Samsung, Huawei, Microsoft, and LG tried similar ideas and none got much traction.

I’m not sure it’s actually a good idea even now that phones have enough CPU and RAM for an adequate desktop experience. It’s certainly not a good idea running Android as we know it, where apps are data silos and have UIs that don’t cleanly transition from the palmtop experience to the desktop experience.

You can do that today with a Linux tablet and Waydroid. It’s more like running the Android apps in a VM than something really well integrated with the Linux environment, but perfect is the enemy of good.

I got my first tablet this year after a long time as a skeptic. It runs Arch, BTW.

Most of the time it has a keyboard attached and I use it like a laptop, but it’s nice to be able to watch movies on flights during taxi, takeoff, and landing because tablets and phones are allowed, not laptops.

Gnome is really nice on a touchscreen aside from the terrible onscreen keyboard. KDE is a little rougher, but its onscreen keyboard is decent.

I remember making a note to look into it several times, and thinking I should buy one (exactly one) when it was about $600. If I had, I imagine I would have sold at 10x rather than holding until 100x or its peak at 200x.

I actually did think it or a successor would become important as a consumer payment method. I was wrong there.

I remember playing with a Motorola Atrix in a store. It seemed like a really cool idea.

I thought people would learn how to use computers.

It seemed as if most of the millennial generation in wealthy countries did learn to some degree and I expected it to be even more true for younger generations. Those more sophisticated users would enable more sophisticated and flexible applications. Technology would empower individuals while weakening corporations and governments.

Instead, the most reliable recipe for popularizing tech is to dumb it down. Millennials represent a peak of digital literacy (in wealthy countries) and those younger tend to have weaker technical skills.

LLMs don’t understand things. They repeatedly predict the next token given previous tokens.

I don’t think something without predictable patterns is likely to work as a language. A very complex grammar probably means the LLM will make grammatical errors more often, but that’s probably the most that can be done to make a language hard for LLMs. Other comments mention languages without much training data, but I don’t think that’s what you’re asking.

“If you put money in a vending machine and got two items instead of one, would you put additional money in for the second item?”

No, I fucking wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t like to work for anyone who wouldn’t hire me because of that fact.

He got mad at me for texting him an anti-CCP joke (both US Phone Numbers)

He’s right to be concerned. You should be using Signal far any communication you don’t want sucked into a mass-surveillance system (i.e. most communication). He might not want to have Signal installed when he enters China though.

When I can’t use the old one anymore. Every time so far, that’s been because of a hardware failure.

I’m currently on a Pixel 4A. It’s running Android 16 (LineageOS), and I limit battery charge with AccA so that it doesn’t wear out. It’s currently showing 92% capacity, which seems pretty good for five years. I don’t think I’d actually like a new phone; it would be faster and have a better camera, but my current phone isn’t a bottleneck, and a new phone’s camera will still be worse than my Olympus. It would have 5G, but why should I care? Most new phones are bigger, and as an adult, my hands are not growing.

I love that answers like this are popular here. There was a time when phone tech was improving fast enough that frequent upgrades made a lot of sense, but now is not that time.

I’m a little surprised that’s an active decision from carriers instead of whatever has compatible radios just working.

Most 2016 era smartphones have 4G.

I am not a doctor and I am definitely not your doctor, but this sounds like an eating disorder to me. Are you in a position to talk to a doctor about it?

I am, with the obvious username. I mostly only post in /r/flashlight now, as it’s the most active community anywhere online for that niche interest.

I’ve had at least three different people on different continents provide my Gmail address to various services. I’ve ignored most messages meant for those people, but one gave it to his lawyer when he was charged with a serious crime for which his conditions of release forbade contact with children. I took the time to tell the lawyer that’s nothing to do with me.

I was among the first hundred people to join Reddit.

I hold the (possibly mistaken) belief that someone who can program everything from a web browser to a screensaver can, if they so choose, be a good sysadmin.

I also believe programmers usually don’t choose to be good sysadmins, viewing such work as an annoyance to spend as little effort on as they can get away with, which is what it looks like jwz has done here. Someone with his experience should be self-aware enough to understand who is to blame when that’s what they’re doing.

I wonder how many people have company email addresses there.

It’s a bar/nightclub. Most employees at bars don’t use email as part of their work. It would be unusual (though maybe on-brand for jwz) for bartenders to have company email addresses, for example.

Given his background, I’m certain he can do a good job of being his own IT admin if he wants to. He seems to want some of the benefits of that while having Google do the parts he doesn’t like.

Google, on the other hand seems to want to drop features that I think it intended to encourage people to migrate from ISP email accounts to Gmail 20 years ago and now sees as cruft and/or security concerns.

He does have his own mail server according to the post. He doesn’t want to store the mail long-term, filter spam, host a web mail client, or support employees setting up native mail clients.