My wife upgraded from a Samsung S21 Ultra to an S25 Ultra but uses it mostly same way.

The one new feature I have seen her use is the AI person/object removal in the gallery. Samsung’s AI tools can run entirely on-device, which is nice (avoids sending the photos to the cloud and using an AI data center for the processing). I tried them while in airplane mode to confirm they do indeed work with no internet connection.

She upgraded because the old one had a pretty scratched screen (we installed a screen protector on the new one!) and the battery wasn’t lasting long any more. The official repair store that Samsung use in the US, UBreakIFix, don’t stock S21 batteries any more, and I didn’t trust myself enough to replace it myself.

I really hope some phones are released with support for MicroSD Express.

One of the practical reasons companies started removing MicroSD slots is because SD cards were far slower than the internal storage, and installing apps onto them could make everything laggier. That’s mostly solved with MicroSD Express which is up to 9x faster than the legacy MicroSD standard.

Of course, there’s also the financial aspect, which the manufacturers love. If you can’t insert an SD card, you have to pay the manufacturer for more storage.

Here’s hoping the EU mandates that phones need to support removable storage.

Proton’s server is closed source so I don’t trust it as much as Bitwarden.

Bitwarden’s the only “cloud-based” password manager I trust, since their entire stack is open-source.

For self-hosting, they recently released Bitwarden Lite, which is a lot simpler to host than their regular server. One Docker image and you can use SQLite for the database. Different design decisions compared to the regular server which is designed to scale up to handle businesses with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees.

There’s also Vaultwarden, which is an unofficial third-party server implementation.

Makes sense - thanks.

Doesn’t the water evaporate and become part of the water cycle? Water can’t just disappear? Maybe I’m missing something.

It would be good to cut down water usage… Not just for data centers but also for things like lawns and golf courses.

This applies to a lot of services. Only expose something publicly if the public need to access it, and make sure it’s properly secured. If it’s just for you or your family (or friends) to use, use a peer-to-peer / mesh VPN like Tailscale.

PSMC sounds like a bootleg TSMC lol

legacy fab it opened just 19 months ago

what

The healthcare system in the US isn’t great, but you do get a decent experience if you have an employer that offers good insurance. My employer pays most of the cost of my health insurance. I pay around $200/month for my wife and I, but that’s pre-tax money, and the plan is great for US standards. $15 for doctor visits and $100 maximum for ER visits.

In Australia we pay a 1.5% tax to fund the public health care system, so for a $60k salary that’s $900/year.

An important note missing from this article (but included in others) is that Jeff Atwood, the founder of Stack Overflow, donated 2.2 million Euros to Mastodon. That’s likely partially where the 1 million Euro payout for the CEO came from.

Why don’t you like people being paid for their work?

us software salaries are insanely high compared to the rest of the world, because the cost of living in SV is insanely high.

I moved from Australia to the San Francisco Bay Area. My starting income was maybe 3x what I was getting paid in Australia, but the cost of living definitely wasn’t 3x higher. Major Australian cities are considered HCOL (high cost of living) areas too. Some things like electronics and food were cheaper in the USA too, at least until inflation and tariffs made everything go up.

I wonder if Google will ever release a new version of the Coral, with some of the newer TPU tech.

(yes, I know Google handed that off to Asus…)

I’m 95% sure the settlement with the publishers would have included a clause requiring the Internet Archive to delete all “infringing” material in their possession.

I have mixed feelings. I’m glad they survived the lawsuits, and now they can spend their funding on their actual goals rather than it going towards lawyers.

On the other hand, it’s really sad that they had to delete so much of their archive - over half a million books, and a bunch of recordings from their Great 78 Project (which was archiving 300k+ music albums released between ~1900 and 1950). A lot of the things that can’t be archived are eventually going to become lost media.

This is a great post that I hadn’t seen before. Thanks for the link!

I feel the same about software development. For personal projects, I’ll often use a technology stack I’m very familiar with, like C# and MySQL on a Debian Linux server. Maybe not the fanciest, but they’re proven, reliable technologies that have been around for a long time, and will likely still be around a long time from now.

New frameworks, libraries, and languages pop up all the time, but some of the ecosystems move way too quickly. I have some Node.js sites I built years ago that I can’t even run any more without major changes.

Relevant: https://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/happiness-is-a-boring-stack.html

I wish there was a law stipulating that smart devices must allow for local control. That’d never happen in the USA (since companies couldn’t make as much money selling the data, and we can’t hurt the poor companies’ revenue streams), but maybe it’s happen in Europe one day.

“cloud” still mostly means services like AWS and Google Cloud. People don’t refer to Hetzner dedicated servers as “cloud” for example.

They should say at least one thing that’s unique to the cloud, though.