protimewaster

> Well the current Motorola Signature (2026) is 3 times the price of a Pixel.

I understand the sentiment, certainly, but the price difference depends a lot on which model we're comparing to. The Signature will be the flagship from Motorola, and I'll be very, very surprised if it's 3x the price of the Pixel flagship.

Presumably someone who was planning to buy something like the Pixel 10a would be more interested in the non-flagship Motorola devices with GOS support, which are expected to launch later.

> If "thinning down the population" was the intent, shouldn't the US reverse their anti-abortion bullshit laws?

There can be more than one motivation, of course.

Also, it's very possible that outlawing abortion can result in a decreased birth rate. E.g., if a woman is scared that she'll have a problematic pregnancy, she may decide to just not have a child instead of risking needing and not being able to get an emergency abortion.

I wonder if practices will change any of there's ever a device that ships with GOS. Right now, many companies are happy to shrug off GOS, because they don't support "modified devices".

If any of the Motorola devices have GOS as a pre-installed option, now the companies don't have the excuse that the device is modified.

I'm guessing the companies will continue to be difficult, but it'll be amusing to watch, at least.

I think the point is that they didn't charge developers anything specifically to be developers or sell apps. They just needed the same hardware and software as everybody else, which, yes, they probably had to buy.

Fairphone also had the publicly available test key flagged as trusted by the boot loader at one point, which probably discourages projects like GOS, since it makes it harder to trust the hardware to not be a weak link in security.

There's a lot of good troubleshooting and tech info on there, though. I've run into multiple tech issues over the years that aren't documented in bug reports, change logs, etc., but some random person on Reddit will have a post where they investigated the cause and found a solution.

I actually remembered more about this after my initial post. I ended up with two copies of Quake (one is the original shareware release and one is a later release of the full game), and one of them has the PRE flag set in the TOC and the other one doesn't. Now I'm wondering if I ever checked the subcodes for the one that's missing the flags in the TOC. I'll have to dig it out sometime and check.

I did verify that the audio is identical down to an offset, though, between the two.

> The adjacent bit is “copy prohibited” versus “copy permitted”, which is not a piece of metadata I knew Compact Disc had.

I wonder if any equipment ever actually used those other flags for anything?

IIRC, it's actually debatable if the pre-emphasis flag is supposed to be set. I don't remember the exact details anymore, but I think it was discovered that there multiple releases with bit-identical audio tracks, but some of them have the flag set while others don't. They can't both be correct, because the audio data should've changed if the emphasis was removed.

I use Google Photos on GrapheneOS, and Google Photos is blocked from network access (via the network permission exposed on GOS). That must prevent this popup from occurring, because I've never seen it.

Maybe this is the straw that broke the camel's back. It seems like a lot of reforms start by acknowledging basically what you're pointing out here, that something is common practice, but people are finally disgusted enough by it to start trying to do something about it.

> I was optimistic, but once I had it wired up to one of my projects, instead of making magical hands-off progress on my todo list it spent nearly my entire $20 worth of “ona compute units”, whatever those are, thrashing and trying to get a hold of the todos from linear just so it could pick one to start.

This is one of the reasons that I've simply not bothered with a lot of these types of AI products. It feels like gambling. Maybe I'll spend $20 on tokens and end up with something awesome. Or maybe I'll spend $20 on tokens and end up with nothing useful and then I'll be glad it was only $20 I lost.

One of my issues with this is that the market is often pretty slow. With a lot of things, it feels like the market won't have resolved it until I've been dead for 150 years, and, to me, that's just about as good as not solving the problem at all.

I was curious about this, so I looked it up just now. It looks like the project providing UEFI for the Raspberry Pi 5 is abandoned, and compatibility with newer board revisions is reported to be broken (if I correctly understand their "end of support" message on the repo).

I assume these would be batteries that are relatively robust in terms of cycle count, like LiFePO4.

I more meant that, from Apple's perspective, somebody who downloads an app from the App Store is a user, and somebody who posts an app is also a user. Different use cases, obviously, but they're both users. If they prioritize users, both groups should be included.

Are developers not users too? In my mind, people using the App Store to post apps are also users of the App Store.

Is it? Is there a paper that covers this?

I would've thought it should be mostly seamless, since it's being fed the entire conversation all along anyway.

Gemini models are at or near the top in several categories, though, so I'm not sure the takeaway is that they're shamefully far behind.

I think some of them do a better job of limiting their cruelty to their job.

Jobs allegedly spent years lying about whether his daughter was his daughter. That's not necessary for Apple to succeed. That's just being a dick.

> In many countries car is not something essential thanks to public transport.

Is that true in many entire countries? It seems like most of the countries I've visited, there are usually places within the country where transit isn't very good, and if you point at a map and say "I want to visit this part of the county" the answer is "You should rent a car, because there's no good transit connection there."

I absolutely believe this to be true in many cities, though.

That's what gets me too. I've been tasked previously to help a young relative with budgeting, and there were so many "It's only $x a month!" items we found that it was ridiculous.

It's pushed me in the other direction, away from subscriptions. For most things, if I see that it's being sold as a subscription, I just walk away. Obviously this doesn't work for internet service, etc., but it's possible to avoid for most things.

> It’s not this complex everytime, luckily

I'm glad it was straightforward when it come up for me. In my case, I was dealing with an airline based in my county of residence, and I just emailed them saying that the law says I get the money and they just said "okay, we're sending it" and then I had the money.

That's interesting, and I did not know that!

For those asserting that Kimi identifying as another model is evidence of distillation, is this evidence that Claude was distilled from Chinese models?

I agree. I honestly think it's strange that it's often viewed as "good enough" to get a refund.

If I paid $5 for a movie, I did that because I want the movie more than the $5. If I didn't, I would've kept the $5. You giving me $5 and taking the movie away is just replacing the thing I value more with the thing I value less.

The other issue is that, if I paid $5 for a movie 10 years ago, that's now more than $5 due to inflation. If you give me $5 back, you're short.

They also have cut off people who paid, though. It's currently being paid for and had another cutoff for Ukraine in early February.

I do always think it's interesting that the "bad" guys like EA had, for a long time, much friendlier store terms (refunds) than Valve did.

I also never thought that it was very nice of Valve to historically have security practices that are so bad that a group of security experts wrote them a letter begging for better security practices.

The guy in charge of it has demonstrated that he'll cut people off from accessing it on a whim, though, so it's not really cheap and easy access for the entire globe. It's access for the selected people.

If you want to see it outside the context of tech forums, you can look up the industry reports and see the numbers yourself. There are some media types that are dropping, obviously, but there are multiple types of physical media that have seen notable growth recently.

> I doubt that they will go back to where Sony are now.

I agree. However, I do think they would get some positive attention (and some accompanying sales) if they were to backtrack and announce a console more like the 360.

It feels doable if they care to do it. Physical media should still be viable for holding all the game data for a while longer. Blurays can manage up to 128 GB, and I think the average game install size is ~60GB right now, giving most games some room to grow.

The biggest issue with a strategy like that is that they're, like you said, pushing digital-only hard already, and they're also trying to save money, so the idea of spending more money to make future consoles with disk drives, and to make disks, is unlikely to appeal to them.

It is a shame, though, because it seems like the Xbox 360 will have been widely viewed as peak Xbox until the end of Xbox.

Xbox has an interesting opportunity going forward, that I expect they'll fumble.

Interest in physical media has actually been on the upswing, and, with Sony announcing their plans to abandon physical media, it feels like MS has a chance be the "good guys" like what Sony did to MS when MS threatened to ruin physical media prior to the Xbox One release.

However, I'm expecting Microsoft to simply follow Sony's path, because I think they are already going down a path that favors digital-only, and I also think they just don't care to distinguish themselves. It seems like Xbox's claim to fame for the past few years is "It has game pass, and it can play a lot of the same games PlayStation can."