An even deeper irony than the ironic Tolkien book issue ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) is outlined in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity".

I expand on that theme in this essay (from 2010):
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ... The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream. We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working")."

Some ideas from me circa 2011 on how security agencies can actually build a more secure world once they recognize the irony of their current approach:
"The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc." https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines (including at a linked elaboration) why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such free and open source software (FOSS) "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security. I feel open source tools for collaborative structured arguments, multiple perspective analysis, agent-based simulation, and so on, used together for making sense of what is going on in the world, are important to our democracy, security, and prosperity. Imagine if, instead of blog posts and comments on topics, we had searchable structured arguments about simulations and their results all with assumptions defined from different perspectives, where one could see at a glance how different subsets of the community felt about the progress or completeness of different arguments or action plans (somewhat like a debate flow diagram), where even a year of two later one could go back to an existing debate and expand on it with new ideas. As good as, say, Slashdot [or Hacker News] is, such a comprehensive open source sensemaking system would be to Slashdot as Slashdot is to a static webpage. It might help prevent so much rehashing the same old arguments because one could easily find and build on previous ones. ... As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach. ..."

(I previously posted a version of this comment to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/i... about a different irony, but it seemed appropriate here as well given the book irony.)

One reason I've tried to discourage its use, among many others. As I wrote in 2016:
https://pdfernhout.net/reasons...
"As a summary, the main issues in using Slack for free/libre software projects include:
* Proprietary vs. Free; free alternatives exist like Mattermost and Matrix.org and others
* Sending the wrong message about free software communications out of convenience
* Reduces interest in free software and public standards for communications
* Changeable Terms of Service
* Arbitrary termination of access possible with no archive
* Online requirement to access your previous messages
* Retrieves contents of all URLs you include in a message by default
* Centralizes communications in an unencrypted form
* Could inject malware, advertising, or disinformation from the central hub
* Privacy policy does not seem to prohibit much data mining
* Inappropriateness for large communities (design, limits, costs, privacy, archiving)
* Your messages may become controlled by a purchaser of the Slack company
* Standards like email or IRC unify, but services like Slack fragment the global free software community
* Matrix.org looks like a better choice of standard to support"

That all is also why I turned down a job interview at Automattic (the main company supporting FOSS WordPress) eight years ago because they had just switched from IRC to using Slack for interviews. This mattered a lot to me given a major part of my whole job application was about moving Automattic in the direction of improved FOSS real-time messaging.

Specifically about data mining back then, I wrote:
"Slack' privacy policy does not prevent much data mining by Slack or for anyone who might pay them, and Slack is hiring data mining experts. This puts at risk users who rely on Slack but expect privacy. This risk is probably not the sort of thing free software developers interested in social change should be promoting.
      From Slack's policy as of 2015-01-04, which they can also change at any time:
      "To make the product better we have to understand how users are using it. We have a fair bit of data about usage and we intend to use it many different ways to improve our products, including research. This policy is not intended to place any limits on what we do with usage data that is aggregated or de-identified so it is no longer tied to a Slack user."
        And then consider a current job description for a "Data Analyst" position at Slack:
        "Apply your expertise in quantitative analysis, data mining, and the presentation of data to inform and influence product and business decisions""

As I wrote on my website: "And here is a link to a no-doubt overly-long and overly-enthusiastic job application document as essentially a programming and FOSS autobiography intermixed with ideas about how what I had learned over the years could help Automattic (the main developers of WordPress) -- or, to some lesser extent, any other large FOSS effort, including Drupal/Acquia. After waiting a couple of months in the Automattic interview queue, that application fizzled over whether I was willing to use Slack for the job interview at Automattic. My reason for concern over Slack use at Automattic was that, as good as Slack is, the proprietary venture-funded Slack is disrupting the open-source communications ecosystem which WordPress is a big part of. I enjoyed writing that application document overall, and I still hope some of the ideas in it can still help Automattic grow even more in a FOSS direction (or other similar companies like Acquia with Drupal). That document is at least something for my kid to perhaps read someday many years from now. Of course, my kid may just read it and then say, not without significant justification, that I probably should have put the principle of family ahead of other principles in turning down any significant chance for a six-figure salary work-from-home job on FOSS. :-( We always have many principles to choose from, and it can indeed be hard sometimes to get the priorities right. As Scott Berkun (who left Automattic after a year to go back to writing full-time) wrote, even in a metrics-driver organization like Automattic, there is no metric for picking metrics or deciding how to weigh a variety of metrics (beyond perhaps survival itself)."

Ironically, eight years later, Automattic has recently bought Beeper and now has open source messaging plans. So at least they are perhaps slowly heading in a healthier direction.

As Matt Mullenweg wrote recently:
https://ma.tt/2024/04/beeper-t...
"Itâ(TM)s such a delight when a plan comes together and unfolds, especially when itâ(TM)s something youâ(TM)ve been working on for many years. Today the announcement went out that weâ(TM)re combining the best technology from Beeper and Texts to create a great private, secure, and open source messaging client for people to have control of their communications. Weâ(TM)re going to use the Beeper brand, because itâ(TM)s fun. This is not unlike how browsers have evolved, where solid tech and encryption on top of an open ecosystem has created untold value for humanity. Eric Migicovsky has written well about the plan going forward."

Which links to:
https://blog.beeper.com/2024/0...
"In many ways, our journey has only just begun. Beeper has just over 115,000 users and was, until today, in beta. Given the state of the messaging landscape today, we believe there is a huge opportunity for us to push boundaries and create new experiences in chat. The majority of other chat apps have stagnated, entrenched in their positions, with no significant new players emerging since Discordâ(TM)s launch in 2015. Given the state of the messaging world, weâ(TM)ve long felt the need for a strong ally with the resources to support us on our quest. Automattic has a long history of putting user control and privacy first with open source, and great bilateral relationships with Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Matrix and others that we hope can usher in a new era of collaboration.
      Itâ(TM)s a fantastic match. Automattic is best known for supporting WordPress and WooCommerce â" two open source software projects that underpin huge portions of the internetâ(TM)s publishing and ecommerce infrastructure. Together, weâ(TM)ll develop software for a third fundamental pillar of the internet: chat."

Better late than never!

With a replaceable battery and without the extra crap that makes them weigh more?

It's too old and slow but I miss my old LG phone. I could pop the back off anytime I wanted and slot in a new battery with no special tools and the back case was a cheap piece of plastic so the entire thing barely weighed anything.

It's like how if you go and buy a monitor it's a pain in the ass to find one with a matte display even though those are by far the best for your eyes. But glossy monitors sell better and showrooms just like heavier phones sell better.

It's a little challenging if you didn't grow up in the University Town. I guess you could drive five or six hours to do your laundry... And this also assumes your parents aren't so broke they don't have their own washer and dryer.

It's good. Configuration is a bit complicated, but powerful. I sometimes run it on Linux using wine, but that's a little clunky.

We do it all the time with tariffs and treaties. Against a US Owned business yeah (no bills of attainder) but I don't think that applies to a foreign owned business.

I mean, we'll find out when it hits SCOTUS. I honestly don't know how this one is going to rule.

that's like asking Skoora the Gentle Shark not to eat you. It's not in their nature.

I don' know about iPhone but Google decoupled large parts of Android from the main OS a while ago so that a lot of the updates you get are from the "play" store. This means security updates to things like Chrome and even some of the OS libraries are done regardless of Android version. The result is that you can pretty well keep running the phone until your apps stop working. My brother just upgraded from a Samsung S3 and only because spotify stopped working.

Tablets are a mess though. His 2 year old android tab's battery blew and replacements are unobtanium. It's basically e-waste now.

after 2-3 years? When I was buying my Kid's iPhones that happened like clockwork, with or without a battery replacement. I thought they were just trying to get a new phone, and I needed one anyway so I took their old iPhone and bought them a new one and sure enough, the old phone was kind of skitzo.

I'm going on 4 years since the last new iPhone though (the kid's out of college) so my info is way out of date.

My Moto G is fine at 3 years but the battery needs a replacement and I don't really want to do it myself (I'm all thumbs and it looks like a pain in the neck to do if you don't have a heat mat) but I've been putting it off because new batteries look a bit like playing the lottery unless I wanna spend a lot.

Toshiba has been struggling for ages. Their PC and laptop biz was top of the line for ages and then just collapsed. And they've been getting their asses handed to them in every other industry frankly.

Private equity usually guts companies, but in Toshiba's case I'm not sure what's there to gut. Also Japan's stock market is very different than ours, it seems more difficult to pull the kind of shenanigans US private equity firms do. Not that Japan doesn't have it's own economic issues, just for different reasons.

I don't know how UK cops are with innocent bystanders, but over here they aren't careful at all. And also not personally liable for harming innocent bystanders while performing their duties.

Once everyone has a numbered tag on their bike, then an officer can take a photo and the court can send the idiot a fine or summons.

If people have bikes without tags, start arresting the owners or confiscating bikes you find. After you take a few expensive bikes people will adjust their behavior.

Finders keepers. That's the law of the crypto-jungle. Which is precisely why I am on the side of civilization.

I think I would have used a different terminology.

except when it's inconvenient to whoever has the most money. Then we run crying to Uncle Sam for protection.