(Using insane maniac as a compliment here; the world would be a much more boring and unenjoyable place without insane maniacs willing to waste their time making it a better or at least more interesting place.)

Thank you Sir/Maam, a better day was had here due to this…

Singularly fucking stupid IP gated moronicity. So much profit available before custom chips. Why?

That’s alright, they’ll suck it up eventually. Along with ‘age control’ de-anonymization.

Signed, GrapheneOS user.

And dissent is, by normalization, what allows peace in society.

Truly, but also by extension, tolerance makes for a more civilized society. Especially for the different.

comfortable with dissent

That’s a thing worth making mainstream. So much has been lost.

Particularly compelling.

The tragic fate of Wells’ Eloi was that they had devolved beyond the point of return. Their intelligence and will to act had atrophied from disuse.

Decades of lowering educational standards using excuses like ‘job readiness’, targeted destruction of attention span, ramping up the work week hours (including commute times, especially for those with multiple jobs and ‘gigs’) to destroy free time and make workers too exhausted for anything more than doom scrolling, like, say, organizing.

Not so much ‘disuse’ but a depressingly effective campaign hidden within economic ‘science’. Again, the metaphor strains, it’s certainly not what Wells had in mind, but the re-interpretation is chewy.

But another expected scenario is an attacker with a nondescript car and a wifi router inside who can sweep the neighborhood searching thru walls for Person X.

Hmmf, nasty, but labor intensive. Is it working on backscatter ? because your devices shouldn’t be responding much (beyond ping / authentication query level).

Also, at that point they can just use whatever fits in a van, radar, IR scanners, who knows what, fucking X-rays maybe, don’t know that they’d bother with this.

Avoiding it being deployed at scale to everybody’s router might be more important.

It’s a (corrupted) router level attack, so the sensible counter is OpenWRT or rolling your own router. I doubt many cheap routers have the grunt to run this anyway.

a psychopath, a public threat to society, a terrorist if you will.

I’ve heard it argued rather well that it’s more dread than terror that these pricks create. It’s a useful distinction, but ‘dreadist’ rolls off the tongue like a brick.

keeping the cat in the bag

Just the neoliberal instinct to promote monopoly.

what does Uncle Sam do?

If you have adequate opsec, nothing ;}. At the moment, them pursuing it might provoke other governments to dump those laws, after all the deal was for tariff free trade, turn around is fair play. But manufacturers won’t want to take the legal risk until it shakes out.

Climate change only cares how much CO2 you emit, not how much you get for it.

What comes after bargaining? Oh, yeah, depression. Ways to go yet.

I’ve never seen a roadmap

Neither have I, sounds like a good project in itself if it doesn’t exist. ‘Drivers for xyz, reverse engineering something’ is part of the problem, phones usually (nearly always best I understand) have proprietary blobs of firmware to a greater or lesser degree and it’s a moving target different between manufacturers and most often models. Qualcomm modems are particularly egregious for patent reasons. US trade deal enforced global DMCA laws make reverse engineering legally tricky. Hence the desire for linux specific hardware platforms.

I get (and share) the purist hate on saOS’s non OSS UI, but to get linux phones up and running you need app support₁ and market adoption (people buying phones) to make it a viable switch from the walled gardens for more people to use it, to get more hardware made and so on. Chicken and egg deal, bootstrapping. As such anything that gets people in front of linux phones should be embraced at this point, as long as it can run linux native code₂ . When the snowball is rolling, then push for full OSS.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good (enough for now).

1: There’s plenty of linux apps but few are designed for small touchscreens. Android emulation often takes us back to non open source anyway, even as it helps adoption.

2: and preferably can be re-flashed with something better later, which is becoming rare as bootloaders get locked down.

Banger of a song.

Afterwards, “economy in a recession” is synonymous to “free buffet” to those at the reins.

Not at all wrong, but there’s only so much blood parasites can suck before the host dies (and with luck kills the parasites, and / or sends a strong signal to everybody else to get their infestations eradicated, or at the very least under control), and that host is already hurting bad.

Perhaps I’m being optimistic, but a collapse of the likely magnitude could be that straw, or maybe it’ll just be the back of US influence that breaks.

The lower prices could be aimed at undercutting the competition.

Mobster voice: Sure would be a pity if the monetization potential of those 2 huge IPOs (3 if you count SpaceX with xAI deadweight rolled in) went boom when that’s all that’s holding your economy out of recession (depression depending on how they cook the books).

Fuck Zuck, the cuck that sucks.

Yup, easy peasy. And if you really want AI deep research, how about plugging it into your own local LLM with Vane

damage that will take decades to undo.

Extremely unlikely to ever be undone IMO, decades may as well be never. Otherwise, agreed.

Interesting to speculate how many of these are “Bullshit Jobs”, which arguably are the only ones AI is capable of replacing. While this may suck in the short term (especially for USians and others without a decent social security net), in the long run it may lead to more fulfilling work.