscription for every site they visit, and most people won’t pay for donations if you try a donations based model.

I’ll give a short overview of my experience with the phone thus far. In general, I’m pretty happy with it. For now it’s adequately snappy. It does lag in some apps and has some odd behavior (YouTube seems to lock the refresh rate to 60 as soon as any preview starts playing, even if it’s off screen, making scrolling not as smooth), but in general the responsiveness of the phone itself is very good. They have some annoying bugs. For example, they still haven’t fixed the screen being locked to like 10Hz when unlocking the phone sometimes. But, in general, it hasn’t really been a problem, have been using it without much issue. The most annoying part has to be the positioning of the volume buttons, for me at least. They’re positioned on the left side of the phone, directly opposite to the power button, so I’m constantly taking accidental screenshots. It’s extremely annoying, and I don’t understand why they decided to put it there. As someone else mentioned, there are tiny gaps between the screen and the frame, as well as some other seams, so some dead skin gets in there making the phone look a bit dirty, but it isn’t too bad. Double tap to wake is pretty bad, it often doesn’t register double taps properly, and it often gets accidentally activated in my pocket, making the phone try to dial emergency services, forcing me to disable it.

While I have been quite critical when listing the faults, in general I’m still happy with the phone. I was actually surprised by the camera. It’s nothing special, but I expected it to be worse. However, it has much beter performance than I expected, especially in low light, just that the zoom is very bad since it doesn’t have an optical zoom lense. It does what I need it to while being more repairable and from a more ethical company, so if you need a mid range phone, and don’t mind minor inconveniences, I’d recommend it.

I know I’m gonna get a lot of hate for this because everyone here despises ads, but I can see an argument for it. I don’t know if it is legaly sound, but morally, it boils down to the fact that you are literally using a service without paying for it. The website is offering you a product and the payment is ads. If you don’t want to pay for it, don’t use it, otherwise you really are just stealing it (even if that “stealing” costs very little to the site). I personally use an adblocker and agree that ads on most sites are obnoxious, but I also feel like people make adblockers out to be completely black and white, which they are not.

The problem is that if you make a PayPal equivalent, you’re still beholdent to MasterCard and Visa since you need them for people to actually add money to their account, and if you want to make a direct competitor to MasterCard and Visa, that’s basically impossible without government support because they’re way too entrenched, why would a business support a random new payment method that nobody is using yet.

I’m not saying LLMs are conscious, just that I believe there isn’t a reason we couldn’t make something that’s considered conscious

Cavemen had no knowledge of chemical reactions, yet they were able to create fire

I get that, but I also sometimes see the people behind them when walking completely loose their shit from that, visibly angry, leaning in, yelling and honking, which I feel is a bit overkill.

I don’t understand how, but somehow drivers seem to be the biggest whinny cunts on the planet. I feel like 80% of drivers rage from the smallest of inconveniences, if you inconvenience them for even a few seconds they’ll yell at you or flip you off. God forbid someone not notice the bonus right-turn green arrow. I feel like every time I see that everyone behind them wants to bring hell down upon them and curse their entire lineage for even existing. Even people I know personally that are typically very nice and aren’t prone to getting angry get irrationally mad at people they see on the street for such trivial things. It’s amazing.