I'm pretty sure that it was pretty clear for some time that they aren't legal, but if you're a political party in Europe and you badly want votes that might be going to AfD or similar, this is a low-effort way to score some points.
I'm not sure if you're going to see this if you're avoiding social media for two months, but...while I don't personally see much gain from using a phone rather than a PC for Internet access for two months, if it's enough of a pain and it doesn't violate whatever rules you're setting for yourself, you can connect a keyboard. There are a bunch of Bluetooth keyboards aimed at Android devices, some of which fold and are themselves phone-sized for portability.
You can also get USB-C hubs with pass-through charging, stuff like this that will give you some USB-A ports to plug wired keyboards into, if you're using the phone at a desk.
Android won't show the on-screen keyboard if you have a connected physical keyboard, so you also get a lot more screen space while doing text entry.
Most if not all UIs for websites are shit in mobile.
Firefox (and probably other browsers, but I use Firefox) can request the desktop version of websites. Tap the menu button in the lower-right, and then choose "Desktop site".
Now, the desktop site may not work well on a small screen either, but you will have access to it.
The marking above the hyphen there is an underscore --- it's telling you that hitting shift-hyphen will give you an underscore.
You may be using software that supports inserting an em-dash when you hit that combination, but I don't believe that it's the keyboard layout that dictates that.
searches
It sounds like Microsoft Word does something similar:
I was once told "I write like someone who thinks they are good at writing." That was met with rounds of applause by the people who can't (or won't) spell, capitalize, or punctuate anything.
Tall poppy syndrome is a term that originated in Australia and New Zealand in the 1980s that refers to people with notable public success or achievements that are ostracised by others as a form of egalitarianism.[1][2] Intense scrutiny and criticism of such a person is termed as "cutting down the tall poppy".[3]
I use a the Compose key (Compose hyphen hyphen hyphen) or emacs (C-x 8 _ m) on Linux, and on Android, my soft keyboard supports holding hyphen to insert one.
And the Lemmy Web UI converts a triple hyphen to an em-dash.
The Lemmy Web UI converts a double hyphen to an en-dash and a triple to an em-dash when displaying text. However, not all clients do this. I'm viewing this in Eternity, and it leaves the hyphens intact.
This conversion happens when viewing the comment, rather than writing it.
Smartphone cameras are almost certainly the largest source of photography in society today, and those things default to doing all kinds of automatic processing on the images they take.
The OS will stage it, and the update will actually happen on reboot.
If you're using a Linux system, you probably have fwupd installed, which can pull down BIOS updates for various attached devices, including motherboard BIOSes. I'm sure that Windows has some analog.
Most commercial establishments in the US are air-conditioned. Taiwan has --- as you point out --- a pretty warm, humid climate. Are Taiwanese bookstores not not typically air-conditioned? I'd think that they'd be a prime candidate.
I was reading about public library humidity and temperature control a month or two back, and it sounded like it was also pretty much the norm to air condition those, for the preservation reasons that you mention.
Chief among them was Seewa AI, which offered its users the “perfect AI girlfriend”, drew them in with intimate conversations and promised that all chats were strictly confidential. (They weren’t.)
End of the day, if it's in the cloud instead of local --- and this applies for pretty much any service, not just LLM models --- you're relying on trust in the service provider (as well as anyone who might buy them, and trust that they are able to secure their network against people who might break into it).
Only real exception to that is situations where you use client software from another source and the service provider only gets to see any data in encrypted form --- think of someone providing storage for a restic backup, say.
In 2026, we don't have enough memory to do local LLM computation everywhere, so there's a real limitation versus most other forms of SaaS --- we can't choose to run LLMs locally for more than a fraction of society. Cloud-based LLMs require less memory to provision one machine in the cloud and share that hardware, since any one user is only using it a fraction of the time. But as the memory shortage ends, I expect you'll have more people running LLMs locally. Still be more-expensive from a hardware standpoint than cloud computation, though.
Steam can't really "take the game back" from you (again, at least the offline functionality).
I mean...sort of. Steam will only run in offline mode if you first run it in online mode and ask Steam to allow the machine to enter offline mode. I imagine that this is to keep people from simply installing games on many PCs and then taking them all offline.
checks
Yeah, sounds like a maximum of one host can be offline for an account, and I imagine that they fingerprint hosts.
Some games don't require Steam to be running. Like, Steam just downloads them and launches them, and they still work even if you launch them without Steam running, don't use Steamlib. For those, yes.
There are other PC game vendors who do explicitly support this mode of operation, like GOG.
I'm pretty sure that it was pretty clear for some time that they aren't legal, but if you're a political party in Europe and you badly want votes that might be going to AfD or similar, this is a low-effort way to score some points.
I'm not sure if you're going to see this if you're avoiding social media for two months, but...while I don't personally see much gain from using a phone rather than a PC for Internet access for two months, if it's enough of a pain and it doesn't violate whatever rules you're setting for yourself, you can connect a keyboard. There are a bunch of Bluetooth keyboards aimed at Android devices, some of which fold and are themselves phone-sized for portability.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=folding+keyboard
You can also get USB-C hubs with pass-through charging, stuff like this that will give you some USB-A ports to plug wired keyboards into, if you're using the phone at a desk.
Android won't show the on-screen keyboard if you have a connected physical keyboard, so you also get a lot more screen space while doing text entry.
Firefox (and probably other browsers, but I use Firefox) can request the desktop version of websites. Tap the menu button in the lower-right, and then choose "Desktop site".
Now, the desktop site may not work well on a small screen either, but you will have access to it.
That's one possible response to them being removed, I suppose.
"Everyone should use System X! It's preferable because not many people use it!"
:-)
The true threat came from the childless.
Aha! AI!
Chiseled Etruscan stonework, that's what it is.
If you go through Unicode, there are a bunch of hyphen-like characters. In many typefaces, some may appear identical.
searches
EDIT: That's not an exhaustive list, either. Off-the-cuff, I can also think of the line-drawing characters, which also have a horizontal line.
The marking above the hyphen there is an underscore --- it's telling you that hitting shift-hyphen will give you an underscore.
You may be using software that supports inserting an em-dash when you hit that combination, but I don't believe that it's the keyboard layout that dictates that.
searches
It sounds like Microsoft Word does something similar:
https://www.avantixlearning.ca/microsoft-word/how-to-insert-an-em-dash-or-en-dash-in-a-word-document-4-ways/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
"That one sounds uppity!"
You can write or draw stuff with a fountain pen with an AxiDraw, and that's an off-the-shelf system. I imagine that it could paint as well.
EDIT: Apparently the Inkscape plugin used to drive it was originally designed to drive a plotter that did watercolor painting.
I use a the Compose key (Compose hyphen hyphen hyphen) or emacs (C-x 8 _ m) on Linux, and on Android, my soft keyboard supports holding hyphen to insert one.
And the Lemmy Web UI converts a triple hyphen to an em-dash.
The Lemmy Web UI converts a double hyphen to an en-dash and a triple to an em-dash when displaying text. However, not all clients do this. I'm viewing this in Eternity, and it leaves the hyphens intact.
This conversion happens when viewing the comment, rather than writing it.
Smartphone cameras are almost certainly the largest source of photography in society today, and those things default to doing all kinds of automatic processing on the images they take.
It does rather make one suspect that a number of people haven't read a great deal of properly-written English.
The OS will stage it, and the update will actually happen on reboot.
If you're using a Linux system, you probably have
fwupdinstalled, which can pull down BIOS updates for various attached devices, including motherboard BIOSes. I'm sure that Windows has some analog.Most commercial establishments in the US are air-conditioned. Taiwan has --- as you point out --- a pretty warm, humid climate. Are Taiwanese bookstores not not typically air-conditioned? I'd think that they'd be a prime candidate.
I was reading about public library humidity and temperature control a month or two back, and it sounded like it was also pretty much the norm to air condition those, for the preservation reasons that you mention.
End of the day, if it's in the cloud instead of local --- and this applies for pretty much any service, not just LLM models --- you're relying on trust in the service provider (as well as anyone who might buy them, and trust that they are able to secure their network against people who might break into it).
Only real exception to that is situations where you use client software from another source and the service provider only gets to see any data in encrypted form --- think of someone providing storage for a
resticbackup, say.In 2026, we don't have enough memory to do local LLM computation everywhere, so there's a real limitation versus most other forms of SaaS --- we can't choose to run LLMs locally for more than a fraction of society. Cloud-based LLMs require less memory to provision one machine in the cloud and share that hardware, since any one user is only using it a fraction of the time. But as the memory shortage ends, I expect you'll have more people running LLMs locally. Still be more-expensive from a hardware standpoint than cloud computation, though.
I mean...sort of. Steam will only run in offline mode if you first run it in online mode and ask Steam to allow the machine to enter offline mode. I imagine that this is to keep people from simply installing games on many PCs and then taking them all offline.
checks
Yeah, sounds like a maximum of one host can be offline for an account, and I imagine that they fingerprint hosts.
Some games don't require Steam to be running. Like, Steam just downloads them and launches them, and they still work even if you launch them without Steam running, don't use Steamlib. For those, yes.
There are other PC game vendors who do explicitly support this mode of operation, like GOG.