I just put them on my head and it made “crack”. You have to slightly flex the headband every time when putting the headphones on your ears, and I guess doing this for a few hundred times weakens the plastic to the point where it just gives up.

250€ 🫠

Absolutely. Added to that, they seem to be actively ruining their headphones with software updates as well. My XM5’s randomly turned off every few hours and thanks to a Chinese hacker I was able to downgrade the software - guess what, the problem went away.

They’re either doing this deliberately so you buy the latest model or their development team is utterly incompetent.

On their older models, they had a different design and you could fold the earcups inwards. It was a really useful feature, they easily fit into a small bag. The newer ones can’t do that anymore and come with an extremely large carrying case. Sony has really lost the plot, but they still have excellent noise cancelling (the main reason for me buying them).

But that’s gonna be my last model now.

Not sure what OP is doing.

Nothing special, I just wear them every day and I have a regular-sized head. I also have XM2’s which still work, they have a more sturdy hinge design. Sony cost-optimized their latest models too much, the headband is much thinner than on the XM2’s as well, which puts more pressure on my head and makes them slightly more uncomfortable. I can only suspect they did that so they have to mold less plastic and save a few cents on each model…

This is the second time these broke on my WH1000-XM5’s. At least they’re easily replacable by just removing a few screws and dropping in a new one.

Compared to that, this bad boy is over 30 years old and never broke once - thanks to a headband which is made out of metal. Despite that, it’s even more comfortable than Sony’s modern one:

I have stopped using it, because the skill atrophy kicked in and I don’t want to turn into someone chatting with a bot every day.

To quote myself:

I work as a software developer and over the last months, I slipped into a habit of letting ChatGPT write more and more code for me. It’s just so easy to do! Write a function here, do some documentation there, do all of the boilerplate for me, set up some pre-commit hooks, …

Two weeks ago I deleted my OpenAI account and forced myself to write all code without LLMs, just as I did before. Because there is one very real problem of excessive AI useage in software development: Skill atrophy.

I was actively losing knowledge. Sometimes I had to look up the easiest things (like builtin Javascript functions) I was definitely able to work with off the top of my head just a year ago. I turned away from being an actual developer to someone chatting with a machine. I slowly lost the fun in coding, because I outsourced the problem solving aspects that gave me a dopamine boost to the AI. I basically became a glorified copypaster.

I really hope so, but for that to happen, hardware prices have to go down again and that might take a while.

The skill erosion is real, and I could see it on myself just after a week of trying out Claude

While it took me a few months to really notice it, that still shocked me. Using AI extensively makes you depend on it - and that’s exactly what the big players want. A customer paying a recurring subscription just to do their job.

Since I am not forced to use it, I deleted my OpenAI account and started to code without LLM assistance again. It’s much more fun to solve problems by myself (and get a dopamine kick out of that) anyway - and when the bubble inevitably pops, I can still go on as I did before.

Unless, perhaps, AI five years from now understands that too.

LLMs have already hit a ceiling, the improvements between new model releases are pretty much negligible. They had to come up with very expensive agents checking the output to reduce hallucinations. The best example for that is GPT-5 from OpenAI, which was extremely underwhelming.

I have a job and no one forces me to use AI. Feels like an absolute dream right now.

This is the toaster equivalent of the longcat meme.

Thank you, that looks like a good alternative! :)

The Yazio calory tracker app added a shitty AI assistant a while ago that tells you every time after scanning a pizza that you should eat less pizza. It cannot be disabled. It loads for two to three seconds and you have to wait for it to spew out its shit before continuing.

Everyone hates it. They had a perfectly good product, but to please investors or some shit they just had to add one more useless feature. Gotta love capitalism. After my subscription runs out, I’ll switch to OpenFoodFacts and FoodYou, fuck 'em.

The Jelly Star will even get an Android 16 update this month, after staying on Android 13 for ages. Unihertz got pressure from the competition. :)

I don’t see any ads on the paid version here.

True, but it also didn’t help that Microsoft set really low system specs for “Windows Vista Ready”. So we had a lot of computers with an official Vista badge that weren’t really capable of running it well.

The specs to earn that badge were 512MB of RAM and an 800MHz processor, which was absolutely not enough for it.