Some things are - on purpose - made easy to misuse and - by design - accessible to people, who are likely to misuse them. All this money, this supposedly cutting edge technology, and reporting to the police, but they aren’t able to tell when a child is at risk and report it as well?

Smells like bullshit to me. More like they don’t care. I’m not so sure children should even be allowed to use chatbots in the first place. Or only allowed to use versions specifically trained for interactions with children. But of course - banning children from accessing youtube and wikipedia is a much more pressing concern.

Hey everyone! As many have noticed, the PinePhone Pro is currently out ot stock on the Pine Store. Unfortunately we have to deliver you the following news: the PinePhone Pro is officially discontinued. We were told it didn’t sell well enough to keep production going. But the good news for current owners are that spare parts will still be made for up to two years, depending on demand. Meanwhile, the trusty PinePhone (A64) is still alive and kicking, and Pine Store plans to keep it rolling for about two more years.

Well, that sucks. So I guess the better move here would be to wait for something new? I don’t think the regular PinePhone is at all viable as a daily driver.

It’s quite easy to blame the common people, but I don’t think it’s that simple. The American Empire has been carefully constructed in a way that would not allow any real opposition to exist under any circumstances.

The Americans keep voting against their own interests. You may say it’s because they’re stupid or ignorant. While generally true, can you safely pin the blame on them? In a system that consistently undermines and sabotages the educational institutions, as well as gives the people little free time to educate themselves on their own - is it through their own fault that they’re uneducated?

Furthermore, no matter which one of the two parties you vote for - you’ll still be voting against your best interests. It’s only a matter of choosing how much and in what specific ways you preffer to get taken advantage of and abused. All major news outlets are run by friends and families of the government, so they’ll never host actual opposition, meaning it might as well not exist.

Americans constantly fight each other instead of working together to overthrow the authoritarian regime. Well, what else can they do? A silly post online may lead to termination of employment, which carries with itself serious risk of going homeless. Protesting may, and often is, answered with brute, sometimes lethal force. Can’t work with a broken bone, so you get fired and go homeless. Or die from police brutality.

This is not a new, nor a simple issue. We’re talking about systematic problems that have been festering over the last 200 years. There isn’t one single party to blame, and it certainly isn’t the average Americans - they are among the victims here.

One of the most cozy setups I’ve ever seen. Except whatever it is surrounding the cable in the top right. Kinda disgsuting looking.

Just because I’ll hold my nose and do the necessary thing doesn’t mean everyone else will.

The ‘necessary thing’ is voting for a fascist multi millionaire? He may be slightly better than the current guy, since the bar to pass is so low, but he’s very far from an actually valid candidate.

I understand different people have different situations in which the ‘necessary thing’ may vary. However, he’ll only solve a handful of current issues plaguing the USA, if even that. From whefe I’m standing (which arguably is quite far away as I’m a European) you’d achieve much more by protesting. Especially given that there may not be another election in your country. Though I’m also aware protests in the USA may come with serious risk of injury or loss of life.

OnlyOffice, not OpenOffice. This is a different suite entirely. Might be better for people coming from MS Office, since it looks practically identical. Also supports opening multiple files as tabs.

I’m a huge fan of Pine64, but I wouldn’t expect the PinePhone to be a great replacement for an Android smartphone. Personally I have quite extensive experience with PineBook Pro, PineTime and PineBuds Pro. I haven’t had the chance to try the PinePhone, but I’d definitely go for the Pro.

Even then, prepare for a junky experience and forget about lixuries such as good camera, nice screen, smooth UI/UX. Their devices are great, and the ideas behind them more so. But unfortunately they rarely work well, perhaps with the exception of PineBuds Pro.

Good point. Sometimes it helps to read properly

no more locked bootloader

Likewise modifying the bootloader requires unlocking it - which means no more secure boot and anyone who takes your phone can happily boot whatever they like on it. This is also bad.

Except for Graphene. The last step in the installation is locking the bootloader back, and the phone clearly says it’s locked.

It’s also the most productive economic system ever tried.

I think whether this is true highly depends on the definition of productivity and circumstances.

What definition of productivity are we applying here? Capitalism sure is great at inflating useless statistics. It also seems to be decent for actually valuable products and services. However, depending on what you take into account, it’s not so clear that it’s the superior system.

Furthermore, there have been several cases of socialist governments improving the quality of life at a rate never seen in capitalist countries. Almost completely eradicating illiteracy in less than a year (Cuba). Or vaccinating half the population in a few months (Burkina Faso). Of course, those governments are rare and don’t last long thanks to the CIA.

Personally I’d say the most immediate solution - or more accurately, improvement - is to mix our current capitalist dystopia with as much socialist policies as possible. Many countries in the EU are doing thay and it seems to be working pretty well. Let’s just copy and build on that, then worry about the next steps.

As of right now, it’s looking like GrapheneOS will be unaffected, and Google has yet to lock down the bootloader. So this should remain a valid option for at least 2 years.

Other than that:

• Any smartphones with an unlocked bootloader + any ROMs without gapps
• Chinese smartphones with non-Google Android builds
• Linux smartphones
• Bonus: Huawei is about to release their own non-Android OS, but I wouldn’t expect it to be privacy-friendly

Honestly there probably isn’t any good, long-term solution. Personally I’m somewhat shocked we’ve gone this many years with reasonably open smartphones. Next step is probably closing bootloaders in new laptops, as part of the switch to ARM (which is already undergoing).

It’s very likely that no amount of negative feedback will change anything. Why not waste some of their time anyway? Write to them, call them, spread the word. This is the only thing we can do. Even if it goes through regardless - at the very least we can make it as unpleasant as possible.

Two things especially worth noting from the article.

If you have a non-Google build of Android on your phone, none of this applies.

This means that at least GrapheneOS will be unaffected for now. Other ROMs without gapps will be unaffected only as long as you don’t install gapps. Since Graphene has a sandbox for them, I’m assuming it’ll be fine. That is, unless Google decides to lock the bootloader entirely.

In September 2026, Google plans to launch this feature in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. The next step is still hazy, but Google is targeting 2027 to expand the verification requirements globally.

So most users worldwide still have at least 1.5 years until it’s implemented. Plenty of time to get a Pixel and install Graphene on it. Or to figure out some other plan.

Don’t get me wrong - this is insane, unreasonable and horrible news for everyone. We should push back as hard as physically possible against it. However, at the very least we still have some time to figure things out before the policy rolls out.

This is the law in all EU member states. What the article is discussing is different. Technically, a deepfake of you is not a photograph of you, unless you can reliably prove that a photograph of you was used to create it. Of course, it had to be, but a court will never accept “that’s how deepfakes work” as evidence.

The new Danish law is forbidding anyone from making anything that closely resembles you, meaning nobody can make a deepfake of you, regardless of whether or not it’s proven that a real picture of you was used. Just like you cannot create anything that closely resembles any other copyright-protected content, regardless of whether or not you use any of the original creator’s material in the process.

(…) it was all avoidable.

It really wasn’t. Everything in American politics for long years has been leading to this point. It was always bound to happen, sooner or later. Sure, by choosing another president you could have potentially delayed it by a few years. But later it would have happened anyway. This is not a ‘Trump issue’. This is a ‘USA issue’.

I think Americans are the only ones who haven’t seen this coming. And I don’t mean that in a hostile way. Your education system has been sabotaged for decades, so it’s no wonder the people are uninformed and ignorant to what’s going on. The only ones to blame are the psychopathic politicians and billionaires who deliberately made this happen over the last 200 years.

(…) if Russia can’t even win against Ukraine how would they ever fight against the EU, our army is both larger and much better equipped then Ukraine.

The problem is, the EU isn’t united nearly enough to fight a war together. If, for instance, Russia attacks, it’ll be mostly Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia defending. Maybe Romania too, and maybe with some support from the rest of the EU. As it stands right now, the EU is divided on many issues, with some countries (notably Hungary) intentionally sabotaging it from the inside.

Even if - and that’s a big if - all or at least most of EU member states can come to agreement and cooperate in a conflict, our militaries aren’t very well prepared to work together. This would require years of cross-border military drills between all of the member states. Especially considering the fact that the vast majority of all EU soldiers have never seen any real combat. Russia may be losing a lot of soldiers in Ukraine. But those who survive become extremely valuable assets for the military, since real world combat experience is infinitely more useful than textbooks or casual training exercises.

You’re also massively wrong about DirectX on Linux, DXVK and VKD3D both work to run various versions of it on Linux.

I very clearly wrote that Linux does not support DirectX. Which is 100% true, no matter how you look at it. Just because there are translation layers, it doesn’t mean Linux ‘supports DirectX’, because it doesn’t. It supports Vulkan, which DXVK and VKD3D translate DirectX API calls to.

Let’s say you can’t read Spanish, but you hire a translator to translate a text for you. Now you can read it. Does that mean you can suddenly read Spanish?

They created the Game Porting Toolkit a while ago

Hmm… Must have missed that. I’ll need to take a look. Might be the exact same thing I mentioned and I just had no idea it was already released.

The RaspberryPi has existed for ~15 years at this point, the platform is far more mature than Windows on ARM and rivals macOS for support.

I wrote “From my experience” and “Might depend on the device though.” Also, RaspberryPi is not a daily use device. At least not for the vast majority of people.

If Linux works on ARM for other people - great. I’m hoping to be able to switch to it sometime in the near future. However, the last time I tried it was horrendous. A lot of programs I use were completely unavailable, with no compatibility layer that I know of. That was about 2 years ago.

That said, I also tried Windows 11 on ARM around the same time and it was great. Practically everything worked out of the box and worked flawlessly. It was basically the same experience as on amd64.

After introducing Metal (their own proprietary graphics api), Apple killed OpenGL support and never implemented Vulkan support. Almost every single video game nowadays uses either DirectX (Microsoft’s proprietary API) or Vulkan for 3D graphics. 2D games use OpenGL and Vulkan. OpenGL and Vulkan are both open source and cross platform.

Windows supports everything, Linux everything except DirectX, and MacOS (for Apple Silicon devices) only supports Metal. You can still play OpenGL games on Intel-based Macs. Steam tells you which games won’t work on recent Mac systems.

In order for a game to run on ARM Macs, it has to either be ported to Metal, or there needs to be a compatibility layer like Wine and Proton. However, neither of these two work, since Apple no longer supports OpenGL or Vulkan. Theoretically, it is possible for people to write a new compatibility layer, specifically for Metal. The problem is, nobody wants to, because it’s a lot of work (as usual with development for Apple devices), and you never know when Apple may decide to drop support for some other libraries/APIs/drivers.

Additionally, Apple seems to be working on their own Metal translation layer. Leaks show impressive performance in Cyberpunk 2077. However, nobody knows what the availability will be like or when it releases.

In the case of Macs it’s not an issue with the ARM architecture, but with Apple. Since they dropped support for some libraries a few years ago, new versions of wine (and proton) stopped working on Apple Silicon. That’s the main and pretty much only reason why you can only play like 13 games on newer Macs.

As for Linux, ARM support is still in its early stages. From my experience it’s not even ready for regular daily use. Might depend on the device though. M1 Macbooks run pretty good with Asahi.