At least (according to them) they want to Get to a point where you can reach into a kitchen drawer and be able to replace your Screen.

I tried Filelight with my phone connected through KDE Connect and I can confirm that it works!

Or Logseq is a great Obsidian alternative with no account needed and apps for Linux and Android. You can sync it with Syncthing.

There is one big reason why they would care - antitrust and EU regulation protection. They have no intention to destroy the platform Rather they want to please the regulators as they are leveraging the open standards. The EEE strategy is a conspiracy theory. Government regulations are the most probable reason for this change.

If something killed XMPP for me - it was Matrix. On open source replacement that is not only more popular, but has more active development and it's easier to use. No big company required. And since XMPP is still alive for its niche user base and EU is probably the reason for Threads federation - I don't think this is the right hill to die on.

I think we both misunderstood each other. I looked up the press release and they say that there were some generative improvements to Magic Eraser that run on device. But that's not in the "Magic Editor" UI I meant, when I was talking about the new features of Pixel 8. You were mad at Google because of the upload to the cloud. That happens ONLY if you use the Magic Editor that uses large models in their datacenters for best results. But if you use the normal Magic Eraser it will work on device and hence offline. Although it does use some generative AI now - I 100% guarantee you that it will be worse than the Magic Editor, which uses image models that are too powerful for the Tensor G3. So you were angry for nothing.

It's obvious that you don't understand this topic at all. So it would be better to end this discussion. But I will try to explain. Old Magic Eraser: definitely not generative ai, because it doesn't "generate" anything - just completes the missing part with the other parts of the image. So it's not that resource heavy and can be processed on device. It doesn't require complex diffusion generative models. New Magic Eraser: uses actual generative ai, because it generates whole new objects that replace the part you want to erase. And that requires a lot of processing, because it needs large image generation models that currently can't be run on the device. Although, Pixel 8 could run some small image generation models, they would be far worse than the large models that Google runs on their servers. In the future, the technology will get better and more lightweight. So in a few years, it will be possible to run a good image gen models on device. But that's not the current focus of the industry.

Well, the Magic Eraser is just an algorithmic fill. It's not an actual generative ai. So it doesn't require so much compute power. If Pixel 8 had the new generative Magic Eraser on device, it would be either really bad or take minutes to process.

It's apparently independent again - announced in July 2023. here's the announcement

I use Feeder. Minimal, but has everything I need (feed groups, bookmarks, offline downloads). Open source with no ads or tracking from Play Store or F-Droid.

Pixel 7 works perfectly for me. I like nearly all aspects of it. The camera is extremely good (I've recently made a comparison with iPhone 14 Pro Max and iPhone was far worse) and reliable. The battery life and performance is good. The phone feels smooth, without a lot of bugs. I don't have a recent experience with Samsung, but I will stick with Pixel going forward.