The last time someone claimed a medal in an olympiad like this, turned out they manually translated the problem into Lean and then ran a brute force search algorithm to find a proof. For 60 hours. On a supercomputer.
Meanwhile high schoolers get a piece of paper and 4.5 hours.
Even though chess is now effectively solved against human players, I still remember Kasparov's suspicion that one of Deep Blue's moves had a human touch. It was never proven or disproven, but I trust Kasparov's deep intuition amplified by Kasparov requesting access to Deep Blue’s logs, and IBM refusing to share them in full. For more discussions see [1][2][3].
Classic mistake is that if 1 worker will produce 10 products a day, 10 workers will produce 100. Fact is what one software developer will do in a week, ten will do in a year. Copypasta can be fast and very inaccuare today -- it will be faster and much more inaccurate later.
Fairphone is as insecure as most non-flagship Android phones. Make of that what you will.
GrapheneOS takes security very seriously. Your average desktop PC or laptop won't come close to their requirements. That makes GrapheneOS an excellent OS for people who want the security of iOS without the many downsides of Apple. Their patches reduce usability but make the phone more secure than Google's own, official Android build.
However, if you've ever used a Windows (or Linux) laptop, you've already experienced the kind of insecurity that GrapheneOS tries to prevent. No hardware encryption accelerators outside of the CPU, rarely any patches that roll out within a weak of announcement, firmware protection being basically nonexistent, no A/B updates, almost certainly no verified boot (even with Secure Boot enabled), and usually no firmware USB lockdown.
Interesting enough, GrapheneOS runs exclusively on google devices. This fact makes it obsolete for me. I don't trust google in anything, soft or hard ware.
Security is a policy-driven spectrum of considerations and solutions. GrapheneOS targets very specific threat models, which is not possible with Fairphone hardware/BSP. Whether it makes it not secure for your own use cases, it's up to you to decide.
Case in point: re-lockable bootloader requirement. Not everyone is a target for an evil maid types of physical attacks or possible state actor pressure. But when you actually need it, it's not negotiable.
Whining about algebra not being in most CS curriculums is just a lie. Every university in the world has (if it doesn't, it's not a university) maths as a minor regardless of what your major is. And everyone I know, including me, took algebra as a minor being a CS major (if you didn't, question your choice of career).
How about just don't use their services and boycott their tech stacks at work? I know, it requires some brain use and more than just shouting at the cloud, but it's doable.
A few individuals doing that is meaningless. Individual action only matters if you can get a critical mass of people on board.
It also ignores the reality of the prisoners dilemma, in that a service can be bad for society over all but within that society it is better to use it than to not. Everyone driving around huge cars is a clear example of this. When a scenario like this is identified the correct thing to do is regulate it with law.
Why do you want to be not "meaningless"? If they don't like something that they don't have to use, they are free to do that. How is breaking up big tech going to solve anything.
Also big companies are easiest to regulate and all the countries regulate them all the time. If you have 100 different TikToks, they threaten democracy even more as the profit incentive push towards extremism in any case.
> A few individuals doing that is meaningless. Individual action only matters if you can get a critical mass of people on board.
The same should be true of democracy, but unfortunately, in representative democracy, you only need to convince a few representatives, which does not actually require a critical mass of people agreeing.
Why not do both, change your own patterns and change the regulatory frameworks to make capitalism benefit society? Though I would go as far as saying: use regulatory frameworks to save capitalism. A market where a small set of winners takes all is not functioning capitalism anymore.
I have been using Linux both home and at work for the last couple of decades. I am thinking of degoogling my life, it is a bit harder, but I think I will get it done some day soon.
And meanwhile, at least one Danish ministry has decided to drop Microsoft Office, and more are likely to follow if that goes well.
So, there is some movement to the right direction, but big changes take a long time...
They don't.