You're missing the point. Some people want to enjoy other's creations. Some people care about what's behind a piece. The question is not "can an LLM generate something decent", we already reached that point. The question is, why would I pay $80 for that. If you feel like it, sure, go for it. Some people don't.

Microsoft killed wordpad. It seems that a small text editor with basic formatting and some text-related features was NOT something people wanted.

Which makes the inclusion of basic formatting and some text-related features in notepad even more baffling.

The issue isn't that notepad is irreplaceable, it's more like how far up their collective asses can their heads go.

When microsoft execs wonder "why are people not happy with out products?", this is where we should point them toward. (I know they never ask themselves this question, unfortunately). As far as windows tools were concerned for the last forever, they had notepad: extremely barebone text editor, and wordpad.

Notepad go-to use was to "clean" the clipboard, or note something super quickly. Nothing more, nothing less. For every other usages there was a better tool. And conversely, there was no tool that ensured that a copy/paste would be clean better than notepad.

They also had wordpad. I never really knew what it was for, but it could do some amount of formatting/page layout, and could save usable enough files. It filled the niche of people that wanted "some" formatting beyond bare-bone notes, but did not want a full word processor supposedly.

Then came microsoft, killing wordpad out of the blue, and putting all of these features (and more, obviously) into notepad. Basically, they consider that the use case for wordpad is still present, since they keep the features up, but they renamed it "notepad". And in doing so, they removed the actually useful notepad, in favor of go fuck yourself.

It is impossible for most of us to understand how far removed people making these decisions are from the real world.

It's called "testing the water". Everytime, we progress a bit more toward that. You think draconian ID checking online came out of the blue? The idea's been marinating for years. Full control over user devices is a dream for these business. They're in a position to enforce that on mobile, and will keep trying, normalizing the idea. They also looked into doing the same for web browsers, backed out, but still, push the standards towards including more and more component to serve that purpose.

Minimizing this because they walked back one step after walking forward two steps is silly.

The point is that, on your own device, if you want to do something, you can do it.

They say "advanced users" in the sense that your uncle that's technologically inept would have to jump through hoops and ignore many warning labels that would usually drive them toward being cautious (or calling their all-knowing nephew) in an attempt to thwart unwanted apk installation.

Yes, that mean that nowadays, "advanced users" means "know how to read".

Anyway, it does not have anything to do with the quality, safety, or whatever, of the apk. There's no expectation on the end user to be aware of everything. The premise is that, my device, my choice, and if I, as an adult, want to install whatever, it's my decision, not google's.

This is, basically, going to appease a lot of people. Give me control over my damn device.

It seems obvious that this was a way to test the water for more drastic measures in the future, though. It always is.

Some years ago, I was willing to *pay* to use MS software. And did, in fact. Despite them. Despite Microsoft trying its best, at every corner, to be the most obnoxious, annoying, backward clowns of software development. I paid, and kept using windows and a handful of things. But they kept pulling away, again, again, and again.

Now they'd have to pay me real money for even thinking about it. And a lot of it.

Had they just tried to make useful, non intrusive OS, with stable, non borked software around it, combined with their leader position, they could have kept going and going. But no, they had to shit the bed, repeatedly, with a lot of effort.

The thing that seems to be the most useful, small tasks over a limited subset of data, the thing that runs fine on device (and if the trend of providing the appropriate hardware keep going, will continue running fine locally), the thing that provides immediate, almost tangible benefit, with in most case easily and quickly verifiable output, while also not needing the computational power of a city block, THAT is what google deems "unsustainable" ?

And obviously, what seems to be sustainable to google is centralizing all requests into datacenters that each are as power hungry as a little state, to put your data in their "secure cloud enclave" or whatever (you know, the thing that regularly gets breached, and isn't exactly good against physical access), to run ever increasing workload of dubious purpose.

Sure. The future is the exponentially increasingly demanding central architecture that can't catch up with its promise, not the thing that seems to actually work at a level that might not obliterate us.

Granted, I've only given the article a cursory glance, but is this really saying "you can connect two bluetooth headsets and have the same audio in them"? As in, windows will allow streaming the same audio to multiple output devices?

Because, if so, we've been doing it for years with software like VoiceMeeter on windows, bluetooth or not (assuming your bluetooth headsets *actually* connects to a windows machine without issues), and obviously it's been a thing in other OSes as well. Is that what the great Microsoft can do, in 2025? Being years late on a party that already ended, and pushing useless features?

I really hope I'm missing something very important, otherwise it's kinda sad.

It is possible, today, to multi-home. Critical services do that (or should). It's not even *that* hard, although you have to be competent with all your providers.

I'll oversimplify a bit, but

• DNS can have multiple resolvers, that's not the hardest part (let's hope the root do not crash.)
• Load balancers, through both DNS and apt container management (or whatever similar tech you have) can handle one provider failing mostly gracefully; some clients will insist on hitting the dead one, but it will smooth out. You will have to have load balancers that can work with multi-homed stuff, so prepare to tinker a bit unless your providers are nice.
• Services "processing" that can be stateless will rely on their resources being available, and can be spanned as needed to absorb the load, including over multiple hosts.
• Services that aren't stateless are more of a hassle because it's easier to lose something if one goes dark, but it's a risk that can be evaluated and mitigated too, with proper admins and services.
• The "ressources" (storage, database, dedicated hardware, etc.) all have some form of redundancy mechanism available, that can range from trivial to complex to setup, but ultimately things can fall back properly if one instance disappear.

Note that all of this assumes one of the following: either your providers play nice with each other, or you go bare metal in some places to setup redundancy, replication, etc.. Also note that this will require competent sysadmins to at the very least bridge the gap between multiple providers. A business could be built on top of these ideas, to provide services that are "transparently" served by at least two big, independent providers. But all of this costs a lot.

About Signal they failed when AWS failed. Baring any active attempt at hindering Signal, this is a relatively rare event (although it happens more and more these days). Increasing infrastructure costs indefinitely to handle a very sporadic downtime is not really an obvious solution. Keep in mind that as long as it's not the whole AWS zone that goes under, AWS is quite good at keeping services available in case of minor events (other providers too, I suppose).

I have no idea where Signal gets his money, but wherever that is, I assume that "increasing infrastructure cost by 40% to alleviate two hours of downtime a year" would not look too good.

Apparently, you'd be surprised by the amount of people that have no idea what a capital letter, a comma, an apostrophe, or a dot is on internet.

VPN have their uses circumventing geofencing, reaching out on restricted networks, and probably a few other things that I'm not too concerned with. But I see no point running *all* your connections through a VPN 24/7 unless you're a state enemy or something of that caliber. It's not about security (TLS is doing its job), it's not really about tracking protection (you get my IP that might or might not be static, and might or might not be shared with multiple users, big fucking woop, 99% of the tracking happens in the browser itself).

Although if you route *everything* through a VPN, people running these servers will centralize a lot of juicy metadata about your internet usage, frequency of visit of this or that IP, amount of data exchanged, and if you include DNS into that, what actual service you're looking at. Sounds interesting. Thankfully Mozilla is not in the business of creeping into the data collection/advertisement business, or there would be reasons to be worried.

It's really hard these day to be positive about things. I wish them the best of luck. Having a working, usable, open-source based phone sounds great. However, I can't shake off the few limitations that are likely to make this not viable for most people, beyond a general lack of interest in openness:

• - support for banking/govt. apps that may or may not become mandatory in the near future. Not having my bank app on Android makes doing anything hard already
• - support for the aforementioned apps that are likely to require a (supposedly) strict walled-garden infrastructure. Sure, rooted android can sort of fake some Play Protect checks, but chasing an ever changing DRM scheme is not viable long-term
• - Actual hardware support, long-term. I can't imagine phone manufacturer being too happy unlocking their bootloader for custom rom install, let alone make them fully open. I know some do, to some extents, but we'd remain at the mercy of some exec somewhere to allow us to use our devices. It'd be nice to see this happen in collaboration with someone able to manufature phones, and I didn't see much about that in the initial announcement.

Those limitations can be lifted/worked around, and given the current trend, I'm ready to pay some premium for a phone that won't spy on me or dictate what I can and cannot do. But it has to work to begin with. Let's hope all this goes well.

It's so good to see that the recent ruling that imposed them to allow third-party stores worked so well for consumers and dev all around, right?
Having a central authority dictate what's allowed and what isn't is also a boon for free speech.
There is no way this can be abused in any way, correct?
Good thing we stayed on Android to avoid Apple bullshit walled garden, phew, thanks open source OS!
Sarcasm, obviously. With the incoming "chat control" thing in the EU, probably mandatory digital ID app in the near future, bank and many administrations requiring a "vetted" smartphone for basic operations (can't even log-in on my bank website without one), and the ongoing cat and mouse game with many apps that tries to make services usable against Google's will, this will NOT go down well.
I know the EU took a sharp turn toward consumer hostility in the last few months, but I really hope they man up with this one, because I don't see anything else blocking this. They probably won't given that it's a population control wet dream, but still.