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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 11th, 2023

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  • Seamless integration has been around since the first real-time chatrooms though. Again, just making a better UI

    For phone calls that’s just VoIP which was around waaaaayyy before the iPhone, Skype was doing something similar in the consumer geek market in 2004/5. They just brought it to the big consumer market, and again, made it 1000x easier to do.


  • There’s an old saying in computing. “you improve usability by taking away options and features” apple didn’t necessarily invent this mindset. But they perfected it.

    They took BSD, a security focused, but not very user friendly, offshoot of Linux/unix and made it “popular” by adding several layers of polish and doing a lot of the configuration work for you and made it osx. This was a time when Linux usability/management on the personal/newbie scale was garbage. If you wanted to install a certain distro of *nix, you better make sure you have supporting hardware and the right up to date tutorial, which is managed by an unknown volunteer, which was usually some person bored on the weekend a few months ago and never updated, they’ve made *nix installation and management a lot better though recently.

    They also did this with music. People used to have large collections of unorganized mp3s in the early 00s, unless you were really anal and had a lot of time in your hands, because you were likely downloading them from several different illegal places, and legally buying mp3s were all over the place. You could buy the album off this weird obscure website that you didn’t want to trust with your CC information, because there were a lot of mom and pop music stores online. Then apple brought out iTunes and allowed both buying and managing (and eventually upgrading, traveling around with) music to be dead simple.

    For smartphones, they stole a LOT from BlackBerry, but they took it to the next level. Blackberry had email, a private messaging network, and mobile web scrolling waayyyy before anyone. And so many people loved it so much that even Obama famously didn’t want to give his up when he took office. Then apple came out with the iPhone, and blew it away with a bigger screen and again, a lot more polish.

    Innovation happens in small steps over years. Apple didn’t invent mobile phones, smart phones, tablets, or computing, they didn’t invent security, encrypted audio/video calls, or music management. They’ve done a lot of crappy stuff, and they charge super high amounts of money for less than state of the art hardware. Their innovation could be summed up by this profound statement I remember a friend said to me once around 2003/4.

    “Osx, because making Linux pretty was easier than fixing Windows”



  • It basically copies the best of every other messaging platform. I was at my in-laws where everyone on my wife’s side has an iPhone and we’re talking about a LOT of the features.

    • can tell if notifications are turned off on phone
    • read receipts
    • higher quality limit on video/pictures sent
    • messaging that can be done in wifi-only areas (imagine having a few group threads/people you CANT talk to while at home because you live in a dead zone)

    Any other big feature of any other messaging app I was able to think of (Signal/Whatsapp, discord, slack) is all there (except public chatrooms and private servers obvs), WITH OS integration

    I still like my pixel, but I get it now.

    Still holding out hope that Google allows for RCS features to come to Google voice.










  • Life well lived for me is the following.

    1. My life ends in a comfy bed surrounded by friends and family having died before becoming a burden on them.
    2. I’ve made a positive impact on those around me
    3. I’ve left my children/family in better financial shape than I was born into (which, frankly, was pretty good already)
    4. I traveled and saw what the world has to offer

    Yeah, life is meaningless, and we’re one small speck in a universe so big it breaks our brains to think about and we only last a similar amount of time in regard to the vastness of time itself. . … so I might as well make myself and the people around me feel good

    As far as the short term? Have a good conversation with friends/family, go for a walk through a nearby forest.