This is separate from A-GPS. Google seems to be using WiFi rather than Bluetooth, but the broader point remains the same. No one is stopping any vendor from crowdsourcing the location of every BT device... which is what Apple has done, for Airtags which don't have the battery capacity to run a GPS chip. Sure without GPS it wouldn't be very effective to rely on only nearby devices to guess the current location. But an attacker only has to get lucky once to get your home address. So the only safe approach is to hide nearby devices/networks from unauthorized apps.

"unforseen hardware failure" somebody didn't check their backups!

It's one of those things where periodically someone gets sanctioned and a few others get scared and stop doing it (or tone it down) for a while. I guess SHEIN are either overdoing it or they crossed the popularity threshold where companies become more scrutinized

This doesn't really surprise me, I've gotten weird vibes from Pimax for years. Not so much to do with their hardware, but how their sales / promo team operates. A while back at my old workplace we randomly got contacted by Pimax trying to have us carry their headset, which was weird since we didn't sell VR stuff or computers even, just other electronics. It was a very out of place request which we basically said we wouldn't consider it until we can verify the quality of the headset, after which they never replied.

And that's fine. I agree. Becoming consumist hoarders is what got us to where we're at. Or rather, what allowed companies and institutions to take us here.

Tech execs when the shortage hits: I just had a brilliant idea! Let's just give untrained junior vibe-coding engineers the power of senior engineers, and even more AI tools. Problem solved forever, bonus please!

Turns out dry sarcasm doesn't come across well in text form, if only there was a way to indicate it

This is where the magic of near meaningless corpo-babble comes in. The layoffs are part of a plan to aspirationally acheive the goal of $10b revenue by EoY 2025. What they are actually doing is a significant restructuring of the company, refocusing by outside hiring some amount of new people to lead or be a part of departments or positions that haven't existed before, or are being refocused to other priorities... ... But this process also involves laying off 500 of the 'least productive' or 'least mission critical' employees. So, technically, they can, and are, arguing that their new organizational paradigm will be so succesful that it actually will result in increased revenue, not just lower expenses. Generally corpos call this something like 'right-sizing' or 'refocusing' or something like that. ... But of course... anyone with any actual experience with working at a place that does this... will tell you roughly this is what happens: Turns out all those 'grunts' you let go of, well they actually do a lot more work in a bunch of weird, esoteric, bandaid solutions to keep everything going, than upper management was aware of... because middle management doesn't acknowledge or often even understand that that work was being done, because they are generally self-aggrandizing narcissist petty tyrants who spend more time in meetings fluffing themselves up than actually doing any useful management. Then, also, you are now bringing on new, outside people who look great on paper, to lead new or modified apartments... but they of course also do not have any institutional knowledge, as they are new. So now, you have a whole bunch of undocumented work that was being done, processes which were being followed... which is no longer being done, which is not documented.... and the new guys, even if they have the best intentions, now have to spend a quarter or two or three figuring out just exactly how much pre-existing middle management has been bullshitting about, figuring out just how much things do not actually function as they ssid it did... So now your efficiency improving restructuring is actually a chaotic mess. ... Now, this 'right sizing' is not always apocalyptically extremely bad, but it is also essentially never totally free from hiccups... and it increases stress, workload, and tensions between basically everyone at the company, to some extent. Here's Forbes explanation of this phenomenon, if you prefer an explanation of right sizing in corpospeak: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/rightsizing/