I have the CMF Watch 2 pro, and can confirm mostly the same.

Price point is right where OP was looking to spend which is pretty cheap for a smartwatch.

It looks good for the price, machined aluminum bezel, should work with aftermarket bands etc. It works with GadgetBridge (initial pairing was kinda jank for me, but follow the provided directions and you’ll be fine).

Most of the basic features work and are supported with GadgetBridge- step counting, push notifications etc. Some more advanced features may not work. Also if you don’t use the official Nothing/CMF app you are stuck with the 5 or 6 default preloaded watch face designs, most of which kinda suck. Maybe someone has come up with a workaround for this since I last checked.

I guess because he has (mild spoiler) 3 total “guns”.

One thing that is easy to overlook - use a high quality USB cable to connect the phone to your PC for web installation of the OS. There are many garbage-quality cables floating around out there that may charge a small accessory but could be lacking in the data transfer department.

Karl Jobst has done some good investigative journalism on the auction fraud and the “fractional ownership” trading platform scams.

Historically, auction houses and platforms are often using relationships with celebrities and influential people to artificially boost the prices. The platform provides the veneer of a neutral open-market sale. The celebrity provides the “credibility” of a rich buyer, justifying the record price on the game or collectable.

I’d say don’t take any retro game prices at face value, and understand your own local market before buying anything. You can list things for any price you want on eBay. Doesn’t mean the product is routinely trading at that price. Wata can list and claim a “sale” at a ridiculous price on their own platform, and currently there is no way to credibly verify that sale was to a real buyer, and not pre-arranged or fraudulent in some way designed to inflate the precieved value of the item.

GrapheneOS is about as close as you will get.

Have burners if you want, but realize that with vanilla Android or Apple iOS on those devices, they will suck up a lot of data about surrounding devices, Bluetooth devices, and wifi networks. This can be probabalistically matched to your real identity even if you use VPNs and you aren’t using any known accounts on the burners. As for GPS data, that’s even worse.

Its probably best to have at least one “normie” phone you do boring stuff on, a Graphene enabled phone for sensitive-but-not-illegal daily driving, and anything spicier than that should be a burner in a Faraday bag, which you cycle and destroy/discard regularly.

More importantly, do you like doing the work of a fullstack developer but getting paid and treated like a barely-tier 2 support desk person?

Yeah, OP, based on my experience with the Deck, for a vast majority of games you can just go to the ingame pause screen, press power button to “sleep” the Deck, and then resuming later has no impact.

There are a few games that maybe had audio issues or something after resume but nothing major if your main concern was simply avoiding losing progress.

GrapheneOS is a nice reprieve from the sea of endless enshittification news flowing forth from Big Tech these days.

I recommend getting some indie and pixel art style titles instead of just going for AAA. Reason being many of these are cheaper ($5-10, sometimes even less) so you can try different genres, and these titles also tend to sip battery so you will get lots of gameplay time.

Examples I have enjoyed, in no particular order-

Animal Well

Celeste

Stardew Valley

Vampire Survivors

Caveblazers

Balatro

Slay the Spire

Cool. Their analytics experience uniquely positions them to quantify just how few people give a shit about the Oscars in current year.

Japan has very effed up and convoluted laws concerning intellectual property, copyright and fair use.

I don’t envy the situation.

I would recommend going to their Official Announcement and asking the question there or on the linked social media.

They seem to be answering questions on the Nitter/Xcancel linked thread.

Nothing to see here - Is highly successful test of suicide missle!

Instead of assessing compatibility I assume it would include ideological purity tests.

Cool, if GrayJay could integrate similar functionality that’d be great.

Except among Zoomers, with whom the most common password is 67

Even assuming the OS-integrated AI is 100% non-nefarious in what it is doing at a given moment, the fact that its a proprietary blackbox is still a problem for me.

Mega corp using my electricity and CPU cycles to perform “???” computational task with no transparency to the actual owner of the hardware and the individual paying the power bill. Fuck that.

On the technological side of things, you’re pretty much fucked no matter what. Virtually all car companies now have proprietary app integrations, partnerships with Google and Apple, and other anti-privacy features.

Some practical things you can do-

Opt out of as much data collection and sharing as you can. Read the manual and menu dive to disable optional features you don’t need.

If you finance or lease from the dealer, there are likely additional data disclosures and third party sharing that you can opt out of. Read all the paperwork when you sign your purchase or lease documents. In my case I had to literally fill out and mail something in (they don’t want it to be easy to opt-out because they make money from sharing the data with third parties).

I like the idea, but don’t just buy these assuming you’re good to go, and then walk around with a normie iPhone or Android device that phones home constantly with your precise location and device ID, SIM information etc.

There is always at least some error rate and deniability in probabilistic matching by something like facial recognition. There is a lot less deniability of your specific device ID, tied to your real identity (thanks to KYC laws), being in X location at Y time.

(From a US perspective)

I’d say most teens work jobs in order to have spending money for outings with friends, any maybe to save for a car or something. Maybe sock away a bit of money for college. Their real basic living expenses (shelter, food, clothes, school fees) are covered by their parents.

So menial fast food, retail, and service industry jobs going away does impact their ability to earn some cash and learn responsibilities in a relatively low risk way. These jobs disappearing isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if reasonable alternatives emerge that accomplish the same thing.

It can go one of two ways. Maybe teens and students will get entrepreneurial and start their own small businesses. I know some high school kids down the street who started a lawn care business when they were ~12, and they saved so much money throughout their teen years that they both own their own pickup trucks outright, they now have employees, and they just continued growing their business instead of going to college. They are actually providing a service to the economy that people want and need.

The other way it can go is that all traditionally teen jobs go away and there becomes a whole generation of teens who exist solely on the patronage of their parents, which combined with the “keeping up” mentality prevalent in some areas, results in entitled little bitches. There are many kids who would be happy not to work while still expecting to be handed the keys to a late model car, and the newest iPhone. And let’s not forget the multithousand dollar production surrounding the “average” prom date experience or spring break trip. Or worse, these trends further exacerbate the rift between the haves and the have nots because naturally not everyone’s parents are going to be able to afford all this shit.

More than likely we will always need some retail workers, ice cream scoopers, golf caddys, recreation league baseball umpires, and pool lifeguards. Not all first jobs need to be literally McDonalds. I would like more young people to innovate and offer new products and services people actually need and want, because it is better for society as a whole. Otherwise, in 10 years we will look up and find 90% of the US economy is AI, shitcoin speculation, vape and CBD shops, and OnlyFans.