I could see them doing fine losing those features if it meant the hardware was compact, light, and cheap. But doing it on giant $1000 phones is not going to do them any favors with the lemmy crowd like I said.

Yeah now it’s “will it speedrun DOOM?”

100% agreed. I agreed more with each paragraph.

Your last sentence hit on what I think is a contributing if not primary driving factor in the health crisis you described.

It’s like the goal of modern society is to insulate us from the natural world and from learning subjects or doing tasks that we don’t absolutely have to.

But we are critters that evolved on this planet just like the others. You can’t just live a commoditized life that consists of work, car, screen, sleep, repeat and get the same fulfillment out of life as if you found the unique path that’s optimized for your unique brain.

Not acknowledging that everything jacks with your head to SOME degree only prevents you from trying to defend yourself as best you can!

Over the past several years I have gone through a transition from living life the way I was supposed to, or that I thought I wanted to, to living according to what produces the best outputs from my brain. Once I have the lived experience of an undeniable improvement from some change, it might actually become a habit.

I personally might not use a headphone jack or SD card slot very much, but for the market that a GrapheneOS phone would be targeting they seem like OBVIOUS things to include.

The crowd getting excited about this partnership is pretty much the same crowd that complains about features like those going away.

Then make the machine try to keep people talking for as long as possible…

That’s probably a huge part of it. How many billions of dollars have been spent engineering content on a screen to get its tendrils into people’s minds and attention and not let go?

EnGaGeMent!!!

Each one of those F-22s cost as much as a Level 1 trauma center hospital, and it’s specialty is filling up entire hospitals in the other side of the world!

My employer has the usual setup of M365 enterprise shit running on Dell laptops.

Fortunately we devs are able to “dual boot” to run Linux on our machines, since our product is an embedded Linux system. (has anybody seen my Windows partition btw? I can’t even find anything NTFS formatted, whoopsie!)

All that background info is just so I can pay Microsoft a compliment, even if it has asterisks all over it:

The entire Microsoft suite works just fine in a browser, and in LibreWolf too! I do typically add some permissions for those sites for convenience, since librewolf is privacy/tracking hardened (firefox fork) out of the box. I use Teams and Outlook every day, and occasionally will drop a file into OneDrive or edit something in MS Office. I don’t write many office-format documents though, so I’m more likely to be in LibreOffice or a PDF viewer just reading a doc.

You know how in media streaming and gaming there’s that balance of whether it is more convenient to be a paying customer versus pirate everything?

Microsoft’s stuff is literally better to use in Linux. Even if I need to test the Windows build of something, a VM is SO much more convenient. And I’m not even logged into the microsoft shit on that. If I need something from OneDrive, I go to the browser there too.

Except if THAT is a 12 o’clock flasher, in which case it is correct about 30 times each day.

That’s an angle that more people should talk about, honestly.

The mistreatment of the American populace isn’t just to keep a steady supply of cheap labor for the rich people’s investments, it’s to keep a steady supply of cheap lives for the government to do their dirty work.

My generation’s dead and disabled veterans fell in service to that sweet Iraqi oil. Oh and the Saddam hidden underground meme, can’t forget that one!

If these are just little low-powered PCs where you can pop in a USB drive and install a real OS, I could see some uses for them. Hopefully we aren’t entering the wonderful world of phone-like locked down firmware with these things.

But I already have old PCs that are great at, you know, running software on their actual hardware. So realistically I’ll never consider one of these unless they do something awesome like subsidize the cost and sell them as normal little x86-64 PCs with some janky stripped down version of windows installed.

I think it’s more of a way for those of is in the US to hang on to some shred of optimism. Surely somebody somewhere will continue to make nice things for normal people, right?

I’ve spent just a little bit of time in Europe, with most of it in Sweden. I have seen with my own eyes how civilized societies can have nice things in shared spaces!

Excellent! It’s hard to believe how much easier the Linux experience can be than Windows. Take your PC and boot Linux Mint from a thumb drive. If you like it, it can be installed in like 5 clicks. (assuming you already prepped the machine, backed up, etc. I dual booted at first but that only lasted about 2 weeks before I wiped windows)

I have personally since moved to Debian KDE Plasma. It’s a target platform at work, and it’s more of a server machine at home. Plus doing a few more things via CLI or via finding old forum posts or documentation is fine by me.

I might try Garuda on the new PC we’ve been putting together, though. It looks like a well polished gaming-focused OS that is also Arch-based to get me into that whole family of distros. (because Valve went that way of course, and in the future I’ll always want a PC that can seamlessly run SteamVR. Plus computers are fun.)

Eww, friends I know it’s ok to say fuck on the internet, but some words are just yucky to read, you feel me?

lol

I love how “I fucked your mom” is just too straight and real for Lemmy.

I might be an old straight guy, but I can appreciate keeping it fake & gay around here. 🫡

Only poors can do terrorism, silly!

While it may be true that capitalism messes with all of them to some extent, I think there’s still a pretty wide chasm between a Firefox fork like LibreWolf or WaterFox versus just using a default install of Chrome or Edge.

Throw a self hosted Jellyfin server in the mix, and you can access your entire FLAC library from any device you want! Your friends can listen at the same time, if you want to give them logins.

At this point we would be lucky to have somebody like president Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho who actually seems to govern in good faith.

What would the current government do if presented with a super-intelligent advisor? Fix our problems? Lol to that. They would be lucky to be kept alive because somebody that smart is clearly a threat to those who already got theirs.

That seems like one of the more reasonable scenarios to expect “AI” to thrive, actually.

You have dozens to thousands of people doing the actual work, then you have one CEO or owner that asks the AI to summarize what all the workers have been doing and communicating. It then presents them with a list of suggested decisions with some metrics tied to them like chance of success and Net Present Value (NPV).

The AI wouldn’t even have to do a good job! It would just have to get things wrong or make up bullshit whole cloth as much as human middle managers, or maybe even less!

I think this is a possiblity not because the AI will do a good job, but because the ONE thing that LLMs seem to be good at is mimicking what a random human might type, including humans who are often ignorant or wrong.

That would be a humongous world-changing announcement in a sane timeline. Half the people in our stupid culture wouldn’t even register it as a blip though.

In situations like this I like to think of the history students a thousand years from now, assuming the earth is still habitable, etc.

"So humanity’s first public recognition of extraterrestrial life only happened when it did to distract from the fact that the Big Country at the time had reelected the planet’s worst person AGAIN and they needed to delay justice until they died for… let me double check the text… they needed to delay getting in trouble for being at the top of a global human trafficking and rape operation?

And I am supposed to believe these people had running water, airplanes, internet, and space programs? They lied about every other damn thing!"