I don't think you have to waste your money or time on a cruise.
Just being on a boat does it, in fact a blow-up boat for three people (for a good friend and cooler bag with snacks and drinks) will completely detach you from the realities of land life.
Soon we shall see headlines of AI HR personnel being deployed to appropriately 'therapise the employees and mentor them for future opportunities' and HR companies which coordinate them for you. The second extreme that follows is one where we do away with HR and operate on a perfectly managed gig market where you will be hired and fired automatically!
Considering assembly theory (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory) for a possible explanation. The OP does state retinal is simpler, but it's significantly more basic and is organic.
On the other hand: Chlorophyll(s) all have a single magnesium caught at the center of a chlorin 'net'. It seems significantly harder to manufacture!
I cannot find any of Fairphone technical documentation that would provide details on their implementation of the TEE/HSM.
As of now I believe it's only Pixel's Titan and Samsung's KNOX that provide a discrete secure element on Android devices.
On vendor:
Drivers, firmware patches, OS upgrades are a necessity, not an option: most security and privacy updates are not backported. Vendor can't just wait for AOSP to deliver all the patches. Vendor must show a track record providing updates to their hardware
- After a lengthy two-year delay, the phone got a taste of Android 12 in February 2023, with Android 13 arriving relatively quickly in October 2023. For Android 14, Fairphone promised to roll out the update in H2, 2024, almost a year after Google released it. Now, with less than two months left in the year, the company is postponing the update's release to 2025. -- https://www.androidpolice.com/fairphone-4-long-delayed-andro...
- their Security Bulletin patches are consistently 1-2 months behind
- Fairphone 5 is still on Android 14 (since Jul 2024). Android 15 has been released in September 2024. Year and a half later AOSP is on Android 16.
For comparison GrapheneOS had eight releases in July alone (GrapheneOS had a full A16 release on 30th of June for all supported devices).
Security patches are usually released within one-three days (or earlier, from the tree, without waiting for being published in the bundle)
GOS Release for Pixel 9 was ready three days after the device launch.
Android 16 was released less than half a month before the release of the FP6, which itself is less than a month ago. Seems reasonable that it wouldn't ship the latest version under those circumstances.
After a lengthy two-year delay, the phone got a taste of Android 12 in February 2023, with Android 13 arriving relatively quickly in October 2023. For Android 14, Fairphone promised to roll out the update in H2, 2024, almost a year after Google released it.
It is also worth mentioning that Android Security Bulletins generally only contain backports of patches for High and Critical vulnerabilities. Most non-Pixel/GrapheneOS phones only get all the other fixes when moving to the next major release [1]. So getting the next major Android release is important (getting to a recent patch-level alone is not enough).
I can completely understand that Graphene does not want to support Fairphone and others, their security/privacy goals are the complete opposite of what those phones provide.
All the friggin' shaders we have to run to waste GPU cycles, just to get those blobs pretending to refract light. Don't even get me started about the ever-increasing border radii!?
Then why is battery life terrible on iOS 26 and the device is heating up just doing basic stuff with the UI. And it stutters a lot too in places even with a 16 Pro.
It would be an interesting napkin problem to do. Yes it's relatively trivial, but multiply it by 1B smartphones running for many hours every day and how many cities worth of power are you wasting on extraneous shader cycles?
It’s still very little energy. Probably way way less than a bedside lamp per phone.
Phones aren’t a good place to try to save aggregate energy use at a population level. They already use vanishingly small amounts of energy compared to just about anything in your house.
One could suppose that they need to justify the GPU/NPU hardware bloat originally intended for "Apple Intelligence" now that "Apple Intelligence" seems overblown and under-delivered. Though they'd need a lot more shaders beyond just "glass" to really make a dent in the cycles available from all that hardware.
This rounded corner change feels very off. Since Apple has that same radius across all its products (software and hardware), it could be signaling a broader upcoming shift in their hardware, perhaps driven by industrial design needs for future AR/VR/MR glasses.
What I find comical is that the same people praising this on various networks are often the same that hate on cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin or AI because of the energy usage.
Apple has 1bio devices out there, if each of them consumes 10% more energy due to this change, that's a massive energy consumption increase - and this change offers no functional benefit at all.
Netherlands has implemented Tikkie on top of iDEAL, which is essentially the same outcome. You link your bank account, send a payment request URL or put up a QR if you're a business. That's good UX, and it's getting better adoption.
That's definitely closer to Pix, but the advantage of Pix is because since the Brazillian Central Bank forced adoption for almost every player (not just banks, but even things like PagSeguro that is the Brazil equivalent of PayPal), so you can just assume that everyone has a Pix account already.
Last time I went to Brazil I remember that at least twice I asked if the person seeling me something would accept Pix in place of cash since I generally don't carry any cash, and they happily accepted even if they didn't advertise this.
And iDeal is being expanded across Europe; the technology is now owned by the European Payments Industry and rebranded as Wero, which will replace iDeal in the Netherlands, Giropay in Germany, Paylib in France, and Payconiq in Belgium and Luxembourg.
This fragmentation of digital payment methods has had a... less than optimal effect on European payment traffic, with a lot of e-commerce going through American payment providers like credit cards (Visa, Mastercard mainly) and Paypal. A lot of internationally operating online outlets have added support for iDeal over time though, so hopefully Wero will be deployed very fast.
I was just thinking that. He says the system has low transaction costs (free for individuals) and is fast (three seconds) instead of taking days. Sending money abroad is more expensive, but if you shop around for services instead of just paying what your bank charges it can be very cheap and fast.
In the UK we have bank transfers that settle in a maximum of two hours (much less usually, although I do not know whether it is as fast as the Brazilian system on average) and is free for individuals. It seems to be the norm globally. Is Krugman entirely unaware of how the rest of the world works?
The one things he is right about is that we do already have central bank digital currencies. Most currencies exist mostly in digital form (I cannot remember the exact number, but got GBP its well over 90%).
An important feature of (some) crypto stablecoins is that they function like cash.
Cash is fungible. And cash in my wallet is not subject to being frozen like a bank account.
One can argue the merits of a digital cash for society. But a crypto-based digital cash is fundamentally different from a digital bank-based payment system.
I did find myself without barely any cash during Spain's blackout and that made it really stressful. It made me value physical currency a lot more.
Now I wish digital payments didn't require a server/ledger connection at all, but I understand that would risk double-spend attacks unless all the computation could be fully trusted, which we can't even guarantee for existing card payments.
Exactly, it's a solution looking for a solved problem. The digital banking you listed out-perform crypto as well, and have heaps of checks and balances, auditing, and guarantees from central banks. All that will need to be reinvented for "crypto" shit, and they need to show some proof as to why it's better before they get the billions of buy-in required.
Well, I think crypto does solve a couple important problems faced by many speculative markets and casinos: Regulation and taxation. It's any scammer, grifter, and thief's paradise!
It's a paradise for all kinds of scum and dark people, like pedos, human traffickers, drug dealers, ransom hackers, mafias etc. And all this receives a great care from the current fascists USA government, who invested in crypto a lot, I suppose.
> SEPA? IBAN-to-IBAN? iDEAL and many other integrated payment systems
None of these are really comparable to Pix, which occupies a different place in the market (although it also covers these use cases). It absorbs almost all P2P payments as well as business payments, where cards and cash were previously dominant.
I'm not familiar enough with Bancontact, but.... Doesn't Bancontact take up to 3 days to the money to get to business?
Does it support every bank? It feels for me Bancontact feels like a Visa/Master thing?
The point about Pix is how it was created by the Central Bank. Between person, it's 100% free, no fees at all. Between business, they allow banks to charge a fee, but the cost it's super low, so a few banks don't have fees at all.
Pix it's just a way on how you can transfer money from your bank app.
About Google Pay thing, Google Pay here integrated Pix, by using open bank solution. So Google Pay basically becomes a 3rd party client for your bank, and thus, allows you use Pix with Tap to Pay, or... with every website on Chrome's.
As soon as you copy the Pix Code to pay, it invokes Google Pay, and you can pay seamless, without switching to any app.
And because every website, store, supports Pix... This basically delivered Google Pay to everything.
Right, so SEPA Instant is a world away from Pix, which is accepted everywhere in Brazil and sometimes is the only payment methods available.
These comments remind me of the infamous Dropbox comment. Pix is identical to SEPA except in all the ways that count to users, which is why it's wildly more popular.
A vanishingly small number of people split bills, pay for chewing gum, etc with SEPA. Third parties including credit/debit cards and Revolut dominate (with their proprietary P2P payments) in the EU.
It simply occupies a different market space and mindshare than Pix.
