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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: January 13th, 2025

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  • Pixel 9a has some issues with performance, currently. They used older storage tech for the 9 and 9a than other devices and not enough memory for all the “AI” features that are tracking everything you do to make things more convenient. There are a few articles out there related to some ways to improve performance a bit by disabling some background apps that you may not be using. It’s also possible future updates from google may fix some of whatever is causing the issues for many users.

    But it’s not an endemic Android issue, at least not modern versions in my experience. I use GrapheneOS on a Pixel 7 Pro currently and just grabbed a couple of 10+ GB zip files I had on an old dropbox account and unzipped them with the fossify file manager. It was basically instant. Took longer to download them than unzip.

    As I mentioned, your best bet is to use ADB or similar and monitor what applications are eating up resources and try to free some up. Especially any apps thrashing the storage or filling memory. That’s assuming you have already uninstalled any bloatware and rebooted recently to make sure no bad apps are stuck.


  • TL;DR: You should have both due to the explicit breaking of the robots.txt contract by AI companies.

    AI generally doesn’t obey robots.txt. That file is just notifying scrapers what they shouldn’t scrape, but relies on good faith of the scrapers. Many AI companies have explicitly chosen not no to comply with robots.txt, thus breaking the contract, so this is a system that causes those scrapers that are not willing to comply to get stuck in a black hole of junk and waste their time. This is a countermeasure, but not a solution. It’s just way less complex than other options that just block these connections, but then make you get pounded with retries. This way the scraper bot gets stuck for a while and doesn’t waste as many of your resources blocking them over and over again.


  • Bottleneck is usually storage speed rather than processing power. If you have a device that can use external sd cards and your device supports high-speed cards, that might help, though if the controller for sd cards is slow, that might just end up a worse bottleneck. But that’s just a guess and it definitely could be that your memory is not sufficient or background apps are eating up processing, such as crypto-mining malware just as an example. You can check resources over adb while unzipping or try some benchmarks to determine your issue.

    Anecdotally, I have no issues on my Pixel 7 Pro and never had issues on past Pixel or Nexus phones I’ve owned (generally higher end models with plenty of memory and storage space). Pixel devices don’t include sd card slots so this is all on internal storage in those cases.

    Sure anything is likely to take longer on a phone than on a laptop or desktop, but shouldnt be that significant of a difference unless there’s a hardware bottleneck or other apps are using all the resources.




  • Messenger messages are supposedly e2e encrypted, but that doesn’t mean the clients don’t then turn around and give those messages to Meta. The clients do scan the messages and are known to add that information to your advertising profile which is also sold. So, while the messages themselves might be protected in flight, and they may not be shared with Meta in full, they are not private. Also, the meta-information about who you’re contacting is not encrypted, but that’s also the case with most apps, including Signal, as that is difficult to pull off while still being easy for people to find you.


  • Phone number can be problematic to share in some areas of the world, so it does depend on where you are, but email shouldn’t be an issue in general. So easy to get an additional, private email address and use both at the same time.

    I also don’t have most mainstream social media anymore but have noticed a significant drop in people asking for it these days. Might just be my location in a city with a lot of progressive, tech savvy people, though.

    I mostly use phone number and/or Signal these days.



  • I rarely consider anything “too far” unless you’re doing something totally ineffective or duplicating effort, and not talking about redundancy. I think most people who say this are either the people who we need to be secure from or people who are ignorant to the threats. I’m not saying the same threats affect us all, but there’s always a possibility you could become a target through whistleblowing, protest, being attractive, pissing off a random stranger, etc. And usually by the time you are a target, it’s too late. Your information is already out there and it’s difficult to stop broadcasting more with all of the tracking systems in place all over.

    It’s often not clinical paranoia that causes people to worry about security and/or privacy, primarily it’s a desire for a minimal amount of privacy, hiding from predators, and/or basic protection from fascist regimes of various strengths that have taken over most governments. Often keeping a little privacy also is the best way to prevent becoming a target in the first place.




  • Not lock-in in the traditional sense where you’re locked to a particular technology, but effectively lock-in by making a commonly used feature for migration not available for free. This wasn’t discussing uncommon cases like having your own domain in front of a free email service since that’s not then fully free.

    The most common use of free email services is to use the service’s domain and if you need to switch, then needing to change your email at tons of different places. I am still stuck on gmail for a couple of accounts because changing the email with those services means creating an entirely new account and thus losing all history, etc. Example is the Shop app. Without forwarding I’d end up having to keep the gmail app on my phone to get notification of new emails which is problematic since those apps come with additional tracking services which is the whole reason for migrating from gmail.



  • Point seems to be that people are switching from gmail to proton for free email, but it’s going to be even more difficult if Proton becomes like Google turned out since you’ll have to pay to get all the email to your new address while you are transitioning to whatever is next. Instead go to that next thing now before you get “locked in” by having all of your important emails going there. With gmail at least you can forward the emails for free from the places you forget to change your email with at first.





  • They’ll never understand, or never admit yo understanding, that if you put a door in a wall, everyone will exploit it. Just think of how city defense worked before flight. Every invader would go after the gate and it was much, much easier to penetrate than the rest of the wall. But in this case that gate will be totally unguarded, so anyone who figures out how to open it, will open it for everyone. And will make tools for others to use to unlock and open it easily and it will be very difficult to change it if it’s the same gate with the same key used by everyone. Imagine if door locks were all the same. No one would bother locking their doors if it was that easy to unlock instantly. And that’s what the real goal is. To make people stop using security.