I got a new Verizon account in December 2025, and was surprised to learn they'd give me a free phone. I chose a Pixel 10 (128GB, Obsidian).

When I opened the Verizon account, the Verizon employee touched this Pixel 10 just enough to make sure the eSIM was configured, but we never even set up the OS. I moved the eSIM to my phone, so this Pixel 10 has never been used, never even finished the initial boot process.

I think Verizon carrier-locks their phones for 60 days. I got the phone on 12/17/25 so it should be out of carrier lock now.

This Pixel 10 is boot-loader locked and I use GrapheneOS, so it's of no use to me. I tried to sell it on eBay, but they wanted me to upload photos of my ID or some such nonsense, which I won't do. I tried to sell it on Swappa, but they refused because the phone is "financed"*.

This phone is technically in new condition except the plastic seal on the box has been broken.

If you'd like to buy an unused Pixel 10 for $500 + shipping, please send me a private message and we'll work out the details.

Photos can be seen here (link available until 4/30/26): https://immich.thewooskeys.com/s/pixel10

Let me know if you have any questions about the phone.

Offers will be considered.

*The "free phone" deal with Verizon is that they charge me the cost of the phone ($800) prorated monthly over 2 years, and each month they also credit me that same amount so the total charge each month is $0.00. If ever I cancel my plan with them, they will charge me the balance.

Beyond the Motorola Razr flip phones, I can't seem to find many small phone options. Are they out there anywhere?

***correction! I meant to say the iPhone 12 mini! There is an important distinction there and sorry to all who answered before this correction.

So I kind of want to get out of the Gmail ecosystem, and have been eyeing Proton as a good replacement, but I can't help but to think that nearly all of Proton's selling points and marketing points are all smoke and mirrors.

And I don't know, maybe I'm looking at this entirely the wrong way, I am just really struggling to see the appeal of Proton.

First, I'll start with my "threat model".

In general I want to be more anonymous online and slip under the radar better.

I'm not planning on doing anything clandestine, but with the direction the US is going, I'd rather not be an easy target if I want to be active in activism spaces if you catch my drift.

And I'm also interested in staying off of databrokers radars, or obfuscate myself to prevent coherent tracking.

With that being said, it seems that even with a proton email if someone wanted to find my identity they could, data brokers or governments alike, even if I pay for my subscription with cash.

And not that I'm really worried about that, but to me that negates like the entirety of Proton's marketing gimmick.

And I'm failing to see what functional benefit Proton has when it comes to privacy outside of just being "aesthetically private".

Here are some of my concerns, please feel free to correct me if I'm completely offbase with any of the logic below, but this is just my initial thoughts, and I'd love to hear some feedback and/or be corrected or provided more context.

1. Why does the encryption of the message body matter if the envelope and address are is still exposed? If a government or data broker can get the sender/receiver info, timestamps, and my IP, they have a map of my life. Isn't the "private content" just a distraction from the real leak? Like other than not having my emails used to train AI or data being sold to data brokers, I can't find a functional improvement or benefit to my daily life to use Proton outside of thinking "Yeah, fuck The Man" every time I log in. Like I am more worried about governments and data brokers knowing who I'm sending/receiving things from than I am about the content of those messages being exposed since I'm not going to be monologuing evil plans over email, and I really don't care if the databroker tracking me knows that I bought a case of liquid death root beer 4 times in one month since they get that information from Amazon or whatever website anyways.

2. Everyone talks about "Swiss protection," but isn't that just a speed bump? If the U.S. government goes to Switzerland with an MLAT request, Proton has to comply. And even if I've payed with cash, they can still be compelled to log the IP logins and hand over the alias emails and primary mailbox used by that account and the metadata. So if I sign up for something using an alias, they can take that alias and file an MLAT request with Switzerland to get my main email, the metadata for my entire inbox(just not the body content) and the other aliases tied to that account, and then do a search for any services using those emails to find my identity. They could technically use an alias email I've made, send an information request to Switzerland/Proton, get back a list of aliases and email metadata, find that I used an alias to sign up to a pizza delivery service, then subpoena that pizza delivery service for my name, phone number, and address, at that point what's the point? Is the point just to make it harder for them? I'm not planning on doing anything that could get them to want to subpoena my emails ANYWAYS, but what's the point of making it harder for them outside of again, just thinking to myself "haha fuck you" every time I send an email?

3. Even if I use an alias, if the site I use the alias on gets tied to my online data/identity, then my privacy is broken, right? Like lets say I want to sign up for a new site called godotshaders.com, I use a proton alias to sign up. This site then collects that data, my IP, my cookie data, browser user agent string data, and that I'm logged into some account with my other non-proton email, etc, that gets tied to my browsing data they're collecting, and suddenly they've linked that alias email to my advertising profile and other browsing. Rinse & repeat. Now all the aliases are tied to me. I don't see how these emails help with online advertising tracking.

4. I have tons of accounts I use, my bitwarden login count sits at around 850 logins, but I probably only regularly use a small fraction of those. But if I end up changing my email on a lot of those accounts to the proton email, even a proton alias, all that does for data brokers is potentially tie every one of those new alias emails to me. And at that point there is no difference in my data broker information just that I have 850 different alias emails. But my data is still tied to those accounts. So AGAIN, what's the point of this? Do I need to sign up for everything from scratch in order to maybe have privacy?

If you have a flash drive, SSD drive (including NVMe drives), (micro)SD card, or some other popular flash memory media die on you, you might be able to get a free replacement, depending on the manufacturer and the product.

I recently RMA'd a SanDisk microsd card that died unexpectedly. When I looked up their warranty, SanDisk has a lifetime warranty on most of their flash memory products. They even provided a return shipping label. Since they no longer make the card that died, they're sending an upgraded, currently available model.

I've also RMA'd two Kingston NVMe drives. Both of them were getting a bit old, but the RMA was accepted, and in these instances I also received the newer version of the product. I did have to pay for return shipping myself, but it was well worth it.

So if you're about to toss that broken flash media in the trash, double check to see if a warranty applies. It's worth the time and potential shipping cost/hassles in many cases.

I've found myself replying to different people about the early 2025 METR study kind of often. So I thought I'd try posting a top level thread, consider it an unsolicitied public service announcement.

You might be familiar with the study because it has been showing up alongside discussions about AI and coding for about a year. It found that LLMs actually decreased developer productivity and so people love to use it to suggest that the whole AI coding thing is really a big lie and the people who think it makes them more productive are hallucinating.

Here's the thing about that study... No one seems to have even glanced at it!

First, it's from early 2025, they used Claude Sonnet 3.5 or 3.7. Those models are no way comparable to current gen coding agents. The commonly cited inflection point didn't happen until later in 2025 with, depending on who you ask, Sonnet 4.5 or Opus 4.5

The study was comprised of 16 people! If those 16 were even vaguely representative of the developer population at the time most of them wouldn't have had significant experience with LLMs for coding.

These are not tools that just work out of the box, especially back then. It takes time and experimentation, or instruction, to use them well.

It was cool that they did the study, trying to understand LLMs was a good idea. But it's not what anyone would consider a representative, or even well thought out, study. 16 people!

But wait! They did a follow up study later in 2025.

This time with about 60 people and newer models and tools. In that study they found the opposite effect, AI tools sped developers up (which is a shock to no one who has used these tools long enough to get a feel for them). They also mentioned:

However the true speedup could be much higher among the developers and tasks which are selected out of the experiment.

In addition they had some, kind of entertaining, issues:

Due to the severity of these selection effects, we are working on changes to the design of our study.

Back to the drawing board, because:

Recruitment and retention of developers has become more difficult. An increased share of developers say they would not want to do 50% of their work without AI, even though our study pays them $50/hour to work on tasks of their own choosing. Our study is thus systematically missing developers who have the most optimistic expectations about AI’s value.

And...

Developers have become more selective in which tasks they submit. When surveyed, 30% to 50% of developers told us that they were choosing not to submit some tasks because they did not want to do them without AI. This implies we are systematically missing tasks which have high expected uplift from AI.

And so...

Together, these effects make it likely that our estimate reported above is a lower-bound on the true productivity effects of AI on these developers.

[...]

Some developers were less likely to complete tasks that they submitted if they were assigned to the AI-disallowed condition. One developer did not complete any of the tasks that were assigned to the AI-disallowed condition.

[...]

Altogether, these issues make it challenging to interpret our central estimate, and we believe it is likely a bad proxy for the real productivity impact of AI tools on these developers.

So to summarize, the new study showed a productivity increase and they estimate it's larger than the ~20% increase the study found. Cheers to them for being honest about the issues they encountered. For my part I know for sure that the increase is significantly more than 20%. The caveat, though, is that is only true after you've had some experience with the tools.

The truth is that we don't need a study for this, any experienced engineer can readily see it for themselves and you can find them talking about it pretty much everywhere. It would be interesting, though, to see a well designed study that attempted to quantify how big the average productivity increase actually is.

For that the participants using AI would need to be experienced with it and allowed to use their existing setups.

I want to add that this is not an attempt to evangelize for AI. I find the tools useful but I'm not selling anything. I'm interested in them and I stay up to date on the conversations surrounding them and the underlying technology. I use them frequently both for my own projects and to help less technical people improve their business productivity.

Whether AI agents are a good thing or not, from a larger perspective, is a very different, and complicated, conversation. The important thing is that utility and impact are two different conversations. There isn't a debate anymore about utility.

I know this probably won't stop people from continuing to derail conversations with the claim that developers are wrong about utility, but I had to try. It's just hard to let it pass by when someone claims the sky is green.

I understand that AI makes people angry and I think they have good reason to be angry. There are a lot of aspects of the AI revolution that I'm not thrilled about. The hype foremost, the FOMO as part of the hype, the potential for increased wealth consolidation really sucks, though I lay that at the feet of systems that existed before LLMs came along.

It's messy, but let's consider giving the benefit of the doubt to professionals who say a tool works instead of claiming they're wrong. Let them enjoy it. We can still be angry at AI at the same time.

I forgot my driver's license today but had my phone with me. I remembered seeing stories that google and apple both allow these (for some states) in the digital wallet.

Before doing this, I thought I would ask people here to weigh in on whether it is a good idea. Is it considered secure? Is it going to cause me more privacy issues than a physical card in my wallet?

This is also related to recent discussions about online age verification.

This is a related Tildes post from last year: Google Wallet adds age verification and more government ID support

as a grapheneOS user, I obviously care about my privacy, hence why the iPhone will not be my main driver, the grapheneOS device will continue to be.

but I might be getting a free iPhone soon and I have an idea of what I would use it for (Podcasts as Apple Podcast is the best cross-platform podcast app I have come across) but am not sure what else I would be comfortable using it for as I don't know what actions are safe without having Apple gather that much data or telemetry on me.

I know that I won't be using iCloud on it. I have no need for Apple's data storage. Nor do I see myself ever using the App Store, except for installing a VPN app. I might install Signal on it but not anytime soon (not least of which cause Signal does not yet support multiple smartphone usages for the same device). I definitely won't use iMessage as I don't believe in using a messaging service that is limited to a specific ecosystem.

I will note that I wont install a SIM on it. It will be using Wi-Fi for the foreseeable future.

Given these things, i am not sure if there is anything i should be on the look-out for in terms of privacy concerns with the usages I have outlined above

Edit:

Based on the answers to my post, I am getting the sense I didn't explain my current situation, which fair enough.

I have audio and video podcasts I consume, for my audio podcasts that I tend to listen to while commuting and exercising, AntennaPod proved a God send for this, to the extent that I wanted to support the app financially until I saw that they said their costs are already covered and it made me appreciate them even more for their honesty.

However, I have a free iPad I got by accident (not worth going into here) and I prefer to consume my video podcasts on a bigger screen than my google pixel. I don't trust Google with tablet development after a bad experience with another tablet I had from them so that was out. so I decided to just use the free iPad and was delighted to find their Podcasts app also supports videos.

However, I wanted 1 service that I can use on a phone and tablet. AntennaPod does not have any iPad apps. I saw this page and the 2 alternatives seemed to be Pocket Casts and Podverse. I tried Podverse but the iPad app would not even launch for me, it crashed every time so I said goodbye to that.

reading into pocket casts, it seems they do collect some data and they do have the option opt-out of that but that could very well change, which means I'd be in a situation where I could be paying for a product while also having my data collected and I disagree with that business model.

So, Apple Podcasts is probably collecting some data on me but I figured all it knows is what podcasts I listen to, which isn't terribly useful (I hope) considering I have subscribed to podcasts from a feed I generate myself.

And I happened to already have an old iPhone lying around at home so I decided to switch to using that for my audio Podcasts and use my iPad for video podcasts and its sometimes glitchy since I would call the Apple Podcasts synchronization experience (between devices) half-baked at most but I can make it work for my use case. So I am already using a separate iPhone just for podcasts and I might be in the position where I get a new iPhone which would replace the current iPhone but not sure what new threats to be aware of privacy-wise. I would be upgrading from an iPhone SE first gen to whatever new version I am getting.

so like most of the community, I wanted to do a dance when I saw https://tildes.net/~tech/1t09/motorola_and_grapheneos_foundation_partnership_announced. However I have a Google Pixel 6 and according to this page, that stops getting security updates this October.

now what I can't tell is is it a better idea to wait for the new moto+grapheneOS phone or bite the bullet and buy a supported pixel. I don't know if anyone know how long until a moto+grapheneOS phone actually hits the market. If it's next year, not a big deal to wait. If it's 2+ years, I get worried about missing out on security updates.

Not sure the best course of action, security wise.

Decided I wanted to try vibe-coding some stuff. It's been a very long time since I coded anything, and it was all very amateurish, but as the tooling has become better I wanted to give a shot at some silly ideas. Got tired of writing about random teaching and AI related stuff, decided I wanted to build some more stuff to get more acquainted with agentic tooling.

I have gathered some sparse links here and there, but I was hoping the community here may know of some more "definitive" guides. My plan is to use Claude Code, but if people want to share guides for other coding agents (Codex, etc.) please feel free.

Very interested in iOS app development if that helps, but I feel that best practices can likely look very similar across platforms and tools.