Spoiler: Xiaomi is #1 now.

If only there was a way to communicate without videos. The Mesopotamians had something like that but the technology was unfortunately lost.

Nobody intentionally creates vulnerabilities, but more complicated software is more error prone and therefore more likely to be vulnerable. Fast release cycles also get in the way of good testing. The most complicated piece of software on most phones is the web browser, and its complexity is imposed by the web and its advertisements, rather than by what the user wants or needs.

IOS and Android face pretty much the same issues on the OS developer and phone manufacturer sides. Therefore, the IOS and Android worlds could both clean up their acts in about the same way if the incentives were right. That they don’t do so might be a bad situation that we have to cope with, but we shouldn’t pretend that it is a good situation.

I wonder what apps require IOS 16 in some meaningful way. I know there is a situation with Android apps requiring OS upgrades unnecessarily.

Why do companies like McDonalds want you to run an app anyway, instead of e.g. using a web page? There are a few sites or products where I currently give up the equivalent of a french-fry discount rather than run their stupid app. It’s just a minor annoyance so far, but it doesn’t make sense to me. Do those apps usuallly keep running the background so they can track you, or what?

Those security vulnerabililties are because of buggy old software, and updating the software in the old devices does as good a job of fixing the vulnerabilities as selling you a new device does. A significant e-waste tax on every new device, accompanied by credits for keeping old devices working, might help with that. Anyway, if it’s an app (rather than OS) vulnerability and you can’t fix it with an update because the new version of the app requires a new OS, that’s mostly likely an app that you don’t need to use. I’m getting by ok with F-droid apps instead of Play Store apps, for example.

Best still would be to debug the software before shipping it, so it wouldn’t have those vulnerabilities in the first place. There are various forces that get in the way of that, but a significant one is that web development is now driven by delivering more advertising rather than useful information to the user.

I wasn’t aware of the USB-C adapter with pass through charging, but still, it’s extra crap plugged into your phone. Yes I have a Moto G series phone which is Motorola’s budget to low-midrange line. It has a headphone jack and it is full size. Flagship phones have a few more features but none seem important.

The laptop (Thinkpad X220) that I’m using is much older than the iphone 7 and it runs current Debian just fine. Lots of people are running current LineageOS on similarly old Android phones. Why can’t the phone vendors do the same? Planned obsolescence doesn’t change by wrapping it with nice marketing words.

I have figured that if I needed to get an iphone for some reason, it would be a 6+, since that is the last version with a headphone jack (similarly for Pixels, it would be a 4A). But I guess that strategy won’t work any more.

https://kevinboone.me/headphonejack.html

Interesting. Cost is also very important for large scale deployment of course. I wonder if this stuff can become competitive in $ per watt with the current silicon cells.

I don’t know what Cohost was but I’m pessimistic about Lemmy these days. Note that the link is to an article moaning about the centralization of sites like Reddit and that Cohost (whatever that was) failed because it was run by the same type of people. At first I didn’t click on the link because it says “audio” so I expected it to be audio and I didn’t feel like listening to one. It’s a written article though.

This exact same thing happened with the very simple ELIZA chatbot back in the 1960s. Joseph Weizenbaum (ELIZA’s author) wrote about it in his book “Computer Power and Human Reason”. He was shocked and scared. He had written ELIZA as a cute demo, and people treated it as if it were human.

I wouldn’t count on google drive doing anything in particular after expiration, unless that is expressly part of the product description. Just because you can observe it happening now doesn’t mean you can expect it to keep happening. For that matter, Google cancels products all the time. So I wouldn’t even rely on the paid plan not being withdrawn at some inconvenient moment. If you really want to use it, then best strategy is probably use it as long as it lasts, but have some plan B in mind if it goes away.

Oneprovider.com shows lots of offers in Istanbul, though servers are expensive there compared to a place like Hetzner:

https://oneprovider.com/search?&cities[]=62&price=0&price_max=9999999999999999&price_any=0

1.1 USD/mo for 2TB is basically a giveaway or free plan, i.e. you’re the product not the customer. So I’d be suspicious. How much storage are you looking for? Hetzner unfortunately jumps from 3.2 euro/1TB to 11 euro/5TB. So 2TB is kind of a bad spot on that scale. But if google drive is working for you and your stuff is encrypted, why not keep it?

Tbh you get jerked around less with paid plans. I’m happy with Hetzner Storage Box. I have 5TB there for 10 euro/month. I’d never use Google Drive. borgbase.com has a 10GB “free forever” plan and I could see parking some stuff there, but 10GB is pretty small and IDK the conditions. Why not use a VPS provider with better storage options?

It was ok at the time, and if it isn’t ok now, that means you want to run something that is too bloated for its own good.

Really though, special hardware for this doesn’t make too much sense. A raspberry pi with two ethernet interfaces would be great, but if you can live with ethernet plus wifi, the current rpi’s will do it. Otherwise there are lots of similar boards that really do have two ethernet.

I have not really felt much use for self hosted server hardware at home. I use VPS’s for that and it’s less hassle. Maybe it doesn’t count as completely self hosted, but conceptually it’s a miniature colo box.

https://www.freedombox.org/ ?

Email and sometimes irc. And old fashioned sms when needed.

Reed to T’Pol: “I was always rather fond of the name Stinky”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kyb6yDaai4M

So long, Intel.

Lol, AI firms trying to devour the entire internet for training data, discovers that it needs a way to ensure that it doesn’t train on its own output. So it pitches credentials as something to fight AI rather than to mark non-AI data as delicious for ingestion.

I remember a flying saucer game that had an “abduct” button. This sounds similar. Or maybe it means regulatory capture.

Maybe you’re right about Gelsinger. I’ve seen him spew BS but figured he does it because he has to, that Intel has been fundamentally broken for decades, and that he was as a good a CEO choice as they could have made.