> The EU has had 20 years to create an equally successful and popular product, which it failed to do. American companies don’t owe your European nationalist ambitions a dime.
So true.
There's a lot of passive-aggressive anti-US rhetoric and fearmongering on HN at the moment, while America is simply doing what it's always done - innovating and thriving.
As a European, I wish our continent was able to be more like America, as opposed to jealously coveting its outcomes.
and "That blue badge might not be worth what you’re trading for it. A checkmark is cosmetic. Biometric data is forever."
I like the article, but I think it was nearly wholly LLM-generated. It's a shame that this contrived writing style is becoming so commonplace. Just annoying, more than anything.
> I’ve always avoided client-side React because of its direct harm to end users (over-engineered bloated sites that take way longer to load than they need to).
A couple of megabytes of JavaScript is not the "big bloated" application in 2026 that is was in 1990.
Most of us have phones in our pockets capable of 500Mbps.
The payload of an single page app is trivial compared to the bandwidth available to our devices.
I'd much rather optimise for engineer ergonomics than shave a couple of milliseconds off the initial page load.
React + ReactDOM adds ~50kb to a production bundle, not even close to a couple of mbs. React with any popular routing library also makes it trivial to lazy load js per route, so even with a huge application your initial js payload stays small. I ship React apps with a total prod bundle size of ~5mb, but on initial load only require ~100kb.
The idea that React is inherently slow is totally ignorant. I'm sympathetic to the argument that many apps built with React are slow (though I've not seen data to back this up), or that you as a developer don't enjoy writing React, but it's a perfectly fine choice for writing performant web UI if you're even remotely competent at frontend development.
If they'd put a screenshot, that would then have been immediately clear to casual visitors.
My initial assumption was "this is gonna look like a typical OSS product, and not as polished as iOS or Android". A single screenshot would have dispelled that notion.
GrapheneOS is based on the latest release of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) which is Android 16 QPR2. It looks nearly the same as the stock Pixel OS also based on the same AOSP release. The main UI differences are user-facing portions of the many privacy and security features added by GrapheneOS. There are minor differences such as the stock Pixel OS having a few different fonts than AOSP. The main thing to show would be the UI for features such as Contact Scopes, Storage Scopes, per-app exploit protection controls, etc. It looks like the stock Pixel OS without the Google app/service integration not present in AOSP with added privacy and security controls.
There are many useful videos about GrapheneOS here:
Any of the videos older than December 2025 will be prior to Android 16 QPR2 so the overall UI will be outdated. That's part of why we don't focus on screenshots or videos because many would need to get updated every 4 months. We'd mainly be using them for our own features which often improve more frequently than that.
> It sometimes feels like a psy-op to read through all these gushingly positive comments, when you know how the average person feels about it.
Yes, exactly!
A common theme among these weird ideological group-thinks is political undertones.
> "Today, criticism on brutalism and modernism is mostly voiced by those on the far-right side of the political spectrum, precisely because of the association between modernism and the post-war welfare state"
I used to work next door to the Barbican and occasionally visit the site on my lunch breaks.
The old decaying concrete, monolithic construction, dark alleys, stagnant algae-filled lakes, dirty windows around a tropical plant space, pretentious art installations - it was all quite interesting to my morbid curiosity. But I always left the Barbican feeling lonely and bleak.
I cannot imagine the misery of living in that environment and having it seep into your soul.
I moved out of London, and live in the countryside now. There is something transcendent about being surrounded by natural beauty, and being far, far away from urban over-development.
The word you're looking for is dystopia (Star Trek being mostly utopia, at least in the original timeline and as far as Earth/the Federation is concerned).
The majority opinion (“it’s ugly, monolithic, oppressive, decaying” etc) is such an obvious take that people don’t bother expressing it, especially on forums like HN where people are trying to be insightful as opposed to negative.
So all we get to hear are the opinions of architectural contrarians and certain left wingers who align with the political side of brutalism (i.e. a reactionary movement against Britain’s beautiful Victorian architecture, which is associated with monied elites and colonialism).
The thing about most art, architecture, etc is that it’s incredibly subjective, so contrasting your own views with “certain left wingers” is pretty much pointless.
I personally think the entire south bank is pretty ugly, but my views on this, my political views or my views on other styles of architecture don’t matter one jot.
If there’s a building a bunch of people care very much about, then let them protect it.
So true.
There's a lot of passive-aggressive anti-US rhetoric and fearmongering on HN at the moment, while America is simply doing what it's always done - innovating and thriving.
As a European, I wish our continent was able to be more like America, as opposed to jealously coveting its outcomes.
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