https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord

It looks like there’s software to bridge it to Matrix. I have no idea whether that violates ToS. It does look like it’s getting development, though, so I can’t imagine that Discord has been cutting people off en masse for using it.

I get that.

Honestly, though I’m still a little puzzled as to why people initially got into Discord; I never did.

I can understand why people wanted to use some systems. Twitter does massive-scale real-time indexing. That was a huge feature, really changed what one could do on the platform.

Reddit provided a good syntax (Markdown), had a low barrier to entry (no email verification at a time when that was common), and third-party client access. It solved the spam problem that was killing Usenet and permitted for more-reasonable moderation.

There were a whole host of services that aimed to lower the complexity bar to get a web page and some content online associated with someone’s identity; it was clear that lack of technical knowledge and the technical knowledge required to get stuff up was a real limiting factor for many people.

But I just didn’t really get where Discord provided much of a win over stuff like IRC. I mean, I guess maybe it bundled a couple services into one, which maybe lowered the bar to use a bit. IRC really seemed pretty fine to me. Reddit bundling image-hosting seems to have lowered the bar, been something that people wanted. Maybe Discord doing images and file-hosting made it more-accessible.

I have no idea why a number of people who liked Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead used Discord rather than Reddit; it seemed like a dramatically-worse system if one was aiming to create material for others to look back at and refer to.

kagis

https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditForGrownups/comments/t417q1/can_someone_please_explain_discord_to_me_like_im/

It’s just modern day IRC with video.

Ahaha, thanks. This is indeed an ELI60 response, although it doesn’t really explain how Discord suddenly got so popular. But if I couple this with /u/Healthy-Car-1860’s response, I’m kind of getting the picture.

Got popular because it spread through the entire gamer/twitch community like wildfire due to actually being a more complete package and easier to use than anything prior. Online gamers have been struggling with voip software forever (Roger Wilco, Teamspeak, Ventrilo, Skype, and many others).

Once it was rooted in the people who are on their computers app day every day it was bound to spread because the UX is incredibly easy compared to previous options for both chat and voip.

Maybe that’s it. I never had a lot of interest in VoIP, especially group VoIP. When I was playing online games much, people used keyboards to communicate, not mics. There was definitely a period where people needed the ability to collaborate in games and games didn’t always provide that functionality. I remember people complaining about Teamspeak and Ventrilo. I briefly poked at Mumble – nice to have an open-source option – but I just had no reason to want to do VoIP with groups of people.

But I suppose for a video game clan or something, that might be important functionality. And if it’s also a one-stop shop for some other things that you might want to do anyway, it maybe makes sense to just use that rather than multiple services.

Unix’s history is long—much longer than NT’s. Unix’s development started in 1969 and its primary goal was to be a convenient platform for programmers. Unix was inspired by Multics, but compared to that other system, Unix focused on simplicity which is a trait that let it triumph over Multics.

On the other hand, NT’s design derived from VMS’s design, and a lot of people who built the latter system were involved with creating NT.

https://www.itprotoday.com/server-virtualization/windows-nt-and-vms-the-rest-of-the-story

I had that at one point too, was really obnoxious. A couple fixes:

• Bluetooth, including possibly a Bluetooth-to-phone-jack adapter if you have headphones with a phone jack that you’re happy with.

• USB-C audio interface that has better power circuitry than the phone’s DAC. You will need one that can pass through USB PD to charge your phone simultaneously.

battery

I don’t think that this is a conspiracy by phone manufacturers to force purchases of phone hardware.

• All kinds of devices use fixed batteries these days, not just smartphones. It’s cheaper, lighter, makes the device stronger, avoids them having to deal with “User X bought a counterfeit battery that then caught fire” – that’s a real issue for lithium batteries, unlike traditional alkaline/NiMH-type removeable batteries. Virtually the only device class I can think of where removable lithium batteries are the norm is high-end flashlights – anything on !flashlight@lemmy.world probably supports removable 18650s or similar. I have gone out of my way to get a lot of devices that use AA batteries or maybe 18650s, but there are just tons of products, including in highly-competitive, low-barrier-to-entry industries like gamepads, where it’d be impossible to form a cartel to refuse to offer a device with removable batteries. And yet they’ve mostly moved to fixed batteries. There is no industry convention for removable, BMS-enabled, lithium batteries the way AA or the like were traditionally used in devices.

  If there were a cartel driving this against consumer wishes as a whole, you would have just smartphones doing the fixed battery thing, not the consumer electronics industry as a whole.

  If it were cartel-driven, I’d also expect to see, in a situation like that, manufacturers making hefty use of price discrimination – like, think of how some laptop vendors charge a premium for devices with a lot of RAM when they have soldered RAM. But in the market today, the differences in battery size are minimal. Google makes a “large” version of the Pixel, and they barely bump the battery up, even with a slightly larger screen.

  Instead, it was associated with the shift across consumer electronics to non-removable batteries with the move to lithium batteries, which is what you’d expect if sketchy batteries were a problem.

• Phones in particular have a space and weight premium, so compared to a lot of devices that aren’t held in your hand, using removable NiMH batteries or the like is more of an issue.

I’ve been slowly migrating a lot of screen time from phone to laptop.

Phones can do some neat things, and they’re the best device class for one-handed use – and that does matter. You aren’t gonna poke at a laptop in the car to pause music or something. If you’re waiting in a line, easy to pull a phone out. And they have very low power requirements.

But a laptop running Linux is just a far more-open and configurable platform.

And even aside from the software restrictions, the hardware is generally a lot more capable. It’s a lot more-comfortable to type on a laptop than a phone.

A smartphone is dramatically better than a laptop at being a portable phone. Laptops don’t have a super-low-power-but-a-5G-modem-is-active mode.

But for most other things…a laptop is just a considerably-more-capable option. Web browsing. Posting on Lemmy. Editing text. Games. Has better hardware expandability and connectivity. Easier to repair. Better diagnostic tools. OS doesn’t EOL in a few years; I can probably run current Linux distros on truly ancient computers.

And I don’t really think that the smartphone industry is going to dramatically change on this direction in the foreseeable future.

Probably battery life, specifically that 15% means “you have 5 minutes left”.

I’m assuming that unless this is some kind of 3D gaming thing, that you can’t deplete your battery from full in 33 minutes. So I’m guessing that the battery estimation is just off, reads a higher percentage remaining than it should at that point.

There are some power monitor software packages other than the built-in one that can do their own prediction that might be more-accurate. I have BatteryBot on my phone, and I’d bet that there are others out there.

I would be willing to put up with a more-massive phone – especially a thicker one – in exchange for longer battery life. Would also like a larger screen, mostly because I’d like more space for the onscreen keyboard.

I entirely understand people – especially women, with clothes designed to often have smartphone-unfriendly, small, form-fitting pockets – not wanting a large phone. There is also a market for smaller phones, and “bigger phone” is not the answer for everyone. But I’m fine with it for my own phone.

My #2 irritation is that I miss having a phone connector. I understand why manufacturers did it; it bought them a bit more space. I do like having active noise cancellation, and that requires some way to get power to a phone. But there are a long list of things that I like about having a simple, zero-latency, splittable, mixable, inexpensive, always-works-protocol cable that has been on pretty much every device for over a century. I don’t have to worry about charging headphones. The 1/8th inch headphones jack is pretty durable.

My #3 irritation is that the industry – spanning cell service providers, hardware providers, and software providers – has the desire and is willing to try to make it harder to use phone data with tethered devices than with a phone device. I have no problem if you have quotas and then throttle when they’re exceeded or something. I have no problem with you prioritizing a user who has made the least amount of usage of their quota. I have no problem with you even selling prioritized data. But for God’s sake, you have no legitimate reason not to be hardware-agnostic. Don’t try to dictate what I’m doing on my end of a data connection. Wired ISPs don’t do this. You want multiple devices on the other end of your data service, they’re fine with it, even provide hardware to do NATting if required on ISPv4 networks. I appreciate that wireless frequency is a scarcer commodity, but needing to make use of it intelligently should not entail caring which device on the end user’s end is consuming it. If PC-tethered users are consuming way more than their share of bandwidth, then just throttle heavy users.

I assume that it must be cheaper or something. I really preferred having it on the back too; was more ergonomic.

ponders

I guess that the front is maybe easier to use a thumbprint or something on.

That being said, regarding accuracy, it might also have a lower false-positive rate, which is maybe something that you’d want.

and Orange or Yellow are usually “always on” and/or 2.4 amp or some other kind of thing like that.

It’s the variety and surprise here that adds novelty and excitement to life.

https://www.usbmemorydirect.com/blog/usb-port-colors/

The blue USB port is also known as USB 3.0 or SuperSpeed (SS) USB. It was introduced in 2008 and offers a data transfer speed of up to 5 Gbps, which is more than 10 times faster than USB 2.0. In addition, it can transfer data in both directions simultaneously.

I definitely have a number of devices that use newer-than-USB 3.0 and use blue.

The teal USB port is also known as the USB 3.1 Gen 1 or SuperSpeed+ (SS+) USB. Released in 2013, it supports up to 10 Gbps data transfer speed, which is twice as fast as USB 3.0. The color is similar to USB 3.0, but it will appear as slightly more green-toned than the classic blue of 3.0. This is the easiest way to differentiate USB 3.0 vs 3.1 ports.

I don’t think any of my devices actually use teal, regardless of what they support. Oh…hmm. Wait, I think my last desktop motherboard did that.

goes to investigate

Yeah, it has teal and blue ports.

My current motherboard uses blue or red for everything USB-A, so clearly isn’t using blue to indicate “USB 3.0”, and labels every port, blue or red, in English as “USB 3.2”. So it clearly isn’t using the port color to indicate purely speed.

The red USB port is generally classified as USB 3.2, which was released in 2017. However, it can also be used to indicate a USB 3.1 Gen 2 port.

Another source of novelty and excitement.

Yellow USB Port Meaning

The yellow USB port is another color that can indicate either USB 3.2 or USB 3.1 Gen 2.

So much excitement.

The yellow USB port is more commonly found on laptops while the red USB port is more commonly found on desktop computers. This is because the yellow USB port indicates that it is always on, meaning it will continue to draw power even when the computer is turned off or in sleep mode. As a result, you can generally use it to charge other devices, such as smartphones.

Honestly, I didn’t really have an issue with USB type A ports. They worked fine, and it was only a minor inconvenience to orient them the right way. I cared far more about capabilities of the port (speed, power delivery, etc) than I did about the actual port.

I believe that the reason that the smaller USB variants showed up was because some devices were just too small to physically accommodate a USB-A plug. Think MP3 players and later – very importantly – smartphones.

For the vast majority of consumer electronics, USB-A is fine. But for things that are as thin as possible, usually to fit into a pocket, it starts to bump up against limits.

That said, micro-USB sucks in every way. The awkward “is this the right way?” thing is way worse than with USB-A, it’s not meaningfully smaller than mini-USB, the port is incredibly hard to clean (and it always gets dirty), and the connector seems to break all the time. I would’ve been totally fine with moving everything to mini-USB instead.

Mini-USB put the tensioners – the bit that wears out over time, is the bottleneck on the lifetime of the thing – on the (expensive) device rather than the (cheap) cable. Micro-USB and USB-C didn’t make that mistake.

Like, I think that there was a legitimate reason to fix that one way or another.

You’ll want to run USB PD, not to be confused with the USB “P” and “D” label which refers to DisplayPort, not to be confused with some other ways of transporting DisplayPort over USB. And you’ll want charging support, so look for the USB lightning bolt that means “USB charging”, not to be confused with the different USB lightning bolt that means “Thunderbolt”, which isn’t the same thing as the Lightning connector that is about the same size as the USB-C connector and was used in a similar role on various devices.

Piece of cake.

Oh, okay, makes sense, thanks.

Would be nice to have a standard indicator on the cable side of things.

There nothing in the comment that you are responding to or OP’s original post that is specific to USB-C. OP references USB-A and USB-C both, and the comment you responded to doesn’t specify USB-C.

No USB cable has “gigabit speed”. It probably has 480 Mbps (USB 2.0 standard).

What? I’m either misunderstanding you or this statement isn’t correct. Having USB cables that can move data at gigabit rates has been common for quite some years.

Here’s the latest stuff:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB4

Bitrate

20 Gbit/s
40 Gbit/s
80 Gbit/s
120/40 Gbit/s asymmetric

And then you have the standards for not just raw data speed, but also what other modes are supported, for information to be seamlessly tunneled through the cable and connection in a mode that carries signals other than the data signal spec for USB.

Not to mention power-only cables to avoid the security issues associated with cables that permit data transfer.

It’s also important to permit use of adapters for backwards compatibility. Like, if we stop having computers with A ports, there are still gonna be some very expensive devices out there that have A ports. You aren’t going to throw out your electron microscope with a USB A port because the USB guys have decided that USB-C being reversible is cool.

I guess they could have a USB certification body, kinda like UL is for wall power devices, and require that a device have an certification ID number on it that you could look up in their online database to qualify. I mean, you could forge a fake number that doesn’t map to anything, but I feel like that’s a higher bar than just throwing a USB symbol on there. Like, you gotta know that you’re doing something fraudulent in that case.

investigates

Huh.

Apparently UL does certify USB devices. I have no idea how to tell whether a UL-marked device of a given age is certified to do what from the logo alone, though. I guess you could look it up with UL.

https://www.ul.com/services/ul-taiwan-usb-test-lab

I bet that only my high-power USB chargers have it, though. Honestly, I didn’t even know that they covered USB, wouldn’t have looked for a UL mark on USB devices.

investigates

Well, my Logitech F710 gamepad does have a UL mark. That’s some proprietary wireless protocol, uses AA batteries. Not USB and doesn’t plug into the wall. Dunno whether they certified it for wireless or power safety or whatever.

looks further

I have a wired USB gamepad with a bunch of Chinese characters, the URL “www.izdtech.com”, no USB labels, and no UL mark.

I have a wired/wireless USB 8Bitdo gamepad with a CE mark, USB symbols, and no UL mark (I understand that CE doesn’t work like UL. It doesn’t indicate that any independent organization has tested the device, just is a concise way to state that the device manufacturer states that the device conforms to some set of standards).

I have a 100W USB PD “Nekteck” charger with a UL mark and some ID number that looks to be associated with that, no CE mark, an FCC mark that I assume is related to RF interference compliance, an enormous USB standard mark with the 100 watt capability listed, and some sort of mark with a box inside another box that I don’t recognize.

I have an SIIG USB audio interface that has no USB labels, a CE mark, an FCC mark, and no UL mark.

I have a USB-powered audio mixer that has no USB labels, no FCC mark, no UL mark and a CE mark.

I have a laptop USB charger that has no USB labels, a CE mark, multiple UL marks, one of which appears to be in some sort of teardrop-looking thing, some “UK CA” mark that I assume is some kind of UK regulatory body. It’s got that same mysterious “box in a box” mark that I saw before, “VI” in a circle, a picture of a house, some “NYCE” mark, and a “NOM” mark.

I bet that most people have basically no idea what any of this means. I probably know what more of it means than the average person, but definitely not enough to extract a whole lot of information from this. And all of these have a different set of marks; there is no least-common-denominator mark.

clear text labels

The problem with using English anything is that while English is the most-widely-used language in the world, there are still a lot of people out there who don’t know it.

The US has a history of just using English text for everything, because most people in the US can do English. Over in Europe, where the language situation is more-fragmented, I think that there’s more push for using symbols, which…can have benefits, though it also means that everyone has to learn some symbols.

Maybe “STOP” or “ON” and “OFF” or something aren’t that hard to learn. My gut is that maybe we could expect just about everyone in the world to learn a super-minimal subset of English using all-capital Latin letters or something for labeling purposes. “ON”, “OFF”, “STOP”, “YES”, “NO”, “CANCEL”, “POWER”, “ERROR”, “RESET”, “UP”, “DOWN”, maybe something along those lines. Kinda like a pidgin English designed for devices. But that thing has “CERTIFIED”, hardly the first thing someone learns. Also, it appears to have built a US trademark indicator and registered trademark indicator into various official labels, which I think is kind of funny. Like, if the USB guys go out and alter the registration status of their trademarks, are they gonna change the labels, and is everyone gonna go alter their plastic molds and whatever?

Imagine all that text was a bunch of Chinese and imagine how palatable that’d be for the US market. Okay, it’s easier to learn the (small) Latin alphabet than Chinese characters, which maybe makes learning basic words easier, but I can’t recognize a single Chinese character.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. I speak English. I’d rather have descriptive English than a bunch of obscure and sometimes similar-looking symbols, myself. But I don’t feel like this is all that ideal, either, not from a global standpoint.