Even if they wanted to bank on the adblocker thing I imagine they can’t because they have to stay in Google’s good graces. Like 90% of their revenue was google money, and has been for years now.

At this point I’d honestly even pay for a privacy focused mozilla browser that is clean of all this crap, just to keep them afloat, but fat chance of that happening.

They did. It wasn’t quite as good ( awful UI iirc ), but still a decent game. You can get it on gog too

Omg, my favorite civ!

I wonder what it was that made Pornhub cooperate this time around. Iirc in texas and france they just “left” instead of implementing the age verification.

Lost those 400 million in 3 years no less. I know this seems like good news, but to me this is worse, because it looks like the PC market is shrinking fast in favor of mobile, and mobile is atrocious when it comes to user freedoms.

Drove a few cars with “lane hold” and it’s infuriating to have to suddenly correct the car’s trajectory at every curve because it misjudges the road line. Some cars are worse than others but it was literally the first thing I disabled every time. I wonder how truck drivers feel about it. Do modern trucks even have this?

It was just a really strange comment. I mean yeah, road quality varies wildly ( jyst come to eastern europe if you wanna see some remarkable road craters ) but its a broad generalization and the quality surely it varies in china as well, no? I keep trying to imagine what roads were these vehicles designed for if “european” roads prompted a redesign.

I was going to say “because they’re probably state subsidized” but your suggestion is better

Edit: looks like you’re right lol

The urgent pace is baked into BYD’s structure. Taking advantage of China’s lower labor costs, BYD deploys about 900,000 employees, nearly as many as the combined workforces of Toyota and Volkswagen, to accelerate design and manufacturing. At its headquarters, BYD promotes a work-focused life through company-subsidized housing, transportation and schools.

They also combine that with skimping on quality ( admittedly a low bar these days, when even daimler uses cheap chinese interior plastic ):

Chinese engineers have essentially concluded that global industry-standard vetting processes are a wasteful pursuit of “excessive quality,” Han said.

Instead, Chinese automakers release good-enough vehicles quickly, with far fewer prototypes and a fail-fast philosophy mirroring Silicon Valley tech startups, industry executives and experts said.

This sentence makes no sense though:

The problem: The car had been designed for China’s smooth streets and slower speeds. Now, it had to withstand Europe’s winding, bumpy roads.

It’s almost as if this was a propaganda article.

Wang spends many nights in Shenzhen employee housing, eats simple meals and works long days, sometimes in a BYD uniform, two BYD investors and others who know him told Reuters. Unlike many Chinese executives, who are chauffeured around, he often drives himself

I got it - they’re quoting directly, that’s why it reads like propaganda.

Decentralized platforms based on open protocols, such as Mastodon and Bluesky, have been designed from the ground up to prioritize user choice and agency—without needing permission from a corporate gatekeeper. This is most apparent on Bluesky

Tells you that you can take your social media back from big tech then casually recommends Bluesky. Gimme a break.

Also if you want your news free of the constant noise of social media, RSS still exists and it’s still beautiful.

We’re in the honeymoon phase, shit didn’t hit the fan yet. Problem is we devs are fucked either way. If productivity does increase, then workforce demand will go down especially for entry level devs and seniors will be relegated to vibe coding and fixing AI bugs. If it all goes south then layoffs, because line must go up!

Company I’m at also does the forced AI and it’s all but mandatory now. Problem is as code monkeys we’re past the point of heading down to the Winchester for a pint until it blows over. They’re pushing so hard in order to “not fall behind” that you literally can’t escape it. I think even malicious compliance won’t cut it. And when 8/10 companies that dictate the market say that “this is the future”, then this is the future they’ll make whether we like it or not.

Edit: the silver lining is that we’re working with tools that are better than copilot at generating menial work like generating boilerplate code, unit tests, release notes, walls of text for app documentation etc.

Not sure. This phone seems better in some regards and worse in others, so I’d say wait for reviews.

As for me I probably won’t get it. Already have a fp4 I got in a sale to experiment with and see if I can completely degoogle and couldn’t ( not completely anyway ). Now it’s more or less a paperweight that I might revisit in the future, when my daily phone kicks the bucket. The dealbreaker is Android15 because that’s when they shoved gemini in, so any phone with Android14 and security updates will do fine. God I hope that linux phones finally get off the ground already

I know I know, but it was really convenient to keep a spare battery and do a quick swap on the fp4.

Is it me or did they get slightly more vague on their marketing materials, wrt the environmental impact ( at least compared to fp5 ) ?

Also the battery seems a bit harder to replace, as you now need a screwdriver. It does appear to be more flush, so it may be due to size constraints.

Edit: and there’s “more” replaceable parts because the back is split in two. That split might prove better for durability tho, because pulling the back on their older phones felt like it would break every time.

Of course it is. Textbook enshittification: first be good to your users, then to your providers, then fuck both and rake in the cash.

Smartphones are common targets for thieves because they contain valuable personal data and fetch high prices on second-hand markets. To protect this data, Android includes theft protection features that lock down a stolen phone. While thieves might try wiping phones they intend to sell, Android already has robust protections against unauthorized factory resets. Google announced today that these factory reset protections will become even more powerful later this year.

Self-contradicting much?

These justifications are pointless anyway, everybody knows that google and only google has the right to rummage through your data.

“We will not allow you to reset the data until we can confirm that the data is yours”

I know there’s some use cases, but it feels like they’re pandering to smaller and smaller niches. But I suppose tablets are more and more niche these days.

And yeah, I know about the y700, it’s a good device, but I’ve been looking for a nexus7-like device on and off for the past couple of years and find it fascinating that if you were to release it today if would blow most other tablets out of the water. A ten year old device ffs. Anyway, I mostly read stuff, so a 7-8 inch high-res budget tablet is the dream. I’ve done the compromises: a large tcl nxtpaper phone, an e-ink reader, a budget lenovo tab. They’re just not the same tbh.

Why the fuck would you spend 800 euro on a 13", non-upgradeable tablet instead of, say, a laptop?

Apologies, I’m just bitter no one makes 8 inchers anymore.

Hear hear. I subscribed to a couple news accounts and for last minute news its just perfect. But man, start browsing the popular section and you’re in for a fuckton of activism.

Almost pulled the trigger on a Skyline, but then read about the bootloader not being unlockable, and hmd “promising” to make it unlockable at a later time. That’s bullshit right there - if you offer only 2 years of software support you better make the bootloader unlockable, otherwise it’s e-waste.