I just need a search engine the will also give calculator and unit conversation results. Everything else sounds be search results.

At this point, it’s been too many years that I will just query “76 f in c” or “2500*12/3” from my url bar, so this I appreciate the most modest “intelligence” from my web browser.

Literally everything else makes my experience worse, though.

So I’m taking recommendations for more search engines to try out. I don’t know why I start page bothers me so much, but it feels like the results my ISP would give me through DNS capture a decade and two ago.

Gross oversimplification of Private vs Public. We are really taking about three kinds of ownership models, if arguing in good faith.

1. The people that are invested in the company, usually the people that built it, are at the helm.

2. The people that built it took a payout from Private Equity who now have ownership stake, and who now set the growth agenda.

3. The compant is now public, and given to the irrational whims if the ENTIRE marketplace, while at the same time primarily being at the whims of the board and the largest few investor stakeholders.

Steam has largely existed exclusively in the first category. So have most of the oldest businesses in the planet, which are often family-owned and maintained operations across generations.

Aye

Things are getting Hua-wei out of hand!

It normalizes the anti-equity principles of the granting party, which now occupies the US govt.

The benefactor had already shown exactly how they treat people that aren’t white Christian men, and it’s up to schools, businesses and organizations like the Foundation to show resistance and inclusivity.

Where can I read about the requirements? Did whole, I’m prepared to pay dues to belong in a guild or union, depending on cost, and also I’m currently unemployed. Am I welcome, even? Lol.

Bruh. Read the room. You have been taking swings at everyone in these threads and basically telling anyone that can’t beg, borrow or steal a Pixel to fuck off.

Nobody should take you seriously when you talk about discouragement. I asked how you and I could encourage our community today and you told me not to worry about folks in the developing world that can’t “work a few extra hours” for a mythical premium handset.

This was your smartest reply today.

“There are dozens of us! DOZENS!”

Thanks for spelling out all of this. I was you to know the I read every word of it.

The guy we both were responding to managed to waste an hour of my own day with back-and-forth so I figured it was worth seeing how others had torn apart the nonsense, and while I knew the issues in a theory level you explaining Brazil’s ecosystem was an excellent illustration I learn from.

Good luck out there. May we someday both learn to evade feeding the trolls.

Yeah, no, don’t take it personally. He’s just been attacking anyone in the threads that doesn’t buy into his prescribed “solution” while trying to also be some kind of victim-martyr.

Thanks for being here. Community needs vice and we will have to find a way, together, to back the creators that can actually code the paths forward.

Ironically, with an iPhone you could at least buy into Test Flight privately-signed-apps.

Anyhow, it took me a couple days to realize the guy that you and I have both been replying to is just a troll. Thanks for explaining your thoughts through this discussion, and try not to be too demoralized by the guy.

I’ve responded, repeatedly, and at length to you. I’ve treated you like you want to be a responsible member of community. I’ve tried to treat you with benefit of the doubt.

You have generally replied with pithy, two-liner insults and red herrings. I feel comfortable now just disregarding you.

I hope someday you find your way to kindness.

I live in a country where the government is now weaponizing the mobile data on our phones to track us, and assault us. They have begun kidnapping citizens without due process and incarcerating people with legal status, without even filling charges.

These state agencies are buying tech that let’s them follow people around by their phones, and the leading mobile platform companies are openly complicit with governments that assault their people.

When you ask if I’m living in the developing world, I travel international a lot but my home country is experiencing rapid decline, and they have banned several categories of phone manufacturers, most famously Huawei consumer products. Ironically, because that company is suspected of doing the same things that Google is doing (granting access to back-end services and data to government entities).

So it’s really not about any one device.

The people affected by this state violence (a ) deserve privacy just like anyone else, and (b ) depend on their mobile devices for every part of their daily life just like everybody else.

How are you going to help them, when you can’t even help yourself?

Nobody can “help themselves” with a technology platform. It taken cooperation with others, to make systemic changes.

Again, I personally will be fine. I can buy a Chinaphone. Or I can fund a Linux project phone for myself. Or, gods help me, I could buy an iPhone.

But what about the people on the other end of the line? What good is one secure walkie talkie?

ROMs rarely work as one-size-fits-all-devices, yeah?

I only know of four smartphone categories of phones that are really available in the markets around the world today, en masse.

1. The big tentpole phones available from Samsung, Google, Moto, and maybe two other players.

2. Boutique devices from vendors like Nothing and Fairphone with limited reach to global markets (like, being Euro only, or being only distributed in markets that can buy into they ideology, etc). Nearly all of them prices or is MOST humans’ reach.

3. Chinaphones. A mix of fly-by-night brands with ghost shifts in factories that make many varieties of phones with other people’s designs, but have extremely limited first party support and probably zero ROM support from the global community … And then the handful of tech markings like Xiami, HTC, Huawei, and anyone else that bends the knee to the CCP. Virtually no NA market penetration in this decade, and tremendous barrier for entry, for most of the Western world. Also, security issues galore.

4. iPhones.

All that to say, I don’t think a more featured OS existed it’s the way forward, with people all jockeying to make new ROM’s for everyone to NOT be able to run on their phones.

I’m hopeful folks smarter than I will be able to come in about the potential for sandboxes in it phones with their own capacity for running unsigned apps, like a virtualization platform.

“Job” is a precious commodity for many of us.

You understand that people who live in the developing world, and have hostile governments that will weaponize Meta/Google’s data and telemetry against them, ALSO deserve privacy and liberty with their devices too, right?

This is why I’m saying that being prescriptive about what hardware we use is not the end game.

It’s going to have to come from the software platform.

I carry an S22 (with no Google services allowed on it) and an S25. I could buy any flagship phone in cash and not blink. Most folks around you and me don’t have this kind of privilege.

I’m fine.

I’m saying that we can’t ask or expect everyone to have the means to do so, AND that tellibg all of them to buy Pixels to fund the very company that is fucking everyone over, in hopes they leave the bootloader for those phones unlocked indefinitely, is basically just complying in advance.

While you’re busy insulting me and others, I seriously think we need a campaign to empower devs because the solutions are going to have to come from software, and that takes real people’s labor, talent and time. That is solely what I’m advocating for.

This is your community. It rises or falls with how we treat each other. How can you and I encourage each other, today?

1. It’s not a “solution” if it doesn’t solve for most of us. Likely you and I both need to federate with others for results because I’m honestly not a qualified software developer but …

2. Modern flagship phones have more than enough resources to run non-gaming app’s within some other container or even with full virtualization or, worst case scenario, emulation. We desperately need folks to figure out porting Dockerlike platform tools and making them accessible for normies like me.

If we can run an entire Windows environment and, separately, if we can run Hades II on a yesteryear Samsung, we should be able to get a sufficiently sandboxed environment together that’s qualified to run the weather apps and calculator apps I run on FDroid.

Because I’ll be god-damned if I’m going to entrust Google’s calculator app with my contacts and phone status permissions.

Not to say I’m entitled to any of their labor but I would join a crowdfunding program in a heartbeat.

I’m even willing to use the web apps or webpages for banking, if the browsers can make the handshakes. I’ll forfeit using the bank first party apps, if their websites are full featured.

And the bootloader is now locked down across Samsung’s ecosystem, as of this year. Sucks.

If you move to using an unsecured “chinaphone” as an alternative to the big three handset vendors, then it’s unlikely they are target devices for the myriad of uncertified ROM’s.

I think we are going to need software solutions that can run on major Androdis distributions across the variety of hardware.

I think we’re going to need something like UTM or Docker (virtualization or containerization) for running our unsigned Android apps and services, and I don’t know how feasible it will be.

I literally named two different phone models, and I think dismissing that people are often bound to what handsets are available to them is … Well, honestly just cruel.

Most of us don’t have the cash to throw down for phones all the time and we need scalability to protect ALL of us, not just those of us cash flush.

My fingers are still crossed folks figure out some containerization or virtualization solution between now and the Goo-lag.