Yeah, there is no consensus on quantum gravity. There are competing theories, none of which have any viable path to test.

Here’s the abstract from a paper from last year at https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0601043 (PDF, unfortunately):

Freeman Dyson has questioned whether any conceivable experiment in the real universe can detect a single graviton. If not, is it meaningful to talk about gravitons as physical entities? We attempt to answer Dyson’s question and find it is possible concoct an idealized thought experiment capable of detecting one graviton; however, when anything remotely resembling realistic physics is taken into account, detection becomes impossible, indicating that Dyson’s conjecture is very likely true. We also point out several mistakes in the literature dealing with graviton detection and production.

Edit: That said, the paper does address this. They cover a variety of QG theories and try to address the fundamental requirements any theory must meet.

As we do not have a fully consistent theory of quantum gravity, several different axiomatic systems have been proposed to model quantum gravity Witten:1985cc ; Ziaeepour:2021ubo ; Faizal2024 ; bombelli1987spacetime ; Majid:2017bul ; DAriano:2016njq ; Arsiwalla:2021eao . In all these programs, it is assumed a candidate theory of quantum gravity is encoded as a computational formal system

ℱQ​G={ℒQ​G,ΣQ​G,ℛalg}.

It’s over my head, personally.

The majority of people will trail behind by 5-10 years, same as always. As long as a small minority at the cutting edge continue to use and develop better things, everyone will have access to them eventually.

They announced that they’re working with an OEM to support new non-pixel phones (perhaps even shipped with GOS).

The Pixel 9 series will be supported for another 6 years, and GOS support for the Pixel 10 is probably coming after Google releases QPR1 source. Hopefully there will be viable replacements by then.

Google is obviously going to keep making this more difficult but the rest of the world isn’t going to just sit still.

The actual paper presents the findings differently. To quote:

Our results clearly indicate that the resolution limit of the eye is higher than broadly assumed in the industry

They go on to use the iPhone 15 (461ppi) as an example, saying that at 35cm (1.15 feet) it has an effective “pixels per degree” of 65, compared to “individual values as high as 120 ppd” in their human perception measurements. You’d need the equivalent of an iPhone 15 at 850ppi to hit that, which would be a tiny bit over 2160p/UHD.

Honestly, that seems reasonable to me. It matches my intuition and experience that for smartphones, 8K would be overkill, and 4K is a marginal but noticeable upgrade from 1440p.

If you’re sitting the average 2.5 meters away from a 44-inch set, a simple Quad HD (QHD) display already packs more detail than your eye can possibly distinguish

Three paragraphs in and they’ve moved the goalposts from HD (1080p) to 1440p. :/ Anyway, I agree that 2.5 meters is generally too far from a 44" 4K TV. At that distance you should think about stepping up a size or two. Especially if you’re a gamer. You don’t want to deal with tiny UI text.

It’s also worth noting that for film, contrast is typically not that high, so the difference between resolutions will be less noticeable — if you are comparing videos with similar bitrates. If we’re talking about Netflix or YouTube or whatever, they compress the hell out of their streams, so you will definitely notice the difference if only by virtue of the different bitrates. You’d be much harder-pressed to spot the difference between a 1080p Bluray and a 4K Bluray, because 1080p Blurays already use a sufficiently high bitrate.

Does it do that even if you set it to “use device MAC” for the wi-fi network you’re on?

The exact location might depend on brand/OS, but in stock Android it’s in Settings > Network & Internet > Internet > gear icon next to active wi-fi network > Privacy.

The only thing I would use such a thing for is installing an ad blocker for the real world.

I’ll speculate.

My money’s on Asus. Asus is a bit more mainstream than Nothing but still enough of an underdog that I think they should see the value in a partnership. They already target an enthusiast niche with the ROG line.

The Nothing Phone 3 uses an SD 8s Gen 4, which is not Qualcomm’s “flagship” SOC, and it would be stretching the definition of “major” OEM, but who knows? This seems the most likely after Asus.

Moto’s only flagship Snapdragon phone is the Razr Ultra, which I guess is possible. It’d be weird, but hey, I’d buy one.

OnePlus has been moving in the opposite direction for years now, locking things down more and more. I think they’re too big for their britches at this point.

Sony’s flagships are crazy expensive, well beyond the price of Pixels. They also don’t cover the US market, though I’m not sure how important that is to the Graphene devs.

HMD doesn’t make any phones with flagship SOCs. I think their best is the Skyline, with a 7s gen 2, Qualcomm’s fourth-tier SOC line (the “s” stands for shitty).

Fairphone doesn’t use flagship Snapdragons and GOS has had some pretty nasty things to say about them in the past.

Samsung is a pipe dream. They’d have no motivation. The entire GOS user base would be a rounding error to them.

On a global scale, Xiaomi would be a huge get. Not sure I see any of the Chinese OEMs focusing on this though.

Lenovo and Blackberry…might still exist? I think?

Representation…in AI image generation?

The idea that this is something anyone should want is hard to wrap my head around.

If I could opt out of being deepfake-able, I would.

Almost like it’s a spectrum. Wild idea, I know.

If you can’t afford backups, you can’t afford storage. Anyone competent would factor that in from the early planning stages of a PB-scale storage system.

Going into production without backups? For YEARS? It’s so mind-bogglingly incompetent that I wonder if the whole thing was a long-term conspiracy to destroy evidence or something.

Alien meaning “external”.

Electrical interference can come from all kinds of places, near and far. I guess technically you might get interference from other planets but I don’t think that’s what they meant. :) Solar flares are a possibility, though.

Thanks for posting the solution!

If you happen to be using a BTRFS or XFS file system, you might want to try duperemove. It will help you reclaim usable disk space without deleting any files, by using those filesystems’ built-in support for data deduplication and copy-on-write. In other words, it will make duplicate files point to the same data on disk, but still work as individual files. Files will appear and function exactly the same, and editing one copy will not change another (unlike with hard links, for example). That way it won’t interfere with cases like Flatpak or Python virtual environments where you really need multiple copies of the same files.

Still good if you want ROM support or are willing to wait a few months to pick one up for dirt cheap.

GrapheneOS only supports pixels, and LineageOS only officially supports a few more models. If you filter the official LineageOS devices list to 2024/2025 models, you’ll see Pixels, Moto G 5G, and OnePlus 12R. That’s it. Options are similarly limited for Calyx, e/OS, and others. So with most other recent phones, you’re stuck with all the stock bloat and spyware, or unofficial community builds.

Also, they’re dirt cheap in practice in the US. MSRP is a joke. For most of the year, you could get an unlocked, brand new Pixel 9 for less than the MSRP of the low-end 9a. If memory serves, it dropped under $400 at times.

Aside from that, they kind of suck. I wouldn’t even compare them to high-end phones. They are mid-range phones masquerading as high-end. Credit to Google’s marketing department, I guess.

Yeah, I’d rather come at it from the opposite direction. “Everyone censors, so this exactly the kind of shit your government is going to try to force on you in the future.” Everyone should care about this, if only out of self-interest.

China’s writing the playbook. Other countries will follow it sooner than you might think. This is everybody’s problem.

I have a bookmarklet to enable text selection on any web page that tries to block it that way.

Here it is for your convenience. Bookmark it and give a try on the linked blog post:

javascript:document.styleSheets[0].insertRule("* { user-select:text !important }", 1);

Can’t remember where I swiped that from. Probably some ancient StackOverflow thread.

Generally speaking, xz provides higher compression.

None of these are well optimized for images. Depending on your image format, you might be better off leaving those files alone or converting them to a more modern format like JPEG-XL. Supposedly JPEG-XL can further compress JPEG files with no additional loss of quality, and it also has an efficient lossless mode.

Do any of them have the ability to recover from a bit flip or at the very least detect with certainty whether the data is corrupted or not when extracting?

As far as I know, no common compression algorithms feature built-in error correction, nor does tar. This is something you can do with external tools, instead.

For validation, you can save a hash of the compressed output. md5 is a bad hashing algorithm but it’s still generally fine (and widely used) for this purpose. SHA256 is much more robust if you are worried about dedicated malicious forgery, and not just random corruption.

Usually, you’d just put hash files alongside your archive files with appropriate names, so you can manually check them later. Note that this will not provide you with information about which parts of the archive are corrupt, only that it is corrupt.

For error correction, consider par2. Same idea: you give it a file, and it creates a secondary file that can be used alongside the original for error correction later.

I also want the files to be extractable with just the Linux/Unix standard binutils

That is a key advantage of this method. Adding a hash file or par file does not change the basic archive, so you don’t need any special tools to work with it.

You should also consider your file system and media. Some file systems offer built-in error correction. And some media types are less susceptible to corruption than others, either due to physical durability or to baked-in error correction.

Yeah, antennas are connected with cables, so that should be possible.

I don’t know how effective it would be, though. I wonder if it would still get a very weak signal even without the external antenna.

The camera/mic kill switch sounds legit.

The radio “kill switch” is just airplane mode. (Or rather, airplane mode as it used to be, since now it doesn’t actually turn off wi-fi or bluetooth by default in AOSP. But it’s still possible to turn off all the radios on any phone, so it’s weird to promote this as a special feature.)

I suspect it is not possible to implement a physical kill switch on radios with off-the-shelf SOCs since the radios are integrated (I think).

Induction stoves are the new hotness (literally and figuratively). Is that what you’ve used, or did you have the older (and much worse) type with glowing heating coils?

I thought electric stoves were all bullshit until I learned that “induction stove” was not just another term for what I was used to. But I’ve never seen one outside of fairly recent, relatively expensive renovations.

LOL. Smaller battery, too. What exactly is an upgrade from the previous version? They went from a SD 7+ Gen 3 to an 8s Gen 3, which is barely an upgrade at all.

I’m sure the price comparisons will vary based on country, but I’ve seen the OnePlus 13R below $500 pretty routinely on oneplus.com this year. Right now it’s $550 but if I remember right, it was cheaper at launch and a few times since.