I agree about the marketing. I just heard about this phone now and was confused about if I could just use it as a primary phone. It would be nice if they talked more about what the phone is like to use, show what is the home screen and stuff. I'm wondering if I can use it well with some other utility apps that I don't think I'd want to do without like Maps, Parking payment apps, Podcasts and Spotify.

For the Home Screen, they've announced a collaboration with Niagara Launcher and it appears to be close to AOSP+GServices, so I suspect that'll all work out of the box, but yeah, they really should be clearer. Also has both a NanoSim slot and eSim support powered by a not yet public Mediathek SOC.

Major concern as is often the case with new phone startups is the update policy and more importantly whether they'll be able to actually deliver over the years. Has been literally half a decade since I last used a Mediathek device, so maybe this changed, but back then they didn't have the best reputation for long term maintenance, providing drivers to enable updates, etc...

What do you use for maps? Or paying for parking which maybe isn't the case for you but in my city requires use of a smartphone app. What about music and podcasts? Asking cause I would like to use a dumb phone if possible but it seems like it would actually introduce a lot of friction into daily life.

I pay for parking with quarters or a credit card.

If necessary I use a piece of paper for maps.

For music I have an ipod.

And you watch movies on your VHS?

Why are you trying to make fun of me?

The Keyphone they are referencing is Android, so those things can be worked around to some degree.

Hopefully! Supposedly it is pretty locked down but I'm hopeful there is a way to get other apps onto it.

That's a huge exaggeration. National Post is absolutely not more unhinged than Fox News.

> nobody reads intermediate commit messages one by one on a PR

I think it's fine to have a whole bunch of "WIP" commit messages on intermediate commits while the PR is in a draft stage, but then all of those garbage commits should really be squashed down into one commit and you should at least write a one liner that describes what the whole change is doing. I think it does materially make repo history harder to understand to merge in PR's with 10 garbage commits in them.

Which app do you use to read?

Play Books is actually really underrated! It's quite minimal, cross platform with cloud state and does everything really well. One cool unique feature I found is that it can sync notes and highlights straight to a google drive folder.

> Criminals by definition don't need to follow the law and they don't need the 2nd amendment.

This is kind of an argument from tautology that is disconnected to reality. In the real world, supply of criminality and violence is elastic, if you raise the cost, you lower the amount supplied. Crimes and violence committed are affected by committers having the opportunity and tenacity to do so. If you erect more barriers to achieving it, make it less convenient or straight forward to do it, you'll deter some percentage of violence/criminality who just give up or don't make it past the hurdle or whatever.

Otherwise, to take your argument to its logical conclusion, we could get a whole bunch of dumb conclusions, like:

We should just abolish auditing and other anti-corruption accountability mechanisms. By definition, cheats don't need to follow the law, so auditing doesn't catch them, it just imposes extra paperwork on law-abiding citizens!

Why's that? What has changed that makes selling nicknacks on Ebay less worth it?

I never found selling cheapish knicknacks on Ebay very attractive financially but it seems like it's less of Ebay's business these days and just not something I'm willing to devote a lot of time and energy to.

More generally, I do think it used to be more of a flea market even if I never found it a great selling platform for cheap items.

Unless it’s your business, or it’s high value items, the dollar per hour is pitiful.

$10 item sells for $9, charge and ship it, eBay takes its cut, barf. Garage sale or just donate would be simpler.

I'm a little bit unclear about this, will Google's changes here also affect other android distributions like LineageOS, OxygenOS, etc? If not, then I could see that Google locking down their Android Distributions like this could breath a lot of life into some alternative distribution(s). If yes, then perhaps forks of Android or even competitors to android altogether.

Google has delayed releasing pixel 10 sources and unlocking bootloader for new phones is becoming increasingly rare. They may lock it down too going forward.

I don’t think so, but it’s getting harder to flash custom ROMs (locked bootloaders) and there are even legislations in planning which would make it illegal (at least in the eu).

It’s already cumbersome to run your banking app (and other „required“ apps) on a custom ROM with all the attestation going on. I assume these distributions will bleed users and see a reduction in new ones due to higher entry barriers.

When a company makes a profit, that doesn't necessarily mean they made anyone else worse off. In general, when in a competitive environment, and dealing with customers who are responsible adults (which both hold in the case of the restaurant industry), we should presume that everyone is being made better off by the transactions, that it's a win-win situation.

It does when this is the same company that threatens employees who want to unionize.

Hard to extol the virtues of profit when it results in this. I'm sure the owner love it tho.

Well, a union is a form of cartel, it's an anti competitive organization of market participants who are colluding to set prices and extract other concessions from labour buyers. They therefor undermine the ability of markets to maximize value for all participants.

> They therefor undermine the ability of markets to maximize value for all participants.

Currently markets are not maximizing value for all participants, only the wealthiest and owners, so frankly I don't think anyone should give a damn about them

"Labour Buyers" should be counting their blessings if workers just unionize right now

You're acting as if capitalists treat their workers well under the current system when the opposite has occurred. Nearly $50 trillion was stolen from workers [1] by the capitalists owners in the US. Income inequality is literally at worse levels than just prior to the French Revolution.

The first politician to offer $1 trillion in federal assistance to middle/lower classes (free healthcare, free university/vocational training, public housing, public jobs) will absolutely control the electorate at both sides of the aisles.

Remember that redistribution of wealth are very popular American activities. It swings both ways.

[1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html

Well, I don't particularly enjoy ads on Reddit, Gmail, and, when I used them, Tiktok, Facebook, etc but I wasn't particularly pissed off by them either. On YT it seems just so in your way and in your face and egregious. It's like every couple minutes there's an other ad. You can't even chromecast videos to your tv to play in the background because you have to constantly babysit it or else it will load up an ad that goes on forever or 10 minutes until you come back to skip it.