And how exactly do we know for certain that all that juicy web access data complete linked to whatever identifying information associated with a Mozilla account isn’t going to be sold?!

Well, it is supposed to go boom

After the 1974 revolution that overthrew Fascism Portugal had a couple of decades of being quite Leftwing during which it massivelly invested in Education, including tertiary education, so the generations now in their 50s and younger almost universally learned English language at a school and include a large proportion of people with higher degrees.

There was also a period in the 80s/90s with some investment in adult education and that coincided with the fast growth of personal computing around here.

Then add to that that fixed Internet is quite cheap (a TV + unlimited 200Mb fibre + fixed phone line monthly packets costs around €45 and recently some even cheaper and faster providers have entered the local market, so for example I pay €15/month for 1 Gbps fibre) and almost universally fibre, possibly because unlike in countries like the UK the incumbent telecom operator in Portugal for whatever reason didn’t really manage to or tried to block the replacement of older internet access technologies with Fiber (I was living abroad at the time, so I don’t know for sure, but the period with maybe the only half-way decent non-crooked government - led by the guy who now heads the UN - kinda overlaps with the time with fixed Internet started spreading, so maybe they actually did some proper, Northern-Europe quality legislation around data access infrastructure which yielded a far more competitive market than you see in places like the UK).

I suspect some or all of these things explain why in this specific domain Portugal looks a lot more like smaller Northern European countries than it’s tradition of being a Chunk Of South-America in Europe would lead one to expect.

You are correct.

A little digging shows that unlike the CE mark in the EU for electronics, “UL certification isn’t mandatory, but may be required when selling electronic items to retailers”.

UL certification is a requirement for an electric or electronic product to be licensed for sale to consumers in the US. This is enforced on US manufacturers of a product and on importers.

Whilst people buying something from AliExpress for personal use and importing it themselves don’t have to obbey such requirements, those importing them or making them for sale in the US do.

The CE mark does the same thing in the EU.

No idea if in the US there are further licensing requirements for things to be connected to the grid that would close the importing for personal use loophole.

In the age of MBA management, the removal of resilience such as fallback systems because “they’re doing nothing” is the norm.

Nowadays Engineering stuff isn’t done according to Engineering Principles if it conflicts with short term profit maximization.

Since America and Israel attacked Iranian Economic Interests when they bombed oil producing facilities, it’s entirelly fair for Iran to respond in kind.

I actually made money from NOT putting any of my investment money in NFTs and instead putting it somewhere else.

Then again, from the very start the NFT mania looked like a more obvious and dumb version of the Tulip Bulb mania, so I can hardly claim great wisdom from not having put a cent in it.

Exactly.

The best way to learn is to have done the work yourself with all the mistakes that come from not knowing certain things, having wrong expectations or forgetting to account for certain situations, and then get feedback on your mistakes, especially if those giving the feedback know enough to understand the reasons behind the mistakes of the other person.

Another good way to learn is by looking through good quality work from somebody else, though it’s much less effective.

I suspect that getting feedback on work of “somebody” else (the AI) which isn’t even especially good, yields very little learning.

So linking back to my previous post, even though the AI process wastes a lot of time from a more senior person, not only will the AI (which did most of the implementation) not learn at all, but the junior dev that’s supposed to oversee and correct the AI will learn very little thus will improve very little. Meanwhile with the process that did not involve an AI, the same senior dev time expenditure will have taught the junior dev a lot more and since that’s the person doing most of the work yielded a lot more improvement next time around, reducing future expenditure of senior dev time.

Just to add to this:

• When a senior dev reviews code from a more junior dev and gives feedback the more junior person (generally) learns from it.
• When a senior dev reviews code from an AI, the AI does not learn from it.

So beyond the first order effects you pointed out - the using of more time from more experience and hence expensive people - there is a second order effect due of loss of improvement in the making of code which is both persistent and cumulative with time: every review and feedback of the code from a junior dev reduces forever the future need for that, whilst every review and feedback of the code from an AI has no impact at all in need for it in the future.

Given enough time, the total time wasted in reviews and feedback for code from junior devs is limited - because they eventually learn enough not to do such mistakes - but the total time wasted in reviews and feedback for code from an AI is unlimited - because it will never improve.

Good thing I use the LibRedirect plugin in Firefox to redirect YouTube link to Invidious.

In addition to uBlock, of course.

I can tell you that, at least for Europe, they’re doing pretty much the same thing as the US, only it’s higher tariffs rather than blocking the Chinese products.

The effect of special protectionist tariffs on the competitiveness of local companies might not be as strong as for outright blocking of the competing foreign products, but it’s in the same direction, which is why recently even Tesla (which are shit at the actual building cars part of the business) were wiping the floor on EVs with massive European car making businesses which had enormous expertise in actually making cars and decades to evolve EV tech and failed to do so.

Corruption is so entrenched in Portugal that unlike pretty much anywhere in the World, Libel is an actual CRIME prosecuted by the local version of the Public Prosecution Office, which in practice means that no actual damage has to be proven (the legislation literally talks about “protecting the honor” of the person targetted by the libelous comments) and only people with the proper political connections to get the Public Prosecution Office to act (i.e. politicians and rich people) get to be “protected” by this Law.

Oh, and in a country infamous by an extremelly slow Court system, they in practice expedite Libel cases where politicians are the “victim”.

So even descriptions of systems to detect Corruption have to be very carefully worded so as to not even imply that anything caught by them is actually Corruption.

I’m Portuguese and, having also lived elsewhere in Europe, firmly believe that in the domains of Politics and Justice, Portugal is basically a chunk of South America that happens to be in Europe. If it wasn’t for the EU - mainly the laws and pressure coming via it, many ultimatelly originating in places like Northern Europe - the country would be an even bigger shit show.

Clearly they think that gaming is the same as working.

This shit has been in place and in use since the Patriot Act.

It’s also been an open secret that they do it for industrial espionage purposes so never bring company devices or devices configured to access the company network over.

Part of the reason I’ve avoided the US for vacations or even just changing flights since the early 00s - I’ll just go to Canada instead.

“Burning the future of the company for extra personal upsides in the short term” is pretty much MBA-Age management strategy summarized in one sentence.

A loss of overall competitiveness of the local companies is actually a well known and studied problem with using tariffs and import restrictions to protects said local companies.

So any competent government which desires for their local companies to survive and prosper will seek different ways to strengthen then which don’t suffer from that problem. The Chinese government is doing just that, the US government is not.

By all indications, US politicians are spectacularly incompetent and/or are following a strategy of burning the future of US companies for a short term boost in the money they yield for current CxOs and investors.

NEVER, ever, ever host your projects in the site of an American company.

The actual problem isn’t at all making a 4G mini-computer: you can literally buy the necessary parts as modules and wire them together with a a half-way decent microcontroller board and an smallish LED display and then make some code for it in something like Arduino IDE (though I would recommend Platform IO + VS Code instead).

The problem is making it small (especially thin) and capable of running of batteries for days rather than hours.

For example, if you’re trying to actually solve the hard part of the problem you would be better of using a micro-controller with an ARM core rather than the ESP32 as those things are designed to use less power. Also you wouldn’t be able to use boards as those things usually waste power versus designing your own.

That said, it’s a nice hobbyist project.

Well that’s a shame.

I’ve been looking around for a replacement to my aged Samsung A6 (which has been given an extended life by replacing the factory ROM with something with less bloatware, but is still pretty limited in terms of memory) which is not a Surveillance Outpost for just who knows how many nations and just about any companies willing to pay the 3 cents of whatever for the data, and all the Linux and degoogled Android makers only have 10"+ ones, which are too big for my use case which carry a tablet on a coat or trousers back pocket when I’m going to be sitting down somewhere and waiting for something so that I can read books and maybe browse the internet on their free WiFi.

Personally I would LOOOVE a small Linux tablet, but I’m OK with some kind of privacy respecting Android which isn’t riddled with backdoors mandated by governments which have Information Courts issuing Secret Bulk Information Collecting Orders, like the US and the UK.