I also have a PinePhone and PinePhone Pro… but I wouldn’t (yet) recommend them as daily drivers unless :

• you are REALLY committed to privacy
• don’t care much for the camera
• don’t need mobile “Apps” and fine using the Web or Linux (which are great) apps
• don’t need much battery
• you are eager to tinker.

If you’re in EU https://murena.com/smartphones/ is a good compromise IMHO and it will be radically cheaper than an iPhone. I imagine elsewhere there are other companies selling new or refurbished deGoogled phones. Again that’ll probably set you back 300 € versus 1000 € for an iPhone. One is a tool, the other is, again from my biased perspective a former iPhone user, a tool too but mostly a status symbol.

Edit on parental controls : from a technical standpoint, which I’d argue it’s only part of the challenge, I’ve found https://doc.e.foundation/support-topics/parental-control specifically but more broadly https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.timelimit.android.open/ or https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.timelimit.android.aosp.direct/ which are more about self discipline. There is also https://github.com/xMansour/KidSafe but seems outdated.

Android always sends requests to Google.

If you meant even deGoogled Androids (e.g. /e/OS as suggested here), not stock Android, then can you please send references on that?

A de-googled phone with no Play Services is too limiting.

Isn’t microG with alternative app stores sufficient for most people?

The general consensus amongst the Android community is that rooting is detrimental to privacy. In a sense, I agree with them since privilege escalation because of human error becomes a much bigger threat if the user has root access.

No, that’s BS. It entirely depends on your “threat model” just like security.

Namely if you go full OSHW/FLOSS and yet you volunteer your data on Facebook.com (or whatever that website is called today) then you have no privacy. It’s not a technical problem, it’s a behavior problem.

If your threat model is about government hiring dedicated staff to know what you are up to, or that the infrastructure you rely is can’t be trusted, then rooting is the last of your problems.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t worry but I don’t see the relevance of rooting Android in that situation. Root or not does not somehow change how your modem behaves, you’re still at the mercy of the drivers.

I recommend you check projects like Precursor (at https://precursor.dev/ redirecting to the CrowdSupply page) which try to tackle, if I understood correctly, the kind of worry you have, namely actually understand the entire stack.

That being said, even in such context, you still rely on some infrastructure to relay messages to others so you need that and the recipients to also respect your privacy. If not (which would be a fair assumption) then at least you must understand the cryptographic primitives you rely on… and if you don’t (which most people don’t, me included despite my interest in the mathematics behind that, in particular one-way functions) then you have to some trust in the public research in the domain.

So… I do have a Precursor, tinker with it, PinePhone and PinePhone Pro, had an iOS phone until recently, switched to (rooted) /e/OS and my personal position is that while interacting with others (and a mobile is 100% about that) one has to make pragmatic about their choices.

Switched from iOS (iPhone XS) to Android (/e/OS on CMF Nothing, installed by Murena) and 0 regret.

I switched the same day but I didn’t transfer all content, only contacts, 2FA auth and installed most apps I needed. Transition was very easy thanks to Firefox Account and because most of what I really is Web based anyway (e.g. HomeAssistant for my self-hosted IoT setup). KDE Connect was indeed a great surprise, I thought it’d be the same as on iOS but it’s a LOT more functional. Also using Termux (rather than iSH on iOS) with access to the storage made tinkering way easier and powerful.

My new phone is actually 1/3rd of the price of the flagship I bought 6 years ago… but they feel the same. I like that a lot because I do NOT want my phone to “feel” special, I want it to “just” be a functional piece of tech, valuable only for what it does, not what it “is”. It’s not a totem, it’s just a thing I rely on. So yes switching made that very striking.

Overall if you want to “just” move away from iOS or Googled Android I find Murena value proposition to be on point.

considered OpenWRT […] now I just need a commercially available solution.

FWIW you can buy OpenWRT based hardware, no tinkering, e.g. https://www.turris.com/en/products/omnia/

Thanks for taking the time to clarify all that.

It’s not a typo because the paper itself does mention 3090 as a benchmark.

I do tinker with FPGAs at home, for the fun of if (I’m no expert but the fact that I own few already shows that I know more about the topic than most people who don’t even know what it is, or what it’s for) so I’m quite aware of what some of the benefits (and trade of) can be. It’s an interesting research path (again, otherwise I wouldn’t even have invested my own resources to learn more about that architecture in the first place) so I’m not criticizing that either.

What I’m calling BS on… is the title and the “popularization” (and propaganda, let’s be honest here) article. Qualifying a 5 years old chip as flagship (when, again, it never was) and implying what the title does, is wrong. It’s overblown otherwise interesting work. That being said, I’m not surprised, OP share this kind of things regularly, to the point that I ended up blocking him.

Edit: not sure if I really have to say so but the 4090, in March 2025, is NOT the NVIDIA flagship, that’s 1 generation behind. I’m not arguing for the quality of NVIDIA or AMD or whatever chip here. I’m again only trying to highlight the sensationalization of the article to make the title look more impressive.

Edit2: the 5090, in March 2025 again, is NOT even the flagship in this context anyway. That’s only for gamers… but here the article, again, is talking about “energy-efficient AI systems” and for that, NVIDIA has an entire array of products, from Jetson to GB200. So… sure the 3090 isn’t a “bad” card for a benchmark but in that context, it is no flagship.

PS: taking the occasion to highlight that I do wish OP to actually go to China, work and live there. If that’s their true belief and they can do so, to not solely “admire” a political system from the outside, from the perspective of not participating to it, but rather give up on their citizenship and do move to China.

Well, I honestly tried (cf history). You’re neither addressing my remark about the fact from the article nor the bigger picture. Waste of time, blocked.

Unfortunately my model isn’t supported. I might look for a 2nd hand supported one with the USB adapter and try, as I do use and work with Linux on a daily basis.

Based on https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1jb2uvt/roomba_accidentally_saw_outside_and_now_i_cant/ I’d bet some models surely do.

That being said, I am NOT promoting Roomba or any other brand, I’m only highlighting that apps aren’t necessarily a requirement for the basic feature.

Finally, as others suggested if one genuinely does need such feature and is mindful about privacy, I’d check https://valetudo.cloud/ first then see what harder supports it, which sadly doesn’t seem to support Roomba or Roborock AFAICT. It does, lucky you, check https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html#roborock

Edit: apparently “Xiaomi V1 is made by Roborock” according to https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html so maybe there is way, worth investigating for you IMHO.

turns out you can use older GPUs in creative ways to get a lot more out of them than people realized

If that’s the point then that’s the entire GPU used for mining then ML revolution, thanks to CUDA mostly, that already happened in 2010 so that’s even older, that’d 15 yeas ago.

What I was highlighting anyway is that it’s hard to trust an article where simple facts are wrong.

What is this… “Nvidia’s flagship RTX 3090 GPU”? Are we in back in 2020? Half a decade ago? Is this a joke? Even then, it wasn’t the flagship, the 3090 Ti was.

Is there a Murena/Volla of vacuuming robots? Namely can one buy a working robot (new or reconditioned) with Valetudo pre-installed?

FWIW you can use a Roomba without an app. You… push the physical button on the robot, and voila. No app, no connection, still cleaning.

Sure you can’t schedule cleaning but honestly unless you have a version that can empty it’s own trash recipient and your house is always robot cleaning friendly (so… 0 cable on the way, chairs aside, etc) it’s rarely a huge efficiency gain.

Honestly I feel like 10y/o there was a lot of hype around vacuuming robot but it didn’t “explode” in popularity because it’s not really such a big difference.

Blocked, you’re just trying to be provocative instead of having a constructive discussion. I don’t have time to waste on that so don’t bother replying to my comments, I won’t see what you write anymore.

In case any parent is reading this and feels (somehow!) like “Oh no… my child will be left behind!” to the point of considering buying some BS humanoid or animaloid “pedagogical” robot, get yourself a (European designed) good “old” Lego set! They’ve been at it for decades (literally, since at least 1998 with Mindstorms) and they focus specifically on pedagogy at school with e.g. https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/lego-education-spike-essential-set-45345

Do NOT get a cheap piece of plastic that you do not understand, that behaves in “smart” ways you can’t explain and that passes data long you have no idea about!

“Timmy hugged his little robot friend before heading to bed. He doesn’t have a name for it – yet. “It’s like a little teacher or a little friend,” the boy said”

… it’s way WORST than a fail. How do you think this human will develop assuming friendship with a (commercial) product rather than another human being? My bet, but I’m no psychologist, is poorly.

That opening photo is so telling, a chess robot … while one could literally run https://lichess.org/ from ANY device (tablet, mobile phone, laptop, etc) and have a functionally equivalent experience for free (both open source and free of cost, no ad either), in fact arguably a much better one due 0 setup time (literally none, it’s all Web based!) to all the community, tutoring exercises, etc.

This is such a blatant fail.

IMHO that’s the linchpin, what’s the gap between what a leader (political or business) would claim to be true versus… what’s actually working, and beyond that, what’s actually useful then used in practice.

Working in innovation we called this the “marketing gap” and it’s quite a funnel, from broad claim that AI or any other emerging technology will “change everything” to what people, workers and consumers alike, actually use frequently and are wiling to pay for.

One needs bold claims, even if false, to get votes or funding money.

added AI to its products basically to receive government subsidies.

Damn, I opened this post bracing myself for BS comments praising AI slop but this was actually interesting, thanks for sharing! Do you have any references (in English ideally) where I could read about such trends there, not propaganda & tech marketing like that BBC piece?