martheen

In theory, yes, a dedicated development team should be able to write a usable feature phone OS today, considering we had blazing fast feature phones in 2013 at even lower spec playing music seamlessly while browsing the web.

In practice this phone's YouTube reviews show it's running dog slow while lacking basic features, just like pretty much any other recently released feature phones at its price point.

This phone cost about one-fifth of India's minimum monthly wage, while proper new Android cost one-third of monthly wage. My country's economy is somewhat in the same ballpark as India and I doubt anyone I know would buy this. In an r/dumbphones reviews, comments by Indians shows nobody cares about these devices aside from those buying weird devices for curiosity sake.

A dedicated app that's only compatible with itself and only have miniscule install count means nothing. I tried downloading it and it only even support 4 countries prefix at the moment. It's also not that cheaper compared to "proper" smartphone from other brands in that area. Notebookcheck says it's launched with 3999 rupees while I see Itel Zeno 10 is just 4769 rupees. With India's unskilled labor minimum monthly wage about 20000 rupees I don't think anyone would care about the price difference.

I can literally buy a nice house with that just outside the city. And we somehow have universal healthcare despite the average salary is not even one-tenth of American.

https://www.tomshardware.com/speakers/in-a-blind-test-audiop...

A better headphone/speaker in ideal room might be able to deliver better reproduction, but beyond that with lossless digital source and spec-conformant player, the result should be equal. Any fancy cabling, power supply, shielding (beyond what's required by the spec) shouldn't affect the result in anyway noticeable by the ear.

That would be WEB, I'm guessing because WEB is public domain.

If you mean parents using their children SSN to open a credit card, this is because US banking system is always decades behind the rest of the world, so they just accept the number blindly even though technically the children aren't allowed to open a loan yet, being minor.

In theory once the child grows up and shocked that their credit score is ruined, they can file a police report to wipe the debt, but that also means their parents will go to jail, a large risk considering they're likely not in a good physical/mental health in the first place.

Other countries solved this by either having national ID or a working KYC system.

Probably not. OLED screens use less energy the more absolute dark pixel in the screen, and darker anything (can be greyscale or color) consume somewhat less than brighter anything, but greyscale on its own usually don't change how much absolute dark and darker pixels being displayed, unless you also tweak the brightness. Usually, the color filter is applied at the end of the process, so the GPU don't get to skip any calculation.

If it makes you use your device less, then you do save energy a bit.

The only people considering data centers in space are those too out of touch to remember that their vacuum flask retain heat for hours. At any usable capacity we'd be talking about massive field of dissipators, which can't be possibly profitable considering there are far more lucrative payload compared to dumb panels. Some would pretend there's a just around the corner tech to solve the heat waste, but if such tech really exists one of the criticisms of terrestrial data center (wasting stupid amount of water) would've been solved anyway making space data centers even less viable.

And there's also bitflips. Acceptable for astronauts carrying normal laptop to watch movies, but in a data center? Solving it through redundancy easily cut the usable capacity to half, and there's not enough shielding with any competition for the payload slot.

The usual criticism of Mars colonization is maintaining a base in Antarctic is already a heroic effort despite being relatively easier. Google and Microsoft mostly abandoned their "data center underwater in nearby shore" plans even though in those the tech would've only sat for few minutes going down or alternatively waiting for the problematic module being floated to the surface.

Which makes me wonder how they claim to support WhatsApp since they no longer support KaiOS. Maybe it's an Android fork instead.

That's also how one of my first book that's focused on the language (instead of those focusing on how and what to do to build the cool stuff) feels like. Just pages of things that would've probably keep a language lawyer giddy but my blue-collar brain skip to sleep.

Head First series try to take different approach, but by then my brain has already too used to question every single sentence and goes on its way exploring which books simply aren't designed for.

Nah, then someone can still beat it out of you. Instead encode and tattoo it to a hamster with a cage that will auto open if you haven't check in in 24 hours. When the adversary is holding you, the hamster will escape and the neighbor's cat will take care of the rest.

I mean, if you're deliberately being a dick about it, they will ask for a warrant and have the LEO accompanying them while triangulating, they can easily figure out which unit and even room you're in by walking around in the building with directional receiver.

But in general, yeah, unless you do it regularly, living near sensitive facilities (airport, military base, hospital, factories, research labs etc) or deliberately transmitting at/near emergency frequencies (police, paramedic etc) at most you'll get yelled by a pissed off operator (at that point, stop, they could be already coordinating with someone else to triangulate you)

For an artificial it's weirdly obsessed with farmers in a certain country across the ocean

Someone complained, they send someone to check and triangulate, verify that the operator doesn't have the license, then issue a warning or fine.

It's really good at understanding implied meanings. With other LLMs I often had to add a hint to clarify and guide, but Gemini can easily follow and guess the current tension and mood.

To handle older cars that can't close the door by itself, Waymo (used to?) pay nearby DoorDash drivers to close it.

That makes me wonder what happen if only the back seat eject, turns out there's a nice picture about that https://theaviationgeekclub.com/story-f-14-pilot-able-land-t...

Poverty tourism is a thing. Can even pack a trip to scare students on what happen if they don't study

Cross border payment with QR codes are already a thing in plenty of Southeast and East Asian countries. Crypto and stablecoins aren't needed (nor wanted, due to money laundering risks).

Ah, so they're leaving the money on the table. I suppose they're worried about money laundering.

Indonesia's electronic wallet have two tiers, unverified and verified. You don't even need a bank account (because most people don't), just a local number (which even tourist can buy easily at airport), with the limitation on unverified tier is that you can only top it up (by cash if you don't have local bank account) and spend it on merchant, no receiving nor sending money. There's also transaction limit but most of the population won't cross that in normal days.

QR payments are ubiquitous in South East Asia. The eventual goal is ASEAN-wide interoperability, and some are even already interoperable with South Korean, Japanese and Chinese counterparts. And as expected, the US is also complaining about those, merely because Americans can't grasp the concept, like how they lag on pin adoption.

Doesn't seem too different from QRIS in Indonesia, authentication is relatively painless since some apps offer either pin or fingerprint. Being open standard (multiple banks, electronic wallet and payment gateways support it, multiple payment apps support it, all interoperable) probably help since there's never any delay I've experienced for years, and this system is handling from small payment on roadside hawkers to electronic purchase in large stores both offline and online.

More fancy payment flow are also available, such as vendors generating one-time QR code that already include the payment amount, and the user apps generating one-time QR code that the vendor scan, thus switching some of user steps to the vendor.

In most cities I've lived and visited, using QR is far more convenient than paper. Good luck using contactless when most phones don't support it, and even when Visa & MasterCard pushed their contactless standard, I never encounter a single vendor with a working machine (this range from small shops to large hypermarket). Maybe because they have bigger MDR than QR, but from customers PoV contactless simply don't work, until QRIS also adopt NFC and suddenly it's workable (but not widespread yet since most phones still don't)

I suppose someone who want ereader only experience will just go with the vanilla firmware or flash CrossPoint, which this project forked from.

I personally hope this could drive more sales for those who don't necessarily want an ereader (or already have one) but are interested in tinkering with it (I doubt anyone looking for gaming or messaging will pick it, seeing it's still more expensive than a proper Android phone), and thus lower the price of future models for everyone.

There's probably some niche where ridiculously long battery life (plugging a small solar panel will effectively make it self-sufficient) and sunlight readable screen with very basic apps would be welcome.

For crossing the Channel, definitely not. A very special exception can be made with prior arrangement for those with disabilities that made entering & leaving their vehicle too cumbersome, but they aren't going to ride this kind of bus.

In my city, if the area is so crowded I can pick a stranger to follow to the common destination or if it's so empty that I don't have to worry about walking into someone, I can confidently read even the most engrossing novel on my phone. I won't dare doing that with any bigger screen because I won't be able to see the upcoming obstacle.

There won't be that much saving due to the lack of scale. The mentality of (normal, well adjusted) people around me is to dismiss laptop entirely as a personal computing device, they have their phones and tablets that are far easier to use. For them to get a laptop would imply they're forced to, because there are Windows apps unavailable for Android/iOS. A cheap Arm notebook is useless for them (unless Microsoft somehow decide to work with Mediatek and the rest for cheap WoA devices). Chromebook never gained popularity in my country with lack of reliable and affordable internet access so the realistic OS would be either one of those Linux distro that support ARM (but in turn, most people don't care about Linux), or Android, in which case it's still far more natural to just get a tablet with a keyboard attachment because Android desktop experience and the apps ecosystem aren't there yet.

Not a native speaker, bleen for me got auto corrected by my brain to green. It doesn't make me uncomfortable, but I'd prefer grue because my brain will immediately understand we're talking about the umbrella term. If grue is said out of context, I'd imagine Gru from despicable me, when written I'd imagine gruel, but, again, because I'm not a native speaker, instead of yucky food I'd instead think about that episode of Masha and the Bear where they end up with a houseful of the porridge.

Most of the major vendors are already assembling x86 laptops for the far larger Windows market, it's cheaper to just reuse those models for ChromeOS instead of designing a special ARM design, which in turn due to lack of scale are priced similarly to their x86 counterpart. Price sensitive customers thus don't see that much saving.

Battery life is nice, but I doubt there's that much market yearning for a cheap laptop with long battery life. People who really need large screen for long work without wall power either go at x64 (which can reach 12 hours on mid range now), or change their workflow to use Android tablet. The ubiquity of USB charging port that can power the laptop (or at least top it up while standing by on lunch) also means even if an x86 laptop may not last an entire day, the owner don't have to suffer the inconvenience of carrying around the power brick.

If it's purely DNS blocking (no IP redirection or blocking), your own recursive resolver (eg, unbound) shouldn't be affected, assuming the ISP doesn't also intercept unencrypted DNS queries. If there's also interception, encrypted DNS upstream might help (assuming they're not blocked entirely, repressive countries do this, so far not in EU)

I don't think any of them will help in Spain case though, I believe the ISP/court choose to block the IP range entirely, which hit Cloudflare customers. DNS hijinks won't solve those.