That planned obsolescence thing on light bulbs isn't the entire story. Light bulbs will last longer if driven less hard, due to the lower temperature. But that lower temperature also means much lower efficiency because the blackbody spectrum shifts even further into the infrared. So some compromise had to be picked between having a reasonable amount of light and a reasonable life span.
But yeah agree, this subscription thing is spreading like a cancer.
I'm not an expert on the case law, but supposedly United States v. General Electric Co. et al., 82 F.Supp. 753 (D.N.J. 1949) indicates that whatever design trade-offs might have existed, corporate policy makers were really just trying to screw consumers [1] (which is why they probably had to agree on short lifespans as a cartel rather than just market "this line of bulbs for these preferences" vs. "this other line for other people" -- either as a group or separate vendors). I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop where they figure out how to make LED bulbs crappy enough to need replacement.
Leds are already awful. I already lost 4 of 10 led light bulbs I boughtast year. I hope they will be replaced. It's because every led bulb has a small transformer inside and it fails quite quickly
I think its a heat dissipation issue. I have some overhead LED lights that replaced some halogen bulbs and they have huge metal heat sinks on the back and have all lasted 10+ years. Unfortunately they are no longer sold but I did buy a few spare just in case.
It depends a lot on the bulbs. When we moved into our current house 11 years ago, we replaced everything with LEDs. Many of those original bulbs are still going strong, including all of the 20 or so integrated pot lights we put in to replace the old-school halogen ones. Others died within a year, and replacements have been similarly hit and miss.
To some extent you get what you pay for; most of the random-Chinese-brand LEDs I've picked up off of Amazon have failed pretty quickly. Most of the Philips and similarly expensive ones have lasted. Also the incandescent-looking ones that stuff all the electronics into the base of the bulb tend to fail quickly, as do anything installed in an enclosed overhead light fixture, due to heat buildup.
> as do anything installed in an enclosed overhead light fixture, due to heat buildup
This is my problem. My house has a lot of enclosed overhead light fixtures, and LEDs just do not last long in them. And renovating all of them to be more LED friendly would be quite expensive.
I got one of these free energy audit things which included swapping out up to 30 or so bulbs with LEDs. Whatever contractor did it seems to have gotten the cheapest bulbs they could, and the majority of them have failed by 4 or 5 years later. So far so good on the name brand ones I replaced them with.
Yes, but the compromise didn't have to be an industrywide conspiracy with penalties for manufacturing light bulbs that were too long-lasting and inefficient. But it was. Consumers could have freely chosen short-lived high-efficiency bulbs or long-lived low-efficiency ones.
In fact, they could have chosen the latter just by wiring two lightbulb sockets in series, or in later years putting one on a dimmer.
"That planned obsolescence thing on light bulbs isn't the entire story."
Whilst that's certainly true the Phoebus cartel's most negative aspect was that it was a secret organisation, its second was that it was actually a cartel. These disadvantaged both light bulb consumers and any company that wasn't a member of the cartel—a new startup company that wasn't aware of or a member of the cartel would be forced out of business by the cartel's secret unfair competition.
Without the cartel manufacturers could have competed by offering a range of bulbs based on longevity versus life depending on consumers' needs. For example, offering a full brightness/1000h type for normal use and a 70% brightness/2000h one for say in applications where bulbs were awkward to replace (such product differences could even be promoted in advertising).
Nowadays, planned obsolescence is at the heart and core of much manufacturing and manufacturers are more secretive than ever about the techniques they've adopted to achieve their idea of the ideal service lives of their products—lives that optimize profits. This is now a very sophisticated business and takes into account many factors including ensuring their competition's products do not gain a reputation for having a longer service life or better repairability than their own (still a likely corrupting factor that originally drove the formation of the Phoebus cartel).
Right, the philosophy's not changed since Phoebus but the sophistication of its implementation has increased almost beyond recognition. There's not space to detail this adequately here except to say I've some excellent examples from the manufacture of whitegoods and how production has changed over recent decades to manufacturers' advantage often to the detriment of consumers.
In short, planned obsolescence and the secrecy that surrounds it has negative and very significant consequences for both consumers and the environment. When purchasing, consumers are thus unable to make informed decisions about whether to trade off the reduced initial costs of products with a short service live against those that have increased longevity and or improved repairability. Similarly, shortlived products only add to environmental pollution, witness the enormous e-waste problem that currently exists.
As manufacturers won't willingly give up panned obsolescence or secrecy that surrounds it, one solution would be to tax products with artificially shortened service lives. In the absence of manufacturing information governments could statistically determine product tax rates based on observable service lives.
Auckland has an almost finished through running project in its city centre, which will greatly improve its railway network. It currently has only one terminus in the city, but trains from one side (the west) have to do an awkward dog leg around the city centre, including a reversal.
Brussels got its through running project in 1952, a 6 track tunnel under its city centre between North and South (aka Midi) stations. That was back when disruption and demolishing things were just things that happened, and it is one of the reasons why ‘brusselization’ is a word. By now operates near its max capacity of 96 trains per hour.
PHP was blamed for a good reason: for a long time it did not by default support prepared SQL statements. You could install the mysqli extension to gain such support but that was almost never available on shared web hosts.
That was the bigger problem, IMO, in that even once PDO existed and the MySQL extension was "fixed" to have prepared statements, so much of the documentation still did it wrong.
And yet similar classes of bugs still pops up today, even with what I would've assumed to be safe defaults? I'm guessing its non-standard databases or DB clients or something?
This case is more just a pure lack of sanitisation, but it's fascinating to see in 2025 still :)
It is one of those things that doesn’t really matter for readability, but although they can’t necessarily put a finger on why, people may still notice that some documents or pages appear to be set with more care for details than others.
(edit: I guess if you don’t have to search on Google what the hell a ‘Microsoft Word’ is, then you’re officially old)
And the 1 and 8 aren't next to each other anymore, either. (See typewriters from the "18"00s.)
> those smart quotes
Fixing straight quotes is a hard problem[0]. My FOSS text editor, KeenWrite[1], includes my library, KeenQuotes[2], for replacing them at build time. It's not perfect, but can typeset my ~400 page novel without any errors.
> Did you know there is a dedicated ellipsis character?
When typesetting Markdown, KeenWrite first converts the document to XHTML (i.e., XML), then invokes ConTeXt to convert XML into TeX macros. One of those macros handles the ellipses by converting it to \dots{}:
What's so weird about it? It's the appropriate way to do it when writing in those languages.
And really easy to do on an Android phone, I've found: Switch the input to French or German, and the on-screen keyboard offers the appropriate quote marks for that language in the same place as usual.
for em dashes and ellipsis at least it's trivial to convert before displaying them... which I do in my own markdown-to-publication toolchain (but not here on HN).
Yeah one wart about Windows is that you always have to lookup these weird registry hacks after getting a fresh install. Disabling this automatic reboot was one of them. Otherwise that would make your computer completely useless for things like
- gaming
- watching movies
- presentations
- anything where you want to let some calculation run unattended for a few hours
- anything where you really don't want your PC to shut down unexpectedly while you’re working…
Well that covers pretty much everything I guess.
And to add insult to injury, Windows 10 for a while took away the ability to Update & shut down. It’d go into some sort of hybrid sleep so you’d keep getting a reboot prompt right after starting up again.
One bit of feedback: don't move the camera if someone clicks one of the circles, that is super disorienting. There is also a bug that if a drag to move the camera happens to end on a circle, the popup opens.
It is quite confusing because there are strong points in favour of either POV.
Point: you can ride a bicycle without hands. That would be completely impossible without gyroscopic effect. Or you can push a bicycle forward without a rider.
Counter-point: kickscooters exist, with tiny little 6″ tyres which have almost no gyroscopic effect, and yet you can balance those in the same way as a bicycle.
Oh yes it may very well over half your kid’s weight. These things are ABSURDLY heavy.
This makes starting hard (an already hard problem when learning), it makes falling off worse because there is so much weight pulling down, and then they get pinned under all that weight so it can be hard to get up again. It makes walking the bike uphill physically impossible so if it is hilly you can't actually go out for a ride.
There will be at least some people out there whose road bike weights less than their toddler’s bike.
That is a common fallacy, I suspect it comes from having enough budget to not having to think about being able to afford something decent.
It is like photographers with $5,000 worth of equipment in their camera bags telling you that equipment doesn’t matter. I mean, there is a reason why they spend all that money right? Of course a good photographer will be able to get good results with a cheap camera, but only in situations where that cheap camera can actually capture the scene. For example, if it is not sensitive enough to capture enough light at night time, you are not getting night time shots, period, no matter how good you are. (this very much used to be a thing 10 years ago)
If you employ programmers, you will buy fast workstations because it will make them MUCH more productive. A slow computer will interrupt your work by making you wait.
I think it is in fact the exact opposite, the better you are at something, the more likely it is that you become limited by your equipment. I will probably not be able to cook better if I get very expensive knives. But I would speculate that an actual professional cook or butcher will be able to work better with sharp knives that keep their edges well.
Programmers are also frequently better equipped to make underpowered machines work for them, by adjusting their techniques, monitoring resource usage and stopping or uninstalling things like bloatware. Whereas normal people will tend to struggle if they just buy the cheapest machine they can find.
But yeah agree, this subscription thing is spreading like a cancer.