I only tolerate the piece of shit phone because of F-Droid. Most of google's apps are banned from connecting to the network (like their fucking keyboard, I don't need or want any internet-requiring options) via Rethink VPN through which all network traffic is routed.

If this goes through, I'm taking my sim card out and putting it into the cheapest dumbphone I can find, using the smartphone strictly offline for OSMAnd navigation and media, uploaded over USB cable.

Let me be reasoned and measured and say fuck the entire gallery of those assholes. I only use Signal now, but I'm fully willing to give that up as well if this goes through and go full GPG-encrypted e-mail with keys exchanged IRL. The only thing I use the smartphone for other than Signal is navigation and OSMand works offline perfectly, I'll just pop my simcard into the cheapest dumbphone I can find and occasionally connect my phone to wifi to download new vector maps.

Creating, exchanging and safe-keeping the keys is hard. But what if OS vendors would provide just that as a system level service?

I recommend "Careless People" by Sarah Wynn-Something

Read that book in two days. Wild stuff. Of course I don't absolve Sarah Wynn for of her responsibility that is Facebook and it's completely maliciously run company. She is also complicit I don't care how many "I was trying to do the right thing! Whaa!" she sprinkled throughout the book.

The fact that they successfully got the book removed from sale for a while speaks volumes. They not only lie they are encouraged to.

This reminds me to throw 10€ at Signal

"Authentic conversations", with single-serving people provided as matches by an opaque algorithm based on short video vibes, this might as well have been mental health services in Mike Judge's Idiocracy.

I appreciate your candid feedback. Kuky is actually built on evidence-based peer support principles. Key research supporting our approach: • Shalaby & Agyapong (2020), JMIR Mental Health – Peer support improves wellbeing and reduces stigma. https://mental.jmir.org/2020/6/e15572 • Cooper et al. (2024), BMC Medicine – Peer-led interventions boost empowerment, hope, and connection. https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291...

These are horrible two and a half backwards steps for usability but please talk to me about how your shitty bouba elements inspire emotion and communicate function. Fucking liars, what emotion is it suppose to inspire that bluetooth is now not turned off when I enter airplane mode and realizing I now need three clicks to shut it off. It's for your own location harvesting bullshit. This inspired me to ban all apps trying to update anything from the network, everything goes through Rethink VPN now and I'm certainly not moving to another major version after 15.

This is just shit, a horrible redesign. I'd much rather "truly express" myself by keeping high information density in the user interface instead of picking color palettes for this trendy "bouba" bullshit. It's as bad a redesign as the recent Bluetooth option, which went from a single click to turn it off (and respecting airplane mode) to multiple clicks and staying on between Android 14 and 15. Of course Google wants BT scanning to work even if you're in airplane mode, they didn't do it for my convenience. I've had enough and am not updating anymore, outside of security updates. Now I use Rethink as on-device VPN and every app, system or not, has no access to the network unless I explicitly enable it, no more nagging to update.

The shenanigans Google pull in order to harvest location data (and prevent you from easily opting out!) really piss me off. I have a second phone that's got Graphene on it as a result, it's pretty much just the location service spycrap I can't stand.

> AI is more or less the same thing — it uses our wonder to convince us of a simulacrum of intelligence when what we are really witnessing is, in a sense, our own childish excitement at a trick of anthropomorphisation

This claim would stand better if it wasn't able to solve math and physics problems I struggle with.

How is seeing 7 entries without scrolling better than seeing 20+

And waiting 2-3 seconds on a spinning circle. Success!

i'll try to improve. thanks for comment. cheers

I have doubled my battery life on Moto Edge with Rethink DNS, blocking everything per app. There's so much junk I don't want to phone home that tries 50 times a day.

This sort of solution appeals to me but I wonder what the trade-off is. I am now sending data about domains I visit and when to a different entity not my ISP, how do I trust them more?

You don't have to use any DNS features, Rethink will happily let you set your DNS resolvers to whatever you like, you can just use it as an on-device VPN that allows you to block or isolate everything per app or per connection.