Other comments have links to more details, but in short: do not support this company.
It was to be expected that a lot of corps will want to milk the term "EU sovereignty" and good willed naive people who don't look inside the packaging.
You're probably responding because of the Jolla tablet :)
To be fair, the Jolla tablet was in 2015, more than 10 years ago. Most probably, many of the people working at Jolla are not the same as then. Also, if you read carefully all the announcements and communication from Jolla, you can easily see they have learned from that crowdfunding affair. This is not the same offer, not in a long mile.
That and the russian ties, the partially closed source OS, the locked bootloader, the $50 device reset fee, the cheap underpowered chinese chipset. The company was sold more than once between investment firms. Yet it presents itself like a happy independent open source collective.
The firm with partly russian ownership went bankrupt a couple of years ago. The russian fork of the software lives on as AuroraOS in their local market but the current Jolla has no ties to russia.
I'd be more concerned for face unlock. You take an OS that goes to the extreme to prevent any external intrusion to your phone and you enable an option to unlock it for anyone by holding the phone to your face?
well the thing is, i don't do anything illegal, i don't have much to hide and even if the police asked me to unlock my phone, i'd do it !
What i don't like is having companies, google amongst others, siphoning my data and making money out of it, while offering in exchange a service that is becoming increasingly worst.
grapheneos with it's enhanced permissions and profiles is pretty god at preventing these spyware from stealing all my data, for instance you can have give whatsapp limited contact permission and make it run in a secondary profile.
face unlock is a tradeoff between security and convenience that i'd happily take ! But grapheneos doesn't give me that choice...
GrapheneOS doesn't support face unlocking right now, but they have a useful two-factor unlock option that requires both a PIN, and biometrics (currently a fingerprint on Pixel devices) to unlock the device while in AFU. It also allows you at the same time to use a long passphrase in BFU.
So these are the employees that ignore the hundreds of other atrocities their companies do against other countries, small firms, individuals, come out flags waving for some cherry-picked issues, and next day go back to their well paid jobs, vested stocks and office perks and lunch chefs to passively support these agendas further, even if they have the best career mobility across almost all industries.
A much simpler alternative is a $25 R36S handheld console (more powerful 4 core cpu, runs both debian and android) and print a different case with a keyboard.
> These are the same people who would lose their minds if their city government told them they could only buy food from vendors the city had approved, licensed, and taxed
But it is exactly like this in the developed world, and not many would buy food from a trunk of a roadside car.
I agree with the sentiment but to a certain degree you can vote with your currency. Also, in many places you can certainly vote for elected officials who are interested in using government tools to prevent and breakup monopolies.
Right, and people do vote with their wallets. They vote for the iPhone. We don't have iPhones because they exist; they exist because we keep buying them. This isn't a chicken and egg situation. Apple offered people a deliciously simplified computer in their pocket and people wanted that more than they wanted control. Their app store model hasn't meaningfully changed in almost two decades (except for whatever malicious compliance they're currently deploying in the EU). so to really examine the scope of the problem we need to acknowledge that almost everyone had a hand in creating it. I researched and ordered a new router that runs on open-source software today, and started setting up a Linux server. And now I'm in bed, scrolling HN on my iPhone.
Another importance difference is that you can pick the companies you use, even if you're a minority in your electoral district. (Except monopolies, of course).
Another important difference is that at least in theory the end goal of a government is the well being of its citizens, while for private companies it is profit.
...but you can. And, open your facebook Marketplace (I know, I know) and just type any food you like. You can buy it there, made by people like you. Risky, maybe, but you can.
It obviously depends on local laws, but it's very commonly illegal to sell prepared food without a license/permit. You might not get caught selling food on FB Marketplace, but that doesn't make it any less allowed.
I agree with the author regarding Apple's walled-garden app distribution, but the analogy just doesn't work here.
Read and think about what you wrote. How can an ai, completing specific scoped tasks, be in any way comparable to the scale of a human life? Maybe the same thing these execs forgot.
I am comparing competency not the "scale of a human life" or whatever that is supposed to mean. AI still lacks taste so it is still hard to replace human originality or creativity but that's almost it when it comes to work that can be done on a computer. It will very clearly surpass everyone in verifiable domains and already has surpassed most people.
We are already at that point where we just don't fully know what to do with what we already have and simply haven't fully internalised it. But all it will take is one economic shakeup to redistribute human intelligence from what we are familiar with.
That is the crux of the problem we're facing as a society: many, many leaders have this idea that they are better served by an AI that is 70% (?), 80% (?) correct when helping them make decisions about their business, than trusting humans - consultants, employees, pundits - that they don't even trust their judgments, bias, own goals, much less paying them.
For those people, an AI better (much better?) than a coin toss is the goal, if it means not relying on people.
Personally, I already deal weekly with people that veemently antagonizes every line of thinking if it isn't what ChatGPT told them before a meeting.
If one puts their faith in answers that come out of a black box, then one must justify the black box's omniscience, specifically by prioritizing it above human intellect and deprioritizing attempts to reason through its logic.
You saw it with older people blindly following sat navs because they'd forgotten how to navigate. And those were much less believable sounding devices!
It's not going to stop until/if the first execs are thrown in jail because the 'I just trusted AI' defense fails.
So the Pebble Duo was a one time thing based on the cache of old parts they found? Why... A lot of people would like a cheap small thin plastic watch. Most fans went after Amazfit Blips after Pebble went out for a reason.
Yup. I actually strongly prefer the look of the duo and consider the time to be ugly. Was fairly annoyed when I got an email saying that actually they can't deliver the watch I bought and would I like to pay more for the ugly one. (Although, some other folks on HN who did get a duo said it had quality issues, so I guess I dodged a bullet)
Yeah I also find the time pretty ugly. I actually had a pre order for it, but cancelled when they revealed the final design (which was very much not to my taste, whereas I liked the preliminary design). I know Eric really likes it, and probably others do too, so I don't see it changing, but I would really like something of the more sharply rectangular design of the original Pebble. It looked so cool.
Not quite the same: the Duo won't ever be made again, since the leftover parts are now all gone. The PT2 could be made again, but there is no guarantee.
My guess is there will at least be periodic runs, and people will just buy a watch if they anticipate needing one in the next year or two based on battery trajectory, for example.
How much loss did they accumulate until 2001? Pretty sure it wasn't the 44 billion OpenAI has. And Amazon didn't have many direct competitors offering the same services.
I believe less and less that scaling to hundreds of millions of user is not just a failure mode. There is a tipping point from which you only serve profits and shareholders/funders. Communities die by becoming too big.
Ask a very simple question: how would this generate profits, which high level manager would be motivated to do this? Sure, 15-20 years ago corporations would've made vanity/critics-industry appeasing projects like this out of pride alone. Those times are over.
It was to be expected that a lot of corps will want to milk the term "EU sovereignty" and good willed naive people who don't look inside the packaging.
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