There are so many things that we describe as a graph of boxes with inputs & outputs that we can indeed draw many parallels see many similarities between them. I think it's quite interesting to think about this diversity of tools and try to analyse what's common and what isn't between them (some are stateless others aren't, some have the notion of "time" and some have not, some are closer to state machines while other closer to mathematical functions, etc.) and it gives a lot of inspiration about new/alternative programming models & architectures
This (boxes with inputs and outputs) is how I reason about almost everything in life as well. I have been told this is what is called "systems thinking". Your comment is spot on.
In most countries (eg Europe, US, Brazil, China, etc.) it's not the case and you have to give your ID (or some sort of identifier linked to your real identity) to get a SIM card or any internet service
Agreed. On the long-term, Apple is the one which might harm Privacy the most because they will kill the real Privacy alternatives by pretending they are one.
People use Google & Facebook because they are dependent on their services but some of them know they are unethical (for e.g the recent WhatsApp scandal shows that at least some people are kinda aware).
Apple on the other hand lies and does propaganda about their fake Privacy and people (even on HN) think they are the solution, and that's far more dangerous I think.
Many people think real Privacy solutions are not worth supporting because they have Safari, IOS & Icloud. Well guess what, ICloud is not even (end2end) encrypted, employees have been listening to your Siri conversation, HomeKit doorbells are doing nonconsenting facial recognition on you & your friends, Apple tracks every app you lunch & when (and no that's not necessary for security, you could just download a blacklist instead of sending Apple your history), and no, Apple does not audit or read any line of code of the apps on the store.
It's killing me that my friends think it's okay to install Facebook, Instagram & Snapchat or whatever on their phone because "No but it's okay, I have an IPhone so Apple has checked the app and everything". For them, Apple is magically going to protect them whatever they do.
That's where you see their lies & propaganda really worked.
Apple is like a polluting gas car that sells & market itself as a green clean ecological electrical car so that people can use without conscience issues
But before anonymity was allowed, so all this toxicity & harassment didn't hurt too much because you could just create a new identity, start again, and it would go away.
Today most people are on FB & social medias under their real name & with their real face and everything is stored & will hunt you for the rest of your life. With fingerprinting, facial recognition, surveillance, etc. there is now no way to speech freely without having your identity tied to it.
Some people claim this is great because you say less crap when they're forced to put their name on it, I think this is a very poor argumentation when we look at what we're losing in exchange. There is a reason why in most democracies voting is anonymous.
You can say some things anonymously, but I'm not sure how far does it extend. Anonymity is tested not by posting under an alias, but when somebody tries to break it. If you get into the middle of real controversy - how far would HN willing to go before they wipe your account and possibly give the details they have (IPs, email, etc.) to the law enforcement, from where they'd immediately be leaked to the press? Was this ever tested in practice - i.e. somebody anonymous on HN was attacked and kept their anonymity?
I'm not talking about a court-mandated warrant. I'm talking about a friendly chat with a fellow law enforcement person who cordially asks for help - who needs warrants between friends? And you do want to be friends with the law enforcement, because it's a bad enemy to have, aren't they?
> It is not their duty to ensure that you can say anything here.
I'm not saying it's their duty. I am saying you can't at the same time claim anonymity is alive and well and say nobody actually will protect your anonymity once push comes to shove. If that's the case, then anonymity essentially does not exist where it counts. Nobody cares that you can anonymously praise the Dear Leader. Anonymity is only important when somebody has real reasons to want to break it. It's like with free speech - nobody worries about speech that everybody likes being free. You only need free speech protections when somebody actually wants to censor, otherwise it's just vacuous.
Maybe yes, maybe not, but who cares if nobody ever finds out? And cops are pretty much immune from most illegal acts on the job, once they are sure they are doing the right thing, or can convincingly pretend they were, and once there's no law on the books explicitly, in minute details, prohibiting exactly this particular behavior. That's "qualified immunity". As for the other side, who's going to prosecute them if the law loves them? Private users, who probably can barely afford one hour of lawyer time?
People say "there should be a law against it". Well, politicians pass a law against it. And then arrange things in a way that makes the law useless since police unions' support brings in sweet money and votes. And then frame the discussion about police misconduct in a way that you either ok with anything and everything the police does, or you support abolishing the police altogether and violent mobs trashing your town daily for sports. That is good for brining in votes too. So I guess that's the point for them. What's the point for people to tolerate such system? Please tell me if you ever find out.
It kind of seems like a second attempt to the do-not-track switch which was a failure. There must be strong backing in the laws for such feature to be meaningful otherwise nobody will respect it
The same reason Firefox and Safari don't use Google V8 & Blink. They (mostly Safari) are the only opposition to Google monopolistic control on the web.
You will always be under control of others if you don't take your independence and open-source means little when it is in practice controlled by only one entity.
If you build an OS on top of Android like /e/, replicant & Lineage & etc. , you are doomed to be living in Google' shadow . They'll shut you down anytime you do something they don't like. And even if it is open-source, if you disagree, you'll never have the financial means to maintain an up to date Android fork. Once/if they abandon Android for Fushia, it's going to be hard maintaining all abandoned Android legacy code alone.
Then, there are also technical reasons. We could ask "why create a new UI lib from scratch when we have QT ?". Yes for the end-user it's mostly the same (a bunch of text and buttons), yet people are developing custom UI lib (eg. Blender/Godot), Flutter, React, Svelte, Druid, Moxie, Makepad, etc. This is needed for innovation and/or to fit your own needs.
Real Linux has lots of potential : it can run Blender, Krita, Godot, VsCode, Steam games, any language, FreeCad, KiCad, Matlab, etc. (None of them have mobile UIs, but still are an asset for tablets & convergence). It is not governed by Google or Apple and it has already quite some drivers for several devices (I could just install Bitwig on a Linux tablet, plug a MIDI keyboard and make music).
So there are definitely reasons to take this path and personally I find this far more exciting than Lineage (although I use Lineage daily & I'm super grateful to that it exists)
Because this era of "separate parts" comes to an end. Now everything is single SoC that are only compatible with big tech proprietary OS.
Google has on purpose made Android different enough so that no Android SoC could run mainline Linux.
Today, no decent SoC can run real Linux, the "best" SoC that can run mainline Linux are :
- Rockship (PinePhone) which is reversed engineered so only old SoC have support and it require massive effort from the community.
- NXP (Librem 5) which are thick power hungry slow SoC (because they are made for automobile I guess)
- Broadcom (Raspberry Pi) which is still super slow compared to most modern smartphone.
In any case the manufacturers of decent SoC don't give a crap about Linux, they only support Android and any Linux support must be done by someone else, often through reverse engineering.
This is a totally anticompetitive situation which is far from what we had on the desktop side.
But even on the laptop/desktop side, this is also coming to an end : Microsoft custom chip & Surfaces, Apple M1, etc. Soon this will be the same as on mobile.
FairPhone makes no special effort about the choice SoC, they just use a SoC which supports Android and which obviously doesn't support Linux.
On the other hand Librem & PinePhone use the only SoC that have Linux support, and they often must develop support themselves through reverse eng. because the manufacturer doesn't care.
Unless we pass laws about it or unless Pine64/Purism become very successful, it is the end of any hope for alternative as no mobile device is able to run anything else than IOS & Android (or HarmonyOS, Fushia or whatever next privacy hell OS is coming from those big tech)
Even in Planes & Cars , the entertainment systems are now powered by Android and not Linux.
Mainline Linux will disappear until it only exist in a emulated VM running on a M1 mac, or on a headless datacenter server.
Purism & Pine64 are currently our only hope for alternative and I encourage anyone to support them. They represent the ugly reality of what is available to the competition, it is slow, thick, power hungry and old but that's all we have.
> Rockship (PinePhone) which is reversed engineered so only old SoC have support and it require massive effort from the community.
PinePhone has Allwinner A64. [0]
And Rockchip SoCs have a quite decent track record of not only supporting mainline linux but even running without proprietary firmware - as does their current top level SoC (RK3399, featured in Pine64's ROCKPro64).
But the point is your looking at a SoC with A53's, which is a 9 year old in-order design. Or for that matter, the rk3399's A72's which is a 5 year old design. That puts them at somewhere between an 6x->4x (geekbench) slower per core vs a modern smartphone depending on which benchmark you compare.
Then you add in the overhead of not being a mobile optimized OS, and your also burning massively more power.
The market share for these phones will remain geeks who want to have a more "open" phone and are willing to deal with a slow, buggy, inefficient device.
Frankly, this won't change until Qualcomm/etc decide to make their SoC's more open, so that smaller companies can build products like these without signing piles of NDAs and shipping android BSP kernels. But then again, that might cut into their business because they won't be able to deprecate 2 year old phones by simply refusing to provide security updates.
Most geeks would be better off picking up a year or two old phone and running lineageOs. At least the devices tend to work, even if they have a dozen or so proprietary blobs.
Yes, unfortunately you're right in that there's lots of room for improvement. Nevertheless I'd call the rk3399 a decent SoC, but then for me the fact that it runs without proprietary firmware is certainly more important than pure performance. What I'd really like to have though, is more RAM - I run my desktop on the rk3399. And I already use the PinePhone as a daily driver although I see that it's not there for most of the people.
But maybe this could not only change at the big vendors' whim, but also if more people express their wish for systems that are less locked in by changing their priorities.
> And Rockchip SoCs have a quite decent track record of not only supporting mainline linux but even running without proprietary firmware - as does their current top level SoC (RK3399, featured in Pine64's ROCKPro64).
Last time I tried, RK3399 was dog slow to boot on Pinebook Pro (only thanks to https://gitlab.com/DeltaGem/levinboot is this changing) and development once Google stopped doing it seems almost entirely stagnant. Just look at ATF history, or U-Boot history, etc.
Pinebook Pro doesn't suspend to ram to this day. Only whatever Google implemented for their chromebooks works.
U-Boot has no business taking > 1-2s to boot PBP. More than that is kinda ridiculous. I was shocked seeing it take 8s when I first booted Manjaro. (My allwinner boards boot in ~2s, and those are all way slower than RK3399) With some older levinboot version, PBP boots to initramfs FDE password prompt in ~4s [1]. It's probably even faster now. I wish it would take 2s to that prompt, because then I can open PBP, enter password right away, and then just do something else waiting for the desktop to load. But 3-4s is already pretty nice.
At least suspend to idle works as a sort of replacement for suspend to ram. PBP can stay for long enough in that state, so it's usable on the go even without suspend to RAM.
Haven't heard of levinboot yet, LGTM, thanks for the hint!
Where do you get your entropy from? Does levinboot provide some (enough?) to the kernel? Right now I delay booting via a sleep in the initramfs so that I have time to randomly press as many keys as possible to get crng initialized before cryptsetup is called. Configuring my U-Boot build to provide entropy to the kernel is still on my to do list, haven't looked into it yet and don't know whether it already does or not. At least last time I checked I observed that KASLR didn't work due to missing entropy (the artificial delay won't work here as KASLR happens way before calling init).
> Google has on purpose made Android different enough so that no Android SoC could run mainline Linux.
daily reminder that this is only possible because the very people in this site, "did not care about GPL or tainted kernel" as long as they had their nvidia GTX working to play quake.
We must have different definitions of “real Linux” if you think this. For example NXP makes arm chips [1] and I have put a bitbake OS on there that I absolutely considered “real Linux,” 4.18 kernel, coreutils etc.
The reason Mozilla has not text-to-speech is because the guy behind RNNoise and LPCSpeech (JM Valin) has been bought by Amazon so that they can build even more privacy invasive Alexa & friends device.
So yeah, in a way this an issue of money, but not because you can't afford GPUs & Data, but because you can't buy the right people
> The reason Mozilla has not text-to-speech is because the guy behind RNNoise and LPCSpeech (JM Valin) has been bought by Amazon
That is part of the problem.
With smaller projects you are at risk of the "hit by a bus" problem, where major/complex technology is dependent on a single individual or a very small team.
There are so many things that we describe as a graph of boxes with inputs & outputs that we can indeed draw many parallels see many similarities between them. I think it's quite interesting to think about this diversity of tools and try to analyse what's common and what isn't between them (some are stateless others aren't, some have the notion of "time" and some have not, some are closer to state machines while other closer to mathematical functions, etc.) and it gives a lot of inspiration about new/alternative programming models & architectures