Yes, I find this credible. At the same time, FOSS and Linux seems to be all the rage now, with big tech’s ties to the Trump regime etc. Even though it’s been nearly two decades ago since I first installed Linux (in the late 00’s I even had an awkward “FOSS as an ethical alternative to piracy” phase), I am not in the tech savy crowd that’s been mainlining this stuff for life – rather I identify more with the growing number of tech illiterate dummies that think “FOSS = good” because Pewdiepie said so or copy/pastes sudo commands that replaces half my boot drive with North Korean crypto malware.

There are actually a few closed apps that do it, some claim to make your phone discoverable as a Bluetooth HID and others via a server/client combo. But I don’t really want to have an internet enabled device being able to track all my screen interactions and control another internet enabled device without some assurance that there’s nothing nefarious going on behind the scenes.

Thanks, yes, I came across it and it looks very good but the target device is an IPad so I didn’t consider it an option (well, I found no closed or open options I liked, really).

I understand you better now. Yes that’s certainly possible, plausible even. But it would seem useful for someone who wants to boost the credibility of their (hypothetical) keylogger app with exotic permissions to have a way to independently be recommended as a good open source option by two leading models in mainstream use.

Strictly speaking, it doesn’t know anything. But regardless of the merits of LLMs, the AI box is the top result on the biggest search engine in the world by default, and what I’m wondering is whether this is an example of intentional manipulation of the search results to give people who don’t know better the false impression that apps are open source.

Yeah, as ridiculous as the record labels are – their reaction is exactly what one would expect after such a high profile move.

If you are Swedish you will remember the Green Party spokesperson Åsa Romson crying as her government announced a crackdown on migrants. Left wing leader Nooshi Dadgostar would (will?) have done the same in Romson’s situation, albeit, hopefully, without crying. That’s just the way it is when you’re a minority partner in a government led by a party that copies all their policies on crime and migration from the far right.

The galaxy brain move is buying an old dumb tv for a pittance and use it for watching Jellyfin/Plex/stream from a browser with uBlock Origin/DNS filtering – all running on some relative’s “obsolete” smart toaster from last year that they happily gift you because “the new version’s bagel mode IS LIT – pun intended – but it needs the 128 gb DDR7 ram of the new model, can barely toast on the old one any more”.

Thanks for the link, hadn’t heard about that project, the list of target features looks very promising

But they all suck, or rather the Internet kinda sucks these days. Google very much included in the sucking.

In Google Search’s prime DDG was still terrible and not a viable competitor even with the privacy advantage. Now both services are almost comparable, so it’s kind of a no-brainer to ditch Google.

Yeah, search has degraded along with the Internet, you almost need an LLM now to filter out all the garbage hits. For a while, adding “reddit” to your search term was an OK high level filter to remove blogspam and e-commerce sites, but interacting with reddit is so annoying now that it’s barely an option and many of the quality reddit posters have moved on while the state and corporate astroturfers are running the show. Never mind that the “reddit filter” also removed results from much better sources, like specialist forums.

Yeah and, like Starmer with his burner phone, using Tim Apple™ Phone with “trust me bro, I’m not gonna tell anyone what you’re doing on your phone, bro, I only gave the fascist president of that hostile country 24 carat gold as tribute that one time, bro, it’s not like I’m on his side or whatever” security features.

Then again, people with nefarious purposes are usually highly motivated.

What does Mozilla doubling down on AI and becoming less appealing to core users mean for Firefox forks going forward? How independent of Mozilla are the biggest ones in practice?

I’m guessing it wouldn’t be very effective for European travellers to the US that already have a lot of their communication based on American servers/infrastructure.

I thought Anon meant movies that people say they liked because of their undeniable, objective quality, but not genuinely enjoyed watching. I guess they’re saying There Will Be Blood is some kinda masturbatory “quality porn”.

At this point I can’t imagine why people would want to live on or visit Sicily. The appeal of the food and culture is undeniable, but the island’s place on the frontlines of climate change really overshadows that by a wide margin in my book: summer temperatures that can go near 50 c, water shortages (the mafia taking over water distribution!), horrific wild fires. The list goes on.

The problem is that it isn’t clear what kinds of exposure private credit and other actors in the shadow banking space hold, because they generally operate on a model of financial obfuscation to get around banking regulation (i.e. being actual banks). What is known is that they are deeply intertwined with financing the AI bubble, even if all their exposure is through debt instruments, crypto schemes or insurance contracts (that probably is not the full scope though), they will be hit hard when their “borrowers” can’t pay back.

It’s the difference between a nice gesture and giving away his life’s work to take a stand. It’s still a nice gesture, but I doubt he will financially notice the lost streaming royalties from his fanbase on Greenland. Boycotting Amazon is probably the bigger thing here.