I've been without a case for about 10 months now. It started as a way to alleviate heat problems, but I haven't had any trouble, despite dropping my phone several times while caseless.

Cases are used for all sorts of things, fashion, for one. But my old case was a popsocket case, and that adds a fair amount of utility. I may buy a bike-mount quadlock case when I upgrade my phone.

You can also buy cases with extra battery packs in them.

It is certainly true that most cases are used for extra protection most of the time, but it's not strictly necessary and not strictly true. There are times where I want my phone to be lighter and thinner, and I absolutely can't get that if they build every phone like it's already in a case, with rugged corners and raised edges. And if they did, then buying a case to mount it to my bike or for extra battery life would REALLY make the phone extremely thick and unwieldy.

It's better to make a thinner phone and allow for cases than the other way around. And these days, a good case is less than $20. A worthwhile tradeoff, I think.

What if they sold you a 3mm sheet of glass but then you could chose to buy a 5mm case with it? Or a 10mm case? Or a 2mm case?

If you get an 8mm phone you can never go thinner than 8mm, even if there are a few isolated situations where you MIGHT want to have a smaller, lighter phone. Reduced size a step towards greater modularity (potentially).

The option to not have a thick heavy phone sometimes if you decide to take the case off.

I've been going without a case on my iPhone 11 for a few months now without any trouble. I'm planning to upgrade this year anyway, so durability is less of a concern at this point, and it's nice to have a thinner and lighter phone for a few months. The case was also trapping heat and my phone was overheating when I was running the public betas.

Smaller devices inherently offer more options than bigger, heavier phones. I can add more battery (battery pack) or protection (cases, screen covers) to a thin phone, but I can't ditch extra battery or case thickness on a large phone. Pretty straightforward.

It's an attempt to move to the platonic ideal of a phone, something John Siracusa calls the 'naked robotic core'.

You make the phone basically nothing but a piece of glass that has all the functionality that you need, and then you start strapping things to it to make it fit your life better. Thin cases for the most basic protection, more rugged cases, cases with extra battery, and you're not burdened down by the decisions the company made for you, you just buy the outside that you need to match the extremely minimal inside. I'd like a very small, light phone because I'm a cyclist and my space is at a premium--I'd have a use for a phone that was more compact but also very functional. (I would have bought the iPhone 12 or 13 mini if I'd been in the market for a phone AND they had the same cameras as the pro models. Instead, they just made a smaller baseline phone, which was disappointing.)

Anyway, I don't know if this is where they're headed, but certainly I could see a future where you pick the processor and piece of glass and that's your 'phone', and then you pick from any number of various cases to suit your day and off you go. If we're always stuck with big, heavy (relatively speaking) phones, you can't remove material for the days where you want something lighter and less obtrusive.

I know nothing about this, I've never heard of it, and I absolutely do not care to learn about it. If HP is involved, it's bad. Period, end of story. I'm not sure what BS thing they'll try to do to sell a subscription to your own stuff, but I want no part of it.

You clearly don't know who Ben (of BenUI.ca) is--which is fair, why should you? But his whole deal has been making resources and giving away answers for free. That's not actually his problem here.

This is really underselling Ben. He set up a site (benui) that documents a lot of the stuff in the Unreal Engine that Epic didn't do a great job of themselves. It's an invaluable resource to those of us that work on Unreal Engine games.

He got hired by Epic recently, so I'm hoping he improves the quality of their released documentation.

So he's not adverse to giving away free advice--it's a big part of how a lot of us know him.

Lots of things influence politics. We should generally think that's a societal good. People are getting involved enough to call their representatives? Neat.

And, like, 'Truth' Social is allowed to exist. So it's not merely about people being involved in politics that they mind, maybe just that there are lots of YOUNG people on TikTok, and young people aren't really super stoked about all the old folks doddering around our institutions.

Are you saying that political representatives don't really like it when people participate in politics? Probably true.

That seems crazy to me--electricity is so much cheaper these days. Where are you getting that stat? If it's true, it's FASCINATING. Like, why even BUY a PHEV if you're not going to plug it in?

There need to be more PHEVs for the transition. After researching cars for the last year, I've decided that my next one will be a PHEV of some kind, because none of the errands I run will ever take me more than the 60km-ish range of the battery, and then when I do actually have to drive somewhere far away (my Mother lives 1000km away), I don't have to worry about fuelling. I'm also planning to lease it, because the landscape will be completely different in 3 years.

FWIW, when the power goes out, a lot of modern EVs can power your house for a few days. And solar could basically make you fully independent. But honestly, I don't think you should have to bear that cost.

(And, as usual, keeping something that's already working is nearly always better than getting something new from a carbon standpoint. Why replace anything if your shit works? I'm only planning to buy a car because I haven't had one for 10 years, but I've moved to a city where I could use one more often.)

Yeah, it's worse and stupider because we could be building rail to those places and making PHEVs more available, but we're not. But besides that, we DO have urban Vancouver (2.9 million people), urban Toronto (9.7 million people in the region), urban Montreal (4.6 million people), plus Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg and a few others close to 1 million each. EIGHTY PERCENT of Canadians live in urban centres.

We love to make excuses for our inaction here in Canada. "Oh, the country is SO BIG. This problem is intractable! Let's just give our money to oil companies and hope they voluntarily lower emissions so we meet our global obligations! Wah!"

We do nothing and demand that the government does nothing either.

Carbon tax? Forget it! Promote EVs! No way! What we want is the good ol' status quo, planet be damned.

I hear a lot about "made in Canada" solutions, and frankly, so far, they all suck. Why don't we just do what other countries have learned have worked: build more bike lanes, make better public transit, build high-speed rail lines. And yeah, phase out SELLING petrol cars in the next 11 years. Just do it. Stop complaining unless you have an actual solution that isn't some BS slogan like "axe the tax".

Honest to god, we're a nation of absolute defeatists sometimes. We want to outsource the building of everything to corporations and do nothing ourselves. It's absurd.

It strongly depends on where you live. I'm in Penticton, BC, and there are times of the year where renting is easy. That is, any time that isn't the summer, because we're a big tourist destination in the summer. Between May and October, forget about short-timeline rentals. You need to book MONTHS in advance.

As to the proposal that EVs be made compatible with small generators: that's a lovely idea on paper, but I think you're deeply underestimating how much design that would take. A generator is heavy and hot. It needs ventilation and a way to fuel it. You can't just throw it in the trunk or the frunk. The generator itself would have to be okay with being in a confined space and not be a fire hazard or a fuel spill hazard. Like, little generators that you plop in your yard aren't being used at highway speeds and don't have to be built to be safe in the event of a collision. Nothing about that idea is practical, and to make it practical would take an insane amount of design.

Honestly, for people in North America that take long road trips sometimes, but need very little range most of the time, a PHEV like the plug-in Prius or similar is absolutely the answer. You get from 50-75km on battery alone, more than enough for errands around town. The Prius has something like a 1000km range when fully charged and fuelled up. It's an incredible solution, and it's not even that much more expensive. I honestly don't even know why mild hybrids exist anymore, the PHEV is far superior and has all the advantages of what you're talking about with a generator.

Yeah, because THE GOVERNMENT BUILT THOSE HOMES.

The Canadian government used to build housing because of COURSE builders want to make a profit, and there's no profit in providing homes for the poor. When the austerity budgets hit in the 90s, the funding to build those homes went away. The responsibility for building homes has been pushed off onto provincial and municipal governments. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunda...

Stop giving the capitalists more money to do this stuff. They never will. They don't want to. If it's profitable for people to be homeless (and it is; our current system requires the constant reminder that you could be homeless to scare you into accepting even the worst jobs) then it doesn't matter if the regulations are relaxed or there's innovation funds. None of those homes go to the poor.

Even when you put conditions on a development--like the developer has to build some low-cost housing as well--they'll build the luxury condos first, then sell the part of the development that was supposed to go to low cost housing and it never gets built.

I half agree with you, and I fully agree with you for all of the part where you're saying that Musk is just a billionaire that's playing us.

But EVs now will get better. The batteries will get lighter and cheaper and there are places where the grid is shit but everyone has started installing solar and batteries at home because it means more stability. But BE cars and trucks are hugely heavy, destroy the roads, and require an upgrade in DRIVING infrastructure. Turns out a 9000lbs BE Hummer is too heavy to be stopped by conventional guardrails at 100km/hr. Forget about the cost to upgrade the grid, we're already so far behind on keeping the roads in good repair and BEVs are NOT helping.

Honestly, the best solution for the environment will be electric bicycles. I've seen a couple analyses done, and you can make a good argument that the lifetime emissions of an electric bike are LESS than those for a conventional bicycle when you take into account the diet of the rider. Turns out electric motors are so good for that sort of thing that you have to be a very small vegan to have any chance of out-performing the electric bike.

And at that point, the stability of the grid will be even less of a concern. Electric vehicles are the future, I just hope it's mostly bikes.

I hate basically everything about gmail. Other than the reliability, the UI and filters are honestly terrible. I'm forced to use it at work (in the web interface), and good luck getting it to filter multiple exact strings, and it definitely can't filter anything based on X-header information. It's a wonder to me that it can be so bad and still be so ubiquitous, but it's big and free and has momentum and it does have extremely good uptime.

I had their free hosting for many years, and I'm glad I pay someone else to do it now. People are so used to how bad gmail is they don't realize that life can be better. (That said, I don't know what the other free options are like; I presume that they have similar limitations.)