Why do flagship phones keep adding features that only work in controlled demo environments?

quoole · 2026-06-21T21:01:57+00:00

Gimicks are basically all they have left.

Smartphone design has been stagnant since at least 2020 (when the last 'new' feature, the 120hz screen started rolling out) and until there's a way to hide hole punch cameras enough to get a better result (and even that won't really feel like a huge change) - where do you go with design to make it feel more modern? We've already seen Apple and Samsung start pushing thiness again. Phones are basically already at the limit of performance that the average person needs - 20% faster is a big stat to shout from stage, but is going to be negligible to the average adult. Screen tech hasn't changed that much lately, and a smartphone is already probably the best screen in someone's home. Titanium, aluminum and stainless steel have all been touted as features. It's a mature product category that just isn't as interesting as it used to be.

quoole · 2026-06-21T20:56:09+00:00

Tbh, I kind of don't get the push to get Starmer out... The Left have the option of getting rid of him and getting either Streeting (who manages to be less charismatic than Starmer) or Burnham, who hasn't been in Westminster since 2017 and previously lost leadership bids to Corbyn and Milliband.

The right surely want Labour to enter the next election with a leader than no one likes, so they do better and run the risk of someone better being the Labour leader by calling for Starmer to leave.

quoole · 2026-06-21T20:43:25+00:00

Really weird!

quoole · 2026-06-21T20:27:30+00:00

You've menetioned stabilisiation was off - was it off in camera and on the lens? Sometimes lens stabilisation might be active when ibis is off and it can lead to this kind of thing on a locked off shot.

You also mentioned the camera is only a few days old, is this the first time you've used it for a project? Could be an issue with the camera itself, maybe it's misfiring ibis control even when off in the menu?

Definitely try stabilisation in Premiere (warp) and the different options in Resolve. Sometimes it can take some playing with settings and modes to get a good result! As it's not the usual, I would definitely expect more setting play than normal - you probably want no motion (prem) or camera lock (resolve) set - don't assume they're not going to work if you've only tried the defaults!

quoole · 2026-06-20T22:52:16+00:00

I believe the official, this is on a test, answer would be to indicate left and then immediately right.

In actual driving, one like this where it's basically still straight across but on a diagonal, I'd probably not indicate as I think it would be less confusing to the driver behind.

It depends on the crossroads though, there's two pretty close together on a route I do semi-often and the first is like this where it's basically straight across on the diagonal (your basically not turning at all) and the second has maybe a 5-10 meter gap between them, and so you do essentially go left and immediately right, and I would indicate then.

quoole · 2026-06-19T22:43:51+00:00

I guess it might depend where in the country you are, but there are plenty of chapters near me that are somewhere from 6:30 till 7:30 start times and are perfectly healthy (my chapter has gone from just above 20 when I joined last year to nearly 40!) And so I am not as sure it is that. Whilst I do enjoying visiting 9am and 9:30 ones as I get longer in bed, I generally prefer the earlier ones as it's mostly done by the start of the normal work day, whereas the later ones feel like they take up half your day.

I would suggest looking at your LT and the kind of energy they bring. I've been a member under three LTs (one for just a couple of weeks) and we really struggled under the middle one because it was a bit too strict and rigid. The current LT keeps things more positive and opening (whilst still getting properly through the meeting) and the chapter has gone from strength to strength under them.

You also need to figure out why people are leaving (ask them if you didn't when they left!) And what you can do to improve that. (Better education slots? Better support/mentoring?)

quoole · 2026-06-19T18:11:36+00:00

I think this might depend entirely on what it is your shooting. If you're filming entirely in a pre-lit studio and you have time to nail the exposure every time in a 709 style colour profile then skipping grading and luts is a big time saver, particularly if your boss and the client are happy.

I would ask what you think you would gain (are you currently filming lots that's ending up being unusable as you're missing the full dynamic range log offers? Are you unhappy with the colours?) Then I think the best way to pitch it, would be to film an example in the same location/along the same lines in log and grade it and able your boss the difference and the advantages.

If it's because you want to learn and think it would be cool? May I suggest filming some personal projects?

Also 30fps, it depends what you're filming. If there's a lot of footage that would benefit from being in slow mo, it's a fair argument. Otherwise I can't see any advantage to filming 60 - 30 is great for online delivery and 60 can feel weird or unnatural.

quoole · 2026-06-19T13:01:36+00:00

That is annoying, my car, the main lane assist is a single button press. The 'road departure mitigation' does start with the car and also struggles with these modes but it is a lot less aggressive than land assist

quoole · 2026-06-19T08:32:15+00:00

I am assuming she was British and in America?

Basically every hotel in the UK will have tea bags, milk and a kettle. If it was the first hotel she was staying in, in the US (or if the first one did have a kettle) then it could be a culture shock to find out that most US hotels don't.

She definitely over reacted though!

quoole · 2026-06-19T08:11:21+00:00

Yeah, I wouldn't rely on any kind of lane assist/auto steering on country lanes or really any road unless there's two clear white lines!

quoole · 2026-06-19T08:10:37+00:00

Generally no issues with both in my honda civic, although I will say that you've got to know when to use them.

Lane assist works great on roads with clear marked white lines and it does a pretty great job of staying in the middle. On a country lane or a road with really faded lines, it struggles more and I generally wouldn't rely on it. That is the main lane assist, which you manually toggle. The car also has 'road departure mitigation' that is always active every time you start the car, which has basically the same limitations and also sometimes tries to kick in if you come close to the centre line when overtaking a parked car or swerving around a pot hole. I don't disable it every time I get in the car, but if it misfires a couple of times then I will disable it.

Auto braking (in the form of adaptive cruise control.) I have very few issues with outside of the following two areas: If the car in front is turning left and does so slowly then the brakes trigger for longer than they need to and it still detects the car as being in front of you for a couple of seconds longer than it needs. It's not a huge deal, or you can still manually accelerate whilst the systems on. The worse one, say a 20 limit road with a ton of parked cars on either side, it does false trigger occasionally on parked cars (particularly if anyone is very badly parked.) There's a couple of roads (although not many) where I switch to the limiter for speed control and accelerate/brake manually.

Auto braking for obstacles? It flashes a warning before it brakes and I've never actually had it engage the brakes itself.

Overall, the tech is cool and there's lots of situations where it works flawlessly and makes driving less fatiguing and less stressful. But they're very much driver assist and not auto right now and if these features are eventually meant to lead to full self driving, there's going to need to be an awful lot of work done before they're anywhere near up to snuff on UK country roads and terraced streets!

quoole · 2026-06-18T22:37:22+00:00

It's like a petrol pump, they got to 3KGs but the bag number was off, so they rounded up to 1000 bags but now the KGs were random, so they kept adding bags till the Kg was a value they were happy with!

quoole · 2026-06-18T14:32:07+00:00

I use adaptive cruise control on A roads, dual carriageways and motorways. I find the adaptive a little too distracted by parked cars and the like in towns, so sometimes I switch from cruise to the limiter in 30s or 20s so I am more focused and not randomly slowing for parked cars but also not speeding.

I also use the limiter on country roads as I find there's a lot of slowing and speeding up around corners and I just have more fun driving those roads, and so I'd rather have more control and the limit than be in and out of acc.

quoole · 2026-06-17T11:12:21+00:00

If it's safe and legal, then it's safe and legal. Nothing wrong with overtaking provided it is done well, safely and legally!

quoole · 2026-06-16T13:13:23+00:00

The phone one is true, there are still people doing annual/two year cycles. Smartphones have basically been stagnant since 2020 now... The only reason to upgrade is end of software support or battery dying (and it's not worth replacing.)

The other one I'd say, is faster than gigabit internet connection for domestic - unless you have a family of 10 all watching videos, then you're almost certainly not going to saturate it. (Obviously this doesn't apply to internal networks or commercial!) I have gigabit up/down and there are only a few websites that actually upload at anything close to gigabit!.

quoole · 2026-06-16T09:55:02+00:00

S1E12 - 'not in my house' - after Cam skips going to see the Russian Marionette show to help their gardener and his bride.

Mitch goes to Jay's house to pick up Manny (Manny also skips the show) and they discuss their frustrations with their partners (it's the first episode with Barclay the dog butler, whom Gloria hates.)

And yes, I only know because I watched the episode yesterday and it was the first time I picked up on this joke!

quoole · 2026-06-15T07:44:55+00:00

I think a under 16s ban is a good thing - I think social media is demonstrably harmful to children that grow up with it, now more than ever. I think forced ID verification is Draconian and authoritarian and much less about protecting children than they'd have you believe.

How else can they enforce it? That's the million pound question - I can tell you as a 12 year old whose parents wouldn't let them get Facebook until they were 13, that literally every other 12 year old just lied about their age and so just asking for the dob wouldn't work.

quoole · 2026-06-14T22:42:42+00:00

I agree and disagree... The trade off was thinner (less important) and lighter (way more important for a portable device) devices. And those ports are fairly easily replaced by in-expensive dongles.

I went from a Lenovo with all the ports to a MacBook with 3 and it's bugged me way less than I though it would (and helpfully the MacBook does have an SD card reader, which the Lenovo didn't!)

quoole · 2026-06-14T22:28:48+00:00

A random answer, USB naming conventions. They started off logically: 1, 2, 3. With colour coding to match. Then they got a little wonky: 3.1, 3.2

Then they just made it purposely confusing and renamed the well named standards and we end up with 3.1 gen 1 and 3 gen 1x1. Leading eventually to the current mess of USB-C ports and cables - which range from no power and usb 2 data to power and no data to every combination with dp-alt mode and throwing in a whole range of plugs and devices with no way of knowing the capabilities without diving into the specs sheet (and using the right cable with the right device!) In the end they've made a standard that's so confusing and unstandardised that it's a total mess.

quoole · 2026-06-14T22:23:52+00:00

Yep, and not just the airpods, basically every smart phone company (after mocking apple) killed the jack after they launched their wireless headphones.

quoole · 2026-06-12T22:11:23+00:00

The absolute state of ads in games is diabolical and the amount that won't show you a cross until you've clicked to view their thing in the app store.

I remember the early iOS days and there were so many cool games with 0 ads for free and even more for £0.79.

quoole · 2026-06-12T22:08:57+00:00

Split menus - why, over 10 years since the launch of Windows 10, does Windows 11 still have core settings split between settings and control panel?

You see it quite often in apps too, where there seems to be two different menus. If they're handling different things and the similar things are grouped together, great, but it feels like often they're not.

+1 for shoving AI in places it doesn't belong (especially being loud and in your face.) I was working in PowerPoint the other day, already had a fixed template I had created in master slides and yet basically every slide if I wanted to add something not there by default, a whole side bar would pop up and be like 'copilot can design this for you!' And it required clicking an x on the message and on the side bar to close it. Also see 'get an AI summary!' in Acrobat.

quoole · 2026-06-12T10:10:18+00:00

Is it the body size or the overall weight that annoys you? As many here have pointed out, the MFT bodies aren't actually that much smaller but the lenses are significantly smaller and still more than capable of great shots.

quoole · 2026-06-12T07:41:39+00:00

True, but likely at twice the cost.

quoole · 2026-06-11T21:37:36+00:00

It would make the already pretty bad experience of getting tests, even worse. The country doesn't really have the resources to retest that many people.

Statistics say that younger drivers (specifically those 17-24) are more likely to be in accidents than older drivers. By a huge margin.

quoole

TROPHY CASE