If you’re really against Pis, you could get one of the USB-controlled modules and try hooking it up to something like a LattePanda, but that’s going to be more expensive.

You could also theoretically get a cell modem chip from a company like Quectel and design the supporting add-on board yourself for any SBC of your choice, but I suspect that’s further down the rabbit hole than you want to go.

So, yeah, the Pi is probably the smartest choice if you really want to do your own hardware build instead of just buying a PinePhone.

Assuming that this is a tinkerer/hobby project and you know your odds of getting a daily-driver phone out of it aren’t good:

You can get various Pi add-ons and USB-addressable cards that supposedly have texting and/or voice call capability. Look up a company called Sixfab. How well they work in practice, I don’t know. Be prepared to immerse yourself in a large manual of AT commands and cell phone protocol stuff.

🎵 It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. 🎵 (Seriously, if I had a nickel for every time someone said or implied that . . .)

I've never understood the whole "fear of missing out" thing, probably because I've spent my entire life "missing out" by most people's standards and am aware that it isn't the end of the world.

If it won't wait by the conveyor belt to collect your checked luggage, there's still a boring, repetitive task it doesn't cover.

My guess is that they're surfacing something from Bing rather than doing this themselves. Still Not Good, though.

Well, if OP ever moves, the old slab could be broken up on site, the base moved, and a new slab cast at the destination. Or just hire the local high school football team at $20/jock/hour—four of them should be able to move it. 😅

Provided you're paying them, I can't see why you would need to feel uncomfortable. Many of them would probably be overjoyed to collect some cash doing something they like doing anyway—seniors whose income was just enough pre-COVID are really struggling now.

Unfortunately, no one's yet succeeded in making a workable checker (AI-written text and the writing of English-as-foreign-language speakers are awkwardly similar along many axes, apparently, so existing checkers have a lot of false positives).

While a nicely-bound blank book with heavy paper isn't worth $500, it isn't entirely worthless, either. To really rip buyers off, it has to be an ebook or print-on-demand. As has already been demonstrated.

Forth. Gotta love that RPN . . .

Probably riffing on the fact that the Pi people hired (some time ago) an ex-cop who had used their devices in surveillance.

Software is like clutter in your closet: it expands to fill the space available. There doesn’t seem any way to prevent it. I’m starting to think the whole phenomenon is related to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. 🤨

I believe there’s an act covering presidential disability, dating from long before Reagan, due to a president’s wife having effectively run the country for a couple of years while her husband was too ill to get out of bed. That would probably cover obvious and serious dementia as well. (Not my country, though, so I may have it wrong.) Problem with the recent Republican presidents is that their insanity is plausibly deniable, if your worldview is damaged enough already.

I concede the point, although Lynx is of limited usefulness on the Javascript-burdened modern Web.

I suppose that what bothers me about the original announcement is that it strikes me as something that shouldn’t have been announced until he had something with at least a Lynx level of viability. You don’t have to tell the world at large about every single hobby you take up.

Maybe I’m just too old and too private to understand People These Days and how they choose to go about their lives. 😅

The author of the article can’t even be bothered to keep his server up-to-date (my first attempt at viewing the article bounced me with a warning that suggests he only has obsolete crypto protocols available for SSL—why bother with SSL at all, then?). He’s quite correct that this initiative is going to come to nothing.

There are currently only four web rendering engines that could be considered remotely usable as daily drivers: WebKit, its fork Blink, and Gecko, with its fork Goanna. WebKit and Blink both have major corporate backing (Apple and Google respectively). Gecko has the Mozilla Foundation paying the major bills. Even Pale Moon’s Goanna has multiple people working on it (and since it’s my daily driver, I know it has persistent issues with a few sites that have to be papered over with extensions). And the rendering engine is not the only thing you need for a browser, just the largest single part. A one-man project starting from scratch is not going to be viable in this day and age.

Pale Moon still supports XUL, if you want to play with it.

Sounds like that shop may have gone out of business for a reason.

I don’t know. Every time I think that there’s some level to which no sane human being would stoop, this guy manages to surprise me. And not in a good way.

Sorry to break it to you, but it doesn’t “know” anything except what text is most likely to come after the text you just typed. It’s an autocomplete. A very sophisticated one, granted, but it has no notion of “fact” and no real understanding of the content of what it’s saying.

Saying that it knows what it’s spouting back to you is exactly what I warned against up above: anthropomorphization. People did this with ELIZA too, and it’s even more dangerous now than it was then.