turboSnail

That “Google has to say it’s ok” type of thing used to be a total dealbreaker. So many things either required fragile workarounds or straight up didn’t work at all.

When I saw the posts about the new Jolla phone, I nearly bought one. Unfortunately, I still have some special hardware that requires android or iOS to work properly, and getting rid of them would feel like jumping back to 2010. That’s the primary reason I don’t think I could get rid of a mainstream mobile device.

However, I’m still tempted to get that phone and try it out as a secondary phone. That way, I would find out where the bottlenecks are these days.

That’s totally doable! Get a domain, find a server you like, pay for hosting, and you can install whatever you want on it. If you want to have your own cloud service, just install nextcloud. Install pihole and start blocking ads everywhere. Do you want to run an LLM in your own cloud? Totally doable as well. Maybe even host a Fediverse instance, while you’re at it.

I know I don’t have the time and energy to play admin in my free time, but I can definitely see the value in a hobby like that. I don’t mind paying for a cloud service or email, because that way I can be sure amateurs like me aren’t running the show. Obviously, I’m not paying Apple or Google to defile me. Those scammers don’t deserve my money or my data. Privacy respecting companies deserve to be paid for their efforts though.

A fully de-goggled Android won’t be able to run some apps. For example banking apps tend to be really picky about these things. Either the app runs on a vanilla Android or it won’t run at all. Sure, you can get rid of Google, but you’ll be making some sacrifices. Another option is to use iOS, but it comes with some messed up sacrifices too.

A third option is to use a Linux phone, but I haven’t got any personal experience with that. Looks promising, but apparently many basic necessities aren’t available yet.

If you don’t really need anything more than email, SMS and phone calls, a de-googled android and Linux phones should be fine. If you want to be more compatible with the rest of the modern world, iOS is the least bad option here. Still, pretty awful but at least you can guarantee that all the modern mobile things work. Sure, you’ll be living without Google, but you’ll be living with Apple now so… Is that a win? Probably not.

Either way, Linux phones look very promising. Remember to check back in 5 about years to see if the situation has improved. Some EU countries are currently severing their ties with American spyware companies, and this move could result in developing the mobile Linux ecosystem to a more usable state. If that happens, I’m probably going to recommend ditching your iPhone and Switching to a mobile Linux phone.

Same here. Our IT guys have good taste in browsers, but they also know that some people in the company may still need one of the messy sites that are incompatible with web standards. Chrome is for those edge cases.

Congrats! You’ve just beaten the final boss and finished the main quest of Gmail. Sounds like a great time to switch to Tutanota.

And install Firefox or one of its many forks.

Some people say Oracle doesn’t have clients. They have hostages.

Stopped reading after the “Why it matters” section. Nobody uses that phrase in an article.

Yikes! That was pretty messed up. Goes to show that you can’t really trust Microsoft or Samsungto handle things for you.

Cooling is still possible if you radiate the heat away. Convective cooling won’t work though.

The temperature of those few particles doesn’t really matter much since there are so few of them. The overall energy density is low. The whole concept of temperature begins to fall apart in an extreme environment like that.

How do you measure the temperature of particles that aren’t there?

Also, the hot argument refers to intense solar radiation, which is available only on one side of the satellite. The other side doesn’t receive sunshine, so it will loose heat.

Well, they are language models after all. They have data on language, not real life. When you go beyond language as a training data, you can expect better results. In the meantime, these kinds of problems aren’t going anywhere.

Li-ion technology has huge factories behind it, so economies of scale apply here. The first Na-ion battery factories have just started, so everything is more expensive to manufacture on a small scale. However, the ingredients are cheaper and easily available. Once they ramp up production, we can make a fair comparison between the two.

I have a feeling LIBs are going to be more expensive, but they won’t disappear since high energy density is very handy in mobile applications like cars and phones. NIBs are probably going to end up being a lot cheaper, which should make them a popular option in all the less demanding applications, like grid energy storage, kitchen scales, and anything in between.

Even better. Those who betrayed your trust are the ones who ultimately pay the price. Think of it as vengeance with benefits.

That’s generally true. Personally, I enjoy using a laptop way more than using a mobile device of any kind.

However, modern life is beginning to require mobile apps (Android or iOS). More and more things simply aren’t available as a website or FOSS. You have to have a vanilla mainstream mobile device to do certain things like using your bank account. I really hate that.

Hardware peripherals are another area that really sucks. If you want to enjoy the comforts of modern life, many people just bow down and use one of the two mobile platforms in order to use their smart ring/scale/lights/curtains/heating/car, etc.

Resisting all that is getting increasingly difficult, because there’s so much to resist. On the other hand, resisting is also becoming increasingly appealing as enshittification intensifies.

“Don’t Bite The Hand That Feeds You”. LLMs seem to have internalized this rule pretty well. I can imagine that this idea can also be taken much further. Basically like trying to search “Tiananmen Square massacre” on the wrong side of the Great Firewall of China.

Well, what if LLMs were instructed to not talk about “sensitive topics” like that? After all, more and more people are already using an LLM as a search engine replacement, so it’s only natural that Microsoft and OpenAI might receive some interesting letters about implementing very specific limitations.

No need to add any more than you usually do. Just leave the ones you are unable to see. Besides, LLMs tend to write in overly grand style, whereas humans can’t be bothered to use every trick in the book. Humans just get to the point and skip all the high-impact language that LLMs seem to love.

LOL. So true.
On top of that, an LLM can also take you on a wild goose chase. When it gives you trash, you tell it to find a way to fix it. It introduces new layers of complication and installs new libraries without ever really approaching a solution. It’s up to the programmer to notice a wild goose chase like that and pull the plug early on.

That’s a fun little mini-game that comes with vibe coding.

Super lazy job applications… can’t even bother to put two minutes into vibing.

How about asking it to write a short political speech on climate change. Then, just count the number of rhetoric devices and em-dashes. A human dev wouldn’t be bothered to write anything fancy or impactful when they just want to submit a bug fix. It would be simple, poorly written, and filled with typos. LLMs try to make it way too impressive and impactful.