I know you are being sarcastic, but that is pretty much how many people buy phones and cars. It’s a gas guzzler with barely 20MPG, requires premium gasoline, is unreliable and can only be serviced at specific dealerships for a top dollar? But it has a premium feel

The entire luxury market would not exist otherwise.

Hardware is nice and all, but how is the software? The 2020 Nord 10 I had was way too eager to kill any background processes, and had a very bad bug consuming all storage space.

I assume the bootloader will be unlockable, being a OnePlus?

“Android is Linux” is a bit oversimplified.

What the is issue, still simply, the way I understand it:

• Linux kernel contains drivers for the specific hardware used in devices (processors, modem, memory, display, camera, etc.)
• Each Android smartphone has different hardware configuration
• Hardware manufacturers want to guard their secrets, so they sign contracts and NDAs with phone manufacturers
• Phone manufacturers create a unique, dead-end fork of a Linux kernel that contains drivers and is configured specifically for that model. (There are exceptions, but generally)

So yes, Android uses a Linux kernel, but in most cases, a very specific one.

Why not replace it? This requires:

• Access to the bootloader and ability to read/write to internal storage on low level, and manufacturers lock it down.
• Knowing the hardware and the drivers. As mentioned, manufacturers will provide drivers only to their contracts. So someone would need to write a driver.
• Once someone writes a driver, it can be added to mainline Linux, available to all.
• That is why “mainlining” a device is a big deal - that means that the kernel for that device can be built, and going forward, that device will be supported for all future kernel versions.

However, Proton’s policy is that if you use some accounts for illegal purposes, you will also lose access to the accounts where you have not yet conducted illegal activities.

Cue horror stories of Google locking person’s entire account due to a credit card charge-back or minor Play Store ToS violation.

Proton should have stayed ProtonMail, not a Google-like “ecosystem”.

DOJ did denaturalize many members of the German American Bund due to their ties with the Nazi party.

Source: You Are Not American by Amanda Frost, great book.

Osmin on PinePhone was… Tolerable. I’m just pleasantly surprised it worked okay with GPS being integrated into the modem.

Takes a long time to get a GPS fix (like old standalone GPS units), but it’s possible to provide A-GPS data to it.

There is the “allow background usage” and “optimize”, but also, locking the app on the app switcher is supposed to help it stay alive.

Depends on Android flavor too. OnePlus OxygenOS, for example, does not respect the “do not optimize/sleep” setting, and will not let apps run in the background (or foreground) unless the app is in the invisible whitelist. E.g: WhatsApp is fine, but SimpleX is not.

https://dontkillmyapp.com/

You cannot use Proton Mail with another provider. And you cannot access Proton Mail from a regular email client (app) due to their encryption setup. (technically you can, but you need Proton Bridge proxy)

How good is LLM training data for a language spoken by less than 10 million people? Keep in mind that most of those people are probably multilingual (i.e. categorizing which language is which by person is harder), and language itself is similar to its neighbors. And then, again, terms.

I know someone who was a translator between two (less widely spoken) languages, and some specifics I recall from our conversations about work:

• Sometimes the translations use many technical terms, and getting those wrong (trusting LLMs) is not an option. (This was for some patents IIRC)
• Some terms simply do not exist in another language, and it could be up to the translator to invent a term to define and carry the information across. (This was for some government digital service, and the term was similar to “digital queue”)
• Tone and nuances are very difficult to translate. Phrasing can have implications and connotations. (Simplest example: “i am afraid” does not imply fear, it’s an established politeness phrase) Neutral in one language could be viewed as hostile in another, too. (And with politicians being petty, could have consequences)

None of those would be addressed with LLMs. Small training set for language (and language being similar to a few others) is an issue. Anything technical or non-existing would be prone to hallucinations. And tone is difficult enough to convey through text to begin with, let alone with LLM translation.

Imgur had the social media element since mid-2010s at least, maybe longer.

Most useful was probably this holder for two 1/2in PEX pipes. Printed in ABS, it holds cold and hot pipes in parallel, and uses a #8 screw for attachment. All commercially available holders are for a single pipe, and use nails. Hammering nails in tight spaces (and doing so twice) is not particularly convenient for me, thus, this contraption was born.

Other than that, stuff that is so practical it is easily forgettable: wall mount for a garage door opener, Y splitter for an exhause fan, various covers and containers.

That’s one of the few subreddits that still has interesting stuff. I don’t care about benchies and shiny dragons.

If we can get food by going to the grocery store, who needs farms?

I’ve sold a few things (games and electronics and such) on eBay within the last year without much hassle.

Seeing lots of dislike for Matrix lately. Hosted a Synapse server for many years, never had issues with encryption keys, but have to agree that Element the company (formerly Vector, but they now control the protocol too?) rolls out more new things than they fix old ones. E.g: Element X is slower and calls are not backwards compatible (!). Synapse server keeps getting some (corporate-looking) auth stuff added while on-boarding and registration for plain accounts on self-hosted servers is still a pain. To give them credit, Element app is consistent across platforms (for purposes of convincing people and troubleshooting), and bridges work pretty well.

But it seems any self-hosted solution has its can of worms.

XMPP, being old, implements all modern-expected functionality as extensions, and servers are not guaranteed to have them (common argument). Spam was an issue as well (but simplicity of the on-device and server database allows easy message and attachment deletions). iOS clients for XMPP are meh and require integration with Apple push servers (Snikket and Monal do that, but for how long?)

Tried SimpleX years ago, loved the idea, but it was going through growing pains. In the same vein as metadata leaks for Matrix and XMPP, if you host your own SMP server with a few users, that exposes some info vs using default servers (along with thousands users)

The ones I know of are not really masquerading, but rather, funding themselves and/or directly related services (often hosting) via convenient ways.

• Conversations.im (XMPP/Jabber client) is $8 on Google Play, free on F-Droid and is FOSS. Dev runs their own instance.
• OsmAnd+ costs money on Google Play, is free on F-Droid, provides hosting of gigabytes of map data.
• Beeper (bridges from popular chats to Matrix) costs money (subscription I believe), but can be set up on one’s own (I run two bridges on my chat server).

What I do dislike is companies overusing “Open” or “Free” in their own or their product names, with no implication of Free or Open Source software. Similar to slapping “engineer” on non-engineering roles or “manager” on non-managerial ones.

There are some mathematical models similar to a Voronoi diagram, which would make districts convex polygons.

With the new gerrymandering 2.0 Ohio is proposing, soon all of their cities will be “red” (on paper)

A small town, or a suburb of a city that is described as “a great place to raise a family”. From what I have seen, that usually means one of two things:

1. The town/suburb is closer to the city, but is wealthy, real estate is expensive, usually very car-centric, which excludes anyone poor (or even middle class, sometimes).

2. The town/village is far away from the nearest city, not necessarily wealthy, but usually ran by a group of people that know each other (good old boys club), probably heavy on religion or other “traditional” values.