I have a .com for like $19.99 but pay to have my info redacted from whois stuff, an email address, all cones to like $42.99
Porkbun charges $11.08 for a .com with whois privacy. $30/year for email hosting might be worth it if you're getting very good service, but I think you're overpaying.
A different Wallet/Pay implementation is a possible outcome, but I'm thinking of a bigger picture where Android phones are more like PCs: no non-unlockable bootloaders, no remote attestation anywhere, barriers to root detection at the OS level, third-party ROMs encouraged.
The early days of Android were like that. I wonder if things had developed along that path, would we have a paradise for power users? A security nightmare for mainstream users? Both? Neither?
I wonder what an alternate history where Google chose not to become evil would look like.
What if they had looked at Microsoft's Palladium proposal and thought, as pretty much everyone outside institutional IT departments did that locked devices with remote attestation was a nightmare scenario best forgotten, refused to build it, and made an effort to prevent anyone else from doing so on top of Android? Safetynet didn't appear until 5-6 years after Android launched to the public. What if it never did? Android already had enough momentum by that point I don't think the financial sector could refuse to be on it no matter what risk management said.
I had that in mind, but it's been a while since I read it and skimming it today, it seems a little dated. The tone may also be a bit harsh to offer to OP in this thread.
Without seeing the entirety of the interaction, it's hard to be sure.
Some people are assholes, and because nobody wants to interact with assholes, they usually end up congregating on whatever forum doesn't ban them. Moderation is hard and ban evasion is often easy, so there end up being a lot of places like that.
The other side is that people in general ask a lot of bad questions, and a forum flooded with bad questions becomes useless because people who could answer good questions either get tired of it and leave, or spend so much time on the bad questions they don't have time for the good ones. People get frustrated when they think that's happening to a forum they enjoy, and programmers are famously better at communicating with machines than with people.
Here's are some tips to ask good questions about programming:
First, try to find the answer without asking other people. This is especially important when it comes to programming because the whole job is problem-solving. That means figuring out how a search result, LLM output, or published documentation relates to whatever it is you're trying to do.
Once you're sure you need help from other people, clearly articulate what it is you want to happen, what you tried in order to achieve it, and what actually happened. Use more detail than you think you need here, especially regarding your expectations. Sometimes the mere act of composing a question this way leads you to the answer, which is effective enough there's a popular technique of explaining problems to inanimate objects.
Include the troubleshooting steps you tried from the first step above in your question. By typing it out, you may discover an error or omission in your process, but you also communicate to other people that you're not just being lazy, wasting their time, and reducing the signal to noise ratio of their forum.
Samsung, Huawei, Microsoft, and LG tried similar ideas and none got much traction.
I'm not sure it's actually a good idea even now that phones have enough CPU and RAM for an adequate desktop experience. It's certainly not a good idea running Android as we know it, where apps are data silos and have UIs that don't cleanly transition from the palmtop experience to the desktop experience.
You can do that today with a Linux tablet and Waydroid. It's more like running the Android apps in a VM than something really well integrated with the Linux environment, but perfect is the enemy of good.
I got my first tablet this year after a long time as a skeptic. It runs Arch, BTW.
Most of the time it has a keyboard attached and I use it like a laptop, but it's nice to be able to watch movies on flights during taxi, takeoff, and landing because tablets and phones are allowed, not laptops.
Gnome is really nice on a touchscreen aside from the terrible onscreen keyboard. KDE is a little rougher, but its onscreen keyboard is decent.
I remember making a note to look into it several times, and thinking I should buy one (exactly one) when it was about $600. If I had, I imagine I would have sold at 10x rather than holding until 100x or its peak at 200x.
I actually did think it or a successor would become important as a consumer payment method. I was wrong there.
I thought people would learn how to use computers.
It seemed as if most of the millennial generation in wealthy countries did learn to some degree and I expected it to be even more true for younger generations. Those more sophisticated users would enable more sophisticated and flexible applications. Technology would empower individuals while weakening corporations and governments.
Instead, the most reliable recipe for popularizing tech is to dumb it down. Millennials represent a peak of digital literacy (in wealthy countries) and those younger tend to have weaker technical skills.
LLMs don't understand things. They repeatedly predict the next token given previous tokens.
I don't think something without predictable patterns is likely to work as a language. A very complex grammar probably means the LLM will make grammatical errors more often, but that's probably the most that can be done to make a language hard for LLMs. Other comments mention languages without much training data, but I don't think that's what you're asking.
He got mad at me for texting him an anti-CCP joke (both US Phone Numbers)
He's right to be concerned. You should be using Signal far any communication you don't want sucked into a mass-surveillance system (i.e. most communication). He might not want to have Signal installed when he enters China though.
When I can't use the old one anymore. Every time so far, that's been because of a hardware failure.
I'm currently on a Pixel 4A. It's running Android 16 (LineageOS), and I limit battery charge with AccA so that it doesn't wear out. It's currently showing 92% capacity, which seems pretty good for five years. I don't think I'd actually like a new phone; it would be faster and have a better camera, but my current phone isn't a bottleneck, and a new phone's camera will still be worse than my Olympus. It would have 5G, but why should I care? Most new phones are bigger, and as an adult, my hands are not growing.
I love that answers like this are popular here. There was a time when phone tech was improving fast enough that frequent upgrades made a lot of sense, but now is not that time.
I've had at least three different people on different continents provide my Gmail address to various services. I've ignored most messages meant for those people, but one gave it to his lawyer when he was charged with a serious crime for which his conditions of release forbade contact with children. I took the time to tell the lawyer that's nothing to do with me.
Porkbun charges $11.08 for a .com with whois privacy. $30/year for email hosting might be worth it if you're getting very good service, but I think you're overpaying.