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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Hybrid batteries don’t last very long for this reason.

    Uhh…they last at least a decade, which is also why for the longest time they had a 10-year powertrain warranty (as required by law to help the transition.) Battery management software on hybrids keep the battery cycling between roughly 40% and 80% until they age out and the bands have to increase. On plug-in hybrids it is managed a bit more complex, with a pocket of energy saved for the plug-in charging/driving. Same principle though.

    Also, since the engine in a hybrid does not have to run a full duty-cycle, nor run at high RPM/power levels as frequently as an ICE-only vehicle, the engine also has a longer more gentle life. No need for turbo or supercharger, and the electric motors don’t care about altitude, so no power fade when climbing mountains.

    Subarus need their headgaskets changed more frequently than a good hybrid would need batteries.

    Someone’s been reading “I’m scared of the future” myth web sites.


  • The mobile companies are slowly hiding all radio controls to guarantee the user is too inconvenienced to keep turning them off. Guarantees more enriched telemetry gathering.

    Happens at the app level too, although it may be less malicious and more crappy coding. Watch Duty on Android, for example, is really a pain of an app in that regard. You can disable android’s WiFi/Bluetooth scanning, but their app uses that Google service specifically instead of raw GPS, so you lose the ability to get location-based wildfire alerts. If you don’t consent to Google stalking.

    What a trade-off, if you don’t give away your location Metadata, you can’t be kept safe from fires?


  • They used to run on a model of “we know best” which is arrogant, but passable in a developing industry like earlier mobile where things needed work. Unfortunately, they still think they know best, and that closed-minded approach only works so long until you lose sync with the tolerance of the general public. Honestly surprised it took them this long. iOS and MacOS have both rotted terribly.

    Take the UI aspects alone. Samsung “leaked” hints about a glass UI, saw user feedback, and pivoted. Apple released a glass UI because they would have never checked what users actually wanted, nor even bothered to see the user feedback from Samsung users and realize it’d apply to them as well.





  • Yeah, amazingly dumb. I have a ThinkPad x201 tablet from 2010 that still works to this day. I upgraded it and added a cellular modem. It still has a dial-up modem. It has gigabit Ethernet. I upgraded the RAM to the eventual maximum 8GB. I replaced the hard drive several times and it now has a 1TB SSD. I replaced the battery once, and only once, because it is so old, I found a surplusser with old OEM batteries, that will eventually fail and I’ll probably have to crack it open and rebuild. It has a CardBus slot that had various things including PCMCIA camera readers, an ExpressCard/34 memory card that had an entire Linux OS on it at one time.

    It has a dock with a slot for an optical drive I never ended up purchasing. It has tunnels designed in the keyboard tray so if you spill a drink, the liquid is routed through safe holes, and the dock even has secondary safe holes. You could pour a gallon of milk on the keyboard and it’d end up on your desk, bypassing all of the computer and dock circuits. Oh it also has a VGA port on it, DisplayPort on the dock, it basically has every computer interface spanning 30 years. It even has a USB port that has BIOS settings for iPhone or BlackBerry charging when the computer is off, (they both had different USB charging protocols back then) and it’s marked in yellow plastic in the port so you can charge your phone off your computer.

    Oh, and it has a headphone jack, a microphone jack, a camera on the screen, stereo mics on the screen for video calls, trackpad, TouchPoint, I can’t even remember all the things it has. A similar-sized modern MacBook has 1/10 of what that old computer can do. It’s currently running Debian and still used on my workbench to this day.

    I didn’t have to build it, I actually bought it on a “black friday” deal when the model was being discontinued.

    Oh, and the tablet part, the display spins around and you can eject a stylus from the body of the computer. Wacom tablet surface overlayed on the screen. With eraser accessory on the other side. Screen lays flat on the keyboard backwards. Dedicated buttons in that mode. Whole thing can be services with Phillips screwdrivers, even field-stripping the hard drive or RAM.

    Also has fingerprint scanner to boot with TPM. 15 years old, it still knows my fingerprint. Not even sure I have the software to reprogram the TPM anymore.


  • GrapheneOS, the privacy and security focused aftermarket operating system, has received an experimental build for the Pixel 10 series

    Received? GrapheneOS are the authors of their software, they don’t receive. Curious how they got the binary blobs to get it to function.

    That “article” is terrible, and doesn’t even touch on the crucial issue - the crux, as it were. Android is one thing, hardware support is the magic piece Google is trying to remove to close their borders and kill creativity forever.

    Rooting for Pixel 10 native support over here, but was it an employee leak? Similar hardware driver copypasta with modifications? Did Google just finally share the necessary binaries legitimately?

    This whole thing is so vague.





  • Wow, that’s an interesting one, thanks for that. That would be quite annoying to deal with.

    In that case, since the 2FA is coming from the carrier, if you can disable 2G and 3G on your handset, the air link on LTE and above is AES-based encrypted at least, if the carrier configures it correctly, even though the channel itself often isn’t. Or if very paranoid you can use WiFi calling in airplane mode on a burner so the carrier sends the message over the wifi calling IMS-encapsulated-in-VPN-connection over the Internet.

    The chance of someone being able to intercept that 2FA code in a way that could get into your bank account is pretty much absolutely scant.

    Not trying to change how you do things either, though. Just knowing how terrible some banks can be at writing software, I’d be more apt to trust “weaker” methods versus apps. The future is quite exhausting.


  • They don’t need your permission to gather all sorts of data from most modern smartphones, nor can you really deny some of it. (Some you can, like camera, and microphone, allegedly.) Part of the whole banking<->handset manufacturer agreement also frequently allows “special access” outside of the traditional user-permission security model. For…“security” to “prevent fraud”.







  • This must be a European problem perhaps? I can’t understand why this is the deal breaker for so many.

    Banks have web sites. I don’t know why anyone would ever allow their financial institutions access to their phone’s plethora of sensors and the available telemetry on what they are doing on their mobile device 24/7. That links confirmed ID + “trusted platform” + biometrics + transactions + location + all the metadata every other app hoovers up in one convenient place. The very same people across the pond are worried about having to verify ID to look at porn, but are cool with their bank knowing the position of their accelerometer while they’re taking a dump.