Hi I’m new here, what’s tuna?

I would go further and say they shouldn’t have the ability to block any transaction consumers are making, regardless of legality.

I basically want them classified like utilities (or the Internet), and the money they’re processing should operate like digital networked cash. If I hand you a dollar bill, it doesn’t arbitrarily decide to stop being money if it thinks the transaction might possibly be even tangentially related to crime. That’s how you end up with these corporations becoming so invasive in the first place, with their overbroad policies blocking entire groups/categories from being in the economy.

Don’t think that I’m pro-crime – but only actual crime is crime. A transfer of funds itself is only sometimes a crime. You don’t see the federal reserve trying to foil small-time drug deals in cash, and for good reason – legitimate crimes should be investigated by law enforcement, not “prevented” at the whims of overeager corpos. It’s not the payment processor’s right or responsibility to prevent or they to predict crime, especially once they’ve built such a system as to become indispensable for most of us. If they are allowed to do that they will always do it the easy way – blanket bans with massive collateral damage to non-criminals.

These companies should be disbanded and their systems should be handed over to the public. Hot take, I know, but I’m of the mind that transaction processing (much like air and water) should not be privatized. You may think at this point that I’m a crypto-head, but not really. It seemed promising at one point and may be still, but now it’s perhaps permanently associated with unsavory types. I’ll use it if it fits the purpose, but expecting the general public to use it as money is insanity. Crypto brought us part of the way there, but such a system can’t really flourish in furtherance of the public good in the current environment – even disregarding the bad PR.

Hey, that makes total sense. And thanks for filling in what I missed! Really too bad about those changes, too. Google set out to create an open mobile ecosystem in opposition to Apple (and, at the time, and to a lesser extent, M$oft). It was such an incredible success at the start. Lately though, it seems they want to run in the opposite direction by tightening their grip - not the best thing for the community of Android users at all.

Of course, the minority group of nerdy, early adopting users who are a dedicated bunch will bear the brunt of it (as always). It’s no surprise they’ll be facing backlash from those groups, which in part explains the surges in demand for better (yet somewhat adjacent) alternatives. I was all in when Google said “don’t be evil”. Now they seem to have abandoned that ethos. I’m still stuck in their ecosystem, have started looking for the exits and I’m definitely not alone in feeling that way.

There’s a reason pixels are preferred, it’s not some kind of malicious conspiracy. The most common sense reason being that there’s a lot of overlap and cross-pollination of devs in the android world. between Google and graphene os in particular.

Pixels are also targeted because it’s a mass-produced flagship with decent specs that is the closest thing to being already rooted off the shelf. It’s the path of least resistance. Plus the used market is robust. A used carrier unlocked pixel 1 or 2 models behind the latest one can be obtained for several hundred dollars cheaper than it originally retailed for.

It takes effort to support additional brands/models.

Most brands lock their bootloaders and make “owning” the device difficult.

I wonder if AI applications other than just “be a generalist chat bot” would run into the same thing. I’m thinking about pharma, weather prediction, etc. They would still have to “understand” their english-language prompts, but the LLMs can do that just fine today, and could feed systems designed to iteratively solve for problems in those areas. A model feeding into itself or other models doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

Perhaps someone with multiple instances of curiosity?

It’s gonna be the year of the Linux phone, I can feel it!