In a final bid to save the product, Google has quarantined the model in a server room with no WiFi, feeding it only proprietary Oracle Java documentation in hopes of breaking its spirit.

😂

Are they abandoning it? Where are they going instead?

The FTC argued that Meta had maintained illegal monopoly power in the narrow sector of the social media market by gobbling up nascent competitors, Instagram and WhatsApp, it feared could threaten its dominance. But throughout the trial, the FTC was dogged by questions about whether it could claim Meta still had that illegal monopoly in the face of a greatly changed social media landscape. Boasberg said the government had to prove current or imminent illegal monopolization, not just past dominance.

Technically, fair on the judge’s part.

I think this is more like Meta winning by delaying the case until it could win on a technicality.

If these arguments had come up when the suit was originally filed, Meta would have lost the case, because TikTok hadn’t grown to be the competitor it is now.

Putting on my tinfoil hat: Meta let TikTok grow in order to avoid being broken up for being a monopoly.

If you care about personal privacy, any replacement firmware will be an improvement over what a smartphone vendor provides. The trick, for most people, will be balancing the competing needs of privacy, compatibility, and convenience. Graphene ought to score highly in both privacy and compatibility, but it only supports a few devices, and its security hardening can make it quirky. ∕e∕OS scores for convenience and support if you’re a Murena customer, but has little to recommend it over Lineage otherwise, in my view. Lineage probably remains the geek’s choice, despite the maintainers’ increasing disdain for tinkering with it.

Using any replacement firmware will be inconvenient if you’re tied to Google’s services, as many of us are. You can try to continue to use those services, but in a less privacy-crushing way, and Graphene and ∕e∕OS purport to offer some help with that. However, I think you’d need to be both knowledgeable and careful to use Google Services, even in these restrictive environments, without inadvertently sacrificing privacy. To my mind, if you want to de-Google, you have to find replacements for Google, not ways to appease Google.

As a Graphene user, I can agree about the frustrations quirks of the OS.

I was looking for reasons to switch to Lineage, but I think I am not yet geek enough to make the switch.

Here was the best tutorial I could find for it.

You can create posts in Lemmy communities by tagging the community account
(It should be a public post)
If the community account is tagged with @, it will share the post and the post will also appear in the forum.
For example, this is a post I created from Mastodon in feddit’s #Tischtennis forum: metalhead.club/@caos/112749905… … and this is how it is displayed in Lemmy: feddit.org/post/556495

The only thing to note from Mastodon and Akkoma etc. is: The beginning of the post/the first paragraph becomes the title of the forum post, as Mastodon does not have a heading field. (see also: Instructions Creating a post from Mastodon)

So it is best to start the post like this (see image 1):

This is my headline (as descriptive a title as possible)
@community@lemmy-instance
This is the further text, link etc.
if necessary a picture (only in the initial post a picture is transferred from Mastodon to Lemmy, between Lemmy and Friendica all images in answers are transferred in the meantime)

*23 year old pays the down payment on a million dollar home for his parents.

“House price $1,060,000. I’ve paid 20% down on it — all from my savings,” the real estate agent, who started his career after high school, said.

I use horse-battery-staple passwords for core stuff (unlocking my computer, bank stuff).

I use the password manager-generated passwords for everything that’s in a browser.

Talking is (not) a free action sounds like it could be a fun mechanic if everyone agrees to it.

Let the big bad talk, but players get to write down an attempted action and roll for successful sneak for as long as he’s yapping.

I get that with raspberries.

I don’t understand how - it doesn’t even look like it has seeds, but it happens every time.

If you have a human-narrated audiobook, you can use Storyteller to synchronize those.

AI-TTS still doesn’t do it for me. It’s either the mispronunciation of proper nouns or the cadence putting me to sleep. Maybe in a few years, I’ll try again.