I've been running GrapheneOS for a few months now, keeping my old Samsung on WiFi as a backup.

It is such a breath of fresh air. It is so quiet and functional. It feels like it prioritizes me, the user. I am so grateful to have this OS.

Of course it has flaws, but they're lesser flaws. Like the crop tool is sometimes unusable in the gallery app. I can live with that. I couldn't live with the AI onslaught and spyware infiltration.

Respectfully, at this point, do we need Googlers to explain?

Structurally: launch-dependent levels/career advancement. Design wise: massive over reliance on A/B testing. Philosophically: a company hell bent on observing, categorizing, and exploiting us in extremis in exchange for only a tiny "relevant" slice of their potential deliverable.

Because of their focus on "scale", they have never cared about any individual user. The indifference of their technical systems is absolute.

But in this hyperpersonalisation era, we somehow give them a free pass when their A/B testing should catch these exact things.

Taking a vacation abroad cant be a new concept for them.

In a VR headset the virtual screen distance is set by the distance of the microdisplay from the lens in the headset.

It's not crazy to think you could move the microdisplay position and get a virtual display at 6". There might be other optical consequences (aberrations, change in viewable area) but in principle it can work.

The microdisplays are usually fixed in place (and sometimes the display and optics are a single package), so it would likely be a bespoke solution.

I'd be open to trying something like this. It might be the kind of simple solution that would work for me.

a few AR glasses come with adjustable knobs for nearsighted people. So, not all of them are fixed distance.

Here's some context for people who are curious about CA DMV data sales:

https://www.thedrive.com/news/35457/why-is-the-california-dm...

I spoke to a McMaster web team member at a bar. They told me that the real reason there's usually no brand information is that they buy the same bolt (for example) from many different suppliers to guarantee availability.

They will only put a brand on a product (example: 3M DP420) when it truly comes from a single source and has special meaning/implications.

That said, I order tens of thousands of dollars of McMaster Carr items each year. They almost always come in packages from the OEM with OEM part numbers. So if I want more bolts like that, I just look at the box they were delivered in. The info is just not on the web interface.

I've purchased equipment from scrapped solar factories in the Bay Area. Tons of people lost jobs and not just technologists.

And I've purchased solar from people who only had jobs because of cheap Chinese panels. Someone in the US still has to market, sell, install, finance, and maintain the panels. Your anecdote isn't interesting by itself, and I was asking specifically about the silly claim made about technologists.

Meta made the decision to take control of what users see via the feed, and to show them mostly content which is NOT from friends. Content that "performs well".

The testimony is disingenuous, but true. People see less of their friends because they are show less of their friends. Friends post less becuase no one sees it.

Yeah with my friends we moved to a matrix group.

This matches my experience. In addition I was advised/strongly encouraged to "go dark" on social media and refrain from ever discussing work at lunch, even with teammates.

My badge only worked where I had explicitly been given access, and desks were to be kept clear and all prototypes or hardware had to be locked in drawers and/or covered with black cloths. Almost every door was a blind door with a second door inside, so that if the outer one opened, it was not possible to see into the inner space.

Strange take. Pixelated camouflage is and was an attempt to make a scale invariant camouflage (works at near and far distances) by encoding patterns at multiple spatial frequencies. It's far from "computers are cool" or pixel art.

There are always reasons (rationalizations) why it had to be exactly like that. Like so many acronyms that are really backronyms. Or, if you are familiar with IT, why a certain technology is "needed" in a product.

I'm not saying that these camo patterns don't work, but the particulars (e.g. why it had to be rectangular pixels, not hexagons or nature-inspired fractals) are often connected to fashions. My personal opinion is that dazzle camo looks cool, by the way ;)

Camo has been and continues to be very well studied. It’s actually incredible how well the pixel camo works compared to everything else. If there were anything better they would be using it

Conceivably this would be done better with more resolution and pixelated patterns are also not found in nature. Keep in mind this rolled out in an era where army recruiting was investing heavily in video games and other favorable media in effort to connect with a new generation of youth. High tech seeming uniforms are also for the morale of the soldier as much as they are for function.

The similarities to Google Books are interesting. Google created Books based on their own scans of books, which publishers considered piracy.

The legal battle initiated by the Authors Guild was vicious and it damaged and hampered Books and other entities and scanning projects like the Internet Archive.

Now Facebook pirates all the world's books, uses them without paying authors or publishers, and seemingly faces no consequences.

I would strongly prefer to live in a world where we could easily search and access all books, than one where the richest guys get to exploit them without consequences.