This makes me sad…

My favorite Mexican place is a local place where the staff doesn’t speak English well. Their salsa bar is amazing and all the food is super fresh and flavorful.

Yeah, it looks cool, but I’m not really in a position to be a guinea pig. If they were around 2 years ago, I probably would’ve given it a shot.

I am looking for another phone at some point in the next year (kids getting about that age), so if I hear good things, I might just pull the trigger. It is a bit chonkier than my current phone, which isn’t great (30mm longer, 10mm wider, and 110g heavier), but according to reviews, it seems to fix all the issues I have w/ the PinePhone.

Who knows, maybe your review will push me over the edge in deciding to get it.

Eh, you’d want something like this to run something custom, because there’s going to be a lot of iteration and it’ll be harder to push things through a distribution they don’t control.

It seems to be Debian based and has some customizations to make work w/ Android apps nicer (Halium support).

I would personally prefer PostmarketOS, but I’d be fine w/ that being a community effort as long as Furilabs doesn’t block installing alternatives.

I disagree. The only time the police should invade your privacy is with a valid warrant, and only to the extent of the warrant.

The police shouldn’t be able to monitor transactions at large for illegal activity, nor should they be to attain a broad warrant to check for illegal transactions if you’re merely suspected of an unrelated crime.

If that means more criminals go free, I’m okay with that. But it should also mean we train our police better to account for the higher difficulty of police work given the protection of our rights.

Sounds like you’re not familiar with Oracle…

Eh, I got a used Pixel 8 for $350 or so, and it works great with GrapheneOS.

My gold standard is a proper Linux phone, but those aren’t reliable enough yet, so using Google’s phone is the next best option.

Then the community shifts to a different model, or puts more resources behind mobile Linux projects, and all that would need to happen is something like what Valve did for Linux for the Steam Deck.

I’m ready to switch to a Linux phone as soon as I can find one where the basic phone features work properly (MMS, wake from sleep, camera, etc). The more people like me can switch, the closer we’ll be to mainstream adoption. That’s the same process as Linux has been going through: I switched before Steam on Linux was a thing, then Steam came and more switched, then Proton made windows games work and more switched, etc, and now we’re seeing the start of “normal” people switching.

I hope that happens before my Pixel 8 goes out of support or breaks.

It’s more an argument against using LLMs for things they’re not intended for. LLMs aren’t therapists, they’re text generators. If you ask it about suicide, it makes a lot of sense for it to generate text relevant to suicide, just like a search engine should.

The real issue here is the parents either weren’t noticing or not responding to the kid’s pain. They should be the first line of defense, and enlist professional help for things they can’t handle themselves.

I agree that gambling is bad and nobody should do it, but that’s different from the government preventing you from doing it.

Something being “bad” doesn’t mean it should be banned, it means it needs closer scrutiny to make sure both sides of the transaction are fully informed of the risks and can meaningfully consent.

money laundering

I don’t like this reasoning because the underlying assumption is that violating people’s privacy is okay if it helps catch criminals.

That said, there are typically rules that limit this. In most areas, casinos have to ID you and report any transaction over a certain amount (usually $10k or so per day, many casinos have a lower threshold) to tax authorities specifically to combat money laundering, just like banks do. That seems to limit money laundering for larger players, but obviously doesn’t do much for smaller players. To do better, we either need much lower limits, or much higher surveillance, and both would violate innocent people’s privacy.

Instead of that, we should take a hard look at policy and policing. For example, a lot of money laundering is by drug dealers, and they exist due to drug bans. Maybe we should consider legalizing and regulating more drugs, which would give people safer options, reduce incarceration rates, and reduce laundering from illegal drugs since more people would go for the safer options. On the policing side, we can improve training, reallocate people from ticketing to investigative work, and build community trust to improve quality of reports.

At the end of the day, I think personal liberty and privacy is more important than preventing harm or catching criminals. I also think we can do both, but we need to start from the perspective of maximising liberty and privacy.

Which 2FA app is that? I use Aegis (replaces Google Authenticator, available on FDroid) and Symantec VIP (from Google Play, but via Aurora and runs w/o Google Play Services). Is it something different?

I honestly don’t care about apps. I switched to GrapheneOS and opted to not use Google Play Services, so my app selection is very limited, especially for things like banking apps. It turns out I can just use the website for the vast majority of them, and I can fill in the gaps with FDroid apps.

The main things stopping me from using a Linux phone (eg PostmarketOS) are:

• MMS compatibility - I use this a lot with family, and getting everyone on Signal or something isn’t going to happen
• battery efficiency - the best I’ve heard is 8 hours with light use, and there are still issues receiving notifications in standby mode
• hardware quality issues and drivers - every phone supported by PostmarketOS either has a bunch of unsupported hardware (ie no camera support), or the hardware is poor (ie the PinePhone has crappy audio)

I don’t need a flagship with top tier driver support, I just need basic phone things to work. I’m even okay with poor camera quality, provided I can take pictures of things and clearly read the text later. I don’t need much in terms of app support, and I’m willing to help port things I need. But my phone needs to work as a phone, and it needs to do so all day without needing to charge until night.

Eh, I disagree. Slavery being banned is obviously a good thing, but that’s because it’s immoral to own someone else, so it’s essentially just kidnapping. Gambling, on the other hand, shouldn’t be banned for the simple reason that consenting adults should be able to do it if they choose.

Basically, I believe there are two types of rights:

• negative rights - restricts others from preventing individuals from doing things to you (e.g. freedom from slavery, freedom to gamble, etc)
• positive rights - forces others to provide goods or services to you (e.g. free healthcare, right to counsel, etc)

I believe nobody should gamble because it’s a poor financial decision and very addictive (and I choose to avoid gambling), but I also believe you should be allowed to gamble, and the government should ensure that companies that provide gambling services do so fairly (i.e. advertisements about win-rates and whatnot are accurate).

So yes, if gambling wasn’t allowed, people w/ addictions would be better off, but those who aren’t at risk of gambling addiction would be harmed due to restrictions on their freedom. So the question is, do we want government to protect us from ourselves, or merely provide a safety net for when we screw up? I’m absolutely in the latter camp, and I think we should use taxes to fund recovery programs for addictive behaviors in lieu of banning them. In general, I think a tax is way more rights-respecting than a ban.

Yup, and that’s how the US got the Mafia. We banned alcohol, but people wanted to drink, so the Mafia made that happen.

All a ban does is hurt law abiding citizens and businesses.