erebion

You create a false dichotomy.

Sadly it’s an extractive technology and business model, those are not good for society.

You could still go to a professional email hoster, no need to do it all yourself.

Google mostly blocks email without SPF and they have a couple more rules, but they document those on their website.

no reason for you to apply genuine concerns

What? The issues by which I’m concerned are reason enough to be concerned.

Buying a used phone that is already at least somewhat supported is better than slop-coding another phone and wasting resources in the process and then others having to clean up the code that nobody actually understands.

Yes, new electronics are part of the problem, that’s why the community brings Linux to old phones.

The post from Casey, linked by lenni, addresses exactly those points. It’s still extractive and hurts communities.

Yeah, if changes are requested and you don’t know what the kernel maintainers want from you, you’ve lost.

Just that.

There is no true life within a false life.

The philosopher Theodor Adorno sums it up quite well.

Slavery, for example, wasn’t solved by handing slaves over to nicer owners, but by ending it.

In a similar way, it’s not possible to improve the world by using exploitative tools, you can’t improve something while destroying it.

For example, not using text generators because of the fossil fuels that this will burn is a good point. Just because it could use electricity from sustainable sources, does not mean it won’t hurt humanity to use it.

Just because it could be better does not mean it is.

I decided to not have a car, because while those can be made to hurt the planet less, they do hurt the planet a lot. And there’s already public transport. Even electric cars aren’t better than taking the train. And I live in a place where this works quite well, so I do that.

I can do better now, not in the future when LLMs might (or might not) better.

I don’t buy products that will quickly be trash just because the companies could build bettee products. We have a choice.

(Footnote: Adorno wrote that sentence looking at the fascist terror in Europe in the 40s. What he is saying, basically: You can’t do the right thing when you live in a system that punishes that. Try to start a protest against cruel Nazis and you’re dead. You can’t further understanding among nations under those circumstances.)

Sorry for the wall of text, having lots of thoughts.

You couldn’t use RedStar anyway. It blocks internet access and isn’t officially available outside North Korea. The only copies around are leaked copies.

I just hear “Let’s exploit others, it’s the fault of capitalism, not the fault of those driving exploitation”.

That’s not how you make the world a better place.

Or just use Ecosia or DuckDuckGo.

A search engine finds you places to look at and doesn’t hallucinate incorrect details.

I know it’s perfectly possible to do mainlining of a device and work on the kernel stuff simply by reading stuff, asking people and bouncing ideas while strengthening the community in the process and having fun with other phone hackers.

It’s not a good tool for research, it will just generate a hallucination and you end up doing something which does not work or just works somehow, but is not done correctly and will break in the future.

I talked to quite a few people recently at the postmarketOS and Alpine Linux conference, it definitely was noticed that more contributions are now coming in that do things wrong or in a subtly broken way and the submitting people have no clue.

If you rely on a lying computer for research, then your code will lie to you.

That’s just Mozilla. They like to change stuff for no apparent reason.

Hoping GNOME Web will have similad sync feature at some point, then I might just switch.

Currently using it mostly on my Mobian phone.

Redcore, for a moment I confused that name with RedStarOS, lol

Debian.

It’s unique in that it is very stable while not being the shiny new thing changing things back and forth for no reason (looking at you, Canonical), it just works and is run by a non-commercial group of people, not a corp.

Debian 43?

Then, tell me, how is the future? :D

I’m still on Debian 14 (wip/testing), to be released in more than a year.

Moving to gmail, not from it?

Google isn’t exactly your friend and will not get better.

Well, we know the best practices for the Nura project:

We forbid the use of generative AI tools in Nura.

It’s literally the first sentence of their policy.

since it’s better at reverse engineering and bug hunting than developing when compared to a human

Citation needed.

“marketshare”

Many distros do not send telemetry by default, so this “metric” must be wildly distorted.