Chinese ROMs come without support for many languages. Even when using English there are still things which are in Chinese.
The people selling the devices on AliExpress are selling then with a "global rom". The issue here is that the rom doesn't exist officially. So no updates are available and you don't know what's actually inside it.
xiaomi.eu provide a modified version of the Chinese rom with language support and some other things. The issue is they charge for this through patreon for any mediatek devices. You have to keep paying if you want security updates. This is immoral and probably illegal as they don't own MIUI or Android and copyleft is designed to prevent this kind of thing.
To add insult to injury they started offering some mediatek roms for free. When people stopped paying the patreon they removed them from the download sites.
Shame on them and shame on the AliExpress sellers. If anyone knows a good course on building android roms and reverse engineering them let me know. Maybe I can fix this situation.
I saw this post on my feed, being both serious and utterly fucking stupid and responded in kind. I did not stop to read the rules of the community, in fact all I really paid attention to is the word solarpunk.
There are large groups of people going around overhyping AI. There are even other groups going around saying AI is completeley useless and is destroying the planet and eating babies or whatever. The first are annoying for sure. The second are actually insulting to me personally. That meme was personally offensive, and offensive to some of my friends too, all of us doing research that will hopefully help people one day. Do you not think I have a right to be very angry over something like that? All because some people can't be bothered to do their research before forming a strong opinion on something. These people are taking their ignorance out on others without caring for the consequences, something I am sure everyone does from time to time. It is only human. What isn't only human is refusing to listen to more informed people when they tell you that you are wrong, back the fuck up and revaluate. It's people who refuse to be corrected, refuse to learn better is who that specific statement was aimed at. Such people are a disgrace to the human race, and sucking my dick is the very very least they can do. People who are like that on a consistent basis are the reason the world is so fucked up, and it would indeed be better if they killed themselves. Examples of these kinds of people include neonazis, conspiracy theorists, and other insane groups of people.
Honestly though hosting my own instance does sound like an interesting option, and I have considered it before. I already have my own server for other shenanigans. It would open me up to more risks. Security updates afaik shouldn't be much of an issue as the correct way to deploy something like this is using docker containers + compose, or even something like kubernetes. There you just pull a new image every so often.