kurito

What a waste of resources. Imagine employing some of the most brilliant engineers on the planet and allocating man-hours towards artificially worsening the experience for your userbase in order to blackmail them into paying you, and giving them back what they had in the first place.

At least this is a loosing game for Google, since this is client side behaviour.

"Experiment" is such an understatement to the treachery happening here

Likewise. I've jumped ship from Chrome to Floorp/Firefox mobile, after 15 years.

The problem is, where do we go now, from Android?

My thoughts exactly. LLMs are tools, and you should be able to draw your tools out of your toolcase whenever you need them. Kagi has a good implementation where AI doesn't obscure your search results, but it's one click away if you need it. If only Kagi had more reasonable pricing.

Yep! This seems like a tribute to Glitch!

I really don't get this. Why would I want to send money via a social media site, especially twitter in its current state?

The EU is protecting its citizens' privacy, as it should, and I find it immensely relieving that the EU has been making mostly sane decisions as far as privacy is concerned. It's not the EU's responsibility to figure out how make Meta's business model be profitable while respecting their users' privacy.

Thank you for taking the time to write all this, it's very informative. It sounds messy, but then again I can't help but feel that every single point you mentioned is quite complex because we managed to reach a point in time where a device designed with repairability first, seems such a farcical concept.

We might have become really precise with manufacturing, and produced beautifully thin and solid devices. But the fact that Apple needs to ship a 79-pound/36kg repair kit just to change the battery of a phone, doesn't really demostrate how clueless people are about the repair process, on the contrary it demonstrates the absurd lengths Apple is willing to go just to mock open access to tools, parts and processes.

Regarding longer warranties, that would be an excellent step, but warranties won't solve the same problems, as they will never cover user caused damage which I'm guessing is the cause for most repairs.

What if we started with the obligation of the manufacturer to provide access to reasonably priced parts along with schematics, without altering their manufacturing process? Would that be an acceptable first step towards making repairs more accessible?

> unable to do a better-than-trained-technician job of a (probably) complicated job

Isn't this because manufacturers are actively hindering repair shops? It's both the result and the cause of the manufacturers' strategy. No schematics, devices built without taking repairability in mind and very expensive parts or parts that come with caveats.

Making longer warranties is always welcome but it won't help as much, because the vast majority of repairs aren't covered under warranty. I'm guessing that most repairs are due to user error than manufacturing defects thus not covered under warranty.

> Because you generate, at best, an adversarial situation.

This shouldn't be the case. Reducing e-waste and thus doing everything possible for sustainability should be the priority here. I've found myself many times in a situation where a perfectly working device was damaged, or just stopped receiving software updates and had to be decommissioned because of security concerns, and this is not only limited to phones.

> Right to repair is a nice idea and it's heart is in the right place, but won't ever work for something like a consumer phone.

Why not? Every major phone manufacturer uses numerous techniques to make devices unrepairable and yet people still find ways to fix them. I'm not a hardware engineer, but I have fixed multiple devices, and I have no special skills or equipment besides standard ifixit toolkits. The only hindrances are introduced by manufacturers themselves. Replacing or refunding devices doesn't reduce e-waste, on the contrary.

I can't get behind what you're saying but I am curious to hear your take. Why do you think right to repair "won't ever work"?

As others have noted, technical and more quality content, especially the one found in subreddits that are more composed in nature is becoming more scarce and rapidly declining in quality. Bots, constant reposts and low quality comments and posts in contrast are rewarded and gain more exposure than ever. "It's just another phase" is a very light way of putting it. Reddit is becoming - maybe arguably has become - a former shell of itself more akin to 9gag than what it used to be.

> but it’s mostly because Android devices just suck now

How do they suck now?

> Would you buy a $1000 android phone when it’s just a worse iPhone?

How is an android phone a worse iPhone? Genuine questions, my opinions are entirely opposite and I would like to understand your perspective.

Reminds me of VanMoof, whose messaging a week ago was:

> We have temporarily paused sales to catch up on the production and delivery of existing orders. Rest assured – this has no effect on servicing.

... and then news broke that it's on the brink of bankruptcy.

When trying to choose between the two, it struck me how unacceptable the behaviour of people on the pfsense project are on platforms like reddit; this was enough to tip the scales permanently. Toxicity and arrogance were prevalent, along with actively trying to squash discussions about non-Netgate hardware (the pfsense brand), while touting the project as open source.