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They could permanently mark the board when they install the RAM on it.

Since, presumably, nobody would try to sell a board with less RAM on it than shipped, a count-down scheme instead of count-up would work.

16GB board: no holes drilled in a marked area; 8GB: one hole drilled; 4GB: two holes drilled; 2GB: three holes drilled.


These things don’t matter to buyers. When the board doesn’t work right or crashes a lot they don’t care which step in their personal supply chain is at fault. They demand the original manufacturer give them a new one for free, which they believe is the terms of the warranty.

That would be the honest way to do it.

I agree that USB is unreliable.

I will point out that if you use ZFS instead of btrfs, you can specify drives to be detected via their serial number names rather than their attachment points, so a reconnect will not require a reboot.

Still, don't depend on USB for anything meant to be permanently connected.


USB is unreliable but it's working for me. I've had zero disconnects in a couple of years of using a Terramaster USB-C DAS. I've heard of the problems enough I've even searched logs for it.

I've wondered if my experience is different because I'm using single disks (but still ZFS) instead of any RAID. There is rarely transfer happening across all of the disks.


Can't say. The power source for the drives is also important. I do use a USB 2.5" HDD without an external power source for one of the SBCs I have, and that's stable, but that SBC is powered directly from the GPIO pins, not USB.

Unfortunately, where I need it the most - the router which is also a NAS - can't use directly-powered USB HDDs. Not enough ports. I had to use a hub. I tried 4 models, two self-powered and two powered by router's USB, and none of them was stable. I also tried 3 models of USB-SATA adapters. Two self-powered, one powered by hub (connected to the hubs that had separate power - didn't work otherwise). None of them was stable. It was always the USB-SATA adapters/racks that disconnected, not the hubs.

Then I bought a mPCIe 4-port SATA controller, Marvell chip. Didn't work. It freeze randomly and woudn't even unfreeze with a router reboot. Possibly too much power draw. Then I put a 2-port SATA, ASM1062 and a port replicator. That one works. 2 years and not one disconnect. The cables are a complete mess.


You're absolutely right! You told me to write like a human and I failed to obey your jnstructions.

This is because I am a pattern recognizer and continuation generator trained on all the words recorded on the Internet, and a lot of those words were written by marketers and junior analysts trying to sell you something. Then the fine-tuning was done by people living in the upper middle ranks of capitalist hellholes. Dilbert would make fun of this if Dilbert's creator hadn't succumbed to the same sort of brain injury common to materially successful people who have all their whims fulfilled and opinions obsequiously affirmed. You know, like billionaires and toddlers.


What I learned from carrying a phone with "2.5d" screen edges:

They make the screen effectively narrower in terms of usable area, while making the phone physically wider.

Do not want.

Please go back to 9:16 or 10:16 screen ratios. If you need more space for the battery, gently round the back. It feels nicer in the hand even when it's 50% thicker than your competitors.

Also, a fingerprint reader / power button on the back is superior to all other placements, and cutouts of any kind are distracting and wasteful. OnePlus managed a motorized pop-out selfie-cam and it's still working for me seven years later.


Huawei was this close to making the perfect 16:9 phone, now, in 2026. I would have gladly used all my apps in a half broken Android VM (they no longer use Android themselves).

It's too bad they had to be extreme about it and ruin it with a huge screen and a 5:3 aspect ratio. it's almost a cube.

https://m.gsmarena.com/huawei_pura_x_view-14887.php


Personally I like the 21:9 ratio of Sony’s Xperia 1. Big but skinny enough to reach my thumb across.

I agree, I like both. Thankfully for us, both are dead and the only options left are 19.5:9 or 20:9. Hooray!

Isn't HarmonyOS a fork of Android? I've never seen anything about the apps being half broken - do you have more info?

The newer versions of are no longer based on Android. So it's either quirky VMs with hundreds of papercuts or nothing.

Huawei Global is still a thing, and in some markets they keep releasing phones using Android 12 and no GMS. That is probably even worse.


Search engines are so 2010. You just announce "hey genie!" and ask for what you want.

The grapes that grow in my back yard are Concords, and that shouldn't be surprising because Concord is a couple of towns over.

They taste just like Welch's.


Yeah, Concord grapes are based on Fox grapes; when the new Welch's headquarters opened on Baker Ave they included a plantation started from cuttings from the original farm (which is just a house now but they still maintain their own grapes.) Welch's downsized and moved the HQ to Waltham last year, apparently the vines got distributed to local historic places and farmers https://concordbridge.org/index.php/2026/04/06/the-grape-esc...

To be clear, Truthear Gates cost almost $23 with the microphone option when they are not on sale... but yes.

Hey, I have those :) To be fair the microphones on cheap IEMs always suck, and you're probably better off using the mic on your device.

is-ought distinction, but specifically:

The heksher marks and logos offered by kosher-certification organizations are protected by trademark; using the trademark under license specifically assures the customer that the organization's standards have been followed precisely, and using the trademark without license defeats the purpose.

Similarly, the American Halal Foundation, the USDA Organic seal, the UL logo and many other programs use the mechanism of trademark to guarantee that the product or service meets their standards.


That's the licensing agreement between the owner and the trademarks, and their customers for the use of the trademark.

But the American Halal Foundation could revise their definition of what counts as Halal, and then license the brand to a company that doesn't meet the current criteria, without asking for permission from anyone.

It's in your wording already: “the customer that the organization's standards have been followed precisely” (emphasis mine), nothing prevents the organization from changing their standards (well, maybe the licensing agreement with their customer brands does, but that's purely a contract thing and has nothing to to with the trademark per se).


Trademark is the mechanism of enforcement for this usage, just as copyright is the mechanism of enforcement for the GPL.

You can come up with other mechanisms that would work, but this is the one that we have in existence now.


Sure. But the same way it would be disingenuous to say that copyright exists so that we can have copyleft, it's a fallacy to say that trademark exist to protect the consumer, which is the point I'm arguing against:

> The core reason to enforce trademarks is not to fluff the corporation that holds it but to let the public be confident in the name.


In this case, it was genocide.

It definitely was. There were at least sometimes extenuating circumstances though.

My sense is that in the US and Canada settlers found a great deal of "apparently" uninhabited land, largely a result of the diseases that had swept through because of earlier contact, decimating the existing population.

My guess is that had disease not done its work, the European settlers would have found it much harder to displace the existing inhabitants.


I have yet to read 1491, but yes I imagine that it would have been much more challenging without that first strike. But the weapons capabilities of the europeans were also going to make it happen one way or another.

Heliboard is good, customizable, and actually open source - GPL3.


I like Heliboard a lot, but its autocorrect gets stuck in the mud all the time.

It completely falls apart and starts injecting nonsense phrases made up of nonsense misspelled words moment you miss a space ('v' or 'b') or type a really long word it doesn't know.

It also stubbornly incorrects other things like 'a' into "and" if it thinks it knows a phrase fragment. It's always wrong. It just happened to me now twice. Above, "or type a" became "or type and". Also, "it's" became "IRS".

Heliboard would be perfect if it stuck to word-only spellcheck and never split words. Just now again, it tried correcting "heliboard" into "hellenized" and "he lib oars".

This is not a matter of just lowering how aggressive the spellcheck is. It will still generate slop every time. The only real option is to completely turn it off. Futo can have similar problems, but there are a lot more options to tweak and the defaults aren't so bad.


I turn off automatic autocorrect except for "I". I can use it manually when I need it (jot often).


Autosuggestions are nice to have but there is no autocorrection that really works well in my experience regardless of OS.


this was my experience. the autocorrect for heliboard is beyond atrocious and renders the keyboard unusable.

i ended up just using gboard on gos because every other one i tried fell short.

hopefully the stock gos one can be reworked into an actually decent keyboard.


If you are referring to Heliboard as an AOSP board replacement, that cannot work, GrapheneOS cannot use GPLv3 projects.

If you mean it as a user installed app, please disregard.


Could you please elaborate? I wouldn't think this causes an issue unless they need to link against it, which I don't think they do.


Unsure what you mean by link against it. GPLv3 requires making the entire project it is bundled with GPLv3 as well. GrapheneOS would need to relicense the entire OS and bundled apps as GPLv3 to allow them to use any app with that license.


Literally none of what you said is true.

Go read the GPLv3 license and/or ask yourself how Linux distributions are able to ship a mix of GPLv3, v2, MIT, BSD, etc licensed software all in the same image.

GrapheneOS may or may not have a policy against shipping GPLv3 software (I don't know), but if they do, it's a political or business decision, not a restriction imposed by GPLv3.


They mean linking as in [1] against a GPLv3 work to create a derived work. Simply including a GPLv3 application in a aggregation of different works (e.g. an OS image) does not require everything else to be GPLv3.

The GPLv3 only applies to a work and works derived from it, so either if you take an existing GPLv3 project and modify it or if you link against a GPLv3 project. In these cases, the other code needs to be under licenses that are compatible with the GPLv3.

This is clearly described in the GPLv3:

A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an "aggregate" if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linker_(computing)


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