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crapple8430

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Funny, on Linux I just use the special key (normally alt or super) to do all my window moving and resizing. It requires no precision at all and works even in tiling WMs without titlebars. I always found it weird Macos and Windows don't have this and it's a little painful to need to be precise with the mouse.

What happens when

Not even this. If you do what OP says on the firefox, and turn on ResistFingerprinting, you'd be seeing many Cloudflare captchas a day. In effect it directly punishes you having any privacy or control. I wonder if they have an internal whitelist for employees? /s

They are separate but related concerns. Privacy is what you have (or don't have) right now. Control is what you can use to keep or throw it away in the future.

Apple gives you some privacy, better than most Android by default. But it gives you no control. If they decide you don't deserve privacy a year down the line, well, too bad.

It's very country dependent. In the US, I don't think many banks do that, but I heard in Europe this is used a lot more, presumably due to more regulatory bs.

It's worth noting GrapheneOS with the locked bootloader will meet basic integrity, and that's what most apps need anyway. Strong integrity requires a whitelisted OS by Google and hardware to support it, but there are many older devices that do not meet it, so it will likely inconvenience too many people to be enforced for now.

I wonder if it would be feasible to build an automated phone-using robot, and access it remotely for any kind of apps enforcing that type of crap. There is really nothing they can do in terms of device attestation to prevent it.

Firefox sync clearly requires a central server. For any kind of peer to peer syncing to work you must have the machines on at the same time and accessible. And then there is the issue of NATs, including CGNATs. To work reliably these almost always have to have some kind of relays anyway (Tailscale's DERP, Syncthing also has relays).

For the experience an average consumer expects, you at a minimum need a central short-lived cache.

A powerful enough machine (usually limited by RAM, not CPU) will let you run a hypervisor OS like Proxmox which helps a lot with making things secure and flexible. You might also want to have RAID, ECC memory. It quickly starts to make sense to build a proper home server rather than cobbling together a bunch of low end hardware. The tipping point is probably when you want more than 1-2 hard drives worth of storage.

I don't really agree with this blog post; there is nothing enshittified about self-hosting.

But it does almost seems like there is a squeeze on general purpose computing from all sides, including homelab. The DRAM and SSD prices is just the latest addition to that. There's also Win 11 requiring TPM, which is not an bad thing by itself, but which will almost certainly take away the ability to run arbitrary OSes 5-10 years down the line on PCs. Or you'd still be able to boot them, but nothing will run on it without a fully trusted chain from TPM -> secure boot -> browser.

a whole chain of removed software freedom

Indeed. But this already has happened for most people. All non-jailbroken iphones and most Androids cannot have their bootloader unlocked, and even if they can, the stuff you can run is often still substantially controlled by Google.

Though in theory this can also be done without involving the OS at the device driver level. It's not hard to imagine a CNN running inside your display controller to detect a bbox and blur out the nudity. It'd still suck and be a middle finger to the owner, but I don't feel like this is much worse than what's already there. Given the popularity of porn, I can easily imagine this sparking a general public sentiment against all this nonsense.

GPT-5.2 7 months ago

GPT 5 Pro is a good 10x more expensive so it's an apples to oranges comparison.

The perf delta is smaller than I thought it'd be given the memory bandwidth difference. I guess likely comes from the Blackwell having native MXFP4, since GPT-OSS-120b has MXFP4 MOE layers.

The NVLink is definitely a strong point, I missed that detail. For LLM inference specifically it matters fairly little iirc, but for training it might.

While this is undoubtably still an excellent deal, the comparison to the new price of H100 is a bit misleading, since today you can buy a new, legit RTX 6000 Pro for about $7-8k, and get similar performance the first two of the models tested at least. As a bonus those can fit in a regular workstation or server, and you can buy multiple. This thing is not worth $80k in the same way that any old enterprise equipment is not worth nearly as much as its price when it was new.

There are a lot of PC boards where the iGPU only has an HDMI 2.1 output, or with a DP1.4. But DP1.4 doesn't support some of the resolution/refresh combinations that HDMI 2.1 does. Normally this doesn't matter, but it could if you have, for example, the Samsung 57 inch dual 4K ultrawide.

You can add it to your user CA store, but no app will trust it since it's treated differently from the system CA store, which you can't modify without root or building your own ROM. In effect it is out of reach for most normal users, as well as people using security focused ROMs like Graphene, when ironically it can improve security in transit in many cases.

If Google wants to censor your website, they have a variety of other, more effective methods, like by adding it to their safe browsing blacklist, which is also used in many Firefox installs.

A related issue is that most consumer devices (both iPhone and current Android) make it impossible or extremely difficult to trust your own root CA for signing such certs.

There are different levels of anti-user checks. Some only detect unlocked bootloader and/or root. Others use the play integrity anti-feature provided by Google. GrapheneOS tells you when apps request play integrity checks, and you'll see that a lot of apps do these requests constantly, even if they don't actually block you for using an unlocked or non-vendor system (custom key but otherwise locked and not rooted like GOS).

We really need a more foolproof technical solution for this if general purpose computing on the mobile phone is to be preserved. Perhaps some type of a remote control scheme to operate on a "slave" device. Failing that, if I do need one of such apps needing "strong" integrity, I'd probably look into getting an iPhone for those.

You can root GrapheneOS just fine. Moreover you can even re-lock the bootloader after rooting.

See: github.com/chenxiaolong/avbroot

I do think that Android is bad-faith open source too, but not in that sense. It's bad faith open source because only AOSP is actually open source, and AOSP by itself is not that useful of an operating system. There are a lot of proprietary components required for a functioning Android phone, usually known as Google apps, which are not open source. Android as a system is better described as open core, not open source. There are even mechanisms to prevent you from using your own fork, such as the various "integrity" APIs.