Enshittification. I have become certain that any app owned by a for-profit company has to follow this path. There is no way to sustain forever growth without harming the product. I have used Pocket Casts for a decade and have premium. I stick with it because I love the web features and feel fine paying for those but I suspect the deal will keep getting worse all the time, Vader style.

Well Obtainium already can access ADB from on device through the Shizuku framework. I use that to update APKs in the background for example. But it’s a super hacky solution and not going to be used by most people.

I considered setting up a Pi for WireGuard at my mom’s house (her router doesn’t support VPN), so we could share subscriptions still, but decided it wasn’t worth the hassle and risk that they would start VPN detecting from the client: could just imagine them sending her emails about it that would confuse her lol

Exactly. It’s an very niche library (tmap for R) and just was completely overhauled. Gemini, chatGPT and Copilot all seem pretty confused and mix up the old and new syntax

LLMs are useful to provide generic examples of how a function works. This is something that would previously take an hour of searching the docs and online forums, but the LLM can do for very quickly, and I appreciate. But I have a library I want to use that was just updated with entirely new syntax. The LLMs are pretty much useless for it. Back to the docs I go! Maybe my terrible code will help to train the model. And in my field (marine biogeochemistry), the LLM generally cannot understand the nuances of what I’m trying to do. Vibe coding is impossible. And I doubt the training set will ever be large or relevant enough for the vibe coding to be feasible.

Mozilla is a bizarre Matryoshka doll with a for profit company inside of the nonprofit. If anything, I believe this structure is responsible for Mozilla’s problems

Samsung had a little pressure sensitive area at the bottom of phone screens in the S9 era. It was handy and I had it set up like a hidden home button.

The S9 also had a variable aperture camera, which I feel like could have been developed a lot more.

I also miss notification LEDs. Sure, AOD mostly replaces it, but it was fun setting different colors for people, situations, etc

The Essential phone had a ceramic back that was very comfortable and cool in the hand. Though it was slippery. Another idea that could have been developed further.

The different back materials on the Moto X were very satisfying. The customization of that phone was unmatched!

I use Wireguard via PiVPN and it’s pretty much foolproof. I don’t bother with Dynamic DNS but have in the past

Building a browser engine is expensive. That’s why almost all other browser engined other than Apple’s have joined the Chromium Borg and gone extinct.

It is classic tech company strategy.

We saw it with Amazon offering suspicious deals for years on name brand stuff to kill competitors. Uber offering subsidized rides to kill taxis. Google Photos offering unlimited free storage

If it seems too good to be true, check under your feet and see if there’s a rug there.

Yes, honestly the most damning thing they’ve done, selling out their own users

Many types of malware are open source

It still has a 9/10 on Steam despite all the flak it took. I think it’s a classic. To me it’s similar to the backlash to Fallout 4 from purists, which I also feel is a classic game

I just moved 20k bookmarks from Pocket to Readeck, and can sympathize lol. A lot of the links are dead. I found a cleanup script I’m going to run but it’s still a huge curation challenge

“We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies” https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections

“We fully intend that Gemini will be the very first AGI” https://venturebeat.com/ai/at-google-i-o-sergey-brin-makes-surprise-appearance-and-declares-google-will-build-the-first-agi/

“If you define AGI (artificial general intelligence) as smarter than the smartest human, I think it’s probably next year, within two years” -Elon Musk https://www.reuters.com/technology/teslas-musk-predicts-ai-will-be-smarter-than-smartest-human-next-year-2024-04-08/

They’re literally selling to credulous investors that AGI is around the corner, when this and to a lesser extent Large Action Models is the only viable product they’ve got. It’s just a demo of how far they are from their promises

I knew there would be these kinds of comments making this obvious point. This is just a demo of how these language models are not going to achieve the “General” part of AGI. It’s going to take a new paradigm

Oh I think I turned off the CDN, but I’ll check, thanks for the tip

I thought that was only for tunnels

Yeah with VPN it’s more straightforward. I wanted it accessible without which was more involved. Honestly the average user doesn’t even know what tailscale or wireguard are, so you are already advanced using those