It'd kind of sad, how the market went. I suppose there are pluses too.

But back in the 80s and 90s, margins were significantly higher. If you look at hardware, I recall selling hardware with 30% margin, if not more... even 80% on some items.

Yet what came with that was support, support, support. And when you sell 5 computers a month, instead of 500, well.. you need that margin to even have a store. Which you need, because no wide-scale internet.

On the software side, it was sort of the same. I remember paying $80 for some pieces of software, which would be like $200 today. You'd pay $1 on an app store for such software, but I'd also call the author if there was a bug. He'd send an update in the mail.

I guess my point is, in those days, it was fun to fix issues. The focus was more specific, there was time to ply the trade, to enjoy it, to have performant, elegant fixes.

Now, it's all "my boss is hassling me and another bug will somehow mean I have to work harder", which is .. well, sad.

Controlled? No. It's about security updates being patched before disclosure.

That said. it is indeed annoying, and there was a lot of uproar when it happened.

For the nuance of it, I'd suggest GrapheneOS docs, you'll get more accurate info.

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/27068-grapheneos-security-p...

Do you have 'Receive security preview updates' on?

Google stopped publishing any info about security updates until (I think) quarterlies come out. GrapheneOS had to sign some sort of non-disclosure for them, in order to roll them into updates.

If you don't have that on, then you're not fully up to date with security updates. This could be the difference.

I've noticed with GrapheneOS, that more recent builds are exhibiting weird issues. This isn't their fault, it's upstream ASOP issues. For example, just in the last few weeks:

* The date has now gone missing from my lockscreen, only showing the time.

* I can no longer see signal strength on my phone for mobile, if wiki is off. I turn wifi on, and now I can. I use a larger font, but it used to be just fine.

There are all sorts of little changes like this I've noticed recently.

It makes me wonder if Google is slowly mangling default ASOP so projects like GrapheneOS will have a crappier daily build experience.

And GrapheneOS doesn't have time to manage features changes like this, they focus on their key security improvements and fixes. If Google is doing this on purpose, it has real potential to seriously degrade ASOP as usable without lots of fixes and changes.

They already rug-pulled security updates or whatever it was a few months back.

And it really seems like the sort of sneaky, underhanded way Google would handle things.

It's OK. This is the dying, last gasp effort that a company makes when it has no way to innovate, no way to add any real value, no capacity to drive change internally, and has become completely non-user focused.

In short, it's what companies like IBM and Broadcom are now.

Shallow husks of their former self, mere holding companies for patents, with a complete lack of care and concern about any end-user retention.

Google search has turned completely into junk over the last two weeks. You may think "two weeks only?!", and you're right there, but this is a whole new level of stupid.

You may not be getting this where you are, but here searches are constantly prepended with human checks, searches can take up to 5+ seconds, you name it. They literally spend so little on maintaining and working on their search engine, that it's effectively unusable much of the time now. I don't care whether it's bot traffic, or what, and no it's not just me, or my ISP. This is wide-scale.

It takes so long I just click on an alternate search engine and search there. I don't have time to waste in their inanity.

Any sane and sensible company wouldn't entirely trash and destroy their mainline product, which is key to drive users to experience Google products. But this degree of sheer, unbridled arrogance is what topples empires. The thought that it really doesn't matter, flows off of google as a foul stench.

Look at Microsoft of old, the god of arrogance. Once the most dominant, powerful tech company in the world. They were king. Browser king. OS king. Everything king. Now they are barely noticed by large swaths of the market.

So goes Alphabet these days.

Plus, the announcer is standing in front of a hedge.

I'm not sure why, but every corporate picture I've seen of someone, in this context, is standing in front of a hedge. Seems to be a California thing?

(Where I live, we only have leaves on hedges 6 months of the year)