The builds are reproducible. Developers can also choose to fetch binaries directly from their repositories, and fdroid will verify that those binaries match the sources. So this is actually safer than downloading directly from developer's repo.
Do you rely on Google Play reviews? Those are known to be highly manipulated and you can find any number of services offering to "boost" your reviews. I personally find online posts where people discuss about some app to have more meaningful feedback on it.
Going through pentagram's site, their shakespeare in the park posters do give me that AI vibe. Perhaps AI has been trained in many such similar posters, but as a layman, I'd be hard pressed to be able to distinguish these from AI generated ones.
On a side note, I wanted to link that collection here, but unfortunately there's no hyperlink, it just opens in a popup. You'll have to scroll down to the bottom of their home page to find it. I hope for their sake they just overlooked this one thing, because if designers don't see the role of hyperlinks in user experience, I can't take them seriously.
Pentagram is an interesting company. We worked with them around fifteen or twenty years ago, so it’s likely a lot has changed, since then.
They had a structure, where each studio was run by a partner, and had its own specialty. Almost a separate company.
We worked with the San Francisco one, which specialized in digital design (looks like it’s no longer around, or transitioned to an independent company). We used them for graphic design. We used DDO (they are still around[0]), for interaction design (we worked with both, simultaneously). It was quite an experience, and taught me a great deal about integration of professional designers, into a technical project. I still use a lot of what I learned, to this day.
They had that “AI vibe,” back then, so I guess we know where the LLMs got some of their training materials.
Their Web sites have always been like that. I’m assuming that part of the reason, is to discourage scraping, and another, is to be fairly pretentious. There was quite a bit of showmanship, back then, and I have no reason to think that it’s any less, these days. They are certainly not alone. New York is filled with studios like that. I know a chap that designs top-end jewelry, and is almost a caricature. On any given day, his outfits cost more than my car. It seems to work. He makes a lot of money, so someone takes him seriously.
DDO website is refreshingly clean. Very reminiscent of early 2000's era, it just gets out of your way inviting you to browse through all the content. I wish more websites retained such functional design. The amount of visual stimulus thrown at you these days can be quite overbearing. While I just glanced through pentagram's site, I found myself spending a lot of time going through DDO's pages. They seem to have some really solid articles too. Thanks for sharing!
The first world overcame those problems by extracting obscene amounts of wealth from the third world to make their populations handsomely rich. When you have everything and lead a comfortable life you're more likely to spend your free time at the pub than go enlist with some private gang or militia. If you look at all the places where organised crime is rampant, the common denominator is always extreme poverty. People living a wretched life, unable to meet their basic needs, with no glimmer of hope for their future are just begging to be recruited into a gang for even the smallest of incentives.
> The first world overcame those problems by extracting obscene amounts of wealth from the third world to make their populations handsomely rich.
This is incorrect, bordering on flat-earthism. It's also impossible if you think about it for more than two seconds. If the "third world" had possessed "obscene amounts of wealth" to begin with, the first world never would have been able to "extract" it.
Even a cursory search will find you literature from respected economists on this subject. There may be debate on how much wealth transfer or the actual impact of it, but there's wide consensus on the fact that there was. Comparing these ideas with flat-earthism is quite extremist, I'm curious if you've reached this conclusion on your own or have been led to it by some sources?
What is their source that the non-fiction book market is collapsing? Their entire premise seems to come down to the fact that non-fiction in 2025 took a smaller share of the top 25 best-selling, hardcover books compared to 2015. It's baffling enough to draw any conclusions from the top 25 of anything, but then to narrow down to hardcover disregards any confounding effects of preferences in format. On top of that they seem to be strangely unaware of this whole phenomenon called ebooks that has been taking the market over by storm.
Besides, non-fiction isn't analogous to fiction, it's not a useful category even. The subset of people who may read biographies may be very different from those who may read popular science or those who read self-help. There is no common denominator encompassing all of these other than the fact that it is a written medium. Fiction is different this way that it is a creative expression often read for the sake of reading and the point is not so much to reach the end. What would be more useful to see is the trend of specific categories of non-fiction over time and which ones are growing and which ones are not.
Perhaps in some ironic way, this article demonstrates why interest in non-fiction may be declining. When you take a singular, weak data point and stretch it over 5 pages saying the same thing, to create a complete non-issue over something that concludes nothing of significance by the end, you have to wonder if one would want to read more of such spiel.
Stretching nothing, but encompassing a fairly standard payload. “The crisis of men is they don’t trust us, the authorities.” No need to pin down why. We’ve poisoned the well so the article is done.
Pleasantly surprised to see dpreview still running, I thought they had shut down. It was a fantastic site back in the day. Not sure how it fares these days.
Do you have a source that says it was an analytical error? Everything I've read over the years suggested they knew there were no WMDs, yet went with the narrative. Here's one post that cites a CIA report that shows the administration knew there were no WMDs.
Not directly, but indirectly by declining any punitive actions. Ideally the banks earnings should've been used up towards the bail out punishing shareholders in the spirit of the free market. But if I remember at that time, execs paid themselves large bonuses immediately following the bail out.
Most of the big ones. The government in fact was issued equity in these banks that they later sold to recover the funds. So it was very much necessary to preserve shareholder value.
This arrangement probably wouldn't have upset people so much were the people responsible for the crisis held accountable. Worse still, they paid themselves huge bonuses as soon as they got bailed out from the bailout money itself! All this made people question the real intention behind the bailout. Corruption is often effected indirectly, so as to give the perpetrator plausible deniability.
No, they’re not examples of corruption. Did Bush or Biden seek to profit from their actions financially? Not that I know of, unless you have proof showing what and how.
Corruption is not limited to financial profit. There are many ways to engage in acts of self interest like grant personal agenda, favours to friends/donors, quid-pro-quo etc.
That’s not an answer to the question. How did any of these presidents profit, financially or not, from their actions regarding Iraq or the 2008 financial crisis? What was the quid pro quo they received?
Well, the question primarily seemed to contest the scope of corruption, so I responded in view to that.
The big banks were one of the top donors to Obama's 2008 campaign. The fact that none of the banks were prosecuted or even held accountable for the crisis raises big questions how much the campaign funding influenced the way the bailout was structured. It also doesn't help Obama that he was famous for going after private funding after backtracking on his pledge not to do so.
Bush's story is similar but with energy companies the most famous being Halliburton who funded his election campaign and turned out to be the biggest beneficiaries to profit from the Iraq war. It probably wouldn't have upset people as much had it not been that the Bush family had close ties to this company and where Dick Cheney also happened to be the CEO. It was a big scandal at that time you can go read back on, but as is with many of these scandals everything seems to be forgotten or forgiven with time. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same with Trump 20 years from now.
- Bush invaded Iraq because an oil company funded his campaign?
- Obama bailed out banks (a thing every government worldwide was doing) because banks funded his campaign?
There’s no evidence of these claims, compared to the evidence of a fucking private jet being bought for Trump in comparison. Also Trump has enriched himself, personally, more than any president in history by quite some margin, using the office of President. I just wanted to show what you’re equivocating about, here.
If you follow the way the private jet thing is done, it is structured as a gift to the government and not the president. It is perfectly legal and you won't be able to find any "proof" of corruption over it. This is how most corruption is done, in an underhanded manner, but everything by the book, with enough plausible deniability.
In many cases corruption is only known to the perpetrator, because it is a matter of intent. One can always proffer a different reason for what they are doing than what they actually intended and when those reasons later turn out to be false, you may never really know whether they acted in good faith in the first place.
So corruption largely comes down to perception end of the day. It is ultimately a matter of trust and when that trust is eroded, the perception of corruption grows. There's no smoke without fire. When we see smoke in a building, we do not go searching for proof of fire, we just gtfo because the risk is too much. We should do the same when we see red flags in people in powerful positions.
These people are also all wealthy with stable fortunes - they don't need a lot of cash because they have everything. Trump is also a rich guy, but he has a lot of debts and legal troubles and worries about leaving office, so he urgently needs cash to bankroll and bribe and attract likeminded individuals to help him.
https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Reproducible_Builds
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