Best thing to do is just stop buying new phones. Play Services and apps will still work and receive updates for years. Swap that old battery and keep chugging for a few years.

Starving all the tech brah corpos of money is the only message we plebs have the power to send. Bouncing to their competitor in a duopoly isn’t actually “showing them” anything.

Why spend all that money when you can spend less for a device by Withings that you piss on?

That’s a good point. Although living in the now, what did old Series 40 or Series 60 do behind the scenes? Probably not much because the extra power to mine user data wasn’t there yet. Also HMD could have made the “+” telemetry. Not to diss it though. I’d much rather risk their software than any other right now.

Yeah, the hardware realm is the real difficult piece, and even if one can manufacture a device with off-the-shelf parts and manage to find chips with enough support for bands/modes for usability on carriers, getting carrier certification is a PITA.

Good luck with that too, with carriers sunsetting legacy networks, old dedicated dumbphones will no longer work in most cases. KaiOS is sometimes used on dumbphones, but most these days just run a fork of Android designed for dumbphones.

Maybe Meshtastic with an SMS API gateway is the way to go. Or cans and string.

That is an amazing dedicated ride. Kudos to your ingenuity!

And zero SIM in America so they can force their controlling narrative rather than consumer choice.

Google hasn’t released Pixel 10 binary blobs with Android 16 AOSP, so unless they can be reverse-extracted out of Google Android and backported, Pixel 9 series will be the last to run Graphene.

Custom ROMs will no longer exist. Google is no longer sharing drivers for Pixel hardware on AOSP and they only release it public very late now. Samsung phones blow a fuse if you unlock them. Not many android brands left. Reverse-engineering and swiping of drivers will work for a time on older models, but it will become increasingly impossible.

I’d argue as a transitional device / threaten the shit out of Google.

In the mean time, governments that still function should fine Google for purposely generating millions of eWaste devices in software.

Maybe they’ll correct, maybe not, but in the mean time, one can spend the time on iOS to pare back what they do on a phone, with the end goal of ending up on a dumbphone/home brewed/linux/alt phone that will then be available.

Some really sweet simple phones like light phone, keyphone, minimal phone, punk mp02 and more already.

For what it’s worth, that app can’t access battery management stats at the system level. It just estimates based on factory specs and basic battery telemetry accessible to userspace apps like charge percent. The app power usage stats the OS provides is heavily flawed at the OS level, not all power consumption like modem behavior is captured accurately or at all.

So, tl;dr, just guesses and is of very limited usefulness. It does increase battery consumption slightly though, which… doesn’t really help.

It did sell. And it seems the vendor’s plan was to use it to promote their software platform and nothing more.

Good transitional way to do it too. I thought of similar for travel. Have a “travel phone” for flights, rental car, ride share, whatever. And it goes off as soon as you’re far enough along to not need it anymore. On for return trip, then back in the drawer it goes.

Use whatever I have for now, with less and less apps. Turn the device off when I am not using it. Start experimenting with project boards with modem cards.

OG iPad with a Bluetooth headset would have been a goto mobile device for most things in size, battery life, cellular reception. Never happened, of course, when they could sell you 30 devices kneecapped in various ways instead. So if what I end up building is a bit large, that is just fine.

It is insanely expensive to get network certification and pay for band licenses, and then build an antenna array that can cover it all well. Myriad of frequencies outside of dealing with mafioso policies.

Cell phones need to be the new landline. Just works. But that takes regulation and design patterns.

“Thinking” mode is just sending wave upon wave of GPUs at the problem until the killbots hit their pre-set kill count. One could roughly simulate that by not using thinking mode and just feeding the answer and question back to the LLM repeatedly until it eventually gets an answer that might be “right”. These companies have hit a technological wall with LLMs and will do anything to attempt to look like they still have forward inertia.

How many U.S. states include the letter “R” in their name? You may not know the answer off the top of your head, but any literate adult could figure it out with a list of the states and minimal effort. Unfortunately, OpenAI’s ChatGPT doesn’t know the answer, even its new GPT-5 model.

Duh, and/or hello. They can’t think or compute. They just look for the statistically correct answer from an n-dimensional matrix of data. They can’t even “compute” 2+2 even thought they are running on an actual computer.

Great reference manuals when trained well, that’s it for LLMs.

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.

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.

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

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.

That’s SOP for government contracts. The US government, and others, have had access in the past. NDA blah blah blah.

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.

FWIW, and not trying to be an apologist as I find their pricing insane, they at least seem to be using good SSDs. I’ve found over the last 10 years that SSD life can vary wildly. Just some light-access databases destroyed some consumer-grade SSDs and hybrid drives’ SSD portions. A couple in less than a year.

Have a dev mac that I absolutely constantly murder the SSD on daily over the last 3 or so years. I’m talking gigabytes of data written daily 5 days a week. Available spare sectors is still 100%, and percentage “used” (which granted, is a vendor-specific life metric) is 5%.

That being said, I’ll still be hating on them for soldering the SSD to the motherboard. That is the real crime.

Intel was technologically cooked when the first AMD Athlon came out, architecturally, and business-wise. They should have kicked true r&d into high-gear and didn’t, really. The Core processors were something, but more of a nudge than something to stay relevant in the 21st century. If Apple can finally crack modems, Qualcomm will be next, although their mil/gov stuff may keep them in business as purely a contractor. Cisco is pretty close too, but they’re too skilled at acquisitions as a method to keep staying relevant.

Have you ever watched all the stupid crapware Google pushes on setup? They force-install 12-20 garbage apps that you then have to go delete. Even then, a user can’t delete Chrome, they can only “disable” it - which Google can reactivate whenever they choose. (Although, one could also argue since they can arbitrarily push apps onto phones, does it matter? Like when they pushed “Android System SafetyCore” without consent.)

Google is malware at this point. Not that Apple is any better. Smartphones have all just become this terrible thing at this point, where you’re just renting a pile of software that you get to use in exchange for the company harvesting everything you do, and they change the terms whenever they want, without your consent.

Don’t feel like you have to race. It took about a year to shift e-mail addresses last time I did it. Keep the old one as a harvesting point until you move over what you want. Then just leave the old one around to use up space on Google’s servers if you really want to softly be a dick. (They eventually close them after some period of inactivity.)

Basic steps for a slightly more thorough method that also preserves old e-mail:

• Do a GDPR/Google data dump of your gmail to mbox file(s).
• Install Mozilla Thunderbird on a computer and use ImportExportTools NG to import the mbox file(s) into Thunderbird so you can access all your old e-mail.
• Delete all e-mail from Gmail.
• Turn off all mail rules on Gmail so everything just comes to the inbox.
• You can forward to your new address if you want to, or, just let email collect in the old account and switch addresses from time to time as you use various services.
• After a time, delete the account if you so choose, or leave it dormant until Google deletes it.

Never seen any of those Firefox problems in 5 or so years on multiple Android phones including Samsung, and using the native back button/3-icon setup instead of gesture nav. Also using a light combination of privacy plugins. May want to check your phone OS settings and make sure there isn’t a third-party app running an unknown display overlay that is screwing with things.

May I introduce you to what already existed at one time? (Motorola Atrix 4G from 2011 with Ubuntu desktop when docked.)

Only if they have the Exynos variant. Won’t work on the Qualcomm variant, annoyingly.

Just think of it this way. Less digital neurons in smaller models means a smaller “brain”. It will be less accurate, more vague, and make more mistakes.

Almost like yet again the tech industry is run by lemming CEOs chasing the latest moss to eat.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beast_Games_lawsuit

One of many terrible things you can read on that terrible sub-human.

Ironically, Google’s new creepy Circle to Search feature gets to override the screenshot denial lockout that Google themselves created.

i think they do it for security reasons.

Yet, on iOS, the same app can’t. So it is more like, “ooh a button to twiddle, I’ll twiddle it!”

The Dollop is an American history podcast. Each week…

Both that and Behind the Bastards are podcasts on history stuff. Dollop trends more towards comedy while reading about terrible things to lighten the mood. Dave reads to Gareth (most of the time) who hasn’t heard the thing before, and plays off his reactions.

Basically, because we don’t own our devices. We are allowed to use our devices by the good graces of the manufacturers that charge a premium for them.

This really needs to change. I remember the preinstalled app antitrust suit(s) in the early 00s. Those need to happen again, but likely the EU will have to as the US is entering a dark age, and the US will continue to have inferior everything to the rest of the world for the foreseeable future.

On Macs in the 90s, it was the easy and fun thing to do, especially after the Fonts folder was created.