I also still dream of one day daily driving a Linux smartphone, but that feels a bit more unrealistic to me, as I have more expectations from a phone, like being able to use bank apps and having a good battery life. But for a smartwatch, which I only expect to show me some biometrics and pass notifications from my phone, this seems perfect.

On this note: aren't JavaScript and QML/Qt too heavy/bloated for a device so small? I expect them to constrain performance and battery life quite a bit, but I admit I don't have a clue and would love to be proven wrong...

What if robots.txt should refer to the ultimate beneficiaries... one which in this case would be the AI product that uses that content... to serve another ultimate beneficiary, a human user.

The problem here is obviously the higher prices for hosting the content, and less revenue for those that serve ads, have product placement on their sites, etc.

As long as robots.txt is about ethics/money and is enforced by morality, it doesn't matter who it refers to anyway.

Public-shaming enforcement might work in some cases though, but I doubt it will be that useful. We're talking about companies that have trained their AIs on IPs, and tried their best to later hide it. Does shame affect robots, or companies for that matter?

Cloudflare would very much like to be the middleman for monetary transactions between AI services and site owners (https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/), but at the moment they don't have a law to hold their back, so articles like these are the best they got.

Libraries and frameworks, I assume you meant open-source here, are a different thing.

A phone for which I paid a good amount of money, now doesn't let me use a different operating system anymore while maintaining the same (or arguably better) high level of security. Something which was possible thanks to the hard work of the GrapheneOS community, for the past ~looks at wikipedia~ 6 years... But that is no more, because the binary blobs cannot be forked like you would normally do in the case of FOSS libraries.

> What if someone else came up and said I'm using Pixel as a doorstop, and now that Pixel has a camera bump, it doesnt work anymore - I hate the company. Strange indeed.

Well luckily they can't physically alter the phone which I already own. If I didn't like the looks of the new Pixel, then I simply would not purchase it.

What Google can do though, is (indirectly) stop me from using it the way I envisioned before I bought this nice computing device, the way many others have been enjoying before me.

Anyway, I wasn't just talking about whether Google are wrong or not to do this. They understand what the consequences of their action are, and that just makes it shitty in my opinion. Am I upset? No, just disappointed.

> This is such a strange position. "I rely on an undocumented behavior, and I'm upset that things changed".

I view your position to put up a snarky defense based on weak analogies, for Google nonetheless, equally strange. "I'm on the internet where people can have different opinions, and I'm upset".

And yes, they're not obligated to provide those binary blobs, but since they've been doing it for such a long while, not announcing it well in advance, like they do with the so many services they choose to discontinue, just adds to that list of things I dislike about them.

Yeah, yeah, it's a bit more work to publish those binaries and make sure they work. But they still kind of have to do that, for themselves. So I think it's fair to assume why they did it. Because they made a choice to take a small loss on the devices they would sell for the few GrapheneOS users, and cash in on the walled garden, data mining, ads serving, yada yada, whatever brings the extra money after the initial phone sale.