Anthropic really needs to focus on reliability. The high quality of their models unfortunately cannot make up for the unreliability. Like an inconsistent friend or employee, you eventually stop checking to see if they're available and just default to options that are.
We need to at least ensure stability for some users and either accept additional Max Plan customers or something. I think that’s what the waiting list feature was for. It’s really disappointing.
This data is pretty questionable. OpenAI employees have said on Twitter that it does not account for ChatGPT Enterprise, where most of their growth is, which is quote-only and not paid by credit card.
Sora clearly was a waste of ressources. I liked using it for a few days, but I could tell it was consuming an insane amount of compute for 10-15 second videos that only a dozen people might watch.
Downloading 500 MB in 5 minutes in the background of a random article is really disrespectful to readers on low-end devices or metered data plans (and these two groups are often the same people!). What a waste of ressources.
I've worked with a lot of people at the bottom end of society in the USA. They are given government provided phones they can use so they have access to Google Maps, email, job search apps etc. These phones come with 3GB of regular data per month. After that they drop down to 2G speed, but not in a way that will allow anything to actually load.
Three days into the month these phones are just ewaste.
Talking about (electronic-)waste, what’s choking is how much resources are required to do the same or less than what used to be possible with far more humble hardware and bandwidth, all that in living memory.
Sure part of "software fills space like a gas" can be explained by "got to go fast to stay ahead on the market", but at some point it’s blatant negligence of frugality where it’s providing overall economical benefits.
> it’s blatant negligence of frugality where it’s providing overall economical benefits.
Recently tried to alter a phone plan on EE’s website, something that should have involved a few clicks. It was slow (literal seconds to open a page) and clunky. The Javascript console was bleeding error messages, and it looked like they’d used every Javascript framework under the sun. And after all that it just gave me an error message saying that the transaction could not be processed.
Gave up and texted (old school SMS) their help line. With a few text messages I was able to change plans. Probably used under 500 bytes to accomplish what the bloated and broken website couldn’t.
I think a basic principle with limited plans that offer the ability to buy extra data is "You should be able to actually load the account platform at the 2G hobbled speeds in order to pay". The heavyweight website/app for the mobile network, combined with the use of a phone number-tied Android login as primary login credential rather than a user account, it meant that the only way to actually get 4G back online was to have access to wifi on the phone in the place & time you needed to re-up; If I did have that access at work, I wouldn't need the data.
Despite years of being too lazy/anxious to figure out phone number portability, I ultimately ended up switching carriers from Simple to Mint because it was just too annoying.
I know at least on att prepaid they don't meter their own websites, if you have completely used your data up you can still access the website at normal speeds to change plans and stuff
That’s precisely the elephant in the room. Money is a distortion and filtering lense that makes obvious things look inexistent until the wall it renders invisible is hit — at high the highest speed it could reach before that.
Reality is extremely poorly summarized within the frame of a single scalar value.
>And if you think that "they don't know what's best for them, but I do" - what makes you any better than a member of the economic elite or an out-of-touch PM at Microsoft?
First of all, there no necessity to go into a you/I or them/us mindset. Also it’s not because some group don’t know what’s best for themselves that any other group will know better — whatever the label given the this other group: "I" or "too-big-to-fail Inc.".
This whole message also seem to assume some kind of full rationalization based on user priorities. But user base to a large extent takes what’s the most obviously thrown at their face. They sometime can tweak their applications if it does give some options to do so, or switch to some alternative if there are not trapped in a defacto oligopoly.
Do people want LLMs thrown at their face at every single corner of their digital interactions? Or is the the "throw it at every single surface indiscriminately and see what stick" driven by the hope that something will stick and make the capital venture lottery produce a few winner take it all?
> That’s precisely the elephant in the room. Money is a distortion and filtering lense
No, money is the most accurate way of measuring value to people that has ever been invented. It quite literally is the least distorted lens you can possibly get. Every single other metric is worse. Aren't you aware of the well-known scientific truism that it's impossible to directly perceive reality, and that all of the indirect methods that we have are imperfect? This is the economic corollary to that.
> Reality is extremely poorly summarized within the frame of a single scalar value.
Correct. Yet, every sane and reasonably well-educated person knows that money is the least bad single scalar value (that also happens to strongly correlate with businesses remaining solvent and individuals remaining off the streets) that can be used to measure value delivered to individuals, and that there's no alternative scalar value or combination of values that's anywhere close to as well agreed-upon as money.
Everything else in your comment is incoherent. "First of all, there no necessity to go into a you/I or them/us mindset." doesn't mean anything.
>No, money is the most accurate way of measuring value to people that has ever been invented. It quite literally is the least distorted lens you can possibly get.
As they say "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it", which also have many other more flavors.[1]
>Aren't you aware of the well-known scientific truism that it's impossible to directly perceive reality, and that all of the indirect methods that we have are imperfect?
As human being, we can’t avoid to make errors, including in our representations, if that is what is meant here, then we have an agreement on that point. But as sure as there are no absolute total truth reachable in the frame of human existence, it’s impossible for a human to claim absolute ignorance in total honesty.
Money at best is a proxy for binding individuals into social classes. In a sense, sure it does measure some human values. Mostly values of dominating classes.
> Yet, every sane and reasonably well-educated person knows that money is the least bad single scalar value
Hello, here is an unreasonable poorly-educated person to which class disdain won’t bother them to the point they just keep quite.
> there's no alternative scalar value or combination of values that's anywhere close to as well agreed-upon as money.
There are of course many possible alternatives. Actually neoliberal capitalism is a very brief moment in human history, even LLMs run by capitalist companies will explain that to anyone interested to ask.[2] Sure money can also be used in different social models, but not all models using money try to inseminate in its social members that it’s the one and sole best indicator of human fulfillment.
>Everything else in your comment is incoherent.
Once again, an LLM can give some chip feedback on such a matter, at least at the analysis level that LLMs can operate on.[3]
> As they say "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it", which also have many other more flavors.[1]
This is a useless, irrelevant, and fallacious thought-terminating cliche that you're using as an attempt to disguise the fact that you have presented no alternative - because you know I'll tear it to shreds if you do. (an LLM comment doesn't count, because they lie and hallucinate, and it's not you responding)
> even LLMs run by capitalist companies will explain that to anyone interested to ask.[2]
You can't even be bothered to try to think for yourself. "psychoslave" is an extremely apt name for your account.
> Money at best is a proxy for binding individuals into social classes.
Oh, and there's the politics - you're not interested in debate, you're a propagandist. You're not arguing in good faith (if that wasn't clear enough from the LLM-generated responses, failure to make any sort of coherent argument, and not including a single actual alternative to money as a proxy for measuring value). If you respond, I'll do my best to debunk your arguments for future HN readers, but it's useless to try to convince you while your basic mindset is that you're shilling for a particular political point.
>This is a useless, irrelevant, and fallacious thought-terminating cliche that you're using as an attempt to disguise the fact that you have presented no alternative - because you know I'll tear it to shreds if you do.
Once again, this kind of sentence show a total absence of will to go further than I/you mentality. A wider perspective is hard to achieve, if even possible, without putting the pretence of this/that personality. This is a path that seems as relevant as yelling at a computer when a software bug occurs. That might feel like a way to evacuate the frustration, but the computer won’t work better not matter what profanity is uttered (though it will never be bothered either, unlike fellow humans which have limited patience and have awareness of their own limited time to be alive).
>(an LLM comment doesn't count, because they lie and hallucinate, and it's not you responding)
LLM can certainly generate confabulations, but pretending they hallucinate or think is a lie. LLMs can also make totally sound output. Using a tool that can generate summary quickly doesn’t mean it voids the hand crafted answer that point to it.
It’s wise not taking LLMs output as a given regarding truth, but they certainly can be useful to point to considerations that can be falsified on one own preferred means.
>You can't even be bothered to try to think for yourself. "psychoslave" is an extremely apt name for your account.
Once again, this kind of attitude brings zero constructive contribution to the discussion. Everyone can be tired or have a bad day and push easily the "ad hominem" button. Hopefully that’s not an deeply engraved habit, and just taking some rest might be enough to step back and provide more positive prose in a near future.
>Oh, and there's the politics - you're not interested in debate, you're a propagandist. You're not arguing in good faith (if that wasn't clear enough from the LLM-generated responses, failure to make any sort of coherent argument, and not including a single actual alternative to money as a proxy for measuring value).
If anyone that disagrees with some premisses is disqualified of being a good faith debate participant, there is actually not much debate to hold, isn’t it?
> not including a single actual alternative to money as a proxy for measuring value
It makes manifest that this comment don’t take into account what was linked previously, so it’s better stop here, but for those interested in some other way to measure value and social systems:
Yeah, you have nothing, and the absolute drivel in the rest of your comment reflects that. These values are categorically not accepted as a proxy for value in any educated country.
How are users choosing this stuff? Do you have an example of two competing services offering the same features, one bloated and one not, and users locked to the bloated one?
To my mind users are simply using what’s put in front of them. They lack the technical knowledge to know better things are possible and even if they did they don’t have any way to advocate for it. Over half of US users use an ad blocker:
Through the platforms they choose to use. Coarse and inefficient and frustrating? Yes. Effective at demonstrating mass preferences and thereby imposing those preferences on platforms? Also yes.
> That alone suggests to me that when given a choice users actually do care.
Using an ad-blocker is obviously extremely different than what I'm describing here.
An ad-blocker is a composable feature that you can graft onto any particular market.
What I'm describing is a relative prioritization among different features, where one has to rank what they truly value, and sacrifice some of the lower-ranked things for the higher-ranked ones. That's categorically different than just being able to flip a switch and turn off ads and save bandwidth with negligible downside.
> Do you have an example of two competing services offering the same features, one bloated and one not, and users locked to the bloated one?
This is irrelevant - see above comment about relative prioritization. Features are one of the "dozens of things to optimize for in software development" that I mentioned above. I can point to many platforms where the bloated ones are winning - because they have the features that users want, and they value those more highly. That's my whole point.
>The actual reason why companies (and even personal and open-source software projects) make these "wasteful" design decisions is because normal users have clearly indicated their priorities.
You really think it's the users asking for bloated webpages? Reddit has been pushing their reddit redesign forever now. No users ever asked for it. There is a large community of users that insist on using the old.reddit interface, and reddit has been chipping away by slowly breaking more and more things (most recently, the mod page).
Compare that with hacker news or craig's list. They're still super light weight, fit for purpose, and I am forever thankful the webdevs (dang,etc) responsible for them did not succumb to the temptation to 'web 2.0/SPA' it.
It's not users clamoring for more bloated websites, it's marketing folks. See also, how nobody builds 'starter' homes anymore. There's a huge unmet market for it, but homebuilders find building mcMansions to be more profitable, so that's what gets built.
> You really think it's the users asking for bloated webpages?
> It's not users clamoring for more bloated websites, it's marketing folks.
You clearly didn't read my comment before responding, because I very clearly made the point that it's not about users wanting worse performance, but a matter of relative priority. Suggest reading before responding.
> Reddit has been pushing their reddit redesign forever now. No users ever asked for it. There is a large community of users that insist on using the old.reddit interface, and reddit has been chipping away by slowly breaking more and more things (most recently, the mod page).
And yet, clearly enough people are getting enough value from the site that it's worth the bloat to them, otherwise Reddit would have reversed the redesign years ago. I also know multiple people who voluntarily use the redesign while being aware of the classic interface.
I can't read your original comment anymore because it's flagged, but rest assured, I read it, and disagreed with it.
Users enduring yet another web 2.0 redesign does not go so far as to prove acceptance. I think every poll they've had on the redesign has been negative.
Regardless, I don't feel like continuing this discussion given your abrasive tone. Tell yourself you 'won' if it satisfies any urge to respond further.
You clearly did not, because nobody who actually read my comment and has functional reading comprehension and basic logic skills would have written these responses:
> You really think it's the users asking for bloated webpages?
> It's not users clamoring for more bloated websites, it's marketing folks.
And:
> and disagreed with it.
Disagreement is only relevant for matters of opinion. For matters of fact, like this one, there is no opinion - only facts and arguments. Can you not tell the difference between opinion and fact?
> Users enduring yet another web 2.0 redesign does not go so far as to prove acceptance.
OK, now you're just trolling, because I already addressed this point in both of the comments you've responded to.
> Tell yourself you 'won' if it satisfies any urge to respond further.
You've proven that you're either unable to read or unable to use basic logic, so it's not even that I've won - you've eliminated yourself. You haven't been able to make a single valid point - you've just misread, misunderstood, and mischaracterized my arguments, and then failed to make any coherent response whatsoever.
I'm not claiming to speak for anybody other than me, although I'd be surprised if using half a gigabyte of metered mobile data would generally be very popular with users on metered plans.
Half a gigabyte if you stay on the page for five minutes, which is a pretty big assumption. If you have a TikTok attention span and are there for 30 seconds, you probably care far less.
(again, I'm not saying this is a good thing - read my parent comment again)
> Three days into the month these phones are just ewaste.
If someone needs a phone like this for email and job searching and has no other option, 2G speeds will work. It’s not e-waste for the intended purpose.
It would be great if they got higher days caps, though, because let’s be realistic in acknowledging that they’re not only going to use it for Google Maps, email, and job search apps.
In my experience, a slow connection can be less usable for some apps than none at all.
If there’s no connection or you’re in airplane mode, some apps will let you access locally stored/cached data, but as soon as there’s a bad connection, they’ll wipe that data by trying to unsuccessfully refresh it from the server.
Not sure if you are aware that with throttled 2G slow you can't even open a package tracking website these days, because the connection times out before you have downloaded all their asset dependencies. And those kind of websites do not support resumes of downloads (or partial content requests).
So you're stuck in a loop of not being able to use the web because the websites keep downloading stuff you don't need.
It's only usable for a limited number of sites that still work with most JS and images blocked (and of course no video ads). I doubt many tech illiterates are aware of how to constrain their data usage on the web or avoid AAA apps with obscene volumes of data transfer. Another issue is it's not just 2G but also heavily deprioritized.
This is an easy fix: Just cut off their data after it runs out instead of falling back to 2G speeds. Sounds like a win-win for both the data provider and the user.
The obvious easy fix is to give them unlimited data. If the intent is to give them internet, they should give them internet that functions for the modern web.
There's a very wide band between "2G" and "unlimited" to explore.
Cell phone systems already have some tiering built in, at least based on the fine print I've read about my plans. Once I run out of "official data" I fall back to low-priority usage, but the cell system is generally so well-provisioned nowadays that I hardly notice. In 2026, one must take explicit action to force people back to 2G. Nothing would stop these plans from, say, simply always being "low priority usage" but at full speed, and for the most part this would satisfy everyone.
This sort of clause reeks of "it was written into a contract 15 years ago and nobody has even so much as thought about it since then" rather than some sort of choice.
Note that many European countries have already got rid of their 3G networks completely [0]. So it's either "you have 4G/5G" or "the internet is pretty much unusable", nothing in between.
As someone living in a European country with no 3G network, my experience with mobile data is that when my phone fails to find a 4G signal and switches to 2G (pretty much only happens in remote areas, thankfully), I can as well send my packets using a pigeon carrier, they're going to arrive to the destination sooner.
2G speeds isn't really full access to "the internet" for some parts of the internet.
My experience with 2G speeds is:
1. Open job application site
2. Upload resume pdf
3. Upload required picture of ID
4. Server's nginx config has a hard-coded timeout after 1 minute. Connection error
5. Try to upload again
6. Connection error
A huge number of pieces of the web have hardcoded timeouts and limits designed to stop slowloris style attacks, and if your connection is slow enough, those will prevent you from ever being able to complete some tasks.
I tried to explain slow loris to a non technical friend, he thought I was joking. The concept of the internet in this day and age is very "cloudy" for a regular user, all pun intended.
This thread is about how a static text article loaded 500 megs in the background. How would someone prepare for that exactly? This is effectively malware as far as your bandwidth is concerned.
I’ve used travel SIMs that only give you about 5GB. You avoid using the web at all, unless you are on WiFi. You can use maps, train and bus apps, banking apps, messaging, AirBnB etc, but not the web. If you go to some place and they want to use a QR code to buy a ticket or use a menu you may as well forget about it.
People on government assistance are just casually going to Starbucks for free wifi? They probably don’t even have a reliable way to get around. Let them eat cake?
There aren't even any Starbucks in these areas :( Best you can do is a McDonald's or Burger King and they hate opening the doors most of the time as they tend to prefer only allowing drive-thru orders.
Because the context is "bottom end of society in the USA." that "are given government provided phones".
If you mean why I don't pay for the publicly provided wifi: well, I would. And all of us. Public services are funded by taxpayer dollars. I would happily accept public wifi for that
Data caps are to an extent “fake”, in that telcos’ costs aren’t measured in how many bytes their customers download/upload. Telcos’ costs come from renting bandwidth from tier 1 and tier 2 ISPs. This bandwidth is constant.
And for popular websites, they will cache lots of content on their own network or peer directly with data centers so they don’t have to pay for the bandwidth there. The routers will continue routing and the switches will continue switching whether you download 5GBs or 5TBs.
One more way to understand how much of a scam mobile data caps are, is that the same ISP will sell you unlimited fiber plans even though essentially your traffic goes through the same backbone.
Data caps may help lessen congestion on their cell towers, but they don’t need to be as low as they are today.
> Telcos’ costs come from renting bandwidth from tier 1 and tier 2 ISPs. This bandwidth is constant.
In the long run, all costs are variable. Phone companies lack the bandwidth to provide all their customers unlimited data all the time. Most of them can’t even provide full speeds to their existing customers at peak times. If they gave everyone unlimited data they’d have to get more bandwidth, and they’d pass on every penny of the cost.
> Data caps may help lessen congestion on their cell towers
Data caps make congestion worse, because you are more likely to restrict where you use data and people are predictable. You'll no longer use bits everywhere because you care less, you'll use it where everyone else does.
https-everywhere does indeed prevent transparent proxying by ISPs. Mostly this isn't an issue: site owners are less likely to have their content tampered with by a content distribution network than by an ISP, and have full control over which CDN(s) are allowed to act on their behalf. Larger content providers operate their own CDNs, of course.
In the case of TFA, PC Gamer isn't directly consuming the bandwidth with their own servers on their own domain name. It's an ad distribution network doing that, and odds are reasonable they're already colocated someplace with your ISP and the bandwidth consumed by ads is totally irrelevant to everyone except the poor sap at the home end of the last mile.
Unless we nut up and ban gambling, there will never be a shortage of broke motherfuckers who should be able to make ends meet with their job but simply never will be able to. You have no idea how badly gambling suppresses a large subset of the working class.
I dont think most people here see that, or even have the willingness to see that. The same was true for the opioid epidemic. Had it hit a group with any political capital there would have been laws passed and the sacklers would have been not just painted as villains, they would have been castrated a quarter of a century ago.
Just wait 15 years when the middle class has been struggling with easily accessible gambling and it can't be explained as problem of character. There will be laws passed and people prosecuted or successfully sued.
Many of those targeted by the sacklers did start as white, middle class, etc. or even white, upper class.
Those folks that did fall to it, then became (often) lower class while failing to it.
The thing to realize, is that the upper classes ‘eat their own’ just like any other. It’s why Trump is as frantic as he is, he knows what will happen when he stops being ‘useful’/necessary.
I'm not really affected by it yet (I've been able to resist gambling more than a self-imposed $20 at a time, which I can afford, and one time I realized I wanted to break my limit, I realized it was an important moment to nut up and walk away). But I understand that there are people it's really affecting. So I'm all in favor of "NO more gambling".
But even if that wasn't a thing - the way it's ruined watching sports now, with the constant odds flashing, etc, I'd ban it JUST for that, on top of all the detrimental effects on society.
Which, as a reminder, was the status quo just a decade or so ago.
I don't remember "I can't throw money away on this football play" being a massive society wide problem that needed fixing in 2010, pretty sure everyone could bet with their friends already.
What's more, betting with friends is vastly less harmful than betting at casinos (digital or otherwise.) When you bet with friends, your loss is their gain and their loss is your gain, the money more or less sticks around, the community as a whole isn't impoverished by it. But when people are gambling away their days wages playing rigged slot machines on their phone, that money might as well have been set on fire. It goes into the pockets of investors who might as well be on the other side of the planet and in the long run it will never be won back. The community as a whole is impoverished by this kind of gambling.
If 2G speeds were what they were when it was heavily used? Sure. Nowadays? Not in my experience. I got downgraded to Google Fi’s 2G in a well-traveled part of Virginia using a flagship Samsung and I couldn’t even load directions on Google Maps where I’d already downloaded most of the map for offline use. 2G ain’t like it used to be when it was still given a second thought by providers.
It’s not only the providers. 2G is 120kbit max on a lot of networks and 50kbit on average. Even a 1MB site, that is lean by today’s standards will take 160 seconds to load.
2G is really from a different age. Does anyone remember WAP and i-mode? I was certainly not able to afford data back then, but that is what all the business’y types were raving about.
True, and also when you actually go to apply for a job it often kicks you out to another website, that will use who knows how many mbs? And you have to fill in your details again and again. Each one a different flavour. Sometimes saying the same thing multiple times for the same job ad.
Non technical people are afraid to block adds on their Android device since Google might find out about it and decides to eliminate their account; I was not able to convince them otherwise.
If someone needs a phone like this for email and job searching and has no other option, 2G speeds will work. It’s not e-waste for the intended purpose.
Guess how I know you've never actually tried this.
Part of my job is testing the web sites I build in the terrible real-world conditions where our customers are. Places like machine rooms, deep basements, and small towns with only municipal or small-carrier 3G cell service. (In spite of what HN believes, there are plenty of places in America with 3G or even zero cell service.)
2G speeds will not work. The device or one of the essential thousands of processes in it will time out because they were designed by tech bubble tech bros who never use their apps in the real world.
When the power's out and broadband is down, if you are lucky the cell network is still up. However, everyone fails over to it simultaneously, so there's no way you'll get 2G speeds out of your 5G plan with 5 bars.
I throttled my browser dev tools to 2G and clicked reload. After 2+ minutes, it popped up a "It looks like you are on a slow connection" modal (sometimes this loads on top of the outage info, obscuring the data you want!), so I clicked "Use low bandwidth version". After 51 seconds, the debugger says page load is finished (for the low bandwidth one), but the page is just a white background, and the browser "loading" animation is still running.
After 2.17 more minutes, I get a form where you can type in an address + a bunch of irrelevant info. I typed an address, waited a minute, then typed this paragraph. After 1.5 minutes, it showed my address in the autocomplete menu, and I clicked it.
33 seconds later, it started loading a google maps ajax. 47 seconds after that, it displayed a header, with a white body. 1.33 minutes later, ignoring styling, it returned the string "power is on".
(No map, etc, at this point.)
Had this been a real outage in a storm, I'd be standing outside in the rain, or in a situation where getting cell coverage for more than 30 seconds at a time is impossible if you're holding the phone. I usually just put the phone on a carefully placed chair, then back away slowly.
Anyway it takes 9 minutes under ideal scenarios (no drops) to send 30 bytes of address, and an 11 byte response. 44 bytes / 540 seconds = 0.08 bytes per second good put.
For reference, voyager can send 20 bytes per second, so it's 250x faster than this. Morse code / telegraphs are typically sent at 1.5 words per minute, where a word is 15 characters, so 0.375 bytes per second = 4.6x faster.
Remember, these are simulated conditions for the PG&E site. My record best time getting it to load during a major outage is 45 minutes, not 9.
Thank you. I often get people responding that 2G speed will work fine for email, chat, Google Maps etc. Maybe if I installed an IMAP client on their phone, maybe.
But I can promise you from sitting with them dozens of times things like Google Maps are unusable once the connection is throttled. It might load some of the map, some of the time. But it never loads all of it and it is just plain unworkable. Even if it loads some of it it takes so long that the busses have gone past by the time they've tried to figure out what direction they need to go.
Google maps works okay on slow connections if you download the tiles for the city you're in beforehand (not that non-technical unemployed people should be expected to do that).
The worst thing is load balancers with a 10 or 20 second timeout, because there's almost nothing you can do other than use Opera Mini or something.
Because Google Maps is all they know? I've been on the web for 30+ years (wrote my own html home page by hand in 1995 while doing my master's) and have just now heard of "Osmand" for maybe the 2nd time in my life. The other being a few months ago. If I haven't heard of it, how would anyone else who isn't technical hear about it?
> If I haven't heard of it, how would anyone else who isn't technical hear about it?
If you assume that mapping services on a low-to-no bandwidth connection are important to them, they'll hear about it through word of mouth. Anything that solves a real problem will spread that way.
Contrapositively, we can conclude that mapping isn't much of a problem for these people.
I have the same background, and I've not heard of Osmand, though I do try to use map downloader apps when I'm abroad, just in case.
The other problem with any map tile downloading is that it eats up their entire 3GB of transfer and their phone is dead before they even start. Catch-22.
Osmand is great, but it's difficult to use, it doesn't have good place search, and it doesn't plan public transport trips very well.
My experience trying to get it to find a route to work just now involved finding my street name but not being able to enter my address, not being able to enter my workplace's exact address either, getting told to take an express train to a stop that I know it never stops at during peak hour, and searching in vain for a way to change the trip time. I bet it also can't handle delays, cancellations, or bus replacements.
Maybe it works better in your city? I notice you wrote "we can conclude that mapping isn't much of a problem for these people", but you could use the same evidence to conclude Osmand isn't much of a solution for their problem.
(I will note that I use it for hiking and it's very good for that, as it is for cycling.)
There is a spot near me near a local college that is a worthless dead zone for data.
The signal is terrible, but it’s there. You can talk on the phone or send texts.
Surfing is horrible. At times you get great speeds. Two seconds later it feels like slow dial up. Really that’s what it feels like most of the time, any kind of speed is the anomaly.
As said in other comments, very few apps actually handle this well. They seem to expect that you either have a good connection or nothing.
It’s been like that for a decade plus. I assume it’s just overloaded and will never be fixed.
0 of course, but wasn't 3G all shut down in the US in 2022 to open up the airspace?
One of those HN myths that comes from only being willing to Google (or ChatGPT) information, rather than encountering it in the real world.
3G still exists in rural and remote areas that no major carrier wants to serve, at least as of April, 2025 — the last time I did a round of real-world web testing. Next round is in September. Maybe with 5G in the cities, some hand-me-down 4G equipment has made it to the places where I test.
Thank you for proving my point, that people on HN falsely think they know more than others because they can Google a link, even though what's happening on the ground is entirely different.
Reality ≠ policy papers, press releases, or web links.
I guess what I am getting from this thread is, there is 3G service out there in the wild. However, in locations where 4G and 5G is available, 3G has been phased out
This doesn’t jibe with my experience trying to make phone calls on rural highways, where it seems there is no signal whatsoever more often than not.
I suppose this could be because ATT-Verizon-T-Mobile used to have 2G in that area (which was discontinued — 900Mhz analog voice band, also decommissioned) has moved on and left swathes of the US without signal, whereas, certain areas (commenter omits an example) never were served by major telecoms and have “evolved” their tech more slowly, so 3G is not decommissioned in those places. In that sense yes there is no contradiction. It still feels like we’ve gone backwards since there are places I used to be able to make a phone call that are now considered remote area with satellite SOS being you’re only way to reach someone
The big-3 have nationwide coverage (well, at least 2 of them).
But even beside that, AFAICT USCellular shut down 3G in January 2024, Appalachian Wireless in Dec 2022, Cellcom in Dec 2023, and C Spire sometime in 2022.
I'm interested to know where exactly public 3G still exists in the USA.
> I'm interested to know where exactly public 3G still exists in the USA.
I gotchu, but I wanna be clear that it is all just fringe/regional operators (which is what the claim was originally about anyway, not about major telcos).
I found a couple with user reports claiming 3G support still being active in random pockets of Wyoming/Colorado/etc. (but no confirmation on the official website), and one with confirmation on the official website.
The one with the official confirmation is Union Wireless[0], with UMTS being a stand-in for 3G (color-coded in grey on their coverage map; mostly southern Wyoming plus parts of Colorado, Utah, and Idaho).
I agree with your overall point though. Functionally, 3G is dead in the US. But factually, there are a few holdout fringe remote areas that still have it.
I used to have an extremely cheap phone plan that had 500MB data, then 64kbps for the rest of the month.
You'd be surprised how far you can get with that. IRC works just fine (as long as you use Quassel w/ Quasseldroid), HN works well, so does reddit (via redreader). RSS readers and wikipedia work as well, and for general web browsing you can set up a readability proxy (basically Firefox' Reader Mode, but server-side). And of course email works really well, too.
Been there, done that, and all without the benefit of a home Internet connection. I also created a couple of scripts that I could run on my desktop computer to install new software or update my operating system. After running the scripts on my computer, I would wander over to the library with nothing more than my phone to download the packages along with grabbing some videos to watch offline.
The issue isn't really living with 500 MB/month of data. For most people, it will simply be knowing that you can do that. The next issue they will face is having the technical ability to actually do so. Then, once you've done all of that, the question will remain: will they be interested in the stripped down Internet. A lot of us who frequent HN may be since the results will still reflect our interests. There are people on IRC who we would want to talk to. There is a slant towards tech sites with RSS. And so on. That isn't going to be reflected in sites targeted at a general audience.
Sure, me and you and everyone here can open a shell connection and do everything with text and it'll work great on 64kbps.
Some of these guys have been locked up for 40 years straight. They're not doing all that extra stuff. They want to go on Indeed or Monster or YouTube. One job site I had to load on my desktop to find out why it wasn't working for them, only to discover the pages had a 250MB payload of random crap downloading, including videos.
The COTS solution for some web browsing is Opera Mini, which may still work? It also uses a proxy to prerender and compress websites, and worked ok at 2G speeds last I used it. It used to work well as a java applet and made the wider internet functional on feature phones. Very solid software.
But as a practical matter, what people rely on phones for are services that are app-based. Good luck completing a Venmo transaction or any amount of banking.
I remember 10+ years ago I had to do my on-boarding paperwork from a research station on the Greenland ice sheet. Workday would just not work with the high latency (but otherwise, not terribly slow) connection. I had to remote desktop to a CONUS computer and use a browser there in order for it to work...
In 1999 I got a job to build one of the first streaming and download systems for the major record labels. Working from home as they didn't have offices yet. I'd been unemployed for months, and the day before I started my broadband got cut off for nonpayment. For the first few weeks all I had was my 9600bps serial connection to my Nokia 9000i. I had to remotely re-encode hundreds of CDs in 2Kbps audio so I could at least debug all my code and stream the music off the servers...
2G (EDGE, EDGE+) doesn't allow you to do a job search.
In reality this is like 16kb with speeds similar to 56k modem. No modern JS website works. Ssh, irc works and thats about it. Modern stuff like certificates also slows it down.
I'm talking here about real life - not some emulated 2G in your browser.
I rarely go over 3gb in a month. But, I also work from home, and I have stable internet connection from home.
If their data plan is the only way they are able to access the internet then yes this is definitely a problem especially with random websites downloading literal gigabytes of ads.
So instead of having website owners ship websites that don't attempt to download the entire internet to your device, your solution is to have people for whom bandwidth is a problem to go somewhere in order to just use the internet?
Calling them ewaste is a little dramatic. While sites like this are a cancer, there is free WiFi in basically every town in America. You can get data for free, even if it’s slightly inconvenient.
It was a bit dramatic, but I've seen these guys just leave these phones behind once the data is gone. They're not likely to carry it around for the next 27 days until the data is refreshed. They'll generally just hustle for $10 to bribe the phone agent to bypass the SSN check and give them another fresh phone.
The issue is that the wifi isn't available where they need it. If I send them to the SSA building to get some federal docs, it's in a dead zone. It might be in the middle of Chicago but there isn't any free wifi for a mile in any direction from there. How do they pull up Google Maps to get home? And it's not always obvious how to get the free wifi as it doesn't just let you connect, you had to go through a multi-step process of signing in and accepting T&Cs these days. Which the phone doesn't always want to do.
I think you may be a bit out of date. There was free WiFi in basically every town. Now it's frequently a vestigial, no-longer-maintained free WiFi that works like crap, because there's no maintenance, because "everyone has cellular data nowadays".
Actually, this is based on my personal experience. I don't use a smartphone for internet. Many of the places where I've tried it, the "free wifi" doesn't work. Maybe the wifi is there, but the uplink is 2G speed, or it has a web sign-in that doesn't work any more. Or maybe an employee accidentally unplugged the router. Days/weeks ago. And "no one complained about it".
I've traveled Greyhound and Amtrak recently. They both advertise free wifi, but it's quite clear they no longer prioritize keeping it working.
Libraries are (probably/hopefully) an exception. But, seeing as Starbucks has been wanting to discourage people from hanging out in recent months, I wouldn't count on Starbucks wifi being reliable.
I lived for months with a 4GB roaming plan. Given, I was not using it at home since I had a wifi connection, but I rarely came close to using all my data unless I was watching YT videos when traveling or something.
I share your sentiment and I agree we should be more mindful of people with metered/slow connections, but the last statement feels blown out of proportion.
I used to be able to get away with this by downloading music, podcasts and maps at home.
During the iOS 26 upgrade cycle, iOS deleted all my third-party map apps and then expired the locally downloaded apple maps. My phone also somehow lost my downloaded podcasts + music a few times, but, unlike losing three offline map applications, that didn't strand me in the middle of the woods with no cell coverage and no maps.
I agree that 4GB (or even 1GB) goes very far with a working phone OS though.
I arrived in a small airport at midnight. Served only by Uber. Since I use Lyft elsewhere, my phone had deleted the Uber app. It took 15 minutes to download that: crappy Wifi and some kind of 5G dead zone. Sometimes you really need to download the app.
I had data turned off most of the time. At home and in the office I had WiFi. Loaded the map before I left home.
Most other places I was too busy doing whatever I was doing to use a phone. Since upgrading, I guess I can look products up in stores now. That's about it.
Not using it at home likely discounts a lot of personal consumption. If you can get your fill at nights, less need to access the internet during the day.
I've had a 1GB/mo $5/mo plan from good2go for the last 2 years. I've never gone over it. But that's because I go from wifi to wifi all the time and I'm very careful when I'm on cell. That definitely doesn't work for most people!
Here in NZ, a lot of people live with less than 1GB of mobile data / month. Once you run out, you have to pay per MB at extortionate rates.
Most people still use sms rather than RCS or Signal or anything secure so they don’t have to pay for the data (most plans have unlimited SMS now)
Of course, the whole country has ultra-fast fibre on unmetered connections (even on the very cheapest plans), so if you’re at work or home it’s fine. Just using data on the go is a non-starter for many
Our Comcast plan has a monthly data usage of 1.2TB. We rarely go over 600GB in any month but month we nearly hit the limit. I was looking through the router logs to see what was going on and it turned out that somehow one particular Instagram video my spouse was watching would consume huge amounts of bandwidth when the channel was live streaming!
crazy solution that might work for you: open an incognito browser and check for deals for new customers. "someone" I know was able to switch from a $50/1.2TB limited 300mbit plan to a $45/unlimited 1Gbit plan doing this.
if they have a better deal for new users: sign up for a new account under someone else in your household, and cancel your old account after you get your new account hardware setup and working.
> These phones come with 3GB of regular data per month. […] Three days into the month these phones are just ewaste.
Are you saying using 1GB of data a day on a smartphone is normal for smartphone users? I have a 10GB plan not because I need it (looking at this year, 2GB would be more than sufficient) but because that’s about the lowest I can get nowadays.
Certainly if, as indicated, the intent is for these users to have a phone for essentials, not for watching YouTube or playing music, 3 GB, IMO, should be sufficient.
My phone also reports as only having used a couple of gigabytes of mobile data each month but that's because most of the time I'm using it attached to wifi at home or work. The people being given free phone plans by the government probably don't have a home internet connection, that 3GB of data will be the only access they have outside of finding a library that's somehow still funded, or paying for a drink to use coffee shop wifi.
Maybe YouTube or listening to music aren't strictly essentials but they also don't seem like absurd luxuries that we should be arbitrarily denying to people in 2026 to save a few cents per user on what I assume is a set of bulk purchased SIMs.
Libraries just got an increase in funding in the US in the 2026 appropriations bills.
> Maybe YouTube or listening to music aren't strictly essentials but they also don't seem like absurd luxuries that we should be arbitrarily denying to people in 2026
No-one's arbitrarily denying things. It's about what should and shouldn't be given as free things that other people work to pay for.
"It's UNFAIR!" is the anthem of whiny children. If these people would benefit from access to Youtube, and we can provide it to them trivially, then by all means, let them have it. If it upsets you when people are given things for free, that's really a "you problem."
They genuinely benefit from YouTube. I saw one guy watching a video on how to use a debit card since he'd never even held one before. They use them to figure out how to fill out paperwork at the SSA and state agencies etc.
My daughter also has a 3GB data plan but she knows to only use whatsapp when she isn't connected to a Wifi network and we configured it to not auto load the photos and videos when on mobile data.
As someone living in a non-net-neutral country this really is the big advantage everybody in net-neutral-land ignores: Meta and Google pay for nearly all of my data use (one of them even seems to cover HN).
Normies don't have good intuition for the size of different kinds of data. They'll stream Netflix for a few hours then genuinely wonder how they hit their data limit because they "weren't even using the internet."
Do you have a stable internet connection that is not your phone data plan? Many people in the lower economic class don't have that and their 3gb data plan may be the only 3gb they can use for the internet in any given month.
Many people in the lower economic class don't have that and their 3gb data plan may be the only 3gb they can use for the internet in any given month.
And poor people often share one phone for an entire family, or even one phone among two or three neighboring households. These are a lot of the customers I serve, and it has a lot of unique challenges around accounts, privacy, and yes data use.
The shitty thing is that serving the under-served is almost by definition (and perhaps by design) not lucrative so such folks continue to go under-served.
As we scale our products we think a lot about p99 and ensure we have all the 9s of uptime but even then we ignore the small percentage of folks who can't even begin to load our sites.
Thanks for sharing and for your service, sir/madam!
I wonder how much money is wasted just transmitting ads over the internet. Like I get websites are getting paid for displaying them but imagine how much cheaper things would be if ads weren't jacking up demands for bandwidth.
It's not wasted bandwidth; we've reached this level of ads because brands have realized that brainwashing the populace via ads to make them want their brand is cheaper than building a better product, so the bandwidth is a small price to pay for brainwashing people.
If we didn't have ads, people would not only need less bandwidth, they'd buy less physical junk, and quite possibly be happier for it.
This also partially explains why my phone sometimes gets hot and uses a double digit of battery randomly when using the browser if it’s streaming video in multiple divs
Fully agree. Having worked closely with a marketing exec/entreprenur type, I've never felt more incompatible with a person's worldview. I mentioned the ads that are "disrespectful to users" at one point when he put one of those annoying modals that pops up half way through the story, and he looked utterly perplexed that anyone would even think thoughts like that. When I pointed out that his analytics and ad stuff were turning my hard-fought 100 ms full page load work into a 5 second nasty mess (I used much more diplomatic language with him :-) ) it was like I was trying to tell a hunter-gatherer to go vegan during the winter.
I really think the marketing people behind most websites just could not give a shit less about users. To them, they are faceless plebs to be manipulated and milked, not humans to be respected. It's quite disheartening.
The NYT already has a very strict paywall, so there's not really a point in blocking the Internet Archive. Things are very different for The Guardian though, since it has absolutely no paywall on the web.
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