gh0stcassette

I’m glad my current car is a 2015 Mazda. It’s recent enough to have a touch screen and Bluetooth, but not so recent that it’s got an LTE/5G radio that can phone home and let them sell my driving data to insurance companies or force subscription payments on me. When I get my next car in a decade or so, hopefully I can import a cheap Chinese EV that’s either easy to jailbreak, or doesn’t have any of that bullshit included.

You'd need some sort of translation layer to allow older versions of the Android userland drivers in the container to talk to the modern Android userspace drivers. Or you could write new userspace drivers inside the container that interact directly with the hardware, but this would likely be expensive and insecure. Definitely doable tho, especially for a company as large as Google.

Especially on Pixels, with the generic system image feature (allows for booting generic, non-device-specific android images), if the container is built with the same userland drivers as a generic system image, it might not even need any special effort/attention to run, though iirc GSIs are pretty recent, so you wouldn't be able to run software for anything before like,, Android 12 or 13 probably.

I mean, as long as it's in a pretty robust sandbox and it's either firewalled or has no network access (if possible for the app in question), I would think security implications are minimal. Like, even if the version of Android inside the container is compromised, the app could only take over its own container, which is non-privileged and doesn't have access to anything you didn't explicitly give it (in terms of user data).

They could just spin up a container of some sort. It's still fundamentally Linux, so it should be possible to run Android inside an lxc container the same way you can run a desktop Linux distro in docker (which is based on the lxc functionality in the Linux kernel)

There's a few apps that let you virtualize an older version of Android, but in my experience they're slow, and they're all from sketchy-looking Chinese companies that are for sure harvesting all your data. There's also an open source project running for this, but I don't remember what it was called and it was fairly limited.

I agree with that on some level, a bit like the whole thought experiment on uploading your brain after death, bit in reverse (preserving only the body instead of only the mind). It's not really you, but it retains enough of a semblance that it's comforting to some people because it feels like some aspect of themselves will live on. Fair :)

Also Monitor Lizards. They're the most intelligent squamate reptile (group that includes all living reptiles except turtles, crocodilians, and birds, who are archosauromorphs), except for possibly the cobra. But, they're still cold-blooded, so I can just nap on a hot rock without eating for 2 days and be Fine. They do get Stupid when the temperature drops too much (lowers their metabolic rate, and intelligence uses lots of energy), but I live in Florida, so that's fine💀. They're also one of the only lizards that can both breathe and walk at the same time (apparently most squamate reptiles use the same muscles for breathing as moving their forelimbs?? Wack.). This is how they became so intelligent, there was more O2 coming into the body, so the overall metabolic budget to evolve stuff like Large Brain became much larger.

Also they're adorable, monitor lizards can be so friendly, curious, and playful, they're like the Lizard version of cat imo. I really want one, they even like to cuddle (humans are Warm, and they're smart enough to recognize and trust you enough to want cuddles). I'm gonna get a cute little Ackie monitor once I graduate college I think.

Spider would be cool tbh. Tho what if you get their fucked up reproductive process where the female lays dozens or hundreds of eggs at once and also maybe tries to Eat her male partner, depending on species.

Or like, you lose your teeth and have to eat by injecting caustic fluid inside Whole Organisms to dissolve their tissues and slurp them up with your Newly-Formed palps/pedi-palps.

You might get venom, which is cool, but most spiders are only venomous to other arthropods because most spiders hunt primarily arthropods (occasionally small amphibians or reptiles for larger species, a couple tarrantulas are known to opportunistically hunt rodents or bird hatchlings, but they don't have venom to begin with, so whatever). Unless you get a black widow or brown recluse or something. A dose of that vemon from a human sized Black Widow or Brown Recluse chimera (the Type of Thing you are now) would like 99% be enough to kill a person

What if you don't keep your memories and just come out as a genetically identical baby of yourself? Turritopsis dohrnii sounds like a cnidarian or some sort (I know loads of jellyfish have life cycles like that), and they don't have brains, so there's no part of their metamorphosis back to the larval phase (whatever it's called for cnidarians) that would preserve your brain.

Idk, humans are cleverer than the average fox, it might just make you cuter (foxes are adorable) and more prone to pissing in random locations (domesticated foxes love to pee all over your shit, they can be litterbox trained, but it's hard). Possibly claws and fangs also, which could be useful

If you want cool eyes, go with the Mantis Shrimp tbh, they've got like 7 or 8 different cone cells for everything from ultraviolet to infrared. IIRC scientists don't think their brains are powerful enough to fully use all that info at once, but I feel like connecting that to a brain that's like 1000x as powerful would fix that.

I'd hope you'd just get the extra cone cells and not compund eyes tho, compound eyes would be Difficult for a human to adopt to, since our visual cortices evolved to process two high resolution visual streams and not like,, 100 shitty visual streams.

I think you could just plug an eye with extra cone types directly into a human brain tho, there are people born with tetrachromia (4th cone cell that extends a bit into the ultraviolet iirc), and they can utilize information from the extra cone cells perfectly fine.

Afaik, the human eye lens absorbs most UV light, so people with tetrachromia can't actually see much UV, but it does give them way more precise color vision overall, because instead of infering colors based on 4 values (red, green, blue, and overall brightness), you're adding a 5th value for violet, which makes colors that look similar to baseline humans easier to tell apart. There are people with no lens on their eyes (either a birth defect or they had to be removed) who can fully see UV radiation tho, I don't even think it requires tetrachromia, the blue cone cells are very slightly sensitive to UV if none of it is absorbed by the lens.

Bats, I want their crazy advanced immune system and interferon production. Bats are tiny mammals with a metabolism even faster than a rat/mouse due to the high energy needs of powered flight. Typically, small mammals with this fast of a metabolism will live like 2-5 years, because cell division is so rapid that after only a few years, the cells' DNA becomes too damaged to continue. However, bats have insane immune systems. They're immune (asymptomatic carriers) to nearly every virus capable of infecting them because their immune systems produce so much interferon that any damage to the DNA (eg from a virus inserting code for its own reproduction into a cell) is corrected almost immediately. This process also partially repairs damage from cell-division, meaning that bats can live up to ~40 YEARS depending on the species. If a human had that ability, it would be like living to 400 or 500 years old, and being immune to nearly every disease (between native viral immunity, and antibiotics for bacterial infections)