Back in the relatively recent years of 2017(or maybe not, that's nine years ago already), smartphone standards were far below what they are today. You could find phones configured with less than a gigabyte of RAM and 16GB of storage could be considered reasonable. Granted, these weren't going to be considered spec beasts during their time, but they were serviceable for the price. However, as compute power increased, these stragglers failed to hold on after being cluttered by user activity like bottlenecked storage or simply higher spec requirements. Thusly, Android Go was born around the tail end of 2017.

I don't intend to make this a history post, but just for the sake of comprehensiveness, Android Go really took stride by doling out optimizations for barebones cellphones and limiting some features like picture in picture and split screen. It really hit it's stride around Android 11 to 12, when phones were still transitioning to modernly reasonable specs.

Mayhaps the most surprising part is that the main constituent of Android Go is essentially a hard-bound toggle set by the manufacturer. But what may be overlooked is that Android Go still exists in the present day. So some developers still end up using it! But why does it still see use in the present day?

In the current iteration of Android Go, phones with 4GB of RAM or less by default are required to use Android Go. But nowadays, we can utilize virtual RAM extensions by allocating some storage space as quick read memory in settings. So this gives manufacturers the power to provide 8GB Android Go phones, making them honestly ovespecced for their on paper capabilities. Often times, these phones have to tone down their bloatware too, so that they don't sap the phone of too much power.
It isn't all upside though, as the aforementioned limitations on multitasking features are arguably the biggest deal breaker.

Manufacturers that use Android Go today are those that have models that cater to ultra-budget and emerging markets. Lower end Motorola and Redmi phones are the ones that are widely available. A notable example are all the phones of Transsion, whose main target market is in Africa and emerging SEA countries.

What's the experience of using it today though?
Aside from the PiP and split screen, The biggest difference isn't really all that strict: the Android Go apps. These can even be downloaded on regular Android and are often just stripped down and more data efficient versions of official Google apps that haven't been given the fresh do-over of Android Go itself. The notable exception is that Android Go will always have Google Assistant, for Google doesn't have plans to release a version of Gemini for Go. Which is ironic as EoL Android phones with lower spec than the current maximum of Android Go(4GB RAM) actually do have Gemini OTA updated on them. Go phones are trying to modernize, so they nowadays have 120hz screens, punch-hole cameras, and enough compute power for everyday. And yet they still compromise by having SD card slots and headphone jacks. The rest is really in the hands of your OEM. Samsung, Redmi, and the Transsion phones all have their little tweaks on the software, some being a little more egregious than most (cough Samsung cough). Motorola should be mostly stock though.

All in all, I just wanted to spread the word that Android Go still exists. Honestly, considering the world RAM crisis, we might actually see more devices on the horizon that utilize Android Go. What're your thoughts?

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Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

This year I'm finally putting into action something that I've been wanting to do for some time: fortifying my home's network, improving privacy for my father and me, and laying the foundation for a smart home. (You guys took the time to help me out with that here, which, btw, thanks again!)

The network and privacy fortification is well underway and working. I set up Pi-hole with Unbound on one of my Raspberry Pis that also acts as a Tailscale exit node, got a new router that can connect my devices to ProtonVPN, have my Synology server working as storage, and... you know what, let's save this for another post. I'm still figuring some things out and want to let the dust settle first.

Anyway, back to gaming and PC'ing.

I'm no stranger to Linux; I've been using it on and off for over a decade on older PCs. But I've never committed to it on my main rig. As I said in another post, "It's the little things that make me not jump to Linux". While "these little things" didn't completely go away, I guess rolling up my sleeves to reconfigure my network, becoming more privacy-conscious, and reading about the ongoing issues with Windows 11 tipped the scales.

I debated between EndeavourOS and Fedora KDE. Fedora won.

EOS is a solid choice and I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to try out an Arch-based distro. But Fedora is undeniably more popular, which means if there's a Linux app, it's almost guaranteed the devs will have a Fedora version with dedicated documentation and installation commands. In other words, the potential for more convenience won out.

And convenient it was, mostly thanks to this website: https://nattdf.streamlit.app/. It helped a ton. It installed codecs, SSH, enabled Flathub and RPM Fusion, etc. It even provides a script to install Nvidia drivers.

But drivers weren't my real worry. My real worry was something else entirely.

You see, I lied to you guys by omission. I actually tried to install Fedora a few months ago, but I had severe issues with my TV. My PC is connected to both a monitor and a TV. The monitor worked without problems, but the TV was a different story. The image quality was terrible. You know those photos taken with the very first camera phones? That's how the colors looked. I remember trying everything: switching to X11, installing different driver versions, messing around with Nvidia settings, display settings, color profiles, even the TV's internal settings. Nothing worked. So I gave up and went back to Windows.

But today, while trying to fix an issue with my TV, I noticed two things:

1. I found out that my TV's HDMI ports are not all equal. Port 4 is HDMI 2.1, while all the others are 2.0.
2. My PC was connected to Port 3.

This was the problem. It's what caused my Windows to randomly lose sound, and it's what made the image quality terrible on Fedora, and it's what caused issues I mentioned in my old post. I don't know how or why Windows could "deal with it" and output 4K 120Hz without apparent image quality loss, but somehow it did.

Regardless, after moving the cable to Port 4, installing Fedora, and getting the drivers running... it works just fine and dandy. Great image quality, 4K, and 120Hz. My PC still works flawlessly as a gaming machine.

The moral of the story? Don't be like me. Before blaming Wayland, Nvidia, drivers, or Linux... check the back of the TV.

This also brings a much-needed sense of standardization to my setup. Now that everything is under the same Linux umbrella, I can manage it all via SSH with total consistency. I’m already eyeing my Raspberry Pi’s Telegram bot as a way to remotely wake the PC for heavy tasks and shut it down afterward. The potential of this setup has me feeling pretty euphoric.

Now that the biggest hurdle is cleared, Steam is running perfectly and Proton is handling my game library like a champ. I'm finally daily-driving Linux on my main rig, and this time, I think it's for good.

This is the second Tildes Book Club Discussion for 2026 and the twentysecond overall. We are discussing The Truth by Terry Pratchett. At the end of March we will discuss The Metamorphosis by Kafka.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.

And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

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What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

Let me start off by saying that I'm exhausted by AI hype. Being interested in LLM agent technology (AI agent hereafter for brevity) means skimming over a lot of hype for one or two useful, semi reality based, bits of information. Maybe the part that I find the most frustrating is how effective the hype is. I don't know if there's ever been a hype cycle like this. Probably a big part of the reason for that is the internet has already proven, within living memory for most people, that technological revolutions really can change everything. Or mess everything up. Either way they generate a lot of economic activity.

So this post is not that. I'm not going to tell you about how AI agents are the second coming for Christ. I'm not selling anything.

Fairly early into learning about AI agents I wanted a way to connect to the agent remotely without hosting it somewhere or exposing ports to the internet. I settled on tailscale and a remote terminal and moved on, I rarely used it. Somehow the tiny friction of "Turn on tailscale, open terminal app, connect, run agent" was enough to make it not feel worth it.

I know I'm far from the only person who had the same "I want it remote" thought, the best evidence: OpenClaw. It's just one of those things that everyone naturally converges on.

If you're not familiar with OpenClaw, the TLDR is: Former founder with more money than he'll ever need vibecodes a bridge between instant messenger apps and LLM APIs. Nothing about it is technically challenging or requires solving any particularly hard problems. It almost immediately becomes the fastest growing GitHub repo of all time and is currently at number 14 for number of stars. It blew up the (tech) internet like very few things ever have. Within months he was hired by Open AI.

OpenClaw now does more than just connect messaging and agents, but I believe that one piece is the killer feature. My tailscale terminal solution, combined with a scheduled task or a cron job and some context files could already do all of the things that OpenClaw can do, and countless people had already implemented similar solutions. But I think it was the tiny bit of friction OpenClaw removed that was responsible for a lot its popularity.

I thought that was interesting but I have no interest in the security nightmare that is OpenClaw, or the "sentience" vibe for that matter, so I built my own tool.

Essentially it's just a light secondary harness combined with a bridge between Signal and Claude Code. It does some other things too, things I wished existing harnesses did, some memory and guidelines, automated prompts and reminders to wake the agent up and have it do stuff, some context to give the agent some level of persistence, make it less LLMy, less annoying. None of that is particularly interesting though.

Once I got it working (MVP took less than a day) and started playing with it, the OpenClaw phenomenon made a lot more sense. Somehow having the agent in a chat interface, with almost zero friction (just open the chat and send something) was cooler than it had any reason to be.

I can't explain it any better than that at the moment. Not only was it kinda fun, it lent itself to a whole range of "what ifs". What if it could do X? What if I wrote a tool that gave it Y capability? I've been experiencing that for some time, but somehow agent in your pocket has a different feeling.

Here's an example of a "what if". What if it could do our grocery shopping? I definitely want that. I already had a custom browser tool that I built for agent coding assistance so I was most of the way there. It was just a matter of teaching the agent to login and navigate a website, something they're already trained to do. Some hand holding, a few helper scripts, and an evening's worth of hours later and I had it working. The agent can respond to a shopping request by building a shopping list based on our most recent orders, presenting it to us for approval/edits in a Signal group chat, doing searches for any additional product requests and adding the finalized order to the cart. It could also checkout the order and schedule the delivery time but I'm doing the last 2 clicks manually for the time being. It's an idiot savant, it seems like a bad idea to give it access to my credit card. Maybe eventually.

The fact that I can handle shopping with a couple of signal messages feels effortless in a way that handling shopping by connecting to my PC terminal remotely via tailscale terminal wouldn't have. Especially when I can include people in the loop who have no interest in tailscaling anywhere. Everyone can use messaging apps.

I imagine before long solutions like this will be built in, either in the grocery websites and apps, or into the frontier harnesses themselves. There will probably be agents everywhere, for better or worse. Probably I'll wish that the agents would all fuck off. In the meantime it's exciting how easy it is to get these tools to do useful things.

Could be from a place you visited or moved to. Could be from a community or group you joined.

Whatever it was, there was something new or unfamiliar to you, and you had to wrap your head around that something that you weren't used to.

What was the culture shock, how did you respond to it, and how do you feel about it now?

At a visceral level I hate Art Deco. I'm all for elegance in architecture, but something about it feels so self-aggrandizing, isolating, and hollow. On the other hand, I think Brutalism, when not overdone, is great. A medium sized Brutalist building with a little bit of moss on the outside and an abundance of plants inside, chef's kiss.