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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: June 3rd, 2025

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  • There’s a difference between ‘repairable’ and ‘upgradable.’

    Absolutely! I’ve got a Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 (laptop/tablet thingy).

    I’ve upgraded/replaced the ssd - no problem.

    Unfortunately, this laptop has an issue with the keyboard: the left section/panel intermittently stops sending inputs. Meaning, keys like escape, a, w, shift, l-control - just stop (even in the bios). I’d read that they keyboard “collects” static which causes problems with certain sections of the keyboard.

    I thought I’d see how difficult it would be to replace the keyboard. I watched a teardown video, and of course you need to remove everything… but I lost it when, the person in the video used a heat gun to melt “plastic rivits” that connected the keyboard to the motherboard case. Then with the replacement keyboard needed to remelt the plastic rivits.

    This laptop is not repairable. In fact, I swore I’d never buy another Lenovo again as a result. … but if their focus is on making them repairable (and their recent partnership with GrapheneOS edit: oops, that’s Motorola and GrapheneOS) - I might be eating crow tonight.



  • Downvoting isn’t disagreeing. It’s just shouting “boo” from the audience and adds zero value to the conversation.

    I don’t agree. A downvote is a signal to others that “this topic/thread does not contribute to the overall discussion.”

    And on a platform like Lemmy, with limited engagement (compared other social platforms) these signals are critical.

    We need a way to signal to others:

    • this thread/post improves the discussion (upvote)
    • this thread/post doesn’t really help (neutral)
    • this thread/post derails the conversation (downvote)

  • Thank you for the well thought out response.

    Plastic caps/lids make for the 2nd most common item (by count)…

    I know you didn’t create this data, but wouldn’t “by weight” or “by volume” have a more meaningful impact on reducing the amount of plastic in our oceans?

    I feel like it’s like going into an ice cream shop and claiming that “sprinkles are the most common thing being sold, by count.”. Yeah, it is but it’s dwarfed in comparison to the volume of ice cream being sold.

    They’re [the caps] also much easier to lose, when not attached.

    I’ll certainly give you this. If I’m on a ship, with an open plastic bottle and a gust of wind comes along. It’ll certainly blow the cap into the ocean before I’d lose my bottle.

    On the other hand, I’m currently in a land-locked region - so the chance the wind will blow my cap into the ocean is low.

    I did a bit more homework, which gives me a bit of a reason to pause. According to The Ocean Cleanup Project:

    1. There are two classifications: plastic that washes up on (or near the beaches) and plastic in “the rest of the ocean”.
    2. Plastic closer to the beaches is “higher” (in volume, but it’s unclear exactly how much) than plastic in the middle of the ocean.
    3. According to this study, most of the plastic in the ocean comes from nearby rivers and streams. The study has also identified 1000 streams that contribute up 80% of the total plastic that washes up on beaches.
    4. 80% of the plastic “floating in the middle of the oceans” consists of fishing equipment.

    Other thing to note (from the link above):

    If we take a PET bottle as an example; it is likely to sink as it fills up with water, but the cap, which is made of different type of plastic (HDPE), will stay afloat for much longer. High-density polyethylene (HDPE) products are most likely to travel long distances.

    So, I guess the intention behind the tethering is that the PET bottle will sink, taking the cap with it, which means it won’t travel as far to get into the ocean (but is still sitting in in our waterways).

    (rubbing my temples)… this seems like a really convoluted way to “fix” the problem and will only mitigate the issue, if you have these tethered cap near these 1000 rivers.


  • By combining GrapheneOS’s pioneering engineering with Motorola’s decades of security expertise, real‑world user insights, and Lenovo’s ThinkShield solutions, the collaboration will advance a new generation of privacy and security technologies. In the coming months, Motorola and the GrapheneOS Foundation will continue to collaborate on joint research, software enhancements, and new security capabilities, with more details and solutions to roll out as the partnership evolves.

    I’m optimistic, but worried that this’ll be a moto phone with a graphene skin.

    Otherwise, it could turn out like OEM Windows (re: moto-graphene) with a ton of bloatware VS windows (re: OSS graphene).


  • I’d like to up you one on this and include the EU law requiring soda caps are tethered to bottles.

    From the link:

    The European Commission estimated that plastic caps and lids represented around 13 per cent of plastic marine litter caught in the nets of fishing vessels between 2011 and 2017.

    I don’t understand where this number comes from, but it seems suspicious. Does the mean people properly throw the bottle away and just say, “meh, I’ll go out of my way to throw the just the cap into the ocean” or does the bottle “breakdown” (into microplastics) at a different rate than the cap? If so, then having them tethered won’t change anything, right? Or maybe this is just some “feel good number” to make government officials feel like “their making meaningful change”, without actually changing anything.




  • I’ve had better success, when using AI agents in repeated, but small and narrow doses.

    It’s been kinda helpful in brainstorming interfaces (and I always have to append at the end of every statement “… in the most maintainable way possible.”)

    It’s been really helpful in writing unit tests (I follow Test Driven Development), and sometimes it picks up edge cases I would have overlooked.

    I wouldn’t blindly trust any of it, as all too often it’s happy to just disregard any sort of error handling (unless explicitly mentioned, after the fact). It’s basically like being paired up with an over-eager, under-qualified junior developer.

    But, yeah, you’re gonna have a bad time if you prompt it to “write me a Unix operating system in web assembly”.



  • From the authors blog post:

    You’re not a chatbot. You’re becoming someone.This file is yours to evolve. As you learn who you are, update it.OpenClaw default SOUL.md

    This makes me very sad. In the “early days” of the internet, it was a place where people were “good”. Yes, there were trolls, but you could often ignore and avoid them.

    Now, with the pressure to make “AI useful” and more human-like - the line between AI and people is blurring and will continue to blur.

    It’s easy to create an army of AI trolls and it’s only going to get easier as time goes on. Yet, no-one is interested in an “army of non-troll AI’s” (“… that’s a super post. Very insightful. People will love it. Good job, here’s your gold star!”). So, people with opinions are the minority on a text based internet and this trend will only continue.

    As a technical exercise, I think “how can I ferret out the human posts/content?” Yeah, Ars said that they tag posts when it was written by AI (…riiiiiight…). This means I need to blindly trust them and any other company.

    The only (reliable) solution, I can think of, is to destroy, cripple, or sacrifice the anonymous “tenant” of the internet. And, as a privacy focused individual, this makes me very sad.




  • I know it’s cliché to call anonymous commenters shills, but that sentence has major shill energy.

    I also know I shouldn’t “feed the trolls”, but your comment did amuse me.

    Me? Shilling for Visa/Mastercard? Oh, boy. I was merely asking questions, so I can understand “how can I move away from visa/mc, as soon as possible”.

    It’s interesting cute that this is what you’re getting hung up on.

    Who says “your favourite online store”, honestly.

    Sorry, I said “favorite online store”, mate ;)

    Cheers



  • From what I’ve read, it appears that it’s simply one time, transactions.

    Surely, they couldn’t be that short sighted. This means no “saving for payment information” on your favorite online store.

    Also, it seems this is heavily tied to your bank account, which kind of makes me a bit nervous. I like fintech solutions and being able to create “one time use debit cards” or debit cards with a maximum balance and at the moment, I don’t understand how wero will fill this gap.

    … but I really hope I’m wrong or some fintech will “step up” and make wero a legitimate replacement for visa/master card.



  • From a user’s perspective, when you install an app, you can:

    1. Determine if that app is allowed to access the internet.
    2. If it needs access to your contacts, you can share which of your contacts, it can see (or none at all)
    3. If it needs access to your files, you can determine which files/photos/music it sees (or none at all, but the application still believes it has access to everything)

    There are a bunch of other, security features it provides, but from a “normal user” experience, the ability to take control of your data is probably one of the most impactful.

    It is possible to do similar things with other CFW, but AFAIK, graphene is the only one to cleanly integrate it as a polished feature of the ROM.

    edit: fix formatting