hendrik

Are the genome AIs more capable than the average ChatGPT? Or do they also sound convincing but fail at every real-world task given to them that has some degree of complexity? I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be afraid of them.

Sure. I’m not against people buying it. Including for novelty or be an early adopter. I’ve had a look at all the foldable phones in the store and I didn’t really like them. I mean it’s a nice idea, and I can see how I’d get some good use out of that large screen. But at least the Samsung one had a pretty noticable fold in the middle. And I can get a rusty used car for that kind of money. Or a mid-range gaming PC new. Maybe I’m just not the target audience. I never got why people buy expensive phones. My $350 one can do pretty much the same tasks in everyday life and also the camera and everything is decent enough. And I spent the extra money that’d get me to $2.000 on a laptop and other things. Yeah, but I know different people make different decisions and that’s fine. I’d be in for something like a Nokia N950 if we want to change the form factor (and operating system for more diversity). But that’s not happening. Or just a regular uninspiring Pixel with the price point of the 4a, just with the current (extended) update timeframe. That’s something they don’t do very often. Probably because of the smaller profit margin. But I also consider it an achievement and challenge to design and sell a device close to high-end specs, just for a fraction of the price.

It’s too darn expensive for what it does. I’ll stick with my $350 phone and a laptop or tablet for now.

I like than everyone seems to think we’re days or weeks away from a ChatGPT 5 release. I’ve read that claim for months now.

But I agree with the premise of the article. Whistleblowing should be legal and appreciated. I wouldn’t rely on the government however. They’ve done far worse things than just fire someone who calls them out, in the past.

Long article with some nice thoughts. And I’d add: Art is about exploring, communicating, … And that includes current events and technology. I mean not every picture is art. But as AI is part of the world, art has to deal with the subject. And art has methods to do so. And I see some potential in AI’s ability to be interactive.

For binge-watching yes. If I’m in the mood and it’s the one off occasion that I’m re-watching some old episode (or the newest one of the week), then of course not 😅

I’d love to see some Linux phone again. For me, propably something like the Nokia N950. But I’m fine without a keyboard, too.

Designing a phone from the grounds up, then also getting into the business of manufacturing for the first time… And having to adapt a whole operating system since it wasn’t optimized for mobile is just a lot of things at the same time. I’m really impressed by what Pine64 and the community were able to pull off. But it’s more a prototype.

I think what we’d need is some modern, normal and attractive phone that is produced by some established (or clever) manufacturer, went through extensive testing and mass production. It’d need to be affordable to attract developers. Have a decent and modern chipset and gain some good mainline Linux support. That always proved to be a bit difficult in the ARM ecosystem. And we’d still need to then proceed and change a lot of things about Linux. As of now it just doesn’t have any clever mechanisms to do something like a connected standby… i.e. save power while also listening for instant messenger messages. And ideally you’d like it to receive messages while in your pocket and not just SMS and calls. And we’d have to change a few more desktop apps to be responsive. All of that is quite some work that hasn’t been tackled yet.

I’m currently using GrapheneOS for my daily life. Maybe someday I’ll find some phone that has all the columns green with the components and features that are supported by a Linux kernel.

My advise is not to buy one. It’s a nice idea. But even with the tech enthusiasts and Linux nerds (like me)… A lot of them will tell you it spends most of it’s existence in your drawer of unfinished projects.

It’s slow, has quite some annoyances and quirks. And by now the chipset that was already old on release, is ancient. It’s generally unusable in every-day situations. And the hardware limits what kind of Linux use you’ll get out of it. The newer pro version makes it better, but not substancially. And it’ll add it’s own quirks in return.

And the software (Linux) doesn’t work great either. Things have settled down and I don’t expect substancial change by now. Yet, you’ll have issues with the touchscreen keyboard. Copy-pasting things. Lots of things aren’t adapted for mobile. Any browser is sluggish and struggles with playing videos.

I’ve bought the hardware keyboard, too. And I can’t recommend that either. It’s just not a great product. It’s not great to type on it and it has more quirks. And it constantly drains the battery for me and I expect it to someday discharge the battery to a point where it’ll destroy it. I’ve tried several things and couldn’t fix that.

You might be better off buying a regular phone that is supported by postmarketOS. But I don’t have any experience with that. And I’m not aware of any good one that I’d recommend at the moment.

Sabine Hossenfelder also did a video on that, today: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bm_BGGDurd0

That’d work, too. But doing that I still had to occasionally/rarely fix my relatives laptops. I think after some of the major updates and the stupid Brother printer drivers messed up and needed manual intervention. But Debian is pretty stable. But with that said, it’s not the only option. I can imagine an atomic distro doing a good job, too. And being low maintenance, or at least fail in a way my mom could handle. I mean that’s how some modern devices work anyways. Be atomic, have A/B updates…

Sure. I somehow doubt that out of all the AI companies, exactly this company will lead the way to AGI when there are other AI companies that are at least 10x more worth and also bought lots of NVidia hardware. Probably lots more. And they also pay some experts.

I see many issues with that / for them.

But I’m not against experimenting and finding out. We maybe need some free and open monetizing options, maybe also ad platforms. That would give people some more options, instead of relying on Google and Apple all the time.

Please just make it respect user privacy, be FLOSS and categorize the Apps, so it’s clear to me what is and what isn’t licensed Free Software.

Seems fun, though.

I myself don’t have any. Most of the books I studied with were in German. But I saw plenty in the library. And it depends on what you want. There are some on specific programming languages, or design patterns, or concepts like object oriented programming …

KDE Connect? Sounds pretty much like the Windows alternative to that.

Read a book on writing good code. There are several ones available. It’s a common thing. Especially for self-taught programmers. And also if you studied… Usually once you progress to complex projects or have to collaborate in bigger teams, you have to learn this. And that’s also why there is a demand (and supply) of books on the subject.

And I always recommend books. They’re a way better way to learn than most of the other stuff you’ll find (in my eyes). And usually written by smart people and structured the right way to teach you something fast and effective. You’ll get the whole picture (something you don’t get when curating your information yourself), it takes like less than half of the time of watching online tutorial videos to finish a book including the assignments. And generally: learn it in a structured way if you want to move past the basics.

I own a Pinephone. But it’s just not a great device. So in my daily life I rely on a different Android phone. I wish there were a nice phone with proper Linux support.

I think this is the decisive list:

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

Maybe have a look at availability and how old the chipset is. These are mostly old and slow phones. It also doesn’t help if RAM/memory is scarce. I don’t have a good recommendation of a decent modern phone.

I thought that wasn’t launched yet? Do they backport and enable that per default to compete with the mass of iPhones, or is it going to be a rare occurence that a tracker gets reported?

And what’s the network like? Are there many devices out there reporting the position of those tags? Or is it just Motorola devices with their 5% market share?