Do you have access to credit unions?

The GrapheneOs team is quite particular about hardware.

I would gladly purchase a phone that came preloaded with LineageOS.

“Better than we have now.” often wins over waiting for perfection.

CoMaps is quite nice.

There are also still companies selling navigation devices that mount in a car windshield, assuming the car doesn’t already have one built in.

Pro tip - those navigation devices also often have an accident camera that records if it feels an impact - which is a good idea anyway.

GMS apps work fine. The only ones that don’t work are ones that act invasively enough to notice they are sandboxed and disable themselves.

Mostly bank apps. Which is irritating, since they all have mobile friendly websites that work fine without needing to know my location and everything else about my phone.

Google has made it extremely hard to degoogle.

Just remember that there are no nice reasons why they are working this hard to keep your phone captive.

We can argue about how bad it will get, but there’s only worse things coming from this effort.

We can take action. We can grab the die that Joel McHale has tossed into the air.

if they want a document printed they just go out to some print shop.

In fairness, it can be expensive to stock the holy water necessary to fend off the demons that inhabit all printers.

I’ll wait and see if they can add some AI to it. But if they can, I’ll invest my entire life savings.

I see you subscribe to the Wolfwood school of pacifism: “I didn’t kill anyone!”

Yes. Web apps existed before JavaScript.

Yes. That’s what AI actually adds - plausible deniability.

My partner and I used to use location sharing pretty much 100% of the time. We just felt better knowing we could find each other.

But today, we do not, because the trust is shattered.

Google just cannot be trusted with our locations.

We need to get scientific about this.

Relevant XKCD: The Difference

Relevant XKCD: The Difference

I agree. But I mean, WordPress and SquareSpace already did that for about 98% of web traffic. It was a big part of the .Com Boom and Bust.

But we keep coming up with new stuff to build web software for, and there’s still plenty of web developer jobs. And there’s still so so many many shit websites.

Today’s AI can only remix, not do the new stuff. Maybe it’ll get good enough to tackle the novel new stuff, someday. I doubt I’ll live to see it, if it happens.

The root of my crankiness is: If we’re about to no longer need developers, I should be seeing widespread websites whose search, cart and checkout actually work correctly every time.

The snake oil salesmen are bragging that the era of carpentry has ended, from on top of a wooden stage that is falling to pieces with each step.

I would say, it can only get better, but it can really go both ways from here.

why do you guys always just move the goalposts?

“Vibe coding” has a pretty specific definition, which includes not understanding the code. So writing tests, or correcting the code both disqualify a piece of work from being technically “vibe coded”.

“yes”, “no”, and “ship” is hilarious.

Knowing it (well, appearing to, by regurgitating the average) better than many developers, pretty soon. A huge number of us know disturbingly little about how computers actually work. (Edit: Sorry, I’m being needlessly unkind to a bunch of us, since as Snoogums said, the current stuff doesn’t actually know anything at all, yet.)

Knowing it better than top developers is a science fiction fantasy singularity daydream.

And even Heinlein’s and Asimov’s post singularity fiction novels acknowledged that there would likely be roles for expert humans.

But for how much longer?

How much longer will we need people who understand how things work?

kindness seems pretty exclusive to white people.

I suppose big portions of history would nod quietly at this, if they could.

With maybe a clarifying note that the real goal was classism, and racism was just a convenient way to achieve more classism.