• 30 Posts
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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: February 10th, 2024

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  • That explanation is fair enough but the headline is red meat the the EV disinformation brigade.

    It’s funny how words affect people differently.

    Not long ago, I posted a short, precisely-stated comment mentioning an observed fact that I had verified with a relevant authority. When I later checked in, I was surprised to find someone accusing me of spreading misinformation, and my comment removed by a moderator. It was clear that my accuser had badly misinterpreted my words. He refused to admit it or accept clarification. (And the mod had already acted, rashly.)

    I re-checked what I had written about twenty times over the course of the day. There was nothing there to support the accusation. My best guess is that my phrasing or the subject matter might have touched on rough emotions from a bad experience, leading him to see what he expected to see instead of what I wrote, and triggering attack mode.

    Communicating well really is complicated. It takes work on both sides, and can quickly turn into a bad time if it goes off the rails.

    Because of this, I’ve been making an effort to read (and re-read) charitably, especially with people I don’t know well.













  • OEM support for the device is needed because an alternate OS cannot provide firmware updates otherwise.

    Firmware and drivers can be made open, just as other software can be made open. It’s really just a matter of incentives. In my experience, law tends to be a pretty effective incentive.

    If the bill of materials included the legal requirements discussed here, then a component supplier would either start producing open firmware/specs, or they would lose that market to another supplier.

    Obviously, Android would not be the only project/product affected by such a legal change.


  • I hate the formatting of most forums. Reddit and Lemmy’s comment nesting is excellent.

    The funny thing about this is that it’s just plain old threading, which has been around since the 1980s or earlier, with the slight variation of showing message contents directly in the thread tree instead of beside it (thanks to today’s high-res displays).

    Usenet readers did threading. Email apps could do it if the developers wanted to; the required information is there. I’ll bet there’s forum software that can do it if an admin enables it.

    For some reason, most corporations seem to have decided that classic message threading has no place in their interfaces. They resort to piling things into stacks or serializing them into seemingly endless scrolls. It fails to represent the structure of group discussions, and sadly, has been going on for so long that many people might not have ever seen the better alternative outside of reddit.



  • mox@lemmy.sdf.orgtoKDE@lemmy.kde.socialMacBook Air owner?
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    10 days ago

    On the other hand, I can put an open OS on my Android and get security updates long after the manufacturer has abandoned it. Can’t do that with an iPhone. (But honestly, few Android devices make it easy, and none that I know of allow every little part of the system to be supported this way.)

    It’s about time we started legally requiring manufacturers to unlock our hardware when support ends, and release the driver specs ahead of time, so the open software community can take over support. The unending accumulation of e-waste due to nothing more than abandoned software is unforgivable.

    This goes hand-in-hand with the right to repair.