I’ve tried avoiding Meta for years but I had to give in because none of my family was willing to move to Signal. Ideally we’d all be using iMessage except my sister has disabled it because her and her partner share the same iCloud account which apparently causes them problem, I have a Nothing Phone, brother and partner use iPhones, mum has an iPhone – basically the only unifying messaging solution is WhatsApp. In a perfect world I would have preferred to stick with Signal but unfortunately a messaging application is kind of useless when all the family is using WhatsApp. It’s one of the reasons why the “just stop using xyz platform” because for many the platform is the only means given the reluctance by so many to consider alternatives.

Personally I think the best thing that could happen would be for Meta to be broken up into four separate companies: WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and AR/VR Metaverse with Facebook and Instagram required to implement the ActivityPub protocol so that the ‘walled in’ problem of society networks can be undone by forcing them to federate thus allowing people to use alternatives while still being able to communicate (regarding the Metaverse and WhatsApp (along with Twitter – assuming Elon Musk doesn’t run it into the ground before it is regulated), if they can be federated as well then then that would be great too).

Almost a week and Android 13/Nothing 1.5.2 has been a solid update. As someone who keeps track of Android development, being the first isn’t always the best and I’ve seen my fair share of early releases only for end users to quickly upgrade then get angry that the update has broken something or there are numerous bugs such as the OxygenOS 12 for OnePlus 9 series. There is an old saying, you only get one chance to make a good impression which is why I would sooner wait a few months for the long hanging bugs to be addressed so when it does release if there are bugs they aren’t show stopper bugs that makes ones device next to unusable or so unreliable it cannot be trusted.

What has been interesting regarding Android 13 (and even Android 12) is how Android (like iOS) has moved from making giant leaps to now the focus is on under the hood improvements and quality of life improvements in the area of user visible changes (link). There hasn’t been a blog post for Android 14 over on blog.esper.io but that is most likely due to the first developer previews being pretty light on details – sometimes Google likes to hold back on big features when they make the official announcement particularly those that are still up in the air regarding whether they’ll be ready in time to make it into Android 14.

Politics in New Zealand is a nightmare and it appears that the National/ACT are doing the same old four step tango: 1) Tax cuts 2) Deregulation 3) Privatisation 4) Build a road. We’re in a climate emergency and this isn’t the time to give tax cuts to the top end of town when we need ‘all hands on deck’ to deal with not only cutting with GHG emissions but also dealing with the consequences that are already baked in due to past GHG emissions put into the atmosphere. Although on the left there are politicians fighting the good fight, on the right they’ve pretty much given up trying to deal with GHG (not that they ever put any real effort into it in the first place) in favour of “prepare the best we can and hold tight” which fails to address the fact that things will keep getting worse the more GHG emissions we put in the atmosphere. Sigh, adaptation is not a substitute for action but it appears that for some it allows them to keep their corporate masters happy while giving the unobservant voter the feeling that the care.