That’s not the only way to dim an LED, just the cheapest. Variable current power regulators are the premium option.

A screw-in LED bulb combines LEDs and power regulating electronics. Some of them handle the variable input voltage a household dimmer provides gracefully, but that’s more expensive.

Locked bootloaders should be illegal. Manufacturers should have to provide enough specs that third parties can write code that runs on the hardware.

From what I can tell, all the karma thresholds are dynamic and probably only knowable by admins. If nearly 1000 isn’t enough to avoid rate limiting then they sound pretty aggressive.

From my perspective HN’s approach seems to do pretty well at mitigating bad behavior, but might be a little too hard on newcomers and casual users.

Low-karma accounts are rate-limited. I don’t know what the threshold is, but that goes away after you gain some karma.

There are some very cute cobras.

A power supply, the thing that gets plugged into AC mains power and outputs some sort of DC (usually USB now) to power electronics is not a “charger”. It (usually) doesn’t know anything about charging batteries, and connecting its output directly to a Li-ion battery would lead to an explosion. The charger is integrated into the device receiving that power.

“Portable battery” is a terrible term to describe a USB powerbank. Thousands of battery types are portable, but don’t have USB ports or output exactly the right voltage. Some powerbanks are sold without batteries.

Anyone using Windows, but not CrowdStrike was also unaffected. CrowdStrike had released crashy updates for Linux before.

If an update to the proprietary Nvidia driver causes Linux to crash, that’s an Nvidia problem, not a Linux problem.

Much like many of the iPhone users when you asked the converse question, it’s not so much that something is stopping me, but that I have no interest in it. I don’t see any benefits that I care about, and it would cost time and money to switch.

Let’s pretend for a moment that I did have some desire to switch, perhaps due to some new hardware from Apple or changes to Android I found unpalatable. Here are some things I’d consider major barriers:

• Sideloading - I want to install stuff without permission from the hardware or OS vendor. Maybe I’ll even write a niche app without asking permission.
• Administrative access - I have root on my Android phone, and I didn’t have to fight it to gain root (I know that’s not true of every device). If I don’t have root or can’t get it easily, it’s not really mine.

That’s… basically it, but those are big things and Apple’s position on them is so opposite mine that they’re risking severe sanctions from the EU to comply with the EU’s sideloading regulations in the most useless way they can.

SMS fallback. A feature which you can use with any app on Android

SMS fallback is not a common feature of internet-based messaging apps on Android. Signal used to do it, but does not now. I don’t think WhatsApp or Telegram ever did.

I have no doubt about the part where iPhone fans waste no opportunity to tell someone else they should get an iPhone. It’s the other side of the argument that falls flat: Alice receives video from Charlie that’s perfectly fine, but Bob’s iPhone sends a pixelated mess, and Bob says the iPhone is better?

Interest in RCS is recent - newer than iMessage, which launched in 2011. RCS with Google’s proprietary extensions is just another proprietary messaging app, and I am not particularly excited about it.

even so far as “patch” a fix that was created to make it possible for their customers to communicate securely with Android users.

There’s no shortage of options for doing that. What Apple wants is tight control over all of its walled gardens, which should be no surprise given the company’s history. They’re very good at making it appear as if decisions made to increase their profits are aligned with the interests of users. It’s probably even true that someone would have exploited the technique Beeper Mini was using to send spam if Apple hadn’t closed it.

Just doesn’t seem plausible to me. If Alice gets low-quality images from Bob and higher-quality images from Charlie, her most likely assumption if she’s not sophisticated enough to be aware of the cause is that Bob’s phone has a bad camera.

It seems unlikely to have that effect when the recipient presumably communicates with people who have other brands of phone, from whom they receive better looking media.

It seems like an odd decision to me, as it would make the iPhone look like it has a substandard camera to someone receiving media from one by MMS.

MMS does have size limits that can hurt image quality, but I have the impression iOS applies limits of its own that are considerably lower. I’m not sure why anybody in 2024 wouldn’t have at least a couple modern messaging apps, but it seems a lot of people don’t.

Android doesn’t support iMessage

I think it’s the inverse: iMessage doesn’t support Android.

Those aren’t equivalent statements; the first implies that something about Android makes it impossible for Apple to produce an iMessage client for it when that is purely a business decision on Apple’s part.

Major privacy issues that come to mind include:

• App store lock-in on iOS combined with terms incompatible with the GPL mean that some of the most privacy-respecting software cannot be distributed for Apple’s mobile devices.
• Apple proposed, but ultimately did not implement client-side scanning for end-to-end encrypted cloud storage. That such a thing even made it to the public proposal stage shows either incompetence (unlikely) or a lack of serious commitment to privacy (more likely). Apple’s proposal may have emboldened EU regulators who are trying to mandate client-side scanning for encrypted chat apps.
• Browser engine lock-in on iOS means hardened third-party browsers are unavailable.
• The popularity of Apple’s platform-exclusive iMessage service in the USA may be hindering adoption of cross-platform encrypted messaging. On the other hand, without it perhaps most of its current users would use SMS, which is obviously worse.

would the government be able to find out that I own the anonymous e-sim on it if my other sim in my phone is another provider not silent-link

Yes. They can almost certainly tie the hardware ID (IMEI) of your phone to your identity through your non-anonymous service provider, and probably do through mass surveillance programs. Whether that’s a security problem for you depends on what you’re doing with it; surely you aren’t using SMS, standard phone calls, or unencrypted messaging services for anything you really want to keep private.

If you want phone service that will resist targeted surveillance by local authorities, even routinely turning on the cellular modem where you live, work, or study is a risk. This article detailing one person’s approach to securing a phone was posted to Lemmy today and should give you a clue about the possible threat models.

one with ads and the same vids without for premium user

If it worked that way, which others have already explained it doesn’t, that would break their business model of showing each person individually targeted ads.