When economic reforms are off the table, and austerity has run out of things to be austere about... yeah, anti-immigrant political parties are going to feast.
Here in the US, there's a dumber revival of the Red Scare. The scare mongering isn't as effective this go round because there's no existing abundance for the people. All people want is affordable housing, jobs that let you plan for the future, and healthcare that won't bankrupt you. But there's no solution to any of those problems that don't involve some class of investors losing money/power. So we're stuck with MAGA. Incoherent ideology for incoherent times. When I look at the AfD, I see the same helpless thrashing taking hold.
> All people want is affordable housing, jobs that let you plan for the future, and healthcare that won't bankrupt you.
Right. I want to see the Democrats campaigning on those things. Midterm is near, they should be getting their We-Wont-Let-AI-Take-Your-Jobs campaign in motion.
> But there's no solution to any of those problems that don't involve some class of investors losing money/power. So we're stuck with MAGA.
You got MAGA because the Dems specifically went the diversity route, instead of at least pretending to address the concerns of the voters.
This time round they've been handed an opportunity on a golden platter: Go anti-AI, at least enough so that people aren't worried about losing their jobs to AI.
They will not see an opportunity like this for a long time, and if MAGA wins again, blame will lie squarely on Dems who decided that arguing about men in women's sport is a productive use of their voter goodwill.
Its kind of the same as Maga, in the way that the people, and the politicians want very different things.. the people want a stop to crazy levels of immigration, and a stop to the EU deciding how they live their lives, and the politicians wants immigration, censorship and the EU to decide everything.. people voting Afd is primarily anti immigration and anti establishment.
I've been a subscriber to Kagi for a few years and just started using the AI assistant.
On the one hand, it's made me a believer in AI as it relates to web searching.
On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.
> On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.
Unfortunately, that is nothing new. A big part of the reason why Google gained popularity, and maintained it for so long, was its resistance to SEO stuffed, spammy articles. The spammers continued escalating things, and now it pretty much takes AI to avoid their garbage.
The new part is AI makes it much easier and cheaper to produce garbage than ever before. So the ratio of garbage to non-garbage has been increasing rapidly.
> So the ratio of garbage to non-garbage has been increasing rapidly.
Is it actually, really? Even late 90s most stuff was garbage, and been like that for as long as I've been on the internet, or maybe I've just always been jaded. But the ratio of "garbage to non-garbage" seems constant for as long as I can remember, multiple decades at this point. The tools for finding the signal through the noise have changed over time though.
I remember people using Yahoo and AltaVista a lot. And before gmail everyone had a yahoo email (if they didn't already have a hotmail). Times change, kings fall from grace.
Google has been the dominant force for about 80% of the internet’s existence. I understand things come and go, but Google is incredibly unique. Their importance cannot be overstated
Yes but they were mainly a force of evil. Despite their old motto. They made the internet everything it is today, a hellscape of tracking, advertising and other monetisation.
I'm not sure AI fully dodges it either. I've asked questions like "best [cuisine] in [place]" and the AI answers with a truly mediocre restaurant that has an amazing website.
Probably true. That said, I spend most of my time querying LLMs for more objective and less financially motivated information. The only time I ask for recommendations is for new routes to explore by bike, and even then it will adapt if you tell it why a route is bad.
I suspect that product and service recommendations will be a near impossible problem to solve. Any time there is a potential for financial gain, someone will figure out how to game the system. Even if it could be resolved, the queries would have to focus on objective criteria ("best" is too subjective).
But then once you get shit results, don't you iterate on the prompt and try again? In this case, add what you actually care about, not just "best cuisine" which can mean a lot of things, and also straight up tell it to not focus on the website or whatever, then eventually you'll get somewhat reasonable and applicable results.
Nope--I was on vacation, walked to the place, and saw it looked like a disaster, but then everyone was hungry and we were already out and about. Too late for more research. I picked a place the old-fashioned way, by walking around and seeing what was nearby. We did fine.
I knew it would be their higher end devices but I really wish they would have put it on their lower end as well.
I have a Moto G running LineageOS and it's my favorite phone ever. The ability to have my 800GB of music synced to a sdcard is something I'm loath to give up.
Motorola's flagships are going to be their first devices providing the updates and hardware-based security features required by GrapheneOS. It will come to lower end devices but it will take longer.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is the first Qualcomm SoC with hardware memory tagging (MTE). MTE isn't even available on the slightly lower end Snapdragon 8 Gen 5. A lot of the SoC security features are segmented based on price and only the flagship SoC platform has everything we need. Snapdragon's upcoming next generation SoC is the first truly providing everything we need. There's still a lot of work to do since providing the features on paper is different from having those fully integrated to match what we have on Pixels.
Replying to you here in hopes you see this question.
I'm one of those people who is affected by PWM on OLED screens. I tried a Pixel 9 Pro XL and it didn't work for me. Have a Razr 2024 which mostly works and that's thanks to some custom PWM settings from Motorola.
Will Graphene OS have these custom PWM mitigation settings on 2027 Motorolas?
If anyone runs across this comment in the future, the answer is: YES. On Mastodon, they told me they will have full support for Motorola's custom PWM settings.
I had Motorola Moto Gs all from the first generation to the fifth or sixth, cheap and worked great, had everything one could wish for in a daily smartphone. But eventually they too started growing in size, and so I got an iPhone 12 Mini instead, that I still use to this day. I'm currently hoping I'll find something released in 2025+ that is the same size as the Mini or the old Moto Gs, but they are nowhere to be found...
I think I'll buy one of those new Motorolas with GrapheneOS just to hopefully vote with my wallet a bit, and make them port it/use it for more phones in the future, which just maybe might eventually be a "normal" sized phone again.
We want to support cheaper devices too but flagships will be the first ones meeting all of our update and security features requirements. Providing hardware memory tagging (MTE) and a good enough secure element with the modern AOSP APIs are the main requirements for hardware security features.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is the only current Snapdragon SoC with hardware memory tagging since even the slightly lower end Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 didn't provide it due to being developed a bit earlier despite being launched later. They tried to provide it for both but didn't get it fully working in time. The next generation makes major secure element improvements. We potentially could have supported a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 with a secure element from another company but there wasn't enough time and the next generation is a lot better in multiple ways. There's still a large amount of porting and integration work remaining to do.
We need the devices to meet our requirements so that's the main limitation. The current generation Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is the only one providing hardware memory tagging (MTE). Even the slightly lower end Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 doesn't support MTE. The next generation flagship SoC has improvements needed to meet our requirements. There's still going to be a lot of porting and integration work. We'll be the first ones using MTE for the whole kernel and OS as we are on Pixels so there's going to be a lot to deal with for it. For Pixels, Google did do testing for MTE across the OS internally but even on Pixels it isn't perfectly supported and we have to fix a lot of memory corruption bugs it finds in both the kernel and userspace.
I would bet that what Motorola can change without trouble on the lower end is more restricted, too. Generally low end models use more parts that are old, off the shelf, and/or shared with several other models to keep costs low, and so major changes can quickly balloon costs.
> Lower end devices will take more time to meet our requirements since the updates and security features aren't as good. It's mostly due to how Qualcomm handles it. The latest Snapdragon flagships have the best security features. We'll also need Motorola to start paying them for longer updates below flagships
I really wish more artists would put their music on band camp. I have even noticed that some artists who used to put their albums up there no longer are. It's a real shame
For discovering new music, I listen to my old college radio station. About once a month they play something good that makes me do a deep dive. I use Pianobar while I work, and creating a station based on a new (to me) artist tends to give me more to explore. I also use music-map.com from time to time.
As for acquiring music, I use Bandcamp. If they aren't on there, I'm not above finding it via file sharing.
I have a bunch of python scripts that help me rename all my files once I get their tags sorted out. For that I mostly use AudioRanger because it's so simple and I only process one album at a time.
From there, I use Syncthing. But I'm thinking about replacing it with rsync and just kick it off manually when I want to update everything about once a month.
For autotagging and importing (moving files), Beets.
For tagging edge cases, MusicBrainz Picard as the GUI and the Python tagging lib underneath it (mutagen iirc) with an LLM inside the pi cli agent for automation.
For format conversion and copying to portable devices, ffmpeg in custom bash scripts managed by an LLM.
Seriously the moderation and flagging policy on this site has reached truly disgusting levels. "Just let me build the dystopia for Silicon Valley freak billionaires and collect my pathetic $180K pittance in peace!"
I'm building a social media product myself and I saw your comment here. So I wanted to reach out and ask if you'd be up to talk about how moderation could be improved online. My contact data is in my bio!
The writing was on the wall when Kamala Harris wouldn't commit to keeping Lina Khan at the FTC. We had some soft Anti-Trust action for the first time in decades, and the Trusts responded. If we get the chance to try again, we should be more clear eyed about what we are up against.
I've de-Googled my life as best I can, but I know how little it actually matters. Now that Google is clearly on the path of closing up Android, I hope the Linux phone effort gets reinvigorated.
Unfortunately I don't think we're going to get the chance to try again. This, and Apple's upcoming case which they'll probably get off free as well, was our chance.
These companies are now even more emboldened, and with market caps bigger than the GDP of most countries, there is no one to stop them. Every politician has a number, and this administration has shown that open bribes are legal and expected.
Good luck prosecuting any big tech when they can pay billions of dollars to the administration to make anything go away.
It does not make any sense to compare market capitalization to GDP.
GDP is a measurement of flow within a certain timespan, market capitalization is a guess by the market of the total potential at a specific point in time.
Wait, are you trying to blame this decision on Kamala Harris not pre-committing to keeping an anti-trust advocate in the FTC? I'm not sure if you noticed, but Kamala Harris is not president and never made these decisions about the FTC. I guarantee you her decisions would have been night and day better than the fraud currently inhabiting the whitehouse.
I'm saying our tenuous attempts towards reestablishing the most basic of anti-trust was dead regardless of who won the election[1].
I think this decision would have been the same regardless of who won. As for the next few years... Harris was clearly signalling that her FTC would be a return to rubber stamping mergers and acting only against the most egregious corporate actions, and even then only when the penalties wouldn't be substantial. I doubt very much that her appointment to FTC Chair would be much different than the current Andrew Ferguson.
Nothing I've written endorses Trump or his actions. But we have to be a little bit more realistic about the interests that Harris was aiming to represent.
We can say that Harris would have been better than Trump in the aggregate, while also prioritizing the interests of Business over those of Consumers. Both these things can be true.
Windows users have no negotiating power. Windows will continued to be monetized in user-hostile ways. Call it enshittification, call it the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, call it what ever you want. It won't reach a breaking point. It'll just get worse and worse, steadily and slowly.
I'm trapped because I'm a C#/WPF developer. But, the day after I retire will see a reformat and installation of Debian.
Also currently a C#/WPF and Windows is permanently segregated to a VM for development. At the end of the day I don't have to use their terrible OS. Retirement is not having to deal with IT that latches onto Microsoft like a parasite.
> Windows is permanently segregated to a VM for development
Have you been able to get a debugger working for this? Last time I tried to develop C++ this way, the Visual Studio debugger would not work from within a VM.
I recently bought my wife a Pixel 8 ($500) and myself a Moto G Stylus ($175). The Pixel has a better camera, but that seems to be about it.
Something I like about my Moto is that it has a sdcard slot. That means I can sync up my entire music library (~600GB). That means I only need a small phone service plan ($15/mo). It also means I get to listen to all the Wilco I want while riding my bike down by the river where there's shoddy reception. There's also a headphone jack, which still comes in handy.
My lament is that as phones get more expensive, they seem to get less useful/interesting.
The 2010's were an exciting time because every year new phones would come out that would be double the power of the previous generation (I still remember trying out an iPhone 3GS when it came out and it was noticeably faster than my iPhone 3G). But I would say starting in like 2016, the progress slowed down and it's now much more incremental.
I now recommend to my friends and family to get lightly used phones that are 2-3 years old. Personally I recently upgraded from an iPhone 11 to an iPhone 15 and the only reason I did so was to go down in screen size from a "Pro Max" to just a "Pro". I imagine I will keep this device for the next 5-7 years and by then the reason I'll be getting a new phone probably won't be because they are noticeably faster.
But I gotta say I like where phones are now. I remember in the 2010's you had to plop down some serious money to get a super fast phone, nowdays I can buy a $150 phone on Amazon that would probably be a great phone for at least 4-5 years.
3 year old phones often have degraded batteries, which is a large part of the reason why they're so available and so cheap. You can put a new battery in for ~$50 and get a fabulous value.
I haven't seen a worthwhile innovation in phone design in at least 5 years. Everything is such a marginal gain for a smaller set of use cases. I got my kid a $150 Moto G Power like 4 years ago because it had a giant battery that lasted 3 days. That's an actually useful feature. It still runs everything just fine and has a fingerprint reader. Not much need for anything else.
Motorolas seemed cool when I was looking for a phone recently but their update support policy was very short. Whether it matters is another question but still..
Pretty much the same story for me. I have a Motorola, wife insisted on a Pixel costing 3 times as much. I don't see anything like 3 times the value.
There are trade offs going both directions:
- The most irritating is the Magnetometer and GPS are both better in the Pixel.
- The Motorola comes with headphone jacks, dual SIM and SDCard, better battery life.
- Fingerprint reader on the Motorola is better.
- Both use the Googles phone app, but Google turns off the call recording on Pixels but it works on the Motorola. Go figure. I use that feature when getting avoid from people like the tax office, so that's a hard no go for me.
- Cheap Motorola's don't have wireless charging, but USB cables are everywhere, wireless chargers not so much.
- I suspect the Pixel's camera is better - but I've never noticed.
Add that all up and for me the Motorola is the better phone; at 1/3 the cost of a Pixel. The "unbeatable value" claim in the headline did cause an eyebrow twitch.
Unlocked. It was a 2023 model I bought in 2024. There are some screaming good deals if you don't mind buying one model older at the right time. I cannot stress enough how much I don't care about OS updates as long as my apps continue to work (not many, mostly from F-Droid).
This is truly the Century of American Hubris. From financial deregulation to spreading democracy in the middle east to carbon fiber submarines, we seem determined to ignore complexity, refuse to acknowledge our biases, and throw out every Lesson-Learned from the last 150 years.
We're going to gut the Federal systems like a Tea Party fever dream. And the re-learning of what we truly need is going to be very painful.
I didn't want two phones, because it just seems so silly. The tablet, based on it's larger size, at least offers things that another phone cannot.
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