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They're predators. They are very good at understanding where your real attention is.

Just as a counterpoint, to avoid people getting the wrong idea about the complexity involved - I use it and it took literally minutes. The most confusing part was that the sync settings in Ankidroid referred to Ankiweb.


Hey, could you put in an issue, especially regarding the pain points, but also including what 'seems unusual': https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android

It's mostly due to time/resource/technical constraints [some of our strings come from a shared backend], but we can do better here, especially if there's now a lot more community interest in the feature.

Pull requests welcome! Do feel free to get in touch on the issue/Discord.


Was about to do that, but it turned out it's already fixed in the current version - so literally the only minor issue I hit on my way to a custom sync server is resolved already :)


It's my primary environment for anything code related (I'm not a developer by profession). Cheap tablet in vertical model, cheap keyboard, termux, tmux, Claude Code with instructions to offload anything more resource intensive to a 5$ VPS. I'll not claim it's perfect - occasionally Claude does try to run something that crashes termux, and the keyboard mappings are not ideal - but it's good enough that I haven't needed a laptop in over a year.


>it's good enough that I haven't needed a laptop in over a year

Not to single you out but I worry about this trend. As things stand, free (FLOSS) privacy-respecting computing remains all but impossible on the mobile platform. If now Termux is encouraging even geeks to abandon the desktop, that seems like a net negative.


You can, of course, define understanding as a metaphysical property that only people have. If you then try to use that definition to determine whether a machine understands, you'll have a clear answer for yourself. The whole operation, however, does not lead to much understanding of anything.


>> Understanding, when used in its unqualified form, implies people possessing same.

> You can, of course, define understanding as a metaphysical property that only people have.

This is not what I said.

What I said was unqualified use of "understanding" implies understanding people possess. Thus it being a metaphysical property by definition and existing strictly within a person.

Many other entities possess their own form of understanding. Most would agree mammals do. Some would say any living creature does.

I would make the case that every program compiler (C, C#, C++, D, Java, Kotlin, Pascal, etc.) possesses understanding of a particular sort.

All of the aforementioned examples differ from the kind of understanding people possess.


As someone who's spent the last 3 years in Africa, if there's one thing I learnt here is that if it can be fixed, they'll find a way to fix it.


Brazilian person here, when I moved to Europe I was baffled I couldn't find shops that fixed electronics. Like I wanted to get my Android phone charging port replaced, I literally couldn't find a shop in my city willing to do the repair.

I eventually went back to Brazil and had it fixed there and replaced the battery. Freaking phone lasted 8 years on my very clumsly hands, still works even. The fix cost me ~30 usd plus the battery cost.


Somebody who has the skills to fix electronics will be working with fixing devices which are much more expensive and critical than cell phones.

Industrial dishwasher breaks down? You need to get an electrician there ASAP.

Cell phone breaks down? Throw it away and buy a new one.

Brazil has very low salaries for skilled workers, so it makes sense that it's cheap to find somebody to fix your phone.


Note that mobile phone repair is the no. 1 service provided by repair shops in rural areas of many countries in Africa.

Like 50%+ of all repairs are mobile phone repairs


Yes, it's something extremely valuable, an expensive portable, and the new models all just keep getting worse and worse. There's no reason not to fix them.

It's also a repair that demands some amount of training. I imagine people fix a lot of things without getting them to a shop.


Hackers are down voting my comment. My question to them: If you could get paid twice the salary per hour to repair expensive machines, would you spend your time repairing mobile phones?

Everybody wants that juicy, juicy cheap labour, but nobody wants to be the cheap worker.


Do you think US people capable of fixing phones make more than the ~$600/hour they can add in value by fixing phones there?


No. Fixing modern phones requires a lot of specialized equipment.

You need to be able to fix microscopic flaws in soldering.

There are locked-down components that you cannot replace.

Here is a referenece: https://www.ipadrehab.com/index.cfm?Page=About


If nobody is offering cell phone repair services, that means repairing cell phones is not profitable enough compared to other things the person can do with their time. Otherwise people would offer these services.


Two economists were walking when they spotted a $100 bill. One asked the other "should one of us pick it up?", the other replied "no, if there was a $100 bill there, somebody would have picked it up already", so they kept walking.

Not even the joke is funny. People repeating it seriously is even less so.

Anyway, you would be right if you are trying to claim that the repairmen isn't the party maintaining the irrational situation, so they are powerless to fix it.


Then put your money where your mouth is and open as many cell phone repair shops in Europe as you please. You can mortgage your house and borrow a bunch of money if you need to get started.

But I think that there is always some reason or another why nobody is offering a service which seems to have great demand among customers.


No, it's extremely easy and routine to fix cell phones. You could train teenagers to do it.


And you can train those teenagers to do things which are much more profitable. If they have the dexterity and other skills needed to work on cell phone electronics, then they can work on other electronics.

If it was a good business, then there would be cell phone repair shops on every corner in Europe, like you have in other parts of the world where that makes sense.


lol yeah I was gonna say that they fix everything. They can't just Amazon prime new shit. It's weird how OP just assumes they're inept at repairs when that's just not true at all.


I didn’t say, nor do I assume, people are inept at repairs. I said that the communities that are being targeted with off-grid solar don’t currently have the skills or infrastructure required to maintain these systems.

It’s something I’ve seen with my own eyes and that I’ve read in academic literature as a widespread problem. Cross and Murray 2018 [1] being one the first papers to talk about it, I saw it myself for the first time around that time in Tanzania.

I stayed in a village where each house had at least 2 broken solar lanterns stored in a corner (like those old routers people love to keep).

The next closest repair shop was first 30min motorbike ride then a 2 hour bus ride away.

This was a village of 8,000 people.

Yes, the person with a diploma from the local technical college can fix a lot of things but they live in the local town with grid electric etc. They don’t live in these remote rural regions where off grid is so important/impactful.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462961...

Edit:

The solution is to teach more people how to design, build and maintain solar energy systems so that the skills are embedded in off grid communities and give them the tools to carry out the work. You can do a lot with a soldering iron and good grasp of electronics!


Well, what is the alternative then? Probably the same problem when their diesel generator conks out. Small things you can do yourself, but rapidly you run into a situation where you need spare parts, or at least a competently run machine shop.


How long did it take for mobile repair shops to proliferate? Surely solar repair shops will also appear.


It's not even Amazon prime. It's all the random industrial doodads you need to keep a modern economy running.

The "modern world supply chain" just doesn't go into africa much or at least not in a way that general commerce has easy access to.


The thing with idealists in the philosophical sense is that they're typically not very well grounded in reality. Not saying it's always drugs/psychotic breaks/deep meditation, but often it is. Even more so with the panpsychists.


I took one of the last ham radio exams in the Netherlands that were taken by having many test takers in a room (now it's computer based, using the same infrastructure as the driver's license theory test).

Of thirty people, there were only men. Not all were old, but at least 70% seemed 40 to 50. Zero minorities. I fit the profile myself (a part from being German, not Dutch) but still feel grossed out by it


I'm the person most positive about technology of all my friends, and this gets a no from me. A relationship is an endless sequence of coordination problems, and you need to work out a way to do these effortlessly. Defer to the person with stronger opinions, everybody decides half of the time, some quid pro quo, I mean there's just endless ways to solve this in an easier and more fun way than using an app.


Yeah the last thing I'd want when we talk dinner with my partner is to both of us grabbing a smartphone and start swiping.


I'd generally call this amount of tables an antipattern - doing this basically implies that there's information stored in the table names that should be in rows instead, like IDs etc. -- But I'll admit that sensor related use cases have a tendency to stress the system in unusual ways, which may have forced this design.


Especially back when we started. Now we would've done it differently, but still think postgres wouldn't really work. Guess we will never now as even far smaller data sets do not work in the way we need them.


I sympathize, and I think this is a bigger problem than the skills/experience/age issues. I'd do what I can to either move to a more dynamic place, or get a remote job for a US company. I know it's hard, but it's better than investing two years to become a pro in a different stack - and still be stuck in the same socioeconomic trap.


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