That actually sounds like a neat idea. I mean, it’s a privacy nightmare, but not much more than any other social media site.

Kind of makes sense. It would be an addition to the lineup rather than a replacement like previous “T” series. It would just cannibalize sales.

Bummer, but probably the right move.

Mobile payment is the only major problem I’ve encountered. Fortunately, for me it’s just a nice-to-have, not a must-have.

I’ve heard that some banks have that feature within their own app, but I’ve never actually seen that. If anyone knows of specific banks that support that, please share! I suspect there’s no such thing in my country but who knows?

Ebooks.com has a ton of DRM-free ebooks. They have a whole DRM-free section, plus a search filter, and they clearly display all available formats before purchase. That’s my first stop for ebooks.

I’ve never tested this hypothesis, but I would guess that a big-ass battery would remain useful after years of wear while a normal battery would need to be almost constantly plugged in. It’s one thing to plug in a power bank now and then, but if it effectively becomes a wired device that’s too much of a pain.

I’ve been using cryptpad.fr (the “flagship instance” of CryptPad) for years. It’s…fine. Really, it’s fine. I’m not thrilled with the experience, but it is functional and I’m not aware of any viable alternatives that are end-to-end encrypted.

It’s based on OnlyOffice, which is basically a heavyweight web-first Microsoft Office clone. Set your expectations accordingly.

No mobile apps, and the web UI is not optimized for mobile. I mean, it works, but does using the desktop MS Office UI on a smartphone sound like fun to you?

Performance is tolerable but if you’re used to Google Sheets, it’s a big downgrade. Some of this is just the necessary overhead involved in an end-to-end encrypted cloud service. Some of it is because, again, this is a heavyweight desktop UI running in a web browser. It’s functional, but it’s not fast and it’s not pretty.

I used that briefly 10+ years ago when I got a Fire Stick for like $5. I even installed it on one of my phones back then, since they had a lot of app giveaways and I was dumb.

It was basically “Google Play but worse”. Like the Epic Games Store is to Steam.

DNS over HTTPS. It allows encrypted DNS lookup with a URL, which allows for url-based customizations not possible with traditional DNS lookups (e.g. the server could have /ads or /trackers endpoints so you can choose what to block).

DNS Over TLS (DoT) is similar, but it doesn’t use URLs, just IP addresses like generic DNS. Both are encrypted.

Once users have given up on comfortable single-handed use, the only limiting factor is pocket size.

For me, that means once it passes about 65mm in width, I might as well jump to ~80mm in width, which is huge even by today’s standards. 70mm wide phones are just the worst of both worlds to me.

I want a small phone, but there hasn’t been a serious option in over 10 years. The Xperia Z3 Compact was the last good “small” Android phone that was actually small enough to justify its existence. That was 2014.

Edit: Also, I suspect with bezels being so small now, the frame would need to be even smaller to avoid accidental edge presses with one-handed operation.

But any 50 watt chip will get absolutely destroyed by a 500 watt gpu

If you are memory-bound (and since OP’s talking about 192GB, it’s pretty safe to assume they are), then it’s hard to make a direct comparison here.

You’d need 8 high-end consumer GPUs to get 192GB. Not only is that insanely expensive to buy and run, but you won’t even be able to support it on a standard residential electrical circuit, or any consumer-level motherboard. Even 4 GPUs (which would be great for 70B models) would cost more than a Mac.

The speed advantage you get from discrete GPUs rapidly disappears as your memory requirements exceed VRAM capacity. Partial offloading to GPU is better than nothing, but if we’re talking about standard PC hardware, it’s not going to be as fast as Apple Silicon for anything that requires a lot of memory.

This might change in the near future as AMD and Intel catch up to Apple Silicon in terms of memory bandwidth and integrated NPU performance. Then you can sidestep the Apple tax, and perhaps you will be able to pair a discrete GPU and get a meaningful performance boost even with larger models.

It’s great that this will be more private, but it’s shitty that there’s not an option to store it encrypted in the cloud. Most phone manufacturers (Google included) are still pretty chintzy with storage space, which is probably why they are limiting this to 90 days of history.

Edit: Actually, there is no hard 90-day limit. I misunderstood this part of the article:

Auto-deletion of data: Visits and routes older than three months will be automatically deleted unless users take specific action to save individual trips.

That “specific action” includes simply disabling auto-delete, or setting it to 18 or 36 months. It’s not something you need to do for every trip you want to retain beyond 90 days. Not sure how much storage this will take up long-term though.

OP must have it set to the lowest compression level. All levels are lossless, but higher compression levels are smaller, at the expense of increased encoding time. Should be half the size or less in general.

Even if they were trustworthy, nothing lasts forever.

Does anyone seriously think Google Play Movies or whatever they call it is going to be around in 50 years? Audible? Spotify?

Unlikely.

I grew up with access to books that were printed before my parents were even born. I doubt your grandkids will be able to say the same. Not if you buy into DRM-infected ecosystems and vendor lock-in, anyway.

The only consolation is that pirates are always one step ahead. But I wouldn’t want to count on that remaining true in 50 years either.

I would guess that’s not a hard limit. Maybe they decided to undersell it because many 4TB+ nvme drives are physically larger and/or require heat sinks, so they might not fit. I don’t see any details on their web site though.

Given two drives with the same size, same heat output, and same interface, it shouldn’t make a difference.

It’s pretty common to see fake limits like that on spec sheets. I can definitely put more RAM in my motherboard than is officially supported since higher-capacity DIMMs are out in the same form factor now compared to when the mobo was released.

It’s insane how many things they push as Snaps when they are entirely incompatible with the Snap model.

I think everyone first learns what Snaps are by googling “why doesn’t ____ work on Ubuntu?” For me, it was Filebot. Spent an hour or two trying to figure out how the hell to get it to actually, you know, access my files. (This was a few years ago, so maybe things are better now. Not sure. I don’t live that Snap life anymore, and I’m not going back.)

Can you explain what you mean by “visually lossless”? Is this a purely subjective classification, or is there a specific definition or benchmark you used?