Time for a joke.

And economist and an accountant were taking a walk when they noticed a frog. The accountant says to the economist, “I’ll give you $100 if you eat that frog.” The economist thinks for a moment, then agrees. A little later they come across another frog, and the economist says, “I’ll give you $100 to eat that frog.” The accountant thinks about it for a second and also agrees. As they continue walking, the accountant says, “So I got to see you eat a frog for $100, and by eating a frog myself, I got my money back, so I understand why I did it. But you had already eaten a frog and had $100, so why did you do it?” The economist replies, “Ah, but this way it’s twice as good for the economy!”

I don’t hate them because they’re women, I hate them for what they eat! Which they do because they’re female. 🤔

I’d say harming mosquitoes (females only, that feed on blood) is better than vegan!

The Deep? That you?

Maybe it would be less happy without the pain!

That’s pretty funny. It’s been legally mandated that bootloaders be unlockable in my country, which I’ve done before.

Claiming that someone stole what you stole is a little hypocritical. Not having a Pebble, and having discovered them just after they were shut down by Google, I’m glad Rebble did what they did. But claiming ownership seems a little over the top. Having an archive of apps available via a third-party site sounds like a win for both parties, except for the financial side. Certainly, not paying anything would be a benefit for RePebble, and not having an option to charge anything would be a loss for Rebble, but it sounds like an unmitigated win for Pebble and RePebble users.

RePebble seems to be very committed to going FOSS, up to releasing some or all of their code as GPL3, which is hard to argue around. I’ll be revisiting this saga in 6 months or so when I’m in the market for a smart watch.

You can mostly disable them. Delete your Samsung account, don’t agree to their terms of service besides the most basic one or two that is required. No defense of Samsung, just what I did to deny them as much as I could of my information until I replace this phone and never buy Samsung again.

I’m a pretty big fan of using fuck, but holy fuck, that was a lot. I wonder why you feel that passionately about it?

I deleted my Samsung account when an update about 6 months ago came along that basically wanted ALL your personal data so you could use AI for photo search, etc. Then I found out about all the other minor things they insist you have an account to use. So, yeah, Fuck Samsung! Now I need to find a phone I can live with to replace it when it stops working.

Android isn’t FOSS, AOSP is. If you keep conflating that, I’m not sure what you’re getting at. And having a sandbox or VM that allows you to run Linux apps is not the same as having native support. That would be like saying Windows had Linux support 20 years ago because VMWare existed.

And no, control of your phone doesn’t equal Linux, but native support for a FOSS OS at the base level means that if the maintainers decide to go in a different direction, you can more easily part ways with them. AOSP used to be a more complete version of Android, but that has been clawed back repeatedly as Google transfers functionality to Google Play services and elsewhere, which has caused difficulties for LineageOS and GrapheneOS to be maintained over the years, including Graphene exploring moving to another device for support from the one line of devices they support now.

Clearly, this isn’t solely the fault of Android and Google, hardware vendors bear a lot of blame, as well as their desire to exert more control over their customers. But Google and Android have the exact same issue and certainly won’t be pressuring hardware vendors to open up their standards.

Can I compile FreeCAD for Android? Can I run Linux apps that are compiled for ARM on Android? As far as I know, no. So it’s even less Linux than MacOS is BSD, and how is that helping for software freedom, or placing the control of the phone you bought in your hands?

So the question becomes when, not if, a Linux phone reaches parity with AOSP-based phones.

Yes, but you can expect almost no useful updates from AOSP anymore, which means it’s up to groups like those who develop GrapheneOS to keep up with what people expect while Android ostensibly keeps advancing, and they only support one hardware line.

AOSP has been neutered as much as Google has been able to. This was the reasonable next step.

The answer to that is to do what God said to do to hasten his coming: spread the gospel. Not ban abortions, arrest gay people, criminalize trans people. Spread the gospel. Anything else is them using religion as an excuse to promote their opinions. I realize a lot of people here recognize that, but I still think it needs to be said.

When that is the light in your day…

The McDonalds point is in reference to inflation, which will certainly have an impact on the cost of vehicles. And I feel like you don’t grasp the concept of a luxury vehicle. By definition, it has more than the basics. This could be why my EV cost less than $20k used and a Model S costs $151k new. No ponytail, but I don’t expect having one would hinder my basic math, economics, or English comprehension skills.

Tine to spin up some alts?

Absolutely. If we had done so with batteries and solar, imagine where we could have been. Both technologies languished for far longer than they had to.

All good. I just keep seeing this all the time about batteries, simply because most of the technological advances are slow, cumulative, aggregate, and largely invisible to consumers. Then people complain about how none of these advances ever make it to market while ignoring, for example, how many pounds old, barely capable cell phones were compared to the functionality of smartphones these days that can run for a full day on a battery a fraction of the size we had for those old behemoths, all apparently without any of those breakthroughs making it to market. I mean, look at the first cell phone in this article. I suspect some advancements occurred in batteries between then and now.