They should not be worried, they should be educated.

If you worry a new user enough they’ll go back to Windows or Apple because there’s less scary warnings there.

We need to make the transition as pain free as possible. Learning about the joys of kernel compilation and SELinux can come later.
The first step is "Hey, this is as usable as Windows, without stupid ads in the start menu.

Aside from budget and time overruns it looks like they overshot the target of “futuristic” and landed in the middle of dystopian…

Sounds quite similar to Markov chains which made me think of this story:

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-automated-curse-generator

Still gets a snort out of me every time Markov chains are mentioned.

Depending on your level of caffeine tolerance/dependency actual coffee might be even better.

Alternatively: Decaf.

Yeah, inductive charging is basically a must.

Especially because it eliminates the guesswork if the watch is correctly seated to charge

No actual technical solution here, but it smells slightly of XY-Problems.

From what you described it seems the main issues are

• too many calls
• not knowing who’s calling
• not wanting to answer the phone
• not reaching the phone in time

Maybe you could look into solutions like setting a custom ringtone for important callers or having the phone announce caller names so your mother can decide if she wants to make the effort to get her phone.

I’m speculating a bit here but I can imagine that getting up and answering the phone is exhausting for your mother. Also if her mindset is " a ringing phone means it’s important" that could make it even more stressful.

Maybe you could find a way to let her silence all calls except caregivers and ICE contacts. (On Android DND exceptions could work for that)

That way she doesn’t feel pressured to answer the phone every time it rings and stays reachable.

If it’s actually just the physical issue of reaching the phone in time, does she have a convenient way to carry the phone indoors like a lanyard?

Hope some of this helps you

Coconut at least…

That feature is right on the border between real neat tech and deeply unsettling.

“Hey, my phone uses its last few electrons to turn into a bluetooth beacon to stay findable” sounds like sci-fi “reserve power emergency mode”

“I can’t turn off the locator chip in a device that holds half my life and memories” is just dystopian.

I’m wondering if there would be a way to keep it useful while minimizing impact for people who stay off the grid. A hardware switch would probably be a good start but they won’t fly with current all-touch designs.

Ah, you “work” in “marketing”?

They occupy a strange niche full of contradictions.

Entering the code on the device itself should increase security as opposed to entering it on a compromised computer.

But plugging it into a compromised computer means the data is compromised anyway.

Their security is way harder to audit than a software solution like PGP. The actual “encryption” varies from actual decent setups to “entering the code connects the data pins with no actual encryption on the storage chip”

Not having to instal/use software to use them means they are suitable for non-technical users which in turn means more support calls for “I forgot the pin, it wiped itself, can you restore my data”

They are kind of useful to check the “data is transported on encrypted media” box for compliance reasons without having to manage something bigger.

It doesn’t. It carries you by having a module for absolutely everything even shooting yourself in the foot.

B stands for Billion (Parameters) IIRC

To a certain degree, yes. If someone at Google decides to wage all-out war against ad blockers they have a good chance. But if that costs more money than it generates, odds are that someone will stop it. Google / Alphabet is publicly traded after all and that means profit above all else.

Embedding ads into the stream would be hard to counter, but it’s far away. That would invalidate caches along the way and need extra performance to reencode the stream with the ads inserted.

That’s extra costs that are hopefully orders of magnitude above the lost ad revenue from ad blockers

Okay, you got me there. In all fairness, as instruction videos go, that one is on the tame side.

Thanks for posting the instructions here.

Tl;dw:

Append systemd.debug_shell to the boot command line.

No, No, they don’t understand everything and nothing!

I’m hopeful that reencoding on the fly or even merging preencoded files into a single stream is too expensive because it needs a lot of compute power and invalidates caches .

IT changes usually affect management as well, while “cost saving” in production doesn’t.

Stopping AWS instances would be handy, but your idea to slag the drives is unnecessary.

Just set up full disk encryption for everything.

You die -> no key -> no data