I don’t think I am well positioned to answer that question given my experience. Ill give it my best.

I believe the advantage of more abstraction of gRPC was desireable because we can point it at a socket (Unix domain or internet sockets) and communicate across different domains. I think we are shooting for a “microserves” architecture but running it on one machine. FFI (IIRC) is more low level and more about language interoperability. gRPC would allow us to prototype stuff faster in other languages (like Python or go) and optimize to rust if it became a bottleneck.

Short answer is, we are able to deliver more value, quicker, to customers (I guess). But I don’t know much about FFI. Perhaps you can offer some reasons and use cases for it?

At work, we started the c++ migration to rust doing the following:

1. Identify “subsystems” in the c++ code base
2. Identify the ingress/egress data flows into this subsystem
3. Replace those ingress/engress interfaces with grpc for data/event sharing (we have yet to profile the performance impact of passing an object over grpc, do work on it, then pass it back)
4. Start a rewrite of the subsystem. from c++ to rust
5. Swap out the two subsystems and reattach at the grpc interfaces
6. Profit in that now our code is memory safe AND decoupled

The challenge here is identifying the subsystems. If the codebase didn’t have distinct boundaries for subsystems, rewrite becomes much more difficult

People like having choice, it was never about saving space in phones.

If you look at which company (apple) and the time of removal of headphone jack (around the time their wireless buds were announced), you’ll notice they removed choice so the consumer can only buy more expensive wireless buds, or many many dongles.

The “save space” is an absolute lie. The international (EU, Asia, etc) version of the iPhone has a dedicated SIM card tray. The US model? No tray, just a freakin placeholder where the international version has the SIM tray. Yes, there is a volume of space that can fit 2 headphone jacks on the US iPhone that is just empty.

Look at this iFixit video where they call apple out on it. The placeholder is huge. at ~1:17+

I’d really want to know what’s driving them

likely ego

The letter is a post on his own blog . Hard to distill into a summary so I recommend reading it get more context. But it seems to have boiled down to:

• How It Was:

  • Strong adherence to the “don’t be evil” ethos, focusing on societal good over profits.
  • Open, transparent communication and decision-making processes.
  • High morale, with a culture of learning from successes and failures.
  • Work focused on benefitting the web and users, rather than Google’s immediate interests.
  • Collaboration and lack of internal silos, encouraging innovation and autonomy.

• How It Is Now:

  • Shift from user-centric to Google-centric, and then to individual-centric decision making.
  • Eroded transparency and increase in organizational silos.
  • Decline in morale and a culture of distrust between employees and management.
  • Focus on short-term financial gains leading to layoffs and defensive employee behavior.
  • Lack of clear vision and leadership, resulting in confused and ineffective management.
  • Overall deterioration of Google’s unique, innovative culture and values.

Brave has superior fingerprint protection, they achieve this by randomizing the browsers fingerprint. Visit EFF’s cover your tracks to test your browser.

To achieve the same functionality that brave achieves out of the box with Firefox I need many extensions and then when I profile both browsers, Firefox is more resource intensive. Brave’s blocking is native to the browser. I will give Firefox the W because I’ve read that uBlock is technically more capable. But as a long time Firefox/uBlock user who switched to brave - this has not been noticable.

As for accessibility, I can configure brave to be really aggressive at ad blocking, tracking blocking, fingerprint blocking, and restricting JS even, and all those options I can set from one place instead of in different settings/extensions. When a website breaks, I click on the button next to the URL and immediately have options to granularly dial down the “protection” or add a website to my trusted list. In Firefox I was annoyed to having go through settings for the extension.

Brave plans to continue supporting Manifest V2 after Google kills it. For Ungoogled Chromium, however, it’s still undecided, likely depending on whether UG contributors are willing to maintain it.

Brave has superior fingerprint protection, they achieve this by randomizing the browsers fingerprint. Visit EFF’s cover your tracks to test your browser.

To achieve the same functionality that brave achieves out of the box with Firefox I need many extensions and then when I profile both browsers, Firefox is more resource intensive. Brave’s blocking is native to the browser. I will give Firefox the W because I’ve read that uBlock is technically more capable. But as a long time Firefox/uBlock user who switched to brave - this has not been noticable.

As for accessibility, I can configure brave to be really aggressive at ad blocking, tracking blocking, fingerprint blocking, and restricting JS even, and all those options I can set from one place instead of in different settings/extensions. When a website breaks, I click on the button next to the URL and immediately have options to granularly dial down the “protection” or add a website to my trusted list. In Firefox I was annoyed to having go through settings for the extension.

Brave plans to continue supporting Manifest V2 after Google kills it. For Ungoogled Chromium, however, it’s still undecided, likely depending on whether UG contributors are willing to maintain it.

he was not, nobody cares about his 2 bytes

Gotcha, thanks. Well, I’ll look into it some more. I appreciate you supporting Rebble!

What is incredible about this product is that I can speak normally and fluently as I normally do.

The need to look at the output as you speak is only necessary if you expect there to be errors. FUTO, amazingly, performs extremely well in this regard and I have a high confidence in not being able to trip it up. I don’t feel that I need to look down at a live transcription.

This whole comment was written using FUTO voice input. I’m definitely going to donate to them.

GrapheneOS is the open source android OS on pixel hardware without any google binary blobs.

The advantage of using it is Google develops and optimizes the OS so it works on their hardware. The GrapheneOS project compiles the source code, hardens some parts, and boom

I take you are a satisfied user. Ages ago when I looked into it, I didn’t see the need. To save time for me and other people on this thread, what value does it bring to you? I would consider subscribing just to financially support them but what other tangible use does a subscription bring?

Hey, you go it!

FYI, you can financially support Rebble and get perks like being able to reply with voice to messages. I don’t personally do so but I know people who have had success with it.

For comparison, my Pebble with everything turned off (like health tracking, apps, steps, alarms etc) and only BT on for notifications, I get about a week still

no problem! that’s what the internet and forums are for :D

Rebble was easier to get working than gadget bridge. just something to consider

to preface what might sound like slander, I really would love to get my hands on apple hardware. It is engineered rather well and the geek in me can appreciate that. However, getting access to your own hardware is an issue.

While I have some concerns about their objective features, to my shame, the greatest problem is with the brand and their practices.

I think the root cause of all my issues stems from their morals and aggressive/elitist business practice - specifically their quest to squeeze money out of users and hide behind the lie of “we are doing this for the user’s benefit”.

I have no issue paying money for features I want or entities I’d like to support. In fact, I’m more inclined to financially support those who I believe in.

And apple loves to gatekeep features and keep them exclusive to apple. They effectively benefit from hard work of others who contribute to open standards and services, but at the same time do not share their own. Greedy.

if I could pin this comment I would

I see what you mean now, that makes sense.

being on equal footing

agreed. Now how can we level the playing field with a multi billion dollar corp lol

agreed!

And with Meta’s resources and reach, they could stand up a Lemmy.world equivalent easily. Play nice, break their arms jerking each off the Fediverse. And once enough of the instances are reliant on the Meta instance, cut off everyone who won’t pay to federate.

I agree with the second part of your comment, and have concerns with the first part of your comment.

I’m all for allowing others to subscribe to Lemmy or Mastadon content, which is why simply defederating isn’t as attractive as ToS. I want others to see that their communities/intrests/heros/what have you/ exist outside of Meta. I want the average person to contribute even if they don’t know how to set up an instance. What I don’t want is Meta hosting content then paywalling it, cutting off others.

For the first part about limiting to one instance… Well FB is technically one instance from a “domain” perspective. They have load balancers and tons of servers hosting their “instance”.

like I said before, I’m not a policy guy, I don’t know how to solve this. But it would be nice for those who are to spear head this and rally up volunteers so we can get in front of it. If there are no solutions, defederating would be the easiest.