A drone can be shot down, a drone can malfunction and crash, a drone can be jammed or otherwise electronically interfered and crash, a drone can structurally fail due to quality control issues or previously unidentified damage from prior rough handling in a warzone and crash.

It’s a lot better if any of those happen to a eBike, than if it happens to a person who’s literally hanging below a drone flying at even just a hundred meters altitude.

Also a eBike can be folded into much more aerodynamics-friendly shapes and sizes to maximize the drone’s range further, a human, not so much lol

Yes yes the way Microsoft was pushing on ARM-based computers was absolutely an attempt to push for much more restrictive computers that are much more controlled by manufacturers than by their users, and I’m also really glad they are not getting far with that. I think it went hand-in-hand with their push for generative AI tools too, to make users more dependent on cloud services in the long term for the same goal.

Their failure might remove two major threats to personal general purpose computing at the same time, which would be awesome XD

I don’t know if they never found a place, they definitely had many phones that were cohesive packages of many features that specifically satisfy the needs of a clearly definable group of people, even if it’s a niche group.

The question is whether they will be able to maintain that place, and the future seems rather bleak on that lately :(

Holy shite imagine buying a PC that does NOT allow you to install Linux in it, or even to install a different version of Windows, because the UEFI/BIOS is locked. If any PC OEM who’s not Microsoft themselves trying to sell that there’s gonna be an outcry.

Why would the same be considered even remotely acceptable on Android devices?

As someone who uses Sony Xperia 1 VI, yes can confirm it’s absolutely amazing. Took me less than half a minute to unlock bootloader and root if you don’t count the time for the mandatory wipe when bootloader is unlocked (per Android design), and you literally don’t lose any OS feature other than Sony’s proprietary video enhancement feature (due to DRM key voiding and DRM level demotion with unlocked bootloader), but it’s pretty shitty anyway and only useable with the standard display mode, and if you’re using an Xperia phone you’re probably a photography/cinema/art enthusiast who would much prefer keeping the phone in the color accurate “professional” display mode anyway. And this phone comes with a very clean AOSP-like ROM with minimal customization from Sony (but those they did make are very good QoL features), so most of the Android ROM modding tools designed for Pixel phones would at least have most of the features working on the Xperia phone too, and you dont really need to worry too much about too much unexpected behaviors from OEM customizations with ROM modding, especially compares to the like of Xiaomi phones lol

But I’m not sure we genuinely have a feature with Sony smartphones. On the newer generation Sony Xperia 1 VII, Sony for the first time outsourced their flagship phones (the Xperia 1 series) to a 3rd party manufacturer instead of making them in factories which Sony owns and have direct control themselves, they have been doing this with their mid-range and budget phones before but this was the first time they did it with their flagship phones, and immediately there have been serious quality control issues resulting to many Xperia 1 VII phones failing prematurely and required motherboard replacement (according to some users who ran into issue early), and Sony later had to launch a whole recall for many of these phones: https://m.gsmarena.com/sony_announces_xperia_1_vii_replacement_program-amp-68647.php

Issues this serious and this widespread is pretty much unheard of for Sony Xperia flagship models, they may not had the most advanced features or sensible pricing, but they have always been known to have at least some of the best build quality, except longevity issues on the Samsung-made OLED screens on gen V model which was more of a Samsung’s fault and it also affected Samsung’s own phones using the same OLED screens anyway.

And all this is after they already stopped officially selling smartphones in the US and China markets with the 2024 gen VI model, which are arguably two of the biggest smartphone markets, and with the 2025 gen VII model Sony announced they are significantly downsizing their operation in the EU.

At this rate, there might now be a new Sony Xperia phone in the next 3-5 years.

But if they put a sufficiently capable chip in their phone, so that you can actually use your phone as a decent general purpose computer like how a smartphone should be like, they wouldn’t be able to force you to buy their AI services anymore would they? Lol

Also remember how they had that very big and very clear text in their ChromeOS documentation, that says “ChromeOS is NOT a general purpose computer.”? Oh boy would they not absolutely LOVE to make it exactly the same situation on Android so they can have absolute control over your interaction with the internet and profit, but alas they can’t take away too many general purpose computing features from the Android OS with a version release without losing the entire market lol, so they try it with hardware XD

Samsung only had locked bootloader in the US market because of the carrier mafias in the US having wayyyy more power than they should have, even over OEMs. They can’t charge you extra for basic features if you can bypass the artificial locks with root empowered tools, or shove adware/bloatware down your throat if you can remove them, can they?

All other market’s models always had unlocked bootloader, even their China/Hong Kong and EU models. Although it’s still not entirely open because Samsung have extremely customized ROM, that also have Samsung’s security suite Knox and Samsung Pay deeply integrated all over the place, where a lot of encryption and obfuscation were included, because they are purpose designed security solutions. So with bootloader unlock you are still going to lose a lot of core OS features (even if you don’t actually mod the boot image to have root access, and just have the bootloader unlocked), there are tools that can restore some, but not all features can be restored.

Well that is, until now, apparently.

But then, on the other hand, Samsung devices are the closest you can get to Apple’s ridiculous walled garden in the Android ecosystem, so you’d you ever want that nonsense anyway lol

Well there’s a fundamental difference between a carnivorous plant and a murderous plant who just kills.

There are many plants who kill large number of animals all the time, as defense measures for example. But a carnivorous plant specifically kills the prey in order extract nutrients from it and use it to benefit itself, and it does so using specialized adaptations specific for that purpose and not just accidentally (like a broken tree branch falling down killing somebody down below doesn’t make the tree carnivorous)

So a carnivorous plant needs to have ALL of these traits:

1. capturing or trapping prey in specialized, usually attractive, traps;
2. killing the captured prey;
3. digesting the prey;
4. absorption of metabolites (nutrients) from the killed and digested prey;
5. use of these metabolites for plant growth and development.

…in order to be considered a carnivorous plant.

Source: Carnivorous Plants: Physiology, Ecology, and Evolution from Oxford University Press

(HIGHLY recommend if you’re interested in this topic, it’s an extremely good book and the best comprehensive overview on carnivorous plants at the moment, with fairly up to date information from this rapidly developing field of study!

Edible insects! They yummy!!! 😋😋😋

And there are many established culinary practices for cooking them from vastly different cultures, so there’s also a good variety of recipes you can find and try out!

Thanks, this might prove promising!

Can you link any direct confirmation that this is actually a VM on hypervisor, and not just a non-hypervised VM but with GPU passthrough like the Crostini on ChromeOS? These two are very different things.

It’s really not a surprise this particular species is soooo widely spread! :D

Yeah if you can manage to get one without their outrageous official price, these are really amazing devices for enthusiasts, took me less than 3 minutes to unlock bootloader and root (most of the time spent by the full system wipe from unlocking bootloader). And they are some of the last flagship spec’ed phones that still have SD card support, and headphone jack, and they come with very clean AOSP-like ROM with minimal customization and no bloat, and because of that most of the root-empowered system customization tools developed for Pixel phones mostly work out of the box on these phones too

Sony

They straight up support the concept of open devices: https://developer.sony.com/open-source/aosp-on-xperia-open-devices

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I’ve been seeing other posts about this too and I’m curious why this wasn’t updated on some ROMs.

I use a Sony Xperia 1 VI which has very clean AOSP-like ROM with only a couple OEM customization features, and the Google Play System remains up to date without me having to maintain it manually. But I’m seeing at least Samsung and Xiaomi phones where people found this wasn’t automatically updated, perhaps it has something to do with some of the heavily OEM-customized ROMs? In that case it still surprised me Samsung didn’t even take care of this considering how they have a particularly close collaboration with Google…

Good thing this is at least very easy to block per-app with a Xposed module.

Although it is quite concerning indeed that there isn’t an easy and explicit way for you to be notified when an app tried to do this on its own, it would be nice to have a tool that can automatically scan an app to see if it does that

I don’t know much about Guilded but just looked it up and saw that it got bought by the Roblox Corporation in 2021, soooo I wouldn’t count on it not enshitify very soon too :(

Why wouldn’t you use a dedicated APK extraction app of your choice to extract the APK file, then send to another device using a file sharing method of your own choice, be it WLAN-direct or even Bluetooth, instead of using Google’s locked-in proprietary tool?

But it was originally derived from coal gas back in the 3rd quarter of the 19th century, when the first internal combustion engine for transportation application was being developed.