Android's strength was its decentralized nature. Google's plan to mandate central registration for every single app developer destroys that. We must resist this centralization of power. @keepandroidopen #KeepAndroidOpenkeepandroidopen.org
Auf YouTube findest du die angesagtesten Videos und Tracks. Außerdem kannst du eigene Inhalte hochladen und mit Freunden oder gleich der ganzen Welt teilen.
I hitchhiked from the info center at Þingvellir National Park to Geyser and the waterfall Gullfoss. Gullfoss runs down two faults through an incredible canyon, and geyser is the one that gave the name "geyser" to all geysers ☺️ (though its neighbor Strokkur is the one erupting more often these days). Both are very touristy but incredible sights; definitely worth seeing. I didn't wait long to catch a lift and I met some interesting people on my way, including a British geologist who gave me some fascinating insight. I'll explain it all later in my peertube videos 😉
“No matter how much they try to beef up a law to make it accurate or effective, we can't get away from the fact that the internet will always route around censorship, and that teens are very tech savvy — whether you like it or not,” EFF’s Rin Alajaji told Utah Public Radio. upr.org/politics/2026-06-04/ut…
A law passed earlier this year would have required adult websites to continue enforcing age restrictions for Utah users — even if those users tried to disguise their location with a VPN.
The beauty of the internet is that there will always be some island state or underground network out there resisting censorship and survaillance, allowing global users to use sites in their jurisdiction or route traffic through their tunnels.
All because ‘platforms’ have evaded & avoided proper regulation. Perhaps there’s a reason why Meta, Google, Amazon, and Muskrat are building out their own global connectivity.
#AppFatigue IPA: /æp/ /fəˈtiːɡ/ (n) The tendency to NOT install new apps on your mobile phone because you finally understand that most apps should just be a website so you can seamlessly use a service on a PC, laptop, tablet or mobile device. Also a sign of distrust as apps are black boxes with access to a lot of data sources that invade your privacy in ways you can hardly quantify.
I noticed that I simply stopped caring about new apps a few years ago. When I get a new mobile phone, I have a rather small set of apps I install and that list is more or less the same since many years. Banking app, Signal, and a few more.
I agree. Some apps are a necessity and I have some apps I personally like and use often (i.e. VLC and the Bandcamp app).
Most of the space on my phone is occupied by music (because I only stream via WiFi and I do want to listen to music while I'm travelling) and photos, not by applications.
This entry was edited (Sunday, June 7, 2026, 8:52 AM)
I recently installed a web shortcut for AliExpress, Vinted and LeBonCoin instead of installing matching apps and granting unnecessary and intruding authorisations
Same - nowadays it's more common that I'll save a bookmark to my home screen to use it as a web-app than it is that I'll install a native app.
The exceptions are messaging and music. Bank apps I've largely moved to a second phone which lives somewhere secure (the exception being my main one - because I need to approve transaction notifications)
When I first got a smartphone, I was install all the apps.
I quickly realised I didn't need most of them.
Now the number of apps on my phone are basically.
Disabled or removed as much of the google shit as possible.
2 banking apps Heating system app (not full of data harvesting) 2 Solar/Battery apps ( manufacturer one has been nerfed with subscriptions, replacement allows me access to my data again) Bought the paid version of the 2nd app. 2 messaging apps (what's app for family, signal for everyone else) Google wallet What3Words Netfix Grayjay (for youtube vids) Emby (for my home mediaserver) Kindle (for my own ebooks, would like to replace with something else) Musicolet - for listening to my own music stored on my own phone. WifiFileTransferPro - To transfer files to my device over my wifi, ad/tracking free and I paid a few quid for the pro version. Firefox web browser Brave web browser DuckDuckGo app with tracking protection enabled and a duck.com email address for online signups. Tusky app for Mastodon Ebay
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When I first got a smartphone, I was install all the apps.
I quickly realised I didn't need most of them.
Now the number of apps on my phone are basically.
Disabled or removed as much of the google shit as possible.
2 banking apps Heating system app (not full of data harvesting) 2 Solar/Battery apps ( manufacturer one has been nerfed with subscriptions, replacement allows me access to my data again) Bought the paid version of the 2nd app. 2 messaging apps (what's app for family, signal for everyone else) Google wallet What3Words Netfix Grayjay (for youtube vids) Emby (for my home mediaserver) Kindle (for my own ebooks, would like to replace with something else) Musicolet - for listening to my own music stored on my own phone. WifiFileTransferPro - To transfer files to my device over my wifi, ad/tracking free and I paid a few quid for the pro version. Firefox web browser Brave web browser DuckDuckGo app with tracking protection enabled and a duck.com email address for online signups. Tusky app for Mastodon Ebay app Amazon app (cancelled prime 3yrs ago) should probably delete as rarely used. Proton VPN app.
That's basically it... there are a couple of netflix games, mahjong and solitaire I occasionally use when out and waiting for people.
All permissions are disabled for everything unless essential for the app to work, DDG app tracking blocks a lot of 3rd party attempts at data collection... but banking apps have to be disabled from DDG or they don't work.
I don't need anything else... and I could probably get rid of 10-20% of what I have.
Do you (or anyone else here) know of any browsers on Android, that convincingly identify as a desktop browser to websites, so one can circumvent the "use our great app" pages, which are often the dead end pages for mobile browsers. 🤮 #AppFatigue
Working hard to release our new TROM Project: TROM Articles. New content. More easily accessible than the books. A huge article is already done and some 80% designed. Hopefully we will release soon! ;)
This is trippy as hell! I also feel like the border is more distinct when it's purple, but I can't really check because they all turn purple when I look at them! 🤯
I had to open the many dots image alone and zoom in. Then if I stare at a dot really hard it does appear to be ever so slightly darker a purple than the rest.
My eyes hurt now and everything is blurry. Don't do this at home.
Your eyes have much lower resolution in blue light than in red or green, the article demonstrates that increasing the size of the blue pixels by 9 times (3x3) makes an almost imperceptible change in the image. Link rot has taken the extra images and a diagram showing a proposed pixel layout of a big blue diamond surrounded by small red and green squares.
a #ProTip for those playing along at home – if you have “night shift” (iOS) or “eye comfort” (Android) on you’ll probably need to turn it off to see the effect, otherwise all the dots will just look purple 💁♀️
what's fascinating about this is that, as someone with deuteranomaly, _none_ of the dots is obviously purple for me, on any background. they all seem "blue, but if you told me they're actually purple, I would believe you", which is just really common for me.
that must mean that the amount of short-wavelength sensitivity loss in the fixated area is not enough to offset the confusion (and overall lower information content) of overlapping long/medium wavelength response?
Whenever I'm forced to use commercial, proprietary software, I look into open-source alternatives because I know it's only a matter of time before the company in question tries to fuck me with a random change to its terms of service.
Why #FDroid for your #Android device? No need to "just trust us" about how we check, how we build and why we care, you can look at everything that we do as #FLOSS offers the transparency you want.
Security and privacy come from trust The experience we have with our devices usually feels private and secure. If no one else is looking at our screen, it se...
@GrapheneOS team if you're reading this, I heard that you guys are partnering with Motorola to provide official support for their devices and even the possibility of buying phones with GrapheneOS pre-installed. I was overall pretty happy about this partnership and what it meant for the future of degoogled mobile OSes, however I'm concerned to see Motorola's involvement in this new affiliate link scandal and how shady it was and their overall response after this came out in public. I know this issue doesn't affect GrapheneOS users in particular, but I still wanted to run this by you and see if you guys have any comment on this.
Just to be clear, this incident regarding Motorola has nothing to do with Rossmann so if you are put off by that video then I'll share the source link here - 9to5google.com/2026/05/25/moto…
I fail to see how covertly putting affiliate links like this can be an "unintended" mistake like Motorola claims. I was asking to see if the GrapheneOS team has any comment on this incident.
It's unintended from Motorola's part since it wasn't authorized by them and was done without their permission. That doesn't mean whoever did it didn't intend to do it. It makes no sense for them to put referral codes into Amazon links with the codes tied to an obscure Instagram influencer. It clearly wasn't something authorized. They're having a company which might be problematic do contract work for them or are using their SDK and both seem to have screwed up missing this going in.
I arrived at Þingvellir National Park after 6pm. I set up my tent at the campsite (since wild camping is illegal in the national parks of Iceland), cooked, relaxed, then went for a walk on the main touristy paths of Thingvellir at around 10pm. It was still light out, yet there was nobody around. Amazing. I stood there, in the fault between North America and Eurasia, and admired the striking walls around me. Those walls move away from each other by about 2cm each year; this is an active rift. These walls are part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and Iceland is one of few places where you can see the ridge above the surface of the ocean. And what an incredible sight it is, especially when you have it all to yourself.
How cool!! 😎 And the fact that they are moving apart 2cm a year is such a direct evidence of how plate tectonics are a thing, because it is such a recent discovery. Nuts!
LLM advocates still don’t seem to be able to comprehend that ordering the machine not to ‘make stuff up’ doesn’t help. It doesn’t know when it’s making stuff up, and it couldn’t change that even if you told it to. (In fact it’s always just making stuff up, and is only ever true by chance.)
Part of why I’m so negative about them is that their advocates simply do not understand how they work and do not seem to want to.
Hallucinations are the bane of my existence when using Claude Code and that has significantly improved after adding the following instructions to my Claude .MD file.
Sharing for anyone else who uses Claude as a daily driver for analysis and writing but has gotten frustrated by it making things up.
@prietschka I do recall that a few weeks back he was complaining that LLM advocates get made to feel unwelcome on the fediverse. (OK? I don’t care. It’s nobody’s job to make people feel good about their bad opinions.)
And then just a couple of days ago he was posting something critical, and like … yes this is what we’ve been saying all along.
reminds me of meeting with the business side of my job and the marketing people keep thinking if they word the requirements juuuuust right suddenly I'll be able to do the impossible.
@solonovamax i feel like it's more that it just wasn't built to give out answers, it was trained not to answer truthfully and "understand" but to just come up with something that sounds kind of convincing
@nelson @solonovamax For better and worse, ML is an optimization algorithm designed to provide statistically close-to-ideal responses (with some jitter to break out of bad loops) to arbitrary input based on training (historic data). It's fantastic for, say, industrial control systems that want to keep a chemical reaction under control, but the nature of the math is that you can train it on any sequence of values, and this includes words. The problem is that language has contextual meaning, and the human brain is very much built to see patterns and meaning in things, even when they aren't there. Like how we see faces in clouds, for example. This technology is the faces in clouds engine.
@complexmath @nelson @solonovamax Exactly so. Ada Lovelace, patron saint of code, in the 1840s, gave us "Lady Lovelace’s Objection," whereupon she famously stated that machines "have no pretensions whatever to originate anything," saying they could only perform tasks they were instructed to do.
“AI” LLMs as they are sold to the rubes is just a spellchecker on steroids. It does not reason. It does not think. It correlates data it has been fed to reach a probability.
Telling it to not hallucinate is some serious cargo cult thinking.
@MissConstrue @complexmath @nelson hypothetically it is possible for an artificial agent (read: "AI") to be capable of accurately modeling the world and "thinking", however it seems that this is not currently even remotely the case.
@solonovamax @complexmath @nelson Theoretically, yes. But I point you towards one of my favorite long term AI projects, Cyc. (Whom I haven’t checked up on since Doug died.). I knew Doug since the 80s, and sort of stayed in the loop with what they were doing, because trying to develop an ontological system fascinates me. I want it to happen, I just don’t think we have the compute yet. I’m not sure it can be done with anything less than quantum.
But Doug’s vision of AI had nothing really in common with current LLM, especially since nobody has come up with a way for it to be commercially viable, because that wasn’t the vision. Knowledge was the dream. As electric dreams go, it was a pretty groovy one.
@MissConstrue @complexmath @nelson I don't think you necessarily need anything quantum for it, just some very powerful classical computational device (based on the fact that given our current understanding of the human brain, they do not do any quantum-like processing. also the fact that quantum computers have been "just a few years away" for what, like 30 years now?)
but yeah, I find AI in concept quite interesting. if you'd asked me pre-chatgpt, that's what I wanted to specialize into. now? god, that shit just sounds so fucking exhausting. I do not want anything to do with it. I want to stay as far away from it as possible.
@solonovamax @MissConstrue @complexmath @nelson I would not expect a large language model to be capable of doing so, no matter how advanced. An ‘AI’ ‘agent’ based on some other technology? Perhaps. But at that point we’re literally just saying ‘technically it’s not impossible for this to exist in future’; we’re in the realm of science fiction.
but yes, I currently believe that an artificial agent capable of thought and accurately modeling the world is science fiction however I believe it is possible, only based on the fact that the transformer architecture is turing complete. but it might not be efficient for this, it might require like a model that's 10,000x larger than what is currently the largest possible model. I do not believe it is something that is possible in the near future (well, I hope it isn't).
but yes, I currently believe that an artificial agent capable of thought and accurately modeling the world is science fiction however I believe it is possible, only based on the fact that the transformer architecture is turing complete. but it might not be efficient for this, it might require like a model that's 10,000x larger than what is currently the largest possible model. I do not believe it is something that is possible in the near future (well, I hope it isn't).
@nelson agents (the general word for entities performing actions to achieve their goal, not talking about necessarily "AI agents", this word even applies to people, and even something like a thermostat that controls temperature) that wish to achieve their goals should be able to accurately model the real world their ability to model the real world is directly correlated with their ability to achieve their goals. so, an agent which can accurately model the real world is able to achieve its goal much more easily that one that cannot accurately model the real world
and, people generally call an accurate model of the real world "truth"
hypothetically, the transformer architecture should be able to scale to human-level intelligence as it is turing-complete. so, how it was trained doesn't necessarily matter, it's just that it is not capable of modeling the real world, so it cannot evaluate the truthiness of a statement
@eestileib @solonovamax @MissConstrue @complexmath reminds me of how much brains actually suck as computers, real brains are full of noise, operate in non-linear scales and are mostly "single-threaded" even though every single neuron works somewhat independently
i think our first mistake was to mistake computation with consciousness
@nelson @solonovamax If you're at all interested in some of the historic discourse regarding this sort of technology, google John Searle's Chinese room argument.
@solonovamax yeah it's just good at knowing what the next word is, so it can string something mathematically coherent
kind of like how "ai art" tends to be extremely generic looking because it quite literally aims to pick the most average in its dataset for a specific prompt
my current take on using AI to "solve problems" or "do tasks":
1) AI is made to produce statistically average output, often making the process more complex if you care about quality
2) output can be completely false, often making the process more c…
It's just rolling linguistic dice, words bouncing around between probablistic paddles in a bigass pachinko matrix. It's not designed to vet facts. It's designed to regurgitate plausible spitwads that RESEMBLE facts. And the weights behind all those paddles and slots are tuned to whatever agenda the designers wish.
...And the designers serve planetwrecking technofascist war profiteers who party with people like Epstein.
Why would anyone ever trust it with so much as a goddamn casserole recipe??
This entry was edited (Saturday, May 30, 2026, 6:45 PM)
@nelson agents (the general word for entities performing actions to achieve their goal, not talking about necessarily "AI agents", this word even applies to people, and even something like a thermostat that controls temperature) that wish to achieve their goals should be able to accurately model the real world their ability to model the real world is directly correlated with their ability to achieve their goals. so, an agent which can accurately model the real world is able to achieve its goal much more easily that one that cannot accurately model the real world
and, people generally call an accurate model of the real world "truth"
hypothetically, the transformer architecture should be able to scale to human-level intelligence as it is turing-complete. so, how it was trained doesn't necessarily matter, it's just that it is not capable of modeling the real world, so it cannot evaluate the truthiness of a statement
@nelson for a theoretical super-intelligence that is extremely good at modeling the real world, the ability to say something that sounds convincing but is false would be extremely natural, as it would be able to accurately predict when it should lie to achieve its end goals. however, LLMs are not at all doing this. it just seems they can't model the real world, instead their model of the real world is inaccurate so they 'hallucinate' things, aka 'lie'
@solonovamax Exactly — IT DOESN’T THINK. It’s not a mind, but just a huge statistical matrix.
(And in top of that, don’t folks like this feel ashamed that their job has devolved to pleading with a mindless idiot genie, rather than writing deterministic code?)
@solonovamax I’m sure that there is genuine utility in LLMs and the newer approaches to AI in general. But too many people are being led astray by LLMs intentional appearance of mentality so that they interact with them as people, as having understanding. That is wrong and risks terrible errors in the final product.
@michaelgemar @solonovamax I'm trying to convert my suddenly boss obsessed with our overlords pushing AI down our throats to at least use AI not as process but to at least write crappy but deterministic code :(
I don't partake on the LLM stuff but they've already proved some degree of usefulness.
I don't think people in general would trust them with sensitive (health, well being) stuff but from what I hear, some people are very good at wielding it as a tool.
I don't know how my car works, I'd be a terrible mechanic and racer. Still, it's very handy tool for me to move around.
I am a safety engineer for safety-relevant and mission-critical systems. And it is disheartening to see safety professionals at international conferences present 2-page-long prompts, doing basically all this, but much more so, and expect their "spicy autocomplete machine" (@pluralistic) to create safety analyses this way. And always talking about the LLM as if it could think. And prompt it to show its internal steps and "reasoning", not understanding that it does no such thing. It just creates another string of words that sounds as if an intelligence were describing the inner workings. The upshot almost always is "It sucks, we have to check and correct everything. We love it. It is the future!" 🤡🤪
This is Glymur Falls, Iceland. Amazing hike and waterfall not too far from Reykjavik. You have to cross a river to get to the lookout, but it's pretty shallow and the hike is quite easy (and well worth it!).
From Glymur falls, I followed a 20km trail called Leggjabrjótur into Þingvellir National Park. This trail was a lot less muddy than the previous one, and just spectacular all around. I camped by Sandvatn Lake. It was below freezing at night, but my sleeping bag kept me warm and cozy 😊
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