Can you use T’s though, once you have enough As to redirect the wind overtop them? Capital T’s of course, lower-case would just get all tangled up in the turbulence.

Don’t forget to put them all in italics so they execute faster!

Bluetooth and WiFi can be tracked as well, even with “anonymized” WiFi MAC addresses.

I’m looking forward to 10 years from now, when this new novelty called, WRITING YOUR OWN SHIT (and reading it!) comes back into prevalence, and everyone thinks it is such an original idea.

(If we, or the Internet, are all still around then, anyway.)

Another route one can go that takes a bit of work is Obtainium. Hand-pick the apps you want to show up and feed their GitHub, F-Droid, etc. links to manage them. Since F-Droid has some issues with how they build packages, it can be used sparingly but not avoided then.

Go app by app until your dependence on the Play Store goes away. Then disable or uninstall (probably can only disable on most phones, I’ve seen anyway) the Play Store completely. Slow way to gain independence from crapware. You can then export your Obtainium config to a JSON file to import on future phones/other phones so you don’t have to duplicate the work.

Some bonus points, the non-Play version of one app I use shrinks from 120MB to 30MB when all the Google dependencies are stripped. You also gain back functionality like full filesystem access and other things Google forces apps to remove from the Play Store flavor.

More freedom. Faster apps. Less overhead. Less Google crap. Not a big scary transition.

That is also the first thing that popped in my head.

While this was an inevitable move, it makes me curious if they are hitting a point where Gemini is becoming so integrated in all their software stacks and they’re just insanely paranoid about any precious “AI” code leaking that they just decided to close the gates early.

Probably for the best long-term. Having this weird dependency on the generosity of a corporation was always a liability. Whatever comes next can hopefully avoid it.

Hopefully someone like the EU, to combat ewaste, eventually requires all hardware manufacturers to sell their mobile hardware with bootloader/firmware flashing unlocking requirements. The work then will be for the community to write support for all these various makes and models of device, but the endgame being actual device freedom. Although with the world seemingly leaning hard into Authoritarianism and Fascism, it might not end up being the right time and freedom will remain underground.

A pity too, all phone hardware at its core is generic ARM computers with various devices connected to fairly generic interface busses. They just encrypt bits of code so the sauce to make things work is hidden.

KaiOS is one alternative, it was FirefoxOS. It’s pretty sluggish though. Maybe on more decent hardware with some optimizations it’d have a possibility. A lot of Nokia feature phones run it.

The complexity of getting the closed binary blobs to run modems and other hardware will make it exceedingly difficult to extract the necessary files and configurations to keep third-party OSes afloat. Then there’s the matter of carrier configs, carrier compatibility, expensive carrier certification, and even then, carriers may still just ban the device because they don’t like it.

Options will end up being:

• Tearing apart ROMs for blobs and backport/reverse-engineering patches to make them run on alt OSes.
• Find some hardware based on janky Chinese modems that will have little band support, lackluster performance, and likely banned by most carriers.
• Start a new company with the pull to design a new phone OS and hardware with chip and carrier support.

Not impossible, just exceedingly difficult. These systems are heavily integrated and heavily proprietary.

Funny part is, this move will actually make Google lose more money, as Google will lose hardware/software sales, and software dev over this. More people will end up on iOS in the interim, and out of it will come some new mobile OS that will make Google’s mobile OS irrelevant in 10 years.

Let’s start now, start a company, base a new phone on QNX, have an Android emulation layer for apps until a proper SDK is developed, and just take the wind out of Google sooner than later.

Oh, the stories I could tell you… I should write a book some day.

My general contribution to the conversation is GitHub should have a donation system. Once a week, some kind of donation raffle happens, and the winner gets GitHub taken down for “reasons” for 4 hours, then 5, 6, 8. Microsoft profits more, and it slowly becomes a technology-and-money-induced vacation day.

Honestly, no, you don’t need a team. It is good practice, but not necessary. I’ve worked at several companies where the production build was made from a tower under a desk or a server blade, or an iMac on a shelf, sometimes one guy knew how it worked, sometimes nobody did, sometimes the whole team did. In most cases, managed by the product’s dev team. IT just firewall-wrapped the crap out of them.

Not to discredit the main meta thread of “we don’t have to manage anything with cloud” vs “having management team” debate. Odd thing is, cloud prices are climbing so rapidly that the industry could shift back in a near future.

Bottom line for most business though: As long as the cost makes sense, why bother self-hosting anything. That’s really what it comes down to. A bonus too, as most companies like being able to blame other companies for their problems. Microsoft knows that, and profited greatly with Windows Server/Office/etc. for that very reason.

When your quarterly profits are dashed because an employee backed into your server room and turned on the halon fire suppression system and you gotta rebuild from scratch from month-old off-site tape backups, how do you write a puff piece to explain that away without self-blame or firing the very people that know how it all works?

When your quarterly profits are dashed because Microsoft’s source control system screwed up, you make a polite public “our upstream software partners had a technical error, we’ve addressed and renegotiated,” message, shareholders are happy, and customers are still stuck with a broken product, but the shareholders are happy.

The best answer is to leave Gmail.

Hey, now, that’s the “power” of “AI” at work! /s

Win+R, notepad, enter. The run command still works…for now.

They sure are destroying that platform at lightning speed.

Hah, per window.

On the front end, you can put lipstick on that pig.

On the back end, it has to work and there’s nowhere to apply lipstick.

OTOH, it seems there is a trend in modern dev practices that it’s acceptable for a service to terminate frequently, as long as it respawns, which finally made me figure out all the sci-fi tropes where a ship’s systems aren’t responding. It’s because too many are crashing in concert. But mostly terrifying that this practice would ever be considered practical.

If America as it is known survives this, massive reforms will have to take place.

Random things like:

• The absolutely useless “impeachment” process will have to be replaced with something closer to Parliamentary “vote of no confidence” - no “trial” to be held by one section of one branch of government. It is nothing more than a sham process. If business boards of directors have figured out how to oust CEOs, the government should have a similar mechanism.
• President can’t have God-mode powers nor sign executive orders anymore. The President’s power should be severely limited. No one person should be a king. Not sure how we managed to do that one thing completely wrong. The position should be nothing more than a communications filter between government branches, nations, states, people, to push policy and steer governance.
• President could be allowed emergency declarations for 15 days, but their action is limited to deploying aid and resources and nothing more. Congress must then convene in 7 of those 15 days to decide how to proceed, in- or out-of-session. They can get off their lazy butts and work for once.
• President should be allowed to be jailed, and no member of government should ever be above the very laws they control.
• Presidential position could also be restructured. Pres and VP are just pres and pres. They both have to agree for any action to be taken. Why having one person with the final decision was ever a good idea when trying to remove kings makes no sense.
• Supreme Court ideally should be disbanded as it was only created to appease the rich, but in lieu of that, it should be completely refreshed. Possibly size expanded to 20 or some arbitrary number that helps break a focused pile of power by a few. All justices removed, replaced with non-partisan justices. If any justice seems to show partisan decision-making, they are audited by (some auditing body) that is probably not the other justices, like how an FAA flight crash incident is audited by a board of retired pilots. Justices will be term-limited. Justices should also be age-limited. Again, borrowing from FAA, if ATC controllers have to retire at 56, we can age-limit every governmental position. This gerontocracy has to stop. Old rarely means wise. Mental fitness should also be a factor, if you’re a Reagan or a Mango or a Feinstein where you don’t even know where you are half the time, you’re out.
• All government positions are term- and/or age-limited, but a staggering rule has to be initiated so there isn’t possibility of a 100% turnover in any given period of years. (Boards already have this concept.)
• Some mechanism should be put in place that makes it more commonplace for states to weigh in when the Federal government is doing something wrong. And one for individual citizens. Voting processes should be standardized and modernized to make every citizen’s vote more powerful.
• To toss the Libertarians a bone, states rights. The power distribution has to be restructured. Things like “state pays Fed x money, so state can receive y money” goes away. The state sends some money to the Federal government and keeps more internally so they can self-manage. The economies of each state would need balance as there are many welfare states that need the money in the Federal government to survive. Regardless, each state’s economy should be structured so that the Federal government is more of an afterthought. Federal government standardizes processes, roads, specifications, etc. so that interstate trade travel and movement is made easier. Basically though, to limit the scope of power the Federal government has. Not to demolish or disband it, just to make it so even if somehow, in the new system, someone tries to play king, they’re but king of very little, and can’t threaten states to bend the knee by trying to cut off their precious money. (Which alone should be made illegal.)
• All the obvious money in elections and money in politics and political donation stuff all has to die, for good. Codified into the constitution. Each candidate is given y amount of timeslots on various media, and z amount of campaigns, funded by taxpayers equally. No other money can be used. (Funded by the taxpayers so it’s all an even ground and some CEO can’t come sail in on his space yacht and run a fancier campaign.)

And at the end of it, governance should be made boring again. One shouldn’t get into the job to be Lauren Boobert the reality TV trash soundbite handjob star. It should be a paper pushing position that keeps the country and its “economy” going.

Probably some other stuff this ramble forgot to add.

It’s weird how business, boards, even HOAs seem to have a better set of checks and balances than the US Federal government.

I consider LLMs basically high-frequency StackExchange trading. You gotta be exact and not keep the thread alive too long or driftrot is real though. Much faster to parse, though.

Also, the ones that can access the web are great for “I want specific lib x version y to solve a weird problem, what support libs are needed?”

RAM speed is going to be negligibly different in daily use, and on-die RAM will compensate for that slightly slower clock on the ARM computer. Intel’s hyperthreading is much less a performance advantage than it used to be. Intel chips suck anymore though, full stop, and generate heat like mofos. I wouldn’t be surprised if this computer uses that generation of Intel chips that randomly dies, gen13 I think?

Worse, that Beelink will be using Intel embedded graphics which is basically the worst on the planet - I’d take Qualcomm Adreno before Intel embedded.

It’s also listed on Amazon as frequently returned. Not worth $869. Could get an Asus (née Intel) NUC that would serve much better, I think there are at least some AMD variants now.

The Beelink might make a dandy headless server if one got lucky though, if GPU isn’t needed for AI/ML or other GPU-based acceleration/calculations.

Beelink also wins points for having actual hard drive and RAM slots as well. Still probably not worth the money versus anything else.

Really can’t wait for some computer companies that aren’t Apple to start pumping out ARM mini PCs and laptops with decent chips.