I'm feeling this pain right now. I was forced to switch to my backup phone after my main one broke. Data is okay over LTE, but it doesn't support VoLTE, and calls over 2G is miserable. Connection is super spotty unless I take the call outdoors, and even then, quality isn't great. Couple that with T-Mobile shutting down 2G in April 2024, and guess who's forced to purchase a new phone just to keep up.
I'd recommend buying a phone from Tracfone (or one of their sub-brands) with a bundled year of service, and then unlocking it after 60 days. They frequently have sales of those bundles for $100 or even less. You should be able to take it to T-Mobile if the model isn't proprietary to Tracfone/Verizon (though you will be stuck with the Tracfone customized firmware). According to this page which tracks prepaid phone deals, QVC and HSN both have Tracfone bundles on sale with lower-end Samsung phones for around that price, and even one with a Pixel 6a if you're willing to spend a little bit more: https://prepaidcompare.net/deals/
I concur. My mom sometimes talked about how her friends / coworkers just got the latest iPhone and that made her want to get one herself. I guess part of it is just FOMO but there's also something about the brand that drove people to do "unusual" things (like you said, smuggling phones from other countries just to be the first)
I'm pretty confident that it's the screen protector peeling off around the crease area. The Z Flip / Fold comes with pre-installed screen protectors, and they kinda sucks - always peeling off after a few months. After replacing it once just to see it bubbling again, I decided to take it off entirely. I haven't seen any problems except that the screen now attracts scratches like crazy.
I've had this idea for a while: make an FPGA capable of executing WASM bytecode, then offloading WASM execution to the FPGA. Sounds like a fun project to learn FPGA and how to make a CPU.
Sorta off topic, but I wonder if a CPU with WASM bytecode as its native instruction set could be more performant / power-efficient than JIT-ing WASM code to ARM/x86 assembly. My understanding is that modern processors comes with a wide range of optimization tricks like register renaming, out-of-order, superscalar, ... such that it's probably just easier to JIT WASM bytecode to the native instruction set, so we'd get those optimizations for free, as opposed to design your own WASM CPU with those same optimizations.
As someone whose a close friend ended themselves, I can offer some perspectives.
"Die by suicide" is preferable to "commit suicide" or "killed themselves" because it shifts the cause from the person to the circumstances that led to the act. In many cases, suicide is not intentional, but is brought upon by (mental illness / other circumstances) in which the person sees suicide as the only way out. Therefore, "kill themselves" implies they willingly choose suicide and is responsible for it, as opposed to "die by suicide", which implies the person is a victim.
For pedantic readers, it's not clear in this case if the person chose suicide by themselves, or were driven to it. Regardless, I'd still err on the caution side.
That would be a good way to avoid the mental health issues that are currently in overload state. But … It won’t solve the problem by soft-pedaling with different words.
I was lucky enough to visit the museum at the end of 2019, just before COVID-19 hit and the museum had to shut down. Unlike the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, the machines here were fully operational and you could actually get to use them - I compiled some hello world code on a NeXTcube and I still remember that fond moment. IIRC they had systems that you can SSH in and use, but seems like they've taken that down. Must be a recent thing since I remember they were operational a year or two ago.
The Mountain View museum is an expensive travesty. Another great "living" museum is the one next to Bletchley Park. You can program the Dekatron with paper tape and watch the base-10 memory cells changing as it runs.
The one next to Bletchley Park is The National Museum of Computing. It's a really great place and, IMHO, much more interesting than Bletchley Park itself.
Per the article, the parent company laid off all of the museum staff in mid-2020, so if they were working a year or two ago, they were doing so despite a lack of maintenance. Something probably broke at some point and there's no one left to fix it.
I managed to compile and run a hello world C program (it might've actually been B?) using ed on an old school Research Unix machine they had.
I also remember messing with the shell on an even older Unix machine that had an actual teletype printer terminal. And directly poking the VGA buffer on a C64 to do goofy things...
I only went once a while ago, when my family took a trip to Seattle, but that is one of my most treasured memories. It's a travesty that future generations of nerdy kids won't get that experience (and I'm sad that I likely won't get it again either).
It was the first and only time me and my brother saw a mainframe actually running. And hundreds of other early computers. Incredible place and such a shame.
