There's probably a way of making these switches for less, if you're willing to trade money for toil and strife. Wind up toys have a very long roll of "wind up spring". 3D print a jig to bend a short piece of that into shape. Use somewhat translucent filament to print the switch. Or use a diffuser/matte thingy from a LCD monitor. I don't know. It'll probably be more expensive in the end but you'll feel good that you did it.
I think you can buy premade LED grid arrays. I would take one of those and overlay one wire per row, one per column, in tension and suspended a few mm apart. You could use a translucent 3d-printed framework to stabilize the wires and have a flexible piece above each junction to act as a button. Not sure how to make it click...
Can you imagine the flack he'd take if it turns out he'd been moonlighting whilst the GitHub ship is sailing though cat 5 with both the mast and the ship whore on fire?
Lest you forget that modern computing exists because ATT built unix and then threw it out to the public, at speed, as they drove away from it as fast as possible. (Something about being an actual monopoly...).
There is at least one thing, on that list that I can almost assure you will be coming back (in concept and spirt) in the next 5 years. Likely open source, because google tossed it...
Meanwhile it has other very public and open winners: Golang, Kubernetes being two stellar examples of them not dropping something like a hot potato.
Yeah, its the "well, legally, we have to provide the source code, but we make it as painful and slow for you as we can without it becoming a blatant violation of the GPL."
GPL requires providing the source code via a medium customarily used for software interchange. Deliberately making it inconvenient by using a medium no longer customarily used for software interchange is a GPL violation. Google Drive is already an unusual way to distribute software.
Google is already failing to provide the Pixel kernel drivers in the preferred form for modification. Their kernel build system uses Git commands but yet they aren't providing the Git repositories it expects to be there. They had to provide a repo metadata file as a workaround but it's not the same since the revisions of the code aren't set properly in the resulting build.
Google is arguably already violating the GPL. They're deliberately making it inconvenient and are adding deliberate delays through requiring manual handling of the requests.
I'm pretty sure there is a lot of code in Android that belongs to Google and is not part of an upstream GPL project. They would be completely entitled to stop sharing it.
HE wants to get rid of forms, and make the rest of the world enjoy the burden of requesting access to open source code through a beloved form. Hope that's clear now.
> Prior to moving it to Google Drive, they started squashing the history into a single commit prior to pushing release tags. The tarballs provided via Google Drive have exactly the same source code. However, they went out of the way to make it more inconvenient in several ways.
Ugh.
Also I can't believe it's been 10 years since they shut down Google Code.
The repositories you have linked are not sufficient to build an Android distribution. In order to get the missing bits, you have to fill out a form: https://source.android.com/opensourcerequest and beg them, and if they decide you are worthy, they will email you a link to a tarball, which is hosted on Google Drive.
That's the mainline kernel. Actual devices use various LTS kernels, for instance the pixel 9a uses kernel 6.1[1], which was hasn't been updated in a year[2]
I'm not sure which one the latest update for the Pixel 9a is using, I have an older Pixel 8. When I look at the Settings -> Android Version I can see it's using a build from January 2026 (also 6.1).
Google hasn't been able to properly do / fix Android gesture navigation for more than half a decade now. The amount that edge swipes in things like photo editing apps are detected as backswipes (sometimes destroying 10+ minutes of editing) is laughable.
Technically this is because a lot of apps thumb their nose at the requirement to have safe areas around swipeable elements in their app, but as a user, that is not my problem to fix. It's Google's.
The workaround is so ridiculously easy too: only allow backswipes to count in the lowest 15% of the bottom left of the screen. Yet despite having hundreds of engineers earning ±350.000 per year work on this problem for years, they haven't been able to either implement or even think of it.
The real fix would be to deprecate the three button layout in Android 18 and remove it in Android 19. Force apps to comply.
The real fix would be to bring back physical control buttons and leave the touchscreen for the rest.
Also, I have 6GB of RAM in my phone - switching from a browser to youtube, or vice-versa, should not cause the other to clear and start back again from a freshly-loaded state.
350,000 a year and people can't even get basic things to operate properly. Google needs broken up and their engineers need to go back to the 90s and learn some real programming skill.
I think you are grossly minimizing the effects on your change on both users and developers. Neither are going to comply and then you have further fragmented the user base and removed a bunch of apps.
I use an Android tablet and I only backswipe at the upper left.
This is absolutely not a witch-hunt. People in that position wield enormous power and take their paycheck and responsibility that comes with it. Linking to his professional linked in relation to his responsibility is nothing but professional.
It's quite painful to resolve cognitive dissonance, so I understand the downvotes for your comment.
People are clever enough to reach high level corporate roles, but at the same time they're are too weak to emotionally process the consequences of their "work" on their human cash cows of below-average intelligence.
However with these kind of moral/ethical questions, it's really hard to draw the line.
Is working at Google and thereby facilitating the scamming of my grandmother worse than being an ordinary pickpocket or an lobbyist for big oil?
Public companies and their executives deserve the same treatment as the government and the politicians. It is completely fine to let them know that the people are upset with their decisions.
