loki

Google claims to do some processing on their own tensor chip locally so it might reduce some data being sent to Google, but it doesn't limit them from tracking you. With Pixel, you are only being tracked by Google and not Samsung or other manufacturer

They say it’s to stop people from stealing iPhones to sell for parts.

There's an easy fix to this. Allow users to mark their devices as broken/dead in their (icloud?) system, so its parts can be extracted and used for genuine repair. Put it behind 2FA, email confirmation, and require purchase invoice, or whatever to make it happen. To counter edge cases, give a month for appeal, only then mark it safe for usage of its parts on other phones. A trillion dollar company should be able to implement this, but they're trillion dollar company for a reason, so yea...

Thiefs don't have access to the accounts inside a locked phone, let alone the invoice of purchase.

Competition is always good for the consumers. Having two authoritarian country competing means you can at least diversify where your data goes. Both will be trying to be at the top of the pyramid and products will get cheaper.

People will figure out a way to use them without the backdoors. Like how people currently buy cheap chinese phones and install LineageOS, or how people de-google with e/os/ or Graphene OS. Hardware backdoors will be a problem as they always have been but even they can be reverse engineered and patched.

If West or China is hostile to your country and threat model, use tech from the other side, and vice versa.

The west and especially US likes to sanction countries that don't bend over for them and everyone joins in because they are afraid of the same retaliation. Every country is realizing that it's not in their best interest to be a lapdog for a single super power. This opens up opportunities for bargains and not be on chokehold as it is now.

It'll be worrying if a single entity becomes the sole global leader in tech.

It's amazing how people forget these things.

Since inclusion of ChatGPT in Bing Chat, I speculated that Microsoft was going to buy OpenAI at some point.

They're probably going to degrade performance, focus on Microsoft partnership (Bing already has a well established web index), and then Microsoft outright buys it and locks it behind a subscription.

You don't get rich by paying your company bills out of your pocket. You use investors money or government grants. Elon is out of ideas when .

Staying away from facebook and its companies always has been a good bet for privacy. It's not going to change anytime soon.

Google isn't building an software/hardware ecosystem, it's building an ad empire. It justs needs its footprint calling back home on as most devices as possible. I don't think it ever cared about which android version is highest (except for PR)

So I'm just thinking out loud. I think it's time lemmy started a non-profit foundation, gather donation and start bug bounties and funding some high traffic instances. Lemmy.ml has been bugging out and that sends out bad first impression.

instances can't keep paying out of their pockets forever.

If lawyers can't be responsible enough to check their citations, imagine how easy it is for the general population to fall for misinformation. Just seeing a post on facebook is enough for some people to consider it a fact.