You need to dish out around $500 (e.g. Pixel 10a) to get such a device new

i hope motorola pulls through with their new line of phones with unlockable bootloaders.

we had a tool for that, it was called necklace

gut feeling

You used to be able to replace a battery just b taking a cover off,

yeah, i do wonder, did these phones use to be water-proof? I don’t remember. In the rain i mean, environmental moisture.

what does software interoperability have to do with it?

https://www.circularise.com/blogs/r-strategies-for-a-circular-economy [R-Strategies for a Circular Economy]

damn the title really made me think for a moment it was talking about r/K strategies and i got all hyped up for a moment. But no, it’s just about resource usage.

well, it’s gotta be possible in concept. nature does it; the brain is compostible, or when incinerated, burns without a trace. Maybe we’re just not there yet technology-wise.

thank you for the links, i’ll study them in detail.

ok then i have a follow-up question: which of these toxic compounds are actually necessary? like could you produce a smartphone that works just as well without them?

my take that they don’t produce toxic waste was based on their low mass and on a discussion that i had with a friend years ago where we looked at the chemistry of smartphones and concluded that essentially, there’s no requirement to use toxic chemicals during their production process. i think my mind went on to assume “since it’s not necessary, it’s not happening”. which i see now was a wrong assumption.

this won’t work. it’s basically technologically impossible for a cell network provider to specifically block content based on keywords such as “trans” and “gender”. that would require decrypting TLS communication and i don’t think NSA is gonna give them the keys to that.

anyways, this proposal is a significant thing, not because of the real (physical) consequences it will have, but because of the psychological consequences. this signifies a push of people to regulate the internet more. which, i think is probably a bit similar to how russia and china each have their own internet which is almost detached from the rest of the world.

is this what the US is turning into?

after thinking about it a bit more, i recognize that the push to regulate smartphones is mostly about the psychological effect that people want to feel in control. it has nothing to do with the technology, it’s just a way of saying “yes i agree to regulating capitalism”.

in a certain sense, i can understand it. you gotta start somewhere.

2027 isnt a real year

yeah i feel the same way. it’s an imaginary year. it’s like a dream, it will be what your subconscious conjures up. if you have bad fantasy, that’s a problem for you!

what would you like the world to be? what bothers you?

:)

spanking already? 😏 what a fast progression ;-)

yeah that’s a good explanation why there’s only a very small number of software companies in the world. google, microsoft, apple, meta. the reason is because, when you have two cars, that’s twice as much as one car. but when you have 2 apps, that’s worth exactly as much as having 1 app.

consider this: scenario 1: one big company writes one calendar app that everybody uses. scenario 2: there’s two medium-sized companies writing calendar app, that share the users. Which is better?

two companies -> twice the fixed cost (writing the code twice for no reason). two database protocols -> incompatibilities, so users sharing data with each other becomes more difficult, for example for group calendars where events are distributed to the app that the user already has. this is also called “network effects”: removing boundaries by everything being on one platform.

downsides of monopolies: one company might have too much market determining force. no competition, therefore difficult to evaluate what would happen if things were done differently.

that’s why there’s no second search giant besides google. for mobile and desktop operating systems there’s two, probably to have some competition (android/iOS, windows/macOS).

meanwhile there are no such monopolies for car companies, because if you build twice as many cars, then you have twice as many cars. so competition pays off.

AI companies aren’t profitable because

1. nobody really wants to use it. we all know it’s a walled garden. OpenAI is gonna enshittify just like google and microsoft did. never put your infrastructure into another company’s hands. that’s a recipe for making yourself vulnerable and you’re gonna dearly regret it later. at this point, trusting an US company with your data is a typical example of insanity. In europe, practically every big company/government institution is trying to get away from the dependency on US tech, not towards it. As long as AI is all hosted on US company server, nobody’s gonna use it. It would have to become self-hosted and open-source/open-weight before that.

I typically don’t like US politics because it’s all shitting on somebody’s head but this is an acceptable question because it can be interpreted in a structural way. Like the river carries water, in an orderly fashion, even though each drop moves chaotically and by common assumption doesn’t even have consciousness, so society moves forward, even though no single person has a plan.

I think that in some sense of the word, things are gonna be ok because life has always found a way, one way or another, and this won’t be different. The question is just what local bubble is gonna make it and what not. About the US politics: I think that governments ultimately derive their power from being useful to society. Just like every major invasion of other countries has failed in decades, so has no tyrannical regime existed forever. There’s always some tradeoff between the ruler being necessary and annoying. Even the “very bad people” (according to newspapers) such as dictators in the third world have a surprising amount of support from the local population because they perform some role, such as holding society together and defending against a (real or imagined) external threat. I think that it’s easy to give in to doomerism, because people are attracted to bad thoughts like the mosquito is attracted to fire, but ultimately the world is on a path of development, and bad rulers can only rule as long as their existence is considered practical. Which won’t be forever.

rounded corners though

actually that’s more like me:

not a shitpost. pls move to political memes