Hmm I think my main concern would be lack of kernel/firmware updates, running something like postmarketOS could partly solve that and still be nearly as easy to set up (just unlock and flash a prebuilt image)

But firmware is still almost entirely dependent on the vendor, since it’s all signed and unpatchable.

Next issue would be lack of connectivity on a lot of phones, which have gone backwards and include USB 2.0 now. WiFi is an option, but less stable, I personally decided to just go 100Mbps and suffer.

As for the battery, it would help a lot if phones were designed to boot without one and they were removable, it all worked well for about half a year until I found out I had a spicy pillow and had to replace it with direct power to the board, which made the whole setup much less elegant and required soldering.

It all comes down to how devices are designed in the end. If someone took the time to make a computer instead of just a phone, and included features that make it useful past its initial life that aren’t that popular (display output, microsd, headphone jack), mainlined all the drivers and maintained firmware, that would be a different story.

But that’s not a very profitable model, because it’s all about reducing waste and thus selling less. A lot needs to change.

Not sure myself, I’m trying to get into some IT jobs (not necessarily programming) that aren’t anywhere near social media and are more focused on internet infrastructure, but getting any job is hard when you’re starting out and I would like to avoid the evil ones at all cost.

But just as there is no ethical consumption in capitalism, there’s no consensual work, so the values of wherever you end up working won’t align with yourself or the other workers fully, it’s just a question of degree.

Hmm, you could probably extend the protocol to do eventual consistency across instances if that ever becomes a problem, remote instances could keep their own counts and only send aggregated updates.

Swapped bicycles with a classmate, it was a very old one and he wasn’t familiar with how the brake handles were positioned, so he slammed into my side and the wheels got bent and locked up, sending me flying into the grass on the side of the road lol It wasn’t that bad besides a few scratches and bruises, but the bikes were a bit worse off…

A more recent contender is when I slammed my right thumb into a door frame at full speed and almost broke it, I had to get an xray to confirm everything was fine.

Making tech thinner and sleeker doesn’t always make it better, I think devices that follow their function look great!

Doesn’t mean there should be no product design, but don’t try to hide things for the sake of hiding them, leave the screws visible, show off the internals, try to complement them!

NIce board!

I almost started out with keyboards, but I ordered a kit from gboards.ca (fully expecting there to be delays), and the person behind that just went poof, and so did the money :/

In the meantime I’ve been playing around with my g305 mouse (ported ZMK to it, no sensor driver yet) and some other projects, but I still want to build a split at some point, I even have the switches laying around already.

I feel like that’s where online payment systems really let us down. If there was an easy universal way to pay a few cents to view content and it wasn’t a privacy and fee nightmare, I’m sure people would have no problem doing that. Digicash systems come to mind, I hope they could make a comeback one day.

But I also fear a lot of the damage could’ve been done already, kids who grow up with the internet now will probably only remember big tech platforms and may not be very eager to try out something more complicated.

Electronics, once you realize that you can pretty much build anything you need if you can find a chip for it you’re unstoppable, at least as long as you can gather the energy to work on it (or to finally fix your broken soldering station)

Not really (I wasn’t using Google directly anyway), I think it fills a slightly different niche than search engines.

It’s good as a fuzzy search for the sum of public knowledge, since it can understand quite complex queries and point you in the right direction, then you can go to regular search engines to find more specific stuff.

Bing was fun to exploit, but I don’t really see why it’s useful, it tends to always look up information which means it provides less of its own knowledge, I can do the searches myself better than an LM. Maybe it can provide more concise answers than all the SEO crap everywhere, but that can be avoided by searching on specific websites like reddit.