Open phones are all fine and well, but good luck convincing banking and government applications to work on those (especially in countries where bank login is used to access government services).
A single manufacturer convinced a lot of them to work with Apple phones.
It's definitely doable, but the product has to be appealing to users, which also seems doable as phones already peaked in capability and making a good phone now is more about polish in build + software than being technologically ahead of the competition.
I consider my 2yo mid-range phone a great phone, and with today's politics owning my phone is in the top-3 things I'd like my next phone to improve on, not a better camera, screen, battery, slimmer build nor gimmicky stuff (ok, maybe an IR to replace remotes or LoRa support would be kind of cool)
> Open phones are all fine and well, but good luck convincing banking and government applications to work on those (especially in countries where bank login is used to access government services).
First phones, then lobbying. As citizens of an open society, government exists to serve us, not the other way around. With enough users, they will have to respond. As I said, there are a number of areas that need attention and a coordinated effort across the breadth of society to restore, maintain and improve the foundations of an open society.
It's almost as if there is a global plan to deanonymise everyone online, and for governments and corporations to have total awareness and control of everyone's actions.
this should realy be one of those accross the aisles things. Well it kinda is, across both sides of the political spectrum there is for some fucking reason a huge support for this. I am so pissed.
This has been going on in full force since the GWB admin in response and using the excuse of the terroristic attacks.
They called it total information awareness. They pretended to bury it. All they did was hide their intentions from the public. They even spied on Congress and they spied on presidential candidates. If they had no decorum for those folks imagine what they are willing to do to collect information on the public.
> As citizens of an open society, government exists to serve us, not the other way around.
I really wish this was true. It should be true. It used to be true. But I don't think it is now.
> With enough users, they will have to respond.
Well, yeah. But even if we had millions of people lined up (which we don't) it still wouldn't be enough to force a positive response.
Frankly there's too much money wrapped up in this now. Because of that, open computing will always be under attack. I hate coming off as so defeatist, but what we need is a culture change, and a new device which is (from the perspective of the 99%) worse and more expensive than Android isn't going to get us that.
Carry an old used iPhone, powered off with no SIM, and treat it as a black box hardware token that you turn on only for these uses. You can tether it via wifi through your “real” freedom phone.
In my country, government applications are required to be interoperable, use open APIs and work with open formats (XML, PDF, etc.). There should be no problem there. I've already used some FOSS applications to interact with government services.
Banks are required to interoperate using open API in the EU. EU managed to cripple this requirement, by not requiring open api access to regular customers, but only to accredited organizations. There's more work to be done on this front.
This is why I'm sticking with moment.js for now. I don't like that it's not immutable, but I value bundling timezone data into the app too much. Our customers are likely to use outdated browsers at their workplaces (we even had to maintain IE11 compatibility a bit too long for our liking).
That is one reason I believe. Being told that you need open source presence to be employed.
I think some people also like the feeling of being helpful. And they do not understand reality of LLM outputs. See comments posting AI generated summaries or answers to question. With no verification or critical checking themselves.
Amazing technical achievement, and also a very unfortunate situation with the reliance on AI translation. I'm not privy to the details of the actual translation process (whether AI translation was really just a technical placeholder or actually the draft for the real translation), but the criticism online has been scathing.
The article says "Something important that should be clarified before we move on is that machine translation (specifically a combination of DeepL and ChatGPT 4o/4.5) was used during the initial hacking phase for testing purposes. Once it was time to translate the game proper, multiple human translators then took over."
Fan translations have used Babel Fish or similar during the development process for decades. If the final script isn't AI translated I don't see any issue with that.
This statement still, unfortunately, doesn't clarify whether the final translation was MTPE (machine translation post-editing) or translated from scratch by humans. I'm not a professional translator, but according to those of them I've seen on Bsky and the likes, MTPE greatly hurts both the translation quality and, ironically, the translation speed. It also makes it easier to accidentally recruit translators who don't have a decent enough grasp of the source language.
Screenshots of the translated game do give an impression of edited - or even, at times, unedited - machine translation. What with overly direct word-by-word translations, as well as reasonably obvious references (which the game is chock full of) getting mistranslated as something else entirely. Although those screenshots, of course, are not necessarily representative of the whole script, which was a collaborative effort by many translators.
Yes the real achievement here I think is the creation and public sharing of the translation tools. The AI translation here should be considered effectively a proof of concept of the tools.
Given the particular nature of this game, so reliant on inside jokes requiring a knowledge of SEGA history, it's likely an AI translation could miss a lot, and I think the community will eagerly await further real translations done by professional translators leveraging these tools.
I hope so... but in the fan translation world the first translation is almost always the only translation, and the only one most people will experience even in the exceedingly rare case of an alternate translation coming into existence (as only the first one ever makes the news).
I was thrilled for new Windows releases between 3.11 and 8.1. I'm still reasonably fond of Windows for personal use. For now I can still de-enshittify it enough to get back the experience I'm used to, and it's comfortable and convenient. But I'm not sure if that will last for long, given the current trend.
That said, for work I've switched to Linux full-time years ago. Native containers are a killer feature for me, and the different UX and driver/dependency/repository issues aren't significant enough to make me want to go back to virtualization in Windows.
You could also offload potentially GC-heavy parts to C++ and write the rest in C#. Depends on the game, but usually most of the game logic that you'll be constantly tinkering with doesn't require all that much memory in the first place.
I was under the impression that all of those services and login methods rely on suomi.fi in the end, but I admit that I don't understand the system terribly well.
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