I'm sorry to have to say this, but this whole thread reeks of someone refusing to help themselves. Several people have given you legitimately helpful advice and you have just come back with excuses as to why it won't work for you. This includes:
- Using a wireless power bank. Android phones will work with a completely dead/useless battery if they are plugged into a power bank. If your power bank doesn't work that way, then you need a new power bank.
- Using a different device. Of course your important files are on this phone. Do you think this phone will last forever? Backup those files to the cloud so you can access them from any device. You get free cloud storage with your Google account.
Instead of blaming all your problems on an external entity like Google, if you take accountability for solving your problem, you will find it is not nearly so intractable. Others here can offer advice, but it is ultimately up to you to decide on a course of action and pursue it. I wish you the best of luck.
> Instead of blaming all your problems on an external entity like Google
But it's not his fault. I can easily empathize with how he's feeling.
Power bank probably doesn't work well because the update limits charging speed.
What if he doesn't have money for buying a new phone? Also, transferring files via cloud storage can be a non-trivial process, especially for a non-technical person.
This person is on HackerNews, implying at least enough technical expertise to use a website. Google Drive is a website. Other people have offered this person alternative devices free of charge. Yet they are so fixated on a specific outcome (Google just fixing this for them) that they can't see another solution when it's offered up on a plate. They are also neglecting to think beyond the immediate problem: say they get the firmware rolled back somehow - what happens when the device stops charging/is stolen/is dropped and all their files are still on it? Have you never know anyone like this before? Someone who needs all their problems solved for them because they refuse to take responsibility for the situations they have created for themselves through action or inaction?
Hi, I'm not sure if you've saw it but not only is the battery is close to dead but the charging is super slow and it struggles to work plugged in. So I cannot use it well. The only option will to get a new phone, but it's been taking a toll on me.
I am not looking to be a charity case. I'm just flustered at what Google did. Something that never happened in history, without warning, ending my phone.
This isn't about an old device, it's just a few years old (2020, on Android 13). I understand that things break, but this is not about that. It's how Google lied to users about the update, then the update wrecking their phones to a point where it doesn't work. If my phone were to have naturally been destroyed then I get it, I have to move on.
I'm sure a lot of people have Pixels here, if all of a sudden it is forced to update, and the phone becomes unusable, would you not be angry? What if Microsoft forcefully updated and made all processors around 2018 bricked? I've browsed here so much and everyone loves to use old and cheap CPUs for their crafts which are beautiful here. I'm sure many people use old phones for many reasons as well, such as mobile servers, gadgets, etc. The Pixel 4a was a budget phone and perfect for those who want a phone with a headphone jack and that just works. Pixel 4a was also one of the phones used for many Android projects.
At this point I just want to tell people on here what Google did and let people know that this can happen to your phone at any time. Hopefully you are all prepared as Pixel 5/6 have been having battery issues as well and a forced update might be coming for that. I hope everyone is prepared.
Your reply is completely uncalled for. I hope you're able to get professional help for whatever it is in your life that drove you to be this callous toward someone.
It can be really hard to understand why people do what they do. But I do know from personal experience that shelter insecurity is one of those pervasive stressors that makes everything difficult.
Maybe their phone getting screwed up was the proverbial last straw. Now, instead of a calm, considered approach, they're fighting exhaustion and panic while trying to problem solve.
But no matter what their circumstances, being vile toward them is unwarranted.
I'm aware of the "listen" versus "problem solving" scenario. I refuse to accept the framing. For some reason people have bought in to the idea that you can unload your emotions on someone and also create expectations on how they should respond.
If someone approaches you with a problem, they should expect you'll help them find a solution.
Not a finance guy, but mu understanding is that shorting can have unlimited losses — you are borrowing an amount of stock at Price $X and selling it at the market price, say 100 shares of TSLA at $400 this week. You are betting that the stock price will go down, and you'll be able to buy it back and repay the 100 shares of stock at perhaps $200/share, pocketing the difference.
BUT, and this is a big BUT, if the price goes up in the meantime, your position goes negative, e.g., if it goes to $800, you are looking at a $40,000 loss. If it goes sufficiently negative that it approaches the point where the other assets at your broker cannot cover such a loss, you will be automatically sold out of your position at a loss. This means the broker will use the other assets in your account to automatically purchase TSLA shares and return them to the loaning party, all at market price.
When there is a large short interest in a stock, this can happen simultaneously all over the market, driving the price to insane levels, as every short must cover their position. This is called a "Short Squeeze". Even if the shorts were right in the end, they all lost. This happened with Porsche a decade ago, driving it's price well over $1000, when it had been $80, and more recently with Gamestop.
There are a LOT more better explanations than mine out there, or maybe some actual finance market guys/gals can weigh in. Here's one [0]. In any case, I hope this helps.
You short 10 shares at $400 and you have $4500 in your account.
The stock is wildly swinging around and temporarily goes up to $440/share.
Your position would cost $4400 and you only have $4500 in your account, so your broker says "oh no! If TSLA goes up a little more we might never get our money back from this customer" so they liquidate your position while they still can.
IMO it's pretty obvious it's being built up for short sellers to have a banner day. I'm guessing the hype bubble will burst sometime after Jan 20 when EV credits are slashed and FSD and the stupid 2-seater with no charging port mysteriously fail to materialize.
This crying wolf has been going on for 10 years. It may happen one day but your comment sounds like a broken record. I can find your same commend posted an ungodly amount of times on /r/realtesla archives.
Yikes. I am very, very lucky to do fulfilling and meaningful work at a place that values me, with people who are a pleasure to work with. But from what I hear this is the exception and not the rule. Knowing this is possible, however, I'm not as scared by the job search as I once was, since I know that when I someday decide to look for my next job, I'll know more of the qualities of the places I want to work at.
For me the key seems to be getting out of the corporate world, away from companies with a singular focus on profit-making and competition and the endless feature churn, corporate ladder climbing, disruptive managerial edicts to change horses midstream, ridiculous metrics to meet, and the inevitable burnout that environment seems to create. Has anyone else had similar (or contradictory) experiences?
I spent a decade in FAANG, then burned out and left. I’m at an early-stage startup now and couldn’t be happier.
The pressures are very different. My most stressful episodes at this startup have been related to technical problems, where I ultimately feel that I’m in control. My most stressful episodes in FAANG were ones in which I fundamentally had little to no control, but had “accountability” (i.e. blame) for the outcome.
For example, I vividly remember being on a flight to visit my ailing grandmother, and having chest pains from stress due to a parallel team throwing up a red flag weeks before the launch of a years-long project. They were a team of specialists whose work I could not personally do, and I had gotten their sign off on the project months prior. Team members changed, and a new person took issue with a fundamental aspect of the project.
I still believe there was nothing I could have reasonably done differently, as I didn’t have the domain knowledge to get sign-off in this area, and had done my due diligence of engaging the team and getting their sign off. Both my manager and their manager agreed, saying that there was nothing more I could have done, and even going so far as to say that I had been set up to fail.
However, this was of course treated as a significant failure on my part, and was held against me as the reason for lack of promotion. Way up my management chain, people were congratulated for the eventual launch of this project which was bringing in tens of millions in revenue.
> Knowing this is possible, however, I'm not as scared by the job search as I once was, since I know that when I someday decide to look for my next job, I'll know more of the qualities of the places I want to work at.
Knowing what qualities to look for, them still existing, and being able to find them... are 3 different things. :)
Data science, specifically contextual data enhancement, small language model evaluation, and helping companies evaluate their use of LLMs. Nearly all unspecialized companies are flying blind with LLMs.
I was in ad tech, specifically media analysis and pipeline evals.
I also consider myself extremely lucky in that regard.
> the key seems to be getting out of the corporate world, away from companies with a singular focus on profit-making and competition
In my experience there are still healthy corporations out there. The signals I now look for are: profitable, privately held, not pursuing IPOs or buyers, grow headcount slowly (if at all), have never needed layoffs, promote engineers into positions of authority, and have high average employee tenure.
It's refreshing to work in an organization where people feel secure enough to make long-term investments in infrastructure, people, and projects that may not pay dividends for many years. (And to be the beneficiary of decades of prior long-term investments.)
Where do you find these places though? That's tricky. They're the real 'unicorns' from my point of view as an employee. I don't care if I earn quite as much if I enjoy my job.
Thinking about the best jobs in my tech career, in one case I made a list of companies that were biking distance from my house, in another an ex-classmate recruited me, in another a recruiter cold-called after I moved to a new state.
Beyond "being lucky" I'm not really sure how to generalize those experiences, though I will say that if you can identify things that you value differently from most that may help you find opportunities that are undervalued.
On the flip side, as I've gotten older I think I've gotten better at recognizing when an organization is a poor fit and having the confidence (and the savings) to turn it down or walk away even if the position is high-status, highly-paid, and/or seems like a perfect fit on paper. That can be especially hard if everyone from your family to your coworkers is telling you you're crazy.
All else being equal I agree with focusing on companies that have a long track record of success -- due to the Lindy Effect they're also more likely to be successful in the future.
> in an industry where there is not much competition
This hasn't matched my experience so far. The less external competition there is to align the company, the more employees seem to channel that drive into internal competition for resources and petty office politics.
Idk if it’s better. I’ve been trying to get into the university.
I taught a class recently. It’s pretty much yours to reign over. It made me never want to go back to corporate drudgery. It’s definitely not for everyone. Even into high schools teachers talk about being bullied by students. I don’t know what it’s like there, but some of it’s probably the schools not supporting the teachers with managing a classroom. Classroom management is really hard ime.
University IT, here. It doesn't pay anything close to what the private sector pays, but I've seen firsthand the good in the community and to society that my university does, and I feel like I'm actually making a difference and an impact. Feels so much less soulless than working enriching a faceless corporation.
I have the same experience working in the public sector. Doesn't mean I never get burnout, but I honestly can't imagine working in most of the IT industry these days.
The best place I ever worked was a small company, but not so tiny that there was no specialization of roles. We were making a complex hardware/software product that was selling pretty well. There were investors, but it was a long-term kind of thing and there wasn't pressure to double in size every few weeks or whatever Silicon Valley nonsense. I moved away from where the company was, unfortunately or I think I might still be there. They're still there doing what they do and building on it with a lot of the same people as when I worked there, rather than the turmoil du jour in "faster paced" environments.
That's a poor analogy - a house is private property which only you and invited guests may enter. A website you publish on the Internet can be viewed by anyone who discovers it. Not including accessibility features excludes disabled users from reaping the benefits of your site. So a better analogy would be "if I build a public space do I have to make it accessible?" You betcha!
I guess this is a philosophical discourse. I simply build my own apps not for everyone and its not my problem if someone has a problem with that. If I build something thats meant for the public I try to build it accessible, but only if I feel like its needed. Seems like there is a market for accessibility software, why not jump on it? Why isn't the accessibility software good enough to not make the devs go extra steps on projects that are clearly not meant for everyone? The internet is for everyone, sure. My apps aren't. Simple as that.
> Why isn't the accessibility software good enough to not make the devs go extra steps on projects that are clearly not meant for everyone?
Is it not an extra step to intentionally hide the scroll bar? And thus, simply no extra work to just... not? Scrolls bars are a convenient feature for all users, nobody is judging the appearance of your website around how it looks with a scroll bar.
Try building a modern looking website only for scrollbars to look like they are from 1990. They break immersion. Especially on artsy websites that try to immerse people.
This is like people who use synonyms prolifically, replacing all of their words so that lexical units do not repeat. It appears jarring and somewhat pretentious, past a certain point: readers will rarely notice the common UI paradigms which they have come to expect, but viewers assuredly become aware upon contradictory circumstances such as absence. Some feel these pseudo-minimalistic phenomena are grating. You intend greatness alongside immersion, however an effect most contrary may occur.
I already face disability as i have to wear glasses to see properly. Still wont change the fact that I wont put the burden of making my apps accessible onto myself as they clearly aren't meant for disabled people and/or people that I don't want to use my app.
This is fascinating. I think this nuanced approach to shifting the perspectives and beliefs of the population of an adversarial nation is exactly the threat that is being missed by other commentators saying "what does TikTok do that's so bad anyway?" The point is that it is extremely subtle and yet very powerful...if China can convince US citizens that China deserves to rule Taiwan, for instance, the US government may find itself without the popular support or political will to take action to protect Taiwanese democracy in the event of an incursion by China.
>if China can convince US citizens that China deserves to rule Taiwan, for instance, the US government may find itself without the popular support or political will to take action to protect Taiwanese democracy in the event of an incursion by China
What is so awful about the idea that people in the United States might be convinced of something? What does it matter who is doing the convincing? You just don’t like the hypothetical outcome you suggested.
Are you opposed to a Taiwanese propaganda campaign, conducted through a newly popular Taiwanese social media app and directed at convincing U.S. citizens to support Taiwan in the event of an incursion by China? What’s the difference?
I find scary the idea that the U.S. government would try to protect its citizens from anyone’s speech or ideas. The best response to speech you don’t like is to argue forcefully against it; not to suppress it. We can make up our own minds.
I don’t want the government trying to suppress or protect me from thoughts or ideas it thinks are bad.
Because it's 10x harder to debunk bullshit than to claim it. You don't know what you don't know, and unfortunately the majority of people are too lazy to critically evaluate their views. For example, how many people actually read linked articles as opposed to just commenting based on the title?
That's how modern misinformation works, you simply bombard social media networks until the truth is lost in a sea of misinformation.
The difference between the truth and the lie though is that in the end when you actually have to implement policy or predict something, lies tend to eventually collapse in on themselves. Credibility as such emerges for the people/insitutions/frameworks that can consistently predict or give results that reflect reality more. But that can take years or even decades, while gepolitical decisions need to made today.
You might be right, but the existence of a problem doesn’t mean that government intervention will make things better.
I don’t want government deciding, on my behalf, what is or is not bullshit — and then taking legislative steps to suppress ideas it doesn’t like.
Is Communism bullshit? Is anti-Anericanism bullshit? How about liberalism? Conservatism? Homosexuality?
Maybe. But those are for me to decide, based on whatever information people want to use to try and convince me. It is not appropriate for government to legislatively suppress ideas or information it thinks is wrong.
If you think otherwise, do you have a problem with the Chinese internet firewall? From their perspective, China is protecting its citizens from harmful, wrong information. You just disagree about their value judgments. (I assume.)
What's your point? China literally has a nationwide firewall to prevent Western ideas from entering the minds of its subjects. Why should we throw open our digital borders to Chinese influence campaigns? "The supreme art of war is to defeat the enemy without fighting", e.g. to undermine Americans' faith in our democratic institutions, to gain the ability to compromise our critical infrastructure, and to influence our politics. All explicitly stated goals of both Bejing and the Kremlin, and the misinformation and distraction campaigns carried out by Russia in the last presidential election are about to ratchet up again. I don't believe we should be making these objectives any easier for our ideological rivals.
> Why should we throw open our digital borders to Chinese influence campaigns?
Because we are not China and our institutions are built on presumption of freedom of speech and freedom of thought and democracy. If we start emulating China, we will become China. Our institutions are supposed to be robust enough to handle local and foreign propaganda and if they are not, then censorship is certainly not a solution that would be compatible with the liberal democratic values that we are supposed to hold.
US Citizens still have the same freedom of speech and freedom of thought and democracy. Those rights don't extend to foreign adversaries. If you want to relay Chinese or Russian or Ukrainian or Israeli or Hamas propaganda, you are completely free to do it, without censorship. Limiting the ability of any of those countries to project it within the US is reasonable stance.
You're limiting the information US Citizens can get from the outside world - therefore you are limiting their freedom of thought and access to information.
I think it's a dangerous road to go down, the US is already extremely inwards facing and suffers from not knowing much about the outside world. I've had hundreds of US Citizens talk to me face to face who don't know what language we speak in Australia, don't know we use different money, not know the seasons are backwards, not know it's a 15 hour flight, not know we don't have a president, etc. etc. (this list is endless). US Citizens are not very well educated about how things work in other countries, clearly to their own detriment.
Just yesterday I was talking to a friend in the US saying my friend has 18 months fully paid maternity leave and he almost fell over. His wife got 10 weeks.
Many countries do things better than the US, and it's dangerous to limit US Citizens learning about that, else they will have no notion things can be (and are) better elsewhere, and should be improved.
Free trade generally does not mean you have to let foreign companies operating in your country do things that domestic companies are not allowed to do.
Most of those sites are not in China not because China says that they cannot operate there but rather because China say they would have to obey the same rules Chines companies do. That generally involves things like storing data on Chinese citizens only on servers in China, censoring things the government wants censored, and giving the government easy access to information including identifying information to unmask anonymous posters.
This is post hoc nonsense. China blocked US tech companies so that they could copy what the US companies do without any threat of superior competition.
The point is that they get to access the Western market with their dancing video app, but Westerners aren't allowed to access their market with the apps they make. That gives those Chinese companies an unfair advantage in potential market reach.
A simplistic economic model that overlooks hundreds of important factors may provide a basic Econ 101 understanding but it does not reflect how the world truly operates and proves nothing.
Sure it's a simple model. But the burden of proof lies with the person claiming that free trade needs to be bilateral. That's not some inherent property of it, or something immediately obvious. A basic look at it past "It's not faaiiiiiir" actually shows quite the opposite
>> China literally has a nationwide firewall to prevent Western ideas from entering the minds of its subjects. Why should we throw open our digital borders to Chinese influence campaigns?
Emulating the policies of a country 'we' think 'is bad' isn't great policy.
>> undermine Americans' faith in our democratic institutions
It seems like Americans did a pretty good job of this themselves at the last election cycle. A highly politicised Supreme Court, a violent attack on the Capitol, a lot of people who don't accept or believe the election result. How much worse can TikTok make things?
>> Emulating the policies of a country 'we' think 'is bad' isn't great policy.
The paradox of tolerance.
>> A highly politicised Supreme Court, a violent attack on the Capitol, a lot of people who don't accept or believe the election result.
2 out of 3 of these were precipitated by foreign influence campaigns on social media actively undermining Americans' trust in our political institutions, so yeah, prohibiting foreign-owned social media networks in advance of the upcoming election is definitely a step in the right direction.
>> 2 out of 3 of these were precipitated by foreign influence campaigns on social media actively undermining Americans' trust in our political institutions
Why is nothing being done about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Truth Social, etc. etc? There are more users on Facebook alone.
The point is that the West painted itself as the defender of freedom, democracy and free markets. Going beyond, it claimed that (in the post Reagan/Thatcher era) that free markets are a prerequisite for being a rich country. Yet, the moment free markets became inconvenient, the west dropped that narrative and went full protectionist. As a result, China gets a propaganda victory in the eyes of non-Western nations.
All things considered, it's a minor problem for the US/West. Just looking like hypocrites. Compared to, say, the 2003 Iraq war it's a nothingburger.
West painted itself as the defender of freedom, democracy and free markets
China is not free, not a democracy, and not a free market, so there no hypocrisy. What was crazy was supporting the one sided relationship where we export our industry and production capacity to China while they block and steal from our businesses.
I'd support TikTok in the US if China gets rid of their firewall.
This is the paradox of tolerance [1]. It’s a worn discussion and far from hypocritical.
In any case, I’d rather be right than consistent. Particularly when it comes to the survival and wellbeing of our people and allies. More pointedly when the other side is a dictatorship.
> the exact argument e.g. Turkey used to ban Wikipedia/Youtube/Twitter etc.
Which one(s)? (Genuinely curious.)
Also, was it a ban or divestment requirement? What wins me over on this bill is it isn’t a ban. It isn’t even a requirement to be controlled by an American. ByteDance could sell TikTok to a Korean or Hugarian or Middle Eastern country—even Turkey—and be in compliance with the law.
> I’d rather be right than consistent. Particularly when it comes to the survival and wellbeing of our people
Turkey's constitution also guarantees free speech etc. However, there are also laws that say you cannot insult people's religious sensibilities or serve sexually explicit content. The motivation for these laws is that this type of content degrades the moral fabric of society.
Politicians whipped up moral panics and judges (who were in many cases appointed by those very same politicians) issued rulings requiring these platforms to remove the offending content. The platforms refused, and were banned. When people argued the bans were against constitutional freedoms, the counter-arguments were always some flavor of "it's more important to prevent the moral degeneration of the country".
> When people argued the bans were against constitutional freedoms, the counter-arguments were always some flavor of "it's more important to prevent the moral degeneration of the country"
When the facts change our opinions should, too. I used to be a free-trade absolutist. It’s become clear that doesn’t work.
I remain a strong free-speech advocate. Which is why I was against Trump’s proposed TikTok ban. This, however, is different. There is an out in divestment—to an American or non-American. And even if ByteDance refuses to sell, TikTok.com won’t be blocked. Moreover, the entire process is subject to judicial oversight. If ByteDance’s Constitutional rights are being abrogated, they have a forum in which to find relief.
Turkey’s tale is cautionary. We should be mindful when we find we were previously wrong. But I think this is different. Free trade (in its absolute sense) isn’t a core American value. Free speech is. The First Amendment protects ByteDance’s speech. It does not guarantee its distribution.
> All explicitly stated goals of both Bejing and the Kremlin, and the misinformation and distraction campaigns carried out by Russia in the last presidential election are about to ratchet up again. I don't believe we should be making these objectives any easier for our ideological rivals.
Those campaigns mostly took part on platforms owned and operated by US companies.
A Chinese company isn't bound by US laws, so this is a necessary precursor to that.
Edit: I stand corrected, they are bound by our laws, but it's orders of magnitude easier to enforce those laws on a company based in the US than a company based in China.
Normally how this works is that national laws dictate what an app can do when operating in the nation's territory, and it's then up to the app owner to decide whether they want to do business in that nation's territory or not.
This is how EU rules apply to US tech companies. US rules for Chinese tech companies is no different in principle.
IMO however the problem isn't privacy, it's being able to stick a thumb on the algorithmic feed and control the information consumption of a slice of society. And TikTok isn't the only problem, it's broadly applicable across consumer tech.
Theoretically, yes. But the US isn't a police state where their activities would be constantly monitored in great detail for compliance. There's a lot they could do under the radar, and a lot of groundwork they could lay for some future inappropriate action.
- Using a wireless power bank. Android phones will work with a completely dead/useless battery if they are plugged into a power bank. If your power bank doesn't work that way, then you need a new power bank.
- Using a different device. Of course your important files are on this phone. Do you think this phone will last forever? Backup those files to the cloud so you can access them from any device. You get free cloud storage with your Google account.
Instead of blaming all your problems on an external entity like Google, if you take accountability for solving your problem, you will find it is not nearly so intractable. Others here can offer advice, but it is ultimately up to you to decide on a course of action and pursue it. I wish you the best of luck.