They should not be worried, they should be educated.

If you worry a new user enough they’ll go back to Windows or Apple because there’s less scary warnings there.

We need to make the transition as pain free as possible. Learning about the joys of kernel compilation and SELinux can come later.
The first step is "Hey, this is as usable as Windows, without stupid ads in the start menu.

Aside from budget and time overruns it looks like they overshot the target of “futuristic” and landed in the middle of dystopian…

Sounds quite similar to Markov chains which made me think of this story:

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-automated-curse-generator

Still gets a snort out of me every time Markov chains are mentioned.

Depending on your level of caffeine tolerance/dependency actual coffee might be even better.

Alternatively: Decaf.

IF you already have an email domain you control.

Calling “acquiring and setting up an email domain and configuring the mail server for wildcards” “basically no extra effort” is a bit disingenuous compared to “solve a captcha for a Gmail account”

No actual technical solution here, but it smells slightly of XY-Problems.

From what you described it seems the main issues are

• too many calls
• not knowing who’s calling
• not wanting to answer the phone
• not reaching the phone in time

Maybe you could look into solutions like setting a custom ringtone for important callers or having the phone announce caller names so your mother can decide if she wants to make the effort to get her phone.

I’m speculating a bit here but I can imagine that getting up and answering the phone is exhausting for your mother. Also if her mindset is " a ringing phone means it’s important" that could make it even more stressful.

Maybe you could find a way to let her silence all calls except caregivers and ICE contacts. (On Android DND exceptions could work for that)

That way she doesn’t feel pressured to answer the phone every time it rings and stays reachable.

If it’s actually just the physical issue of reaching the phone in time, does she have a convenient way to carry the phone indoors like a lanyard?

Hope some of this helps you

Coconut at least…

Teenagers and a dog sound like Scooby Doo. No idea how specific the rest is.

It doesn’t. It carries you by having a module for absolutely everything even shooting yourself in the foot.

B stands for Billion (Parameters) IIRC

To a certain degree, yes. If someone at Google decides to wage all-out war against ad blockers they have a good chance. But if that costs more money than it generates, odds are that someone will stop it. Google / Alphabet is publicly traded after all and that means profit above all else.

Embedding ads into the stream would be hard to counter, but it’s far away. That would invalidate caches along the way and need extra performance to reencode the stream with the ads inserted.

That’s extra costs that are hopefully orders of magnitude above the lost ad revenue from ad blockers

Ballistomancer

IT changes usually affect management as well, while “cost saving” in production doesn’t.

Stopping AWS instances would be handy, but your idea to slag the drives is unnecessary.

Just set up full disk encryption for everything.

You die -> no key -> no data

Yeah, from an actual usability and privacy standpoint, that’s horrible design. It does make for good visuals with the actor and the display in frame at the same time. No more “closeup of a message on a phone display”

I’m personally hoping for smart stuff to get a bit more distributed. A phone-like CPU unit in my pocket streaming display content to my watch and AR glasses or a full size screen on the seat in front of me on the subway. Simple visual and vibration notifications from a smart ring.

Very neat idea, but I’d explicitly add strong encryption to that method, cars do get broken into.

I’d encrypt every off-site backup, but a car is a bit more exposed than a rented safe box.