Say you have your display, this is made up of millions of lights that on their own just light up in whatever single colour you want, but together they light up to create an image.

Your software takes care of breaking down that image of a cat you want to look at into its corresponding pixels - with a value for colour and brightness.

For example it’ll say this area in the cat’s eye is black, so it’ll request the no light to come out of it. Another area might be a pale red so it’ll request red with some middle level of brightness.

Now your firmware takes that requested black for a specific Pixel and it’ll physically cut power to switch off all the lights in the required area. For the pale red it’ll power that the red ligh ON with hald power, whilst green and blue are OFF.

(things get more complex once you consider back-lightning)

There’s not that much choice there, it genuinely takes 2-3 years to implement hardware that is radically different from what you’re currently doing.

Because they’re making millions upon millions of phones, they need to really nail the design before they start mass production. And that’s neither cheap nor fast.

The big manufacturers can probably afford to do this faster, but the smaller ones might struggle so you need to make it fair.

By ‘those privacy laws’ do you mean GDPR? Because that’s caused Threads not to be released in the EU, and you’ll notice that all your devices now have USB C. These regulations have had a pretty significant impact.

The hype around it is pretty insufferable though, in a way neither of the other examples you gave had.

The closest example I can think of is NFTs.

I don’t think it’ll go the way of NFTs, but it’s also going to disappoint people because it’s promising to be everything for everyone.

As far as I’m concern it’s a very powerful search assistant and especially for bridging the gap between regular and power users - being able to use natural language is a game changer.

I also found it great when getting set up with a new piece of SW, and rephrasing or summarising text on general topics. It’s not so good for parsing specialist information even when asked for specific items.

I’m looking forward to seeing what other tools people build with it but thus far I’ve been thoroughly… whelmed.

Okay, so far successfully exiled to Belarus.

What’s the next step?

I’m still struggling to believe that they’ve taken the wrong turn at every point.

When this whole thing happened I figured they’d soften their stance a bit, only to go back on it months or years later and essentially boil the frog slowly. I figured I’d just move to the official app, not that big a deal, especially if they improve it.

Yet 2 weeks later I’ve deleted reddit and running Jerboa now, the way the community rallied is nothing short of incredible and I’m really proud to be here.