HN user
It would be really cool to see the social situational awareness sharing feature be implemented in an open client over an open censorship resistant protocol. Because to me Google maps is just mass surveillance by the pigs even if it does happen to help you today, the long term incentive for big tech is to erode user freedom and collude with corrupt governments.
It makes perfect sense. Android Auto is not libre. You need an attested Google device to use Android Auto and an attested Apple device to use CarPlay, so both options are anti-user at their core, forcing you into being non-anonymous and tracked in a myriad of ways that you can only bypass if you run a custom ROM.
The ultrasound technique there is more like MRI, static imaging, not measuring dynamic electrical signals. Also, regardless of static vs moving, all of this hinges on massive relatively expensive devices (ultrasound is never going to be dirt cheap or miniaturized compared to a smartwatch or even a VR headset) and for the subject to remain perfectly still and probably go through regular calibration sequences. All for <75% accuracy on simple classification tasks. The information mixes in the propagation out of the skull, erasing information. It's analogous to trying to do a row hammer attack on a CPU from outside the computer case.
Also, in the Meta result here, "while actively typing" is actually quite different than passive mind reading because the motor cortex sits nicely near the top surface of the skull, and the muscle memory from past typing makes for a nice well formed signal to measure and classify. It's the same trick over and over since the Brown BrainGate days where you can have people perform or imagine movements and get a decent but not good classification result, and it never gets much better after that trick is exploited. Project dies, VCs and grant writers forget or never appreciated the effect, time goes by, a grad student or corporate research lackey rediscovers it, media puts out an article claiming mind reading is here, and the cycle repeats...
New people are born every day whose faces necessarily are not out there.
Hunt by going to live shows. Nothing compares to finding a good artist irl first.
All factory operating systems come with ads and bloat and spyware, Apple/Samsung included. Google remains the lesser of all other evils because at least to date, they offer an open source OS, bootloader unlocking, and root. A community driven mobile OS is absolutely where we should go, but for now and the foreseeable future you can call a Lyft, deposit a check (in America), and do other mainstream tasks on AOSP flavors without Google/Apple/Samsung having to know anything about it. It's never been easier to make the user friendly choice too: https://grapheneos.org/install/web
How do you get or spend Monero without KYC? It's illegal to do so without reporting every transaction on your taxes. Maybe you can get away with it for small purchases, but with inflation the way it is, any meaningful purchase pushes you over a tax red flag line. Crypto is dead in the water legally speaking in the US.
But payment in of itself is necessarily surveilled.
For SpaceX, the uninhibited nature of CEO Elon Musk, especially in his posts on X, presents risks amid the formality of the IPO process, said University of Notre Dame finance professor Timothy Loughran. “He’s well-known for expressing himself on his social media site
"Uninhibited" and "expressing himself" is quite the sugarcoating for being a racist transphobic Nazi.
While we're fantasizing about evil people doing the noble thing: the fourth option is for Meta to takes its vast wealth and help build resilient uncensorable communications instead of doubling down on centralized and surveilled social networks.
This is how everyone talks about their use of Meta products: "I don't use them except for those times I use them...". We all need to actually boycott and actively help create alternatives or these little bits of fabricated need will keep them in business forever.
The irony is that no real scammer would use this setup because they know it would stand out.
*Google notifications, not all Android. Unified Push combined with a degoogled ROM works great to have convenience and security.
I agree, especially in this context. Allows you to avoid the insecure Google push notifications and keeps the proprietary Signal client more honest to prefer a community implementation of the protocol. It also lets you lock down your on-device data with an additional encryption layer.
No, that part of NASA was defunded.
My pixel 1 is still going strong. Several phones released just last year are bootloader unlockable and rootable, and those should last at least a decade if cared for.
I'm not aware of any law or even terms of service that prevents Apple from saying "we don't like your politics, your iPhone has been disabled, account suspended, all iCloud data deleted." I don't think they would suffer any reputation damage either at this point.
I don't understand how a parent can be OK non-consenually uploading pictures of their children's real faces to an ad driven AI company famous for abusing people's data and manipulating children on their platforms.
"Hell is other people."
What you expect does not have to be what you strive for.
This makes me more sad than hopeful. Great they get use out of it, but there instead should be a medically approved HIPAA compliant device for this purpose built by scientists in the open for all to enjoy. Instead the disabled are coersed to give up all privacy of themselves and others around them both digitally and physically. And more importantly they have to give up their sovereignty over the means of their enhancement by it being closed off and eventually enshittified for customers yet opened up for exploitation by facebook and their corporate and government customers.
Sadly the disabled have no choice but to accept the status quo, and facbook gets to virtue signal while holding humanity back another cycle by not selling us an open platform that would actually help people at scale not just now but forever.
There is a version that makes only the changes to include microg, has OTA updates too: https://lineage.microg.org/
Unsupervised leanring has been around for years and is already how the current wave of models are trained. It doesn't mean no data, it means no human provided labels of the data. So you still need creative new human ideas to move LLMs forward. LLMs != intelligence.
Popularity is irrelevant imo, it's a general purpose FOSS tool. Ignore Element and matrix.org, the open protocol is what matters. These features are useful even if matrix never gains any network effect: 1. talking among a small-ish specific group that needs sovereign communication, e.g. when forming a company or a tight knit in person friend group 2. only data limit is the size of my harddrive 3. bridge to every other popular protocol 4. personal bots and automation with no restrictions 5. Unlimited and customizable clients with no restrictions 6. Combinations of 1-5.
Can't speak for non-self hosters or people who aren't serious about chat, but for chat enthusiasts who can setup a server with bridges and bots, matrix is incredibly useful.
Yes. Nostr and ActivityPub are so easy too, I don't see much advantage to ATProto and so many disadvantages. It's as decentralized as a meme coin, just waiting for the rug pull.
To me something git-like with a peer review UI (a la pull requests) seems far more natural for distributed academic publications than a social media protocol though.
One of the biggest reasons I still prefer to root my phone is to use acc https://github.com/VR-25/acc. It's criminal that you have to root to run code that reduces charging speed or shuts the phone down automatically. I have it shut down at 20% and charge to 80% except when I know I will need to be out for an extended period without a charger.
Despite the opt in limitation, I wonder if this interop capability will allow a bridge that doesn't require you to install whatsapp apk on a real device (unfortunately signal has the same problem). I fortunately kept an old android whose sole purpose is to keep these 2 apps installed. Not ideal, but works well.
Even better if we could ditch the phone number requirement. Many have said to me things like "I use whatsapp not SMS because I am not American", but of course everyone on WhatsApp uses SMS. To stay logged into WhatsApp you necessessarily must have an SMS enabled non-VOIP phone number that you are regularly paying a telecom provider for to receive auth codes.
If this is true, why not make all data of any kind public? Let's level the playing field.
Apple has records that you are installing that, probably putting you on a list.
And it works until it's made illegal in your country and removed from the app store. You have no guarantees that anything that works today will work tomorrow with Apple.
Apple is setting us up to be under a dictator's thumb one conversion at a time.
Not for all points. And not being anonymous means your identity is not private...