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Comment Re:FUCK GOOGLE. (Score 1) 23

Is your phone AI capable? I bought a new one a year ago (the old one was out of OS support) and made sure that mine was not.
My second line in the sand is to use DuckDuckDo as the search engine, although I'm preparing to experiment with Brave's. Replacing the messaging app could be more difficult, especially if I want to keep my history.

Comment Re: "helping" yeah so good of them to "help" (Score 1) 151

China is taking the long-term view here, building up goodwill in Cuba and in other countries where they see themselves potentially in the same situation. I hope they realise that military action with Taiwan would do a lot of damage to that goodwill.
Why is the US still bullying Cuba in the first place? It is not as though Cuba is a threat.

Comment Google forced me to use Fdroid (Score 3, Insightful) 53

There is a public transport app called Öffi which I consider essential when in Germany. It is free, does not gather data on its users and covers the entire country, the alternatives are regional and many really want to know all about their users.
That link is to the Google Play Store, but it has twice been removed from there.
The first time it was because the app encourages donations, but that request was hidden from users installing via the Play Store. I think Google looked at the app and noticed that request for donations but could not see that it was functionally inactive. It took them a few months to accept the truth and permit the app again.
The second time was mid July 2025, they banned it again and refused to say why. I was in Germany and travelling at the time, the app ceased working with a database error and I was screwed, it took me a day or three to download Fdroid and get it working but now I get it from there. It's back in the Play Store (I don't know when that happened) but I have to assume this idiocy is going to happen again.

I use another App where the developer(s) announced that they were going to stop updating their Play Store version because the overhead was just too much, and that the preferred migration path was to Fdroid. It is a security product, one which resolves QR codes to text and requires the user to confirm that they really want to visit that site. Works for me.

Comment Are they fixing something which ain't broke? (Score 4, Insightful) 57

I'd have thought there are other problems which are more important. A day or so ago in Wiesbaden (Germany) Google Maps decided a section of an Autobahn was closed, even though traffic was running normally there, at that point a number of misguided souls left the Autobahn and drove through the city to avoid the non-closed section. It took them a few hours to fix the error.

IF traffic-running-normally THEN ignore announcements that a road is closed.

If the road is really blocked then I'd expect barriers and signs detailing the detour. Google Maps can't read those signs but it should be able to notice that traffic has ceased to flow there.

Comment Re:I thought the housing crisis was about greed (Score 1, Informative) 120

That's not how it works. You can't just buy a tract of land. You have to buy the land, jump through hoops to get permits to build, defeat NIMBY lawsuits, get the local municipality to run services, defeat more NIMBY lawsuits, get new permits from a new municipality administration, then finally break ground on construction.

NIMBYs of all stripes throw up roadblocks during the permitting process and will then sue to get an injunction. If you defeat those lawsuits they'll go after the municipalities suing that permits were approved illegally (which they sometimes are).

After several rounds of legal wrangling you can finally start construction. This ends up with only huge developers being able to build because they can absorb all the pre-construction costs until they sell all the homes. They can also afford the scale to benefit from bulk orders and contracts.

The cost of expanding housing is mostly in the project development rather than labor costs of construction. Even if you had construction robots the construction companies would only offer marginal savings as their bids would just be human contractor - 1%. There would be no reason for them to leave money on the table offering a huge discount off human labor.

Comment Re:Culture Wars (Score 1) 93

You can prove anything with the right statistics.

I'm wondering what effect this is going to have on people trying to enter the U.S.
We've already seen social media posts being a ground to deny admittance, how is it doing to look with installed AI clients? Anthropic - BAD, ChatGPT or Grok - GOOD. As for me, I don't think my phone supports any of them and have no interest finding out anyway.

Comment Re:Permanently daylight savings? (Score 1) 182

The EU is spread over three timezones, plus a few more for the distant French (and Dutch) territories.
- the Baltic states and Greece, probably Cyprus, maybe Finland
- pretty much all of the rest
- Portugal, Ireland
That's from memory and I may have got some of those wrong.
The reason Spain is in the "all of the rest" block rather than Portugal, Ireland (and the UK) is that General Franco owed and admired Hitler and he decided to have his country on the same time zone as the German Reich. The Spanish adapted (they get up an hour later) so the country stayed there once Franco was safely dead.

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