impure-aqua

Alternatively, one could hold a social interaction not centered around some form of consumption, and then you don't have to worry about satisfying people's consumptive preferences

GrapheneOS already ships Seedvault, which extracts application data with no root at all, so what you describe is possible in at least some form, but I assume not with the ergonomics you want.

Providing a good interface for that access is a specific missing capability. But we shouldn't presuppose that the only way to supply it is a global su. The former is a bounded fix; the latter changes the isolation model of the entire system. A portal is mediated, scoped to what you asked for, and revocable. Root is none of those things.

Seedvault is itself an example. The need for backups can be met either with a narrow backup service or by handing out root and letting you do it however you like. Those two have very different security properties, and you can want the new capability without wanting a generic privilege escalation path to deliver it.

Software freedom is about freedom of choice, not philosophically mandated security holes. You are free to take the GrapheneOS code and introduce a huge vulnerability in the form of a privilege escalation path from sandboxed apps if you wish, it is open source and you can easily compile and flash your own build.

Mobile phones store incredibly intimate data and are incredibly vulnerable to seizure. It stores my message history, pictures I've taken, so many other records that together would provide an incredibly detailed view into my private life. And it is on my person at all times, even through checkpoints where I have minimal protections against search and seizure like borders! This is not a device that I want a broad surface for modification of system software on.

It may not record your ethnicity or religion, but ID documents certainly record your sex, and plenty of authoritarians seem interested in identifying individuals for whom this database column has been updated.

Commoditizarion is a process, not a binary state.

If I run an oil refinery, my fractional distillation system needs to be reworked depending on the exact mixture of crude I'm taking as input. So there are still switching costs even in the textbook example of a commodity.

Crucially though the exact upstream I use has minimal impact on the downstream. Closer equivalents, say, another barrel of WTI grade crude from a nearby regional supplier, require extremely minimal reworking. Oil from a different region, that might require more retooling, so I might be willing to sustain a longer shock in market conditions before making that switch. The important thing is the output broadly remains the same, but even this is broad, e.g. a different mix of inputs yields different ratios of output.

LLMs are quite similar no? Maybe switching to another SOTA model has minimal reworking, as you can delegate at the same level of abstraction to the model, whereas switching to a slightly-behind-frontier model you need to do more hand holding. Switching costs being nonzero does not preclude them from being broadly an interchangeable input in the production process. Any non-frontier use (99% of SWE) will be delivered on pretty much the exact same timeline irrespective of which model was used, so my requisition process looks more like buying barrels of oil than e.g. shopping for a new phone.

> of course everyone, it's definitely the 200MB usage surplus that makes your phone feel heavy.

It actually is though? My Pixel 9a has a perfectly serviceable CPU but I am often frustrated by its 8GB of RAM. Switching to the Revolut app to generate a disposable card number consistently evicts my browser tab from RAM. ~100% of the time this happens and I get extremely frustrated by it losing my state in the checkout flow.

> Do most kids have the ability and motivation to build their own machines?

I and pretty much everyone else in my childhood TeamSpeak server did at roughly 14 years of age.

I don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was heavily influenced towards implementing the one child policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a rocketry background and presented a model whereby the population would grow to an unsustainable level unless corrective control was applied.

I think it is unlikely philosophers would have suggested to treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.

WhatsApp performs dynamic code loading from memory, GrapheneOS detects it when you open the app, and blocking this causes the app to crash during startup. So we know that static analysis of the APK is not giving us the whole picture of what actually executes.

This DCL could be fetching some forward_to_NSA() function from a server and registering it to be called on every outgoing message. It would be trivial to hide in tcpdumps, best approach would be tracing with Frida and looking at syscalls to attempt to isolate what is actually being loaded, but it is also trivial for apps to detect they are being debugged and conditionally avoid loading the incriminating code in this instance. This code would only run in environments where the interested parties are sure there is no chance of detection, which is enough of the endpoints that even if you personally can set off the anti-tracing conditions without falling foul of whatever attestation Meta likely have going on, everyone you text will be participating unknowingly in the dragnet anyway.

On my Pixel 9a (also on GrapheneOS) the biggest limitation is it can't be set to higher than 1080p, and the upscaling algorithm with my 4K display (not sure where in the chain that happens, monitor or phone) was quite terrible to the point of text legibility being a concern.

The usage experience otherwise is quite good, it's perhaps my preferred way to sync data to and from my phone, I have it all stored on a NAS so I connect to my Type-C display (which has keyboard, mouse, and ethernet connected to its switch), fire up a terminal, type in my rsync commands, and my pictures & music are synced ~instantly at LAN speeds.

That is true of press, weld, and paint stages, which gives you a chassis and nothing else. It is absolutely not lights out for "final assembly" which despite the name is how massive amounts of the car comes together.

Robots are great at the bulk movement required for sticking sheet metal into huge stamps as well as repeatably welding the output of these stamps together. Early paint stages happens by dipping this whole chassis and later obviously benefits highly from environmental control (paint section is usually certain staff only to enter.)

But with this big painted chassis you still need to mount the engine/transmission, the brake and suspension assembly needs installing, lots of connectors need plugging in for ABS- and supporting all the connectors that will need plugging in is a lot of cabling that needs routing around this chassis. These tasks are very difficult for robots to do, so they tend to be people with mechanical assists, e.g. special hoisting system that takes the weight of engine/trans while the operators (usually two on a stage like this, this all happens on a rolling assembly line) drag it into place, and do the bolting.

Trim line is also huge, insert all these floppy roof liners, install the squishy plastic dashboard, the seats, carpets, door plastic trim, plug in all your speakers and infotainment stuff, again the output of the automated stages is literally the shell of a car, and robots are extremely bad at doing precise clipping together of soft touch plastics or connection of tiny cables. Windshield install happens here too, again these things are mechanically assisted for worker ergonomics but far from automated.

Each of these subassemblies also can be very complex and require lots of manual work too but that usually happens at OEM factories not at the assembly factory. Automation in these staffed areas mostly is the AGVs which follow lines on the floor to automatically deliver kanban boxes which are QR tagged (the origin of the QR code, fun fact) to ensure JIT delivery of the parts needed for each pitch.

It is far from lights out even in the most modern assembly plant and I think it will be a long time until that is true. The amount of poka-yoking that goes into things like connector design so there is an audible "click" when something is properly inserted for example- making a robot able to perform that task at anywhere near the quality of even a young child will take vast amounts of advancement in artificial intelligence and sensing. These are not particularly skilled jobs but the robotics skill required is an order of magnitude more than we can accomplish with today's technology.

There are all sorts of other things that don't show up on a spec sheet so easily that Framework isn't competitive on.

It has a diving board trackpad, significantly worse speakers, no zonal dimming on the display (comparing to MacBook Pro, which higher end specs of the Framework cost as much as), general poor body rigidity, an aggressive fan curve that ramps up audibly on short loads (the Air doesn't even have a fan and the Pro can handle a couple mins of all-core 100% load without becoming audible), etc etc.

As much as I dislike Apple's business practices it's undeniable that other vendors are generally selling significantly cheaper feeling devices at the same price point. These are not niche things, you feel the cheapness on the Framework with every touchpad click, short bursty CPU task, HDR video, audio playback, heck even picking it up off the desk.