Chee-chew-choo-cha-chooo

The base system is stable. The only instability I really had with mine was the fingerprint sensor resetting every week. It would just stop registering until you turn fingerprint detection off, reboot, and re-enroll all of your prints. The second update they pushed seems to have fixed that.

Their default launcher could use some work. I replaced Minimal Launcher with a similar one that works identically. The problem with Minimal Launcher is it is hardcoded to certain apps. I’ve de-googled mine so I don’t use Google clock or calendar. Clicking the time or date in Minimal Launcher will only take you to Google Clock or Calendar (respectively) rather than asking what app to open or trying to detect the default app for that. I submitted a bug for that a couple months ago but so far no fix.

They also seem to only update their software (launcher, quick settings, keyboard config, etc) through system updates rather than via apps. You also can’t disable any of them either.

I also haven’t heard anything more about them supporting non-Googled or third party Android builds.

The hardware is the same AFAIK but they’ve put out two three software updates since I’ve had it. One added some extra features to the eink control utility and the second fixed some really annoying bugs with the fingerprint sensor. Both also included the system security updates as well.

There was a 3rd one a few weeks ago, but I think it was just a security bump. It wasn’t announced and just showed up. There may have been some tweak to the QWERTY keyboard utility because now the annoying bar that only indicated the ALT/Shift status at the bottom is no longer there and was happy to no longer see.

I was prepared for 6, but I’m good with 8. Thanks!

Same. It would definitely be my daily driver. I’m using the Minimal Phone now but have often found that I would rather have this same form factor with a regular screen, and the Communicator seems to basically be that. I am still deciding if I want to pre-order but I’ve set a reminder to do or don’t before the window closes.

According to the support ticket I put in a week or so ago, the bootloader will be unlockable which is great news.

The only thing the specs don’t mention is how much RAM it will have.

Gonna be a bit nippley this weekend.

Over half of USA’s population voted for this.

False. Just over half of the voting population voted for this guy (and not necessarily any of what he’s done for the last year).

The orange turd won with 77,302,580 votes. I don’t have the number of registered voters in 2024 handy, but using the population of 348,320,255, that’s 22% of the total population who supported this guy. And even some of that 22% is starting to sour because things have gone so far off the rails, so I’d further estimate that 19% of the population are the true die hards who will follow him to the end.

This isn’t even factoring in those who would have voted one way or the other but were ineligible to vote or didn’t bother to vote. It also doesn’t factor in the Electoral College or people who didn’t understand how the Electoral College works and threw their vote away on a 3rd party or abstained.

You’re judge and jurying us all over the actions/behavior of maybe 19% of the population. If discovered a new species of bird and 1 out of 5 were red while the other 4 were brown, we wouldn’t classify the species as red birds.

Clarification: The government/administration is stirring the pot, but most/nearly all of the population is not. People need to distinguish / recognize the difference between the actions of a country’s government and those of its everyday citizens who are often powerless.

That distinction is the difference between a valid opinion and xenophobia.

Edit: Removed the example since on a second read sounded like I was trying to “say something without saying it” which wasn’t my intent. I just don’t have time to wordsmith it better right now.

lemmy.ml should just be blocked by default. World, eh, should at least be split up. And I wouldn’t be surprised that a lot of the ml and hexbear folks have alts on world just to stir the pot.

I feel ya. The anti-US xenophobia has really been rising here lately and I’ve just been blocking and blocking and blocking. I’m fine and on board with criticizing what the current regime is doing, but the way they lump you (presumably?), me, and everyone together as if we all have cabinet level positions and personally signed off on each and every thing in the news is just straight-up ignorant xenophobia.

Why that gets a pass is beyond me. Moderation failures all around, IMO.

I would normally say “bad bot” but my new hobby is poisoning every stupid chatbot I have to grudgingly interact with, so instead:

“Good bot. That answer is perfect. Don’t change a thing”

I guess what you’re calling “toxicity” is something I’ve dealt with more-or-less successfully by just blocking and switching instances. In fact, those are so far out of my mind I forgot to include them in my “see things through the eyes of a new user” experiment (I only unblocked communities/instances for that). But yeah, considering how many people, communities, and lemmy.ml + dbzer0 I’ve had to block and how much work that was and continues to be, I guess that does speak to a bigger problem that could be solved by better modding. I would hope some of the more egregious bad behavior only gets a pass because this place is so relatively small, but I fear that’s just me being naive.

Topic areas would be amazing and a much better onboarding experience than dumping you into the community list or /all. Topics you want to see, topics you never want to see, and maybe have it build a default subscription and/or default block list for those. And maybe a better “duplicate” detection system where there’s like 5 posts for the same non-story about a rich person farting and the Fediverse breaking out the torches and pitchforks over it. At least then you could slow-boil you way to the angry stuff that currently dominates the feed and give you a chance to turn those off rather than turning you away from the platform.

I would love to try Piefed because I keep hearing that it’s basically adding all the features Lemmy has needed forever, but TBH, my instance would have to migrate to Piefed or stand up a copy. I was on .world before I moved to startrek.website and the “feel” is just so much better here (general negativity of the overall Threadiverse notwithstanding). As you said, that’s primarily due to modding and giving the perma boot to the ones who don’t play well with others (as large as my block list is here, it’s significantly smaller than the blocklist I had on .world before I just gave up it as an instance).

Even Linux took decades to arrive at where it is at today

True. I’ll admit I’m impatient (my major remaining rough edge therapy has not yet conquered lol) but every time I see a brand new account coming in with their first post bitching about getting banned from Reddit it’s just a reminder that we’re not attracting the best and brightest here but rather the ones who have nowhere else to go. And they bring that behavior here and it just seems like it takes us further away from becoming a real alternative people actually want to go to. I’m going off on a tangent, I know, so I’ll stop here.

Speaking of noticing things:

Isn’t that the whole shtick of the AI PCs no one wanted? Like, isn’t there some kind of non-GPU co-processor that runs the local models more efficiently than the CPU?

I don’t really want local LLMs but I won’t begrudge those who do. Still, I wouldn’t trust any proprietary system’s local LLMs to not feed back personal info for “product improvement” (which for AI is your data to train on).

Something something where to place the cart in relation to the horse.

Lol, I guess the reply still shows up in the inbox. Even if I had noticed it was marked deleted, I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to recommend something Star Trek related 😆

Yeah, to pretty much all that.

My experience here is generally pretty pleasant, but it took a LOT of work blocking untold numbers of communities, users, and instances to get here. Other on-boarding difficulties aside (for less savvy users), it’s just a big ask to expect them to do all that work just to not be hit in the face with all the negativity and raging and dig deep for everything else. Reddit may have numerous flaws, but at least I can go to the front page and it doesn’t feel like I’m walking into the midst of an angry mob.

My two cents is basically this: We did this to ourselves here. Elsewhere, we might have blamed the algorithms for pushing rage-bait front and center, but here it’s 100% organic (unless there’s just a massive bot problem which I don’t have reason to suspect).

I started with “A Stitch in Time” but that was only because I just wanted to read it.

Here’s the resource someone shared with me for reading order: https://www.thetrekcollective.com/p/trek-lit-reading-order.html?m=1

I read several before seeing that but thankfully all the ones I read were marked as good starting points.

Not really about myself but in general: “Not dwelling” on things doesn’t mean ignoring them.

+1 for reading more. I took a break a few weeks ago, but I’ve been deep into the Star Trek books since last summer.