• 12 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I’d consider it unlikely that Google or Apple put anything like that into their phones on purpose, because of the reputational hit if it came out. But, new vulnerabilities are being exploited every day. And don’t forget the need to protect metadata.

    Do you know the movie Citizenfour, a documentary about Edward Snowden? During its production, if the filmmakers wanted to discuss something sensitive, they would leave their phones in the office and go outside to have their conversation without them. There still might have been listening devices around, but they did what they could about the phones.


  • I swear, this place is even stupider than Reddit. Kamala Harris spent a billion dollars literally campaigning against Trump, far more than you did by simply voting against him, but she helped him by running such a terrible campaign. And Biden? Among other things he managed to actually get infected with COVID just in time for his debate with Trump, causing him to throw a cog on nationwide TV. That helped Trump more than anything. If he had just worn an N95 mask, well I can’t guarantee that he would have been re-elected, but he’d have probably avoided infection and done a lot better in the debate. Thanks, Biden.





  • I think you are rationalizing. Biden and Trump both did terrible at dealing with Covid. OWS was one of the few things done right. It really was something like the moon program. Otherwise you can never credit or blame a politician for anything unless they are the ones personally doing the work. But that’s not what they do.

    The alternative to OWS would have been to just let big pharma develop vaccines the usual way, instead of using a lot of approaches in parallel with government funding to get usable ones faster. Of course the protection from those vaccines was then pissed away under both administrations, by doing almost nothing (except during the initial lockdowns) to stop airborne spread of the virus. The Herman Cain Award is one of the most memorable legacies from that.




  • The 8 to 9 upgrade wasn’t terribly expensive but the rest were a lot more. Do you think the individual upgrades were worth it? What were the biggest jumps in usability?

    I still think of the 4A as the last good Pixel, since it has a headphone jack. So I’ve been wondering if it can run current versions of Graphene.

    The main attraction of the 9 from my perspective is NTN (satellite) messaging, but older models might get that later. I certainly don’t want AI in my phone.

    I see there are some fairly affordable older Pixels on woot right now, particularly refurbs, but some new units too. Refurb 6 is $145 and refurb 7 is $200. New 9 Pro XL is $900, way more than I’m willing to pay. I wonder whether the older ones are basically as good if you don’t care about AI or the fanciest cameras.