Liam Proven

@Newhere Right now my little daughter is sitting next to me playing Toca Boca World on a phone running a modified Graphite OS. I am familiar with it. Honestly, it’s a bit of a pain, and I’m normally happy enough with my ultra-budget ChiPhones. Which cost 1/4 as much and frankly do more.

Personally I’m with Scott McNeally:

https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/

“You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

@filister @Newhere

Wow. You spend more on 2nd hand phones than I like to spend on brand new ones!

@yxc999 @zdhzm2pgp

> even this one is way overkill for what I want in a phone. Why can’t there just be a low-spec one instead

Exactly this.

My solution is: dirt-cheap bargain-basement Chinese phones.

They do the job and you can get a lot for under £150.

My best buy was an Umidigi F2. Stunning device for £125. I have bought dinners that cost more than that.

*But* you’ll never get an OS upgrade, they’re unsupported by all the alternative OSes, and there is the everpresent risk of spyware.

For me, that’s worth it, but I get that it’s not for everyone and so I do not unequivocally recommend them.

@jumping_redditor @kibiz0r

You really need to read this series:

https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2025/07/07/arm-desktop-2025-attempt-part-one/

@dessalines

Link unreadable for me in Firefox.

Target:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia/_Signpost/2026-08-02/News/_and/_notes

@Mihies I honestly don’t see why, no, not at all. If you want to keep the data then you plug the drive into anything else with a USB interface. If you don’t want to keep the data, what’s the problem? Just format it and donate it, whole.

@Mihies @douglasg14b

Stick the drive in a USB caddy and keep it?

If it’s an array, buy a big one and then repeat from step 1…

@datendefekt @drawerair

Yeah, no, that’s utter nonsense.

During the COVID lockdown I was doing a lot of walking around the local woods with my infant daughter in a pushchair. I listened to music on my phone. I was using free conf-swag head phones.

So I bought myself new ones. Absolute top-of-the-line super-fancy Sony in-ear things with bass boost and all the trimmings.

They were about CzK 600, which equates to about £25.

I still use them. 6Y later they still sound amazing. By any objective measure they are better than any in-ear things: excellent isolation, superb sound (in as well through the integrated mic), complete cross-platform compatibility, *infinite* battery life – no batteries! No pairing, no synching, no updates ever. Come with build-in anti-theft anti-loss device: a cable.

£25. What that is in dollarbucks I don’t know as I avoid visiting fascist states that might imprison me. $35?

@chobeat

Good?

@Ferk Ah, I see.

I suppose so.

As a one-time committee member on Skeptics in the Pub, there are a lot of things in life that *demonstrably* Do Not Work, never did work, and can be proved not to ever be possible, which all the same, billions of people are very impressed by.

Homeopathy is my go-to example – see:

https://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/

This is true of all Supplementary, Complementary and Alternative Medicine. It’s all a S.C.A.M. ;-)

But it goes much further. Gods, for example. All 100% made up.

And yet…

@Ferk @meejle

> … people are not unimpressed by AI

I disagree strongly. Smart people who understand how it works, and the cost, are DEEPLY and profoundly unimpressed by it.

I want to see it banned.

@meejle @onlooker

> The current state of AI is impressive to me

Really? Seriously? It’s just a fake, every bit as much as ELIZA was – just with a vastly bigger set of responses it generates on the fly from a vast database of stolen material.

@Core_of_Arden @Appoxo The only people I know who don’t use WhatsApp are the very technophobic or rich, antisocial Apple users. It’s ubiquitous. It is the standard method of international texting. I know a few people who use Signal (mostly who work in or around FOSS or security) and a few who use Telegram. They’re all nerds. But friends and family and social contacts and to a degree companies are WhatsApp.

The US is one continent sized country. The ROTW is mostly lots of small countries and lots of movement between them. That means that SMS costs money, sometimes a lot of money, and the Google and Apple systems mean you need to know what type of device the recipient has. If you don’t know, don’t care, and don’t want to know, then you WhatsApp them.

@null @Zerush Well I mean it’s very good at silently downloading files from remote servers without telling you, if that’s what you mean. It does it for other people all the time.

@PanArab @yogthos 20M units in China is too small to count as a rounding error.

When one Chinese phone company hired an American CEO he talked in interviews about how experimentally selling 50M units of a test prototype suggested it might have potential.

@Sxan Immaculate reasoning. Can’t fault it. Well done. 😁

@GregorGizeh @Sxan Old English (and current Icelandic) letters. English had these until we bought printing presses from the Germans, who lack these sounds.

þ represents unvoiced th, ð voiced ð.

So, more logical spellings than the bodge of “th” for both.

So why not?

@UltraGiGaGigantic @geneva_convenience France did have a commercial scale fast breeder reactor, Superphénix.

@jeena @freeguru He really is. He was once a vaguely sane FOSS industry commentator. Then he lost/left his job, and had to monetise his blog & channel. Result: 90% of it is frothing hatred and insanity.

@kristoff Not really… On ChromeOS, there are no apps.