• 2 Posts
  • 120 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle






  • Makes sense. The article calls it “unwarranted gatekeeping,” but they wouldn’t say that if they knew how Android internals work.

    Looking at the video demo for Circle to Search, it’s very likely they built this on top of ActionsServices, an Android component that enables extra interactions on top of the Recents switcher. This is already what’s being used to do things like OCR in the Recents switcher.

    Other non-Google ROMs use ActionsServices too, but their implementations vary, and they can’t just “tack on” something as complicated as this onto any vender implementation of ActionServices and expect it to work. They might not even have a vendor rollout plan for this thing yet, for all we know it was rushed out the door.

    Google has had a tight partnership with Samsung since the Pixel 6 came out, which is why it doesn’t surprise me that Samsung will be getting this feature first. Google can essentially boss Samsung around for little system things like this.

    The “for a long time” comment was probably due to Android 15 already being mostly final at this point. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were core changes to Android to allow more pluggable customizations to the Recents switcher in Android 16. That might enable Google to offer this feature to other vendors more cleanly (assuming the feature survives that long, which is doubtful).



  • That’s entirely different. As an individual, I have the choice to send emails to, or block emails from, Gmail.com.

    But on Lemmy, if I am on an instance that federates with Threads, and I don’t want Threads.net to get a copy of my content or posts (or have my content or posts show up on Threads.net in the future), then tough shit for me, my only option is to either go silent or move to an instance that has defederated from Threads.

    People keep making the email argument, but it is not the same thing at all. I don’t think it’s fair for a large percentage of lemmy.world’s users to not have a voice in a decision that will absolutely impact them, nor is it fair to have a stance of “then leave then.”



  • Ah, I misunderstood what you were saying at first. You’re right, it’s not everything on the instance that gets sent, only those things that federated instances need.

    But as a user, unless I run my own instance, I don’t get to decide when my posts or edits get sent out to any federated servers. That’s what I was referring to. All of that stuff gets sent out “like a firehose.”

    And over time, as more people on Threads interact with certain ActivityPub instances, the range of communities Threads will be sent updates for might as well be the entire instance. If I block them, that’s just a visual block. My stuff will still be sent to them, and depending on how they set up their federation, my content might be available on “threads.net” as well.



  • This doesn’t solve the problem of sending Threads a copy of absolutely every bit of activity that happens on the instance. If I’m on an instance that federates with Threads, even if I put them out of sight/out of mind, they still get a copy of everything I do. A lot of people are on the fediverse for privacy reasons, yet here we are with people begging to hand Facebook this data on a silver platter.

    “But why hide information that’s public? They could just scrape it.”

    Yes, they could. But a real-time feed of activity is more complete, easier to manage, and doesn’t require them to go and build a scraping tool just for this.

    If I don’t want Threads to have any of my data sent to them, I should be able to choose without needing to leave an instance I’ve been on for potentially years.




  • More like guesswork/assumptions than reality

    Sorry to be blunt, but you’re not a developer and it shows. Android’s build system was purpose made to be reproducible. Electron was not.

    There is so much going on in an Electron build, most of which is out of Signal’s control unless they maintain an entire fork of the Electron build stack. That is an enormous engineering effort for basically zero benefit.

    It probably is functionally reproducible, apart from checksums differing due to build dates baked into the artifacts somewhere. It’s not as easy as you think.

    If you think it’s as easy as “building it in a Docker container,” then by all means, try.



  • The person you replied to is being downvoted, and yes, expecting support from Google is a meme, and Google deserves 100% of the negativity they’re receiving in this regard.

    But, in their defense, they have always kept their word on keeping Pixels updated, and in some cases, have added on an additional year of support when not originally planned, including an extra full Android update for older devices.

    So while they eventually kill every new software product they make, they’ve always kept their word on Pixel updates. I think the Pixel team has a lot more resources than the rest of Google, so I’m inclined to believe them for now, but I’ll be one of the first people grabbing a pitchfork if they don’t keep their word.