Xiaomi isn’t actually that big in China AFAIK. There is a lot of competition, not just from Apple but all the other Chinese vendors, most of whom are larger. Huawei, Honor, VIVO and Oppo all have at least an equivalent, if not larger, segment of the Chinese market.

I called them soldiers because that is the terminology the person I was replying to used.

I’m sceptical of the idea that an upvote system will actually reward genuine and interesting content, particularly considering this feature extends all the way up to channels with 500,000 subscribers. The most real YouTubers are those with like <10,000 subscribers; those are the channels I would like to have suggested.

I don’t really see the point (for consumers). The original foldable designs were trying to achieve the combination of a smartphone and tablet. That’s why they were taller and narrower, because when folded out they were supposed to reflect the shape of a tablet in portrait mode. Then manufacturers started changing the dimensions of the outer display to make it look more like a normal phone, which affected the inner display’s ability to mimic a 16:9 tablet. The inner displays on newer foldables have weird aspect ratios that don’t really suit anything particularly well and this tri-fold design seems to retain a similar ratio for the second of the three display modes. My question is: why would anyone ever use their phone in that second display mode when they can fold it out into a proper 16:9 display? Why would you choose the weird aspect ratio that only exists due to design limitations when you can choose a proper one that will be natively supported by everything?

They said “Seems unlikely [that pagers would be in the hands of doctors] considering only pagers belonging to Hezbollah had the explosives added.”

I understood that as referring to doctors unaffiliated with Hezbollah, as it has been made pretty clear that Hezbollah doctors were targets of the attack.

It is heavily implied when you’re all saying “Hezbollah” you’re talking about militants.

No it isn’t. Maybe that’s how you interpreted it, but as I said in another comment it is not just Hezbollah soldiers that were targeted.

Again, it is unreasonable to suggest that workers, including doctors and nurses, that are part of the civilian arm of Hezbollah’s de facto government are fair targets in either morality or international law.

No one has suggested that in this comment chain.

Not just their soldiers, civilian members of the organisation were also using them.

Many of the casualties were not Hezbollah fighters but members of the group’s extensive civilian operations

They went to Hezbollah, as the person you are disagreeing with said.

It might not be your thing, but there is also a minimalist phone from a startup shipping later this year that has a physical keyboard. And there is also the Clicks keyboard case, which currently only supports iPhones but may release for some Android phones in the future.

Android 11 is still capable of updating some core system components through Project Mainline, as opposed to Android 8 which is completely dead. But yeah I agree that it’s probably not worth “upgrading” to those Unihertz devices. I was sharing more so it would be on your radar if they ever release a newer model.

E-waste isn’t the only problem associated with smartphone manufacturing.

While the energy required to power our devices remains significant, for devices like smartphones, tablets, and PCs, the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions now comes from the manufacturing phase. Devices have become more energy-efficient due in part to the shift to mobile platforms, as well as more complex, which increases the amount of energy required to produce each one. Life-cycle assessments of smartphones, tablets and PCs have consistently found that the production phase, including resource extraction and processing, component manufacturing, and assembly, contributes the most to total greenhouse gas emissions, in some cases as much as 80%.

Smartphones and other electronic devices are among the most resource intensive by weight on the planet–miners must dig through more than 30 kilos of rock to obtain the 100 or so grams of minerals used in a smartphone. Industrial mining scars the Earth permanently, leaving behind toxic wastewater and soil, and rehabilitation of mining areas is uncommon.

From Greenpeace’s 2017 Guide to Greener Electronics.

Meta said it was fully expecting many teenagers would try to evade the new measures.

“The more restrictive the experience is, the stronger the theoretical incentive for a teen to try and work around the restriction,” Mr Mosseri said.

In response, the company is launching and developing new tools to catch them out.

Instagram already asks for proof of age from teenage users trying to change their listed date of birth to an adult one, and has done since 2022.

Now, as a new measure, if an underage user tries to set up a new Instagram account with an adult date of birth on the same device, the platform will notice and force them to verify their age.

In a statement, the company said it was not sharing all the tools it was using, “because we don’t want to give teens an instruction manual”.

“So we are working on all these tools, some of them already exist … we need to improve [them] and figure out how to provide protections for those we think are lying about their age,” Mr Mosseri said.

The most stubborn category of “age-liars” are underage users who lied about their age at the outset.

But Meta said it was developing AI tools to proactively detect those people by analysing user behaviour, networks and the way they interact with content.

Source.

I’m 25 now, but I still always say I was born in the 80s out of habit…

…?

I’m surprised so many people think this is a good argument. TikTok is a social media platform. Temu is an online marketplace. The potential to cause disruption within US society is completely different.

Rollies? Can I smoke them?

Unihertz sells a couple of Android 11 phones with physical keyboards.

The article did mention ad-blockers:

Some users take back control from online ads by installing ad-blocker software. These can be free versions in the form of a browser extension, or more advanced versions with a subscription fee.

I think you underestimate how technologically illiterate the average person is. Many people do not even understand the difference between a web browser and a search engine - they use Chrome because they think that’s the only way to perform a Google search.

I agree to an extent, but the problem is not so much the normies themselves as it is the massive commercial market they represent. You might point to mainstream social media as evidence of a problem with the people themselves, but you would be overlooking the fact that the surveillance and attention economies have meant these social media platforms are deliberately designed to position people against one another to drive engagement so these companies can charge more to advertisers. Discourse on the internet isn’t getting worse because there are more bad people online, it’s getting worse because companies have a financial incentive to turn us into bad people when we are online.

I don’t really see any downsides to annual phone releases. For those people who want to upgrade every year, they can

You really can’t see any downside in upgrading your phone every single year? I’ll give you a clue, it starts with an E and ends with a T and it is constantly being degraded by the mining and manufacturing required to flood the market with annual releases that are barely an improvement on the previous iteration.

I haven’t heard of that one but I’ll definitely watch it, thanks for the recommendation! In my city the small Uyghur community has been quite vocal about the treatment of their friends and family back home, many of whom they haven’t been able to contact for years due to the crackdowns. In particular, there was a family who ran a restaurant I used to eat at semi-regularly whose story received worldwide media attention. I have felt quite strongly about this issue since then.

I do not see why everyone wants to deny this and trust big tech.

This is the exact same logic conspiracy theorists use with aliens - “everyone wants to deny they exists and trusts the government, are you guys brainwashed!!!”.

Where is your proof this technology exists and is currently being used? The 404 media articles are not proof of either of these things. They are proof that CMG has some marketing slides and a former web page claiming that they have the capability to do this. They are proof that CMG has contacted at least one other company and tried to sell them this alleged service. They are not proof that the technology is being used, or that it even exists.

It’s so ironic that you claim we are the brainwashed ones for demanding proof, yet you naively assume that CMG must really have developed this technology and employed it worldwide just because they said so. No one would ever lie about the capabilities of their company to inflate its worth and make more money! Only bad big tech lies, everyone else in the world is 100% honest!