AFAIK Librem claims they use separate verified suppliers and builders (compared to more common Android manufacturers, for example). Kind of a zealot thing too though.

And PinePhone (original) at $200 is not that expensive if you think of it as a compact version of a Linux platform like Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi + charger + battery + touch display + 4G modem + GPS unit + microphone + speaker will probably run close to $200 too.

“Software-defined vehicles”? Dafuq?

This reminds me of a story my graph theory professor told me (long before LLMs). One of their grad students discovered that a subset of graphs that are of type A and B at once has fantastic properties, such as fast searching, and a few others, useful in communication networks etc.

Excited about their potential thesis, student asked the professor to take a look. After calculating which graphs actually are types A and B at the same time, professor found that the intersection of such graph types is a null set. So the theoretically nice graphs the student “discovered” simply do not exist.

I did not get why people liked Midsommar.

Same idea of folk/cult horror, old The Wicker Man (1973) was more coherent, and had a point.

Free People’s Village by Sim Kern is on my shelf, haven’t read it yet. The premise is that history went differently in 1990s and US is now a solarpunk utopia… For the rich.

Makes perfect sense. This comment just made me realize English does not have a distinction between order and request. While, for example, in Russian, orders are said in indefinite tense (?). So when you order a dog to sit, you would say “to sit!” (сидеть!), or to order someone to stop, “to stand!” (стоять!). Another less formal way to order (usually a group) is to use “we” as the subject, for example, “[we are] not sitting, [we are] working” (не сидим, работаем)

I have been following https://linmob.net/ for news and developments. They do a good job aggregating from conferences, boards, HN, and reddit.

Who are these smooth-talking scammers that can guide a regular-ass user to jump through hoops in settings to install a malicious app?

Maybe I should ask them how they do it, because I cannot convince my family to download and use Signal. You know, the legit app from the official app store.

That is fair, and I appreciate the explanation.

Edit: Author says GenAI was not used for code, see below.

Original comment, observing signs of GenAI project:

What’s up with these brand-new “Discord alternatives” being cranked out en masse? Would be easier to contribute to XMPP or Matrix IMO.

Initial commit 14,203 files changed +2872320

AI? Or “i worked on this for 10 years and uploaded just now”? /s

Overabundance of emojis in description. Probably AI.

Would be cool to see if anyone manages to get it running.

Were you able to run it yourself? What.

There is a recent book/report called Scam, about these scam compounds. Despite being illegal prisons / forced labor, they create a lot of economic opportunity in nearby towns and villages providing supplies and (paid) labor. Also, scam compound victims often get little sympathy, with notions such as “they are gamblers”, “they want easy money”, or plain old discrimination because they are foreigners.

Allegedly, VoLTE works on Ubuntu Touch for OnePlus Nord N100, N10, Volla Phone 22, and Fairphone 4.

Windows Phone was around in mid-2010s, at least 7 years after iPhone release. But it was not hyped enough: companies did not care to develop apps for it, customers didn’t want a smartphone without X Y Z apps (same argument i see now about mobile linux or even custom ROMs). The phones had nice and fast UI though, and some had very good cameras.

Is your iPad on iOS 9.3.5? It is infamously slow.

It is possible to downgrade it to 8.4.1 (faster, partially more broken) or even 6.1.3 (fast and old school, many apps don’t work, but there are apps in Cydia to fix stuff).

Biggest issue I encountered is sites requiring TLSv1.3 for HTTPS encryption, and browsers simply do not support that.

No, never! Tech corps (both devs and app stores) brainwashed people into thinking “no updates = bad”.

Recently, I have seen people complain about lack of updates for: OS for a handheld emulation device (not the emulator, the OS, which does not have any glaring issues), and Gemini protocol browser (gemini protocol is simple and has not changed since 2019 or so).

Maybe these people don’t use the calculator app because arithmetic was not updated in a few thousand years.

We had “coding without coders” in late 90s (maybe 2000s) with VB and Access databases. Some of my coworkers maintained such “software” previously written by not-a-dev.

And then there was “low code” fad about ten years ago? There was “coding” with diagrams and such, like Scratch but for serious people.

And what will regular developers do? Probably the same old shit, digging in decades-old, hastily-written, and now LLM-generated code, making it all work, and adding functionality. While “architects” and management will draw diagrams (with AI now!), and try to abstract everything into the cloud (and now into AI probably, somehow)

Neat project, but

we set an intention to have a healthy relationship with technology in our home.

Followed by photos of these schedule-reminder screens all over both homes.

Recently learned that “unlocked phone” ≠ ”unlocked bootloader". Purchased an older OnePlus model that was listed as “Unlocked T-Mobile”. Had to submit fastboot unlock key and other data to an online tool, got no response. Contacted support with the same info, they responded after several days saying “the unlock code you sent us is invalid” and “this is an older device and we have no way of unlocking it”. Such reaponsibility from manufacturer.

FYI flashing a (hacky) Global ROM (in place of original T-Mobile/Metro/whatever) using official MSM tool allows fastboot unlocking without a code.

Wiki says the model is from 2011, and all that functionality was implemented on Android 2.3.x, impressive! Google is only 14 versions behind.

Like desktop mode on Librem5 in 2020, convergence on PinePhone from 2021, or Samsung Dex from a few years ago, too.