This is not news, I had "the multi polar world" in history class in high school in the early 2000s, it's just that the US suddenly realized it and has been blind to the change for a while.

The Fairbuds proved that it's possible.

Progress has stalled already, I didn't see much improvement in the past year for my real world tasks

I don't think anybody could suggest going back to Blueray at this point, if selling online without DRM would be the only choice, they would have to comply.

Of course they are happy with that, they are not the ones affected by the problem and even benefit financially from it.

> How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese?

Not very well. The old vietnamese script with Chinese characters had a lot of custom additions not in Chinese to make it work. It clearly was ducktaped.

There are non-Chinese languages in China that use Chinese characters phonetically for writing. Most of these are newer though, since the 1950s.

That was kind of like that with vietnamese, a mix of phonetic-only characters, fully custom characters and standard ones all blend together, it's quite a mess. I doubt any Chinese speaker can understand that.

The colonial administration didn't have to push too hard to make people switch, the customized chinese script wasn't very popular.

Chinese speakers won't understand Zhuang, Yi, or Bai as well. Latinization would probably be more effective, but China would lose some face. They even re-popularized an old form of Uighur script for Mongolian (while Mongolians in outer Mongolia/Russia use Cyrillic).

Depends what you mean by security, if by security you mean sanboxing of apps sure, if by security you mean that you trust what's in your OS and you can control it, it's worse than desktop Linux.

Security isn't just about technical features but also about trust, while I trust my Linux desktop, I don't trust my Android phone with the Play Store running as high privilege, advertising id in the OS and unknown manufacturer additions.

But that's more like talking about a particular distro, like I wouldn't trust North Korea's Linux distro either, compared to Debian.

Meanwhile something close to GrapheneOS running on desktop sounds fantastic.

Perhaps you may like Qubes OS.

Suggesting Qubes OS as the GNU/Linux equivalent of Android is admitting defeat. Android sandboxes multiple apps running on the same system/kernel. Qubes OS sandboxes multiple apps running on multiple different systems (VMs). Qubes, laudable as it may be, is not a parallel to Android.

Qubes is a much more secure alternative to Android without its main downside, which is that Google owns it and steers its development toward enshittification and control [0]. The latter even affects security directly [1].

Android's sandboxes are weaker and AFAIK rely on closed, non-auditable hardware (which is owned by Google in, e.g., GrapheneOS). Qubes protects you more reliably and doesn't require to abandon root privileges or a possibility to take screenshots.

Also, you don't have to run every app in a dedicated VM on Qubes: Instead you group them into security domains, which allowed me to organize my digital life like never before [3].

In addition, Qubes can protect you from supply-chain attacks by isolating VMs from the network and using different OSes side by side. I dream of using Qubes on mobile.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45017028

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45017028

[2] https://doc.qubes-os.org/en/latest/user/how-to-guides/how-to...

Well no, no country on earth has 5 years worth of oil stockpile, logistically it's impossible.

Nothing can compete with the energy density of uranium.

Arguably Qatar does, as do most other nations who produce it locally. That is exactly GP's point.

Oil is relatively easily, inexpensively, and quickly mined and refined. Compared to, say, uranium.

That's not a stockpile, they have to extract and refine it to use it. Russia understood it the hard way with the refineries attacks.

And no, oil is more expensive (especially nowadays) to extract than uranium.

There's a reason nobody ever became rich with a uranium mine, all the value is in the plant and the market price barely covers extracting it, some mines even closed because of the price being too low.

We're not talking about ore, rather fuel. Uranium ore might be inexpensive, I don't know, but converting that ore into fuel is not an easy task. I'm guessing that the reason it's not profitable is that so little of it is actually needed, relative to oil.

How else is that supposed to work?

You either fix a driver in the kernel or a driver outside the kernel, it's not going to make that big of a difference to the person who has to fix it.

The difference is that the end user doesn't have to do it. Someone else is going to do it. Just like it is on Windows.

That only works because Windows has a large marketshare, the day it drops to 10%, users will have to write their own drivers as well

I was highlighting this as a similarity between them, but I see how my comment can be ambiguous. The average Linux user isn't currently writing their own drivers or compiling their own kernels, even with its tiny relative userbase.

Nobody really want a hard fork, if you can't run Android apps, you might as well use a Linux distribution.

Well the idea would be to run Android apps on the hard fork :-).

If you can run Android apps then you need the same behavior as AOSP or I'm missing something?

If you don't rebase from AOSP, the apps won't run pretty quickly.

I actually wonder: if Google stopped pushing to AOSP and "the community" had to fork... the whole Android SDK/NDK is not open source, so I wonder if AOSP could survive at all without Google, even though it is open source.

I think if Google would stop pushing AOSP, there's a very high risk for Google that a consortium of manufacturers would continue themselves as they need it and they would lose control.

I think that is unlikely reality because from manufacturers perspective they don't get AOSP from the public. They get it from their chip provider like Qualcomm who gets private releases from Google. Everything is already set up such that people aren't using the public version, so the more likely reality is that the public version goes away, and google partners keep doing what they are doing. Maybe things are different on the Chinese side of things. So if it were to be created, it would be over there.

Would they, though? Like Huawei forked for a while, and then they made their proprietary HarmonyOS.

For a while I thought it was a missed opportunity to compete on a hard fork, but then I realised that Huawei probably cannot fork the Android SDK/NDK because it's not open source.