sambuccid

Yes that's true, that's the main limitation for me at the moment, and I hope with more people using it and with time we'll get enough apps, like what happened for Linux on desktop. Meanwhile to compensate on Linux mobile we have access to many programs from desktop Linux - not adapted for mobile screen, and many people use Android emulation - which should work very well on official SailfishOS but has limitations on other distros. If I recall correctly I think it might also be possible to have a dual boot Android/Linux for some devices.

Personally I have them separate, an Android phone and a Linux phone. Sadly the Android one is still my main driver, mainly because I chose a not-fully-ready distribution like PureOS on a Librem5, and the battery duration is still too limited for me.

Regarding the thriving software systems of Apple and Google, I think is more due to the popularity of mobile phones than to specific limitations they made on their OSes. I think even on a very open OS, as far as there is a good "famous" framework for development, you can gain the same amount of software.

Personally I think that Android AOSP relies too much on the support from google, that has demonstrated to happily use anti-competitive practices and not be afraid to close and centralise AOSP as much as possible.

In a possible future where google decides to continue any new update of Android as closed source, will the community have enough people stepping in to support the development of AOSP? Will google allow the Play Store to run on AOSP? If not, do we have enough apps distributed outside of the Play Store to compensate?

My point is that for an OS that shares more code with desktop Linux (same apps, same DE, same terminal programs, ...) we can rely on the existing Linux community to maintain and advance the OS, and then adapt it for mobile, which I think takes considerably less resources

Yes most of the devices are old, but I think there are some main ones still being sold.

I bought a Librem 5 a few months ago, so I'm sure on that one.

The Fairphone 5 is around 3 years old, it doesn't seem to be listed in the official store, but they are big on reusing so I think there should be at least a few second-hand ones being sold(I found some on ebay, and some on their forum). I can also see it listed for sale on amazon uk.

The pinephone is another one very old, they seem to have the "basic edition" still avaliable, but it might be slow.

I also noticed SailfishOS is taking pre-orders for a new phone that will be released in october.

But I must admit a lot of the ones I listed might be too expensive if we consider how old they are

I agree that the usability is behind, as we would expect. For me mainly is about missing apps and some hardware support. But in terms of UX for example I liked using SailfishOS, although I'll admit the UI needs some getting used to.

But I prefer this to the feeling that I'm being limited on what I can do on Android/Apple, and the worry of being in a duopoly that allows the companies to worsen their products without ever fearing competition(as far as they do it in small chunks).

- https://sailfishos.org - https://docs.sailfishos.org/Support/Supported_Devices

They have few devices of their own (new one coming out this October) and they officially support many Sony Xperia devices. There are also many community ports.

- https://ubuntu-touch.io - https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io

They have 33 supported devices, some are being shipped directly with the OS or have an official agreement with the phone maker, while others are community ports. Even if community ports, they all seem to have high hardware support, and is all very clearly documented.

- https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 / https://pureos.net

They focus just on the Librem 5, and not everything is fully working but as I said they prioritised privacy and FOSS. The phone is old but the OS is still in active development.

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

They focus on supporting as many devices as possible, currently they don't have "main" devices they support, but they plan to. They too have a very clear documentation on features available for each device.

- https://mobian.org - https://wiki.debian.org/Mobian/Devices

They target devices made with the intent of running linux, but also have a few ports to android devices.

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You'll notice that there are a few devices that are more "linux-friendly" and that are supported by many of these OSes. Phones from Pinephone and Fairphone being the main ones.

It doesn't solve the current issue, but in case we don't manage to push back on this, some people might not know that there are various actual linux OSes for mobile:

- SailfishOS: still linux based and seems fairly community inclusive, but the UI part of the stack is closed source. Is the only one officially allowed to run android apps, via emulation. Has existed for a very long time, it's lightweight and I think the most stable/bug-free in this list.

- Ubuntu Touch: fully open source and community driven, it uses snap packages for security, you might be able to run android apps. Last time I run it also seemed fairly stable/bug-free.

- PureOS: fully open source and privacy focused. I think it's the only one that, released with the Librem 5, can avoid using proprietary blobs for interfacing with the hardware. Seems less stable than SailfishOS and Ubuntu Touch. You would need to buy a fairly expensive-but-old phone(librem 5) to run it.

- PostmarketOS: fully open source, focused on being lightweight and revive old phones, has a huge amount of phones it has been tested on, is based on Alpine.

- Mobian: mobile version of Debian, it's fairly new on this list.

There are many more linux mobile OSes, but as far as I know these are the main ones. There might also be some inaccuracies on this post, I tested some of these a long time ago, and I never actually run the last 2.

I guess the third path could be to use it as less as possible, hopefully finding a job that doesn't enforces its use. Still learn how to use it in case that becomes your only viable option in a few years time. And don't forget how to program by hand, for che case where in a few years time AI didn't improve as much(or just costs too much) and we discover there is a lot of messy AI codeto fix. In that case you might be able to keep your moral stance and still get paid reasonably

With such a population reduction(very polite name for what it actually is) I guess AI will become effectively the only holders of most of the human knowledge

There are at least 4 in the article:

The interventions that could matter are known. Public ownership stakes in AI infrastructure. Aggressive antitrust enforcement. A genuine tax regime on automated labor. Branko Milanovic’s prescription is characteristically direct: spread capital ownership more widely, tax the highest capital incomes more aggressively

I read some time ago about the idea of "redistribution of work", which given the current low level of employment(at least for young people here in UK) and the introduction of AI, it seems to me probably a better strategy than "universal income". I'm worried the absolute absence of a job would have a big impact on the mental health of the average person (we need to feel useful somehow).

Today, among the goods that are universally intended for everyone, we must also include new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data. In a context where the wealth of nations depends increasingly on knowledge and technology, when these goods remain concentrated in the hands of a few, without adequate forms of sharing and access, a new imbalance is created that contradicts the universal destination of goods

Wow, this feels very Hacker ethic-ky

Petitions are also a good way of reaching out to people and explain the dangers of these issues. Many people that usually sign petitions are notified of new ones, and, as a generalisation, they are usually fairly against big tech.

If anyone knows of any european petition around this please share them with us

I like their build system, is very simple to use, based on shell scrips, and has some neat features, like ssh-ing into the machine that had a failed build, or spinning a build with a custom manifest file (useful when you need to iterate quickly).

Although it doesn't have all the "plugins" and other stuff that CI tools have today, it provides fairly "standard" points of integration

For more info: https://man.sr.ht/builds.sr.ht/

I agree the website is a bit confusing at first, but after spending a couple of hours on it you can easily see how it's organised, for example to display branches and files it uses the more basic git terminology (e.g. main branch -> tree, list of commits -> log, branches and tags -> refs)

Similar UI but donation based and public repo only: codeberg.org

Fixed low cost but different UI: sourcehut.org

We might not be paying money, but we don't know what happens to our private data. Maybe it's not used at all, maybe used just internally, maybe could be even sold. Data of millions of users is very very valuable, even just thinking about how much targeted adverts could be placed with it.

I share your concerns, and I was very happy with the state of the art(at least for us developers) before LLMs arrived, while now I'm constantly worrying about the future, and almost accepting in the future I'll no longer have the time to manually "craft" the code 9-5, which is a huge part of what I love about my job.

But since we are now in this reality I want to try and understand what the future might be, so I can prepare, and maybe if possible also influence it. If I could influence it by trying to limit AI I would, if I can't then at least I would like for the models to be accessible to everyone, to limit the "a few rule the world" scenario.

Great article, near the end it talks about where the money go and if there will be universal basic income. I think those paragraph had an assumption that if models get very smart all the money will go to big tech.

But, thanks to all the companies working on open-weight models, I'm starting to think this might no longer happen. Currently open-weights models are said to be just months behind the top players (and I think we should really try to do what we can to keep it that way).

I'm wondering what the predictions would be in the case where AI becomes very powerfull, but also models are generally available.

Two possibilities come to mind, the first one where all the money no longer spent on employment would go towards hardware. New hardware manufacturers or innovators could jump in and create a bit more employment, but eventually it would probably all progress in one direction, which is the only finite resource in the chain, the materials/minerals needed for the hardware. Those materials might become the new "petrol". It's possible that eventually we would have build enough chips to power all the AI we need without needing more extraction, but I wouldn't underestimate our ability to waste resources when they feel aboundant.

In the second possibility, alongside a very powerful open-weight LLM, there could be big performance advancements, which would make the hardware no longer the bottleneck. But I'm struggling to imagine this scenario, maybe we would all be better off? Maybe we would all just be deppressed because most people won't feel "usefull" to society or their peers anymore?

I'm very hopeful for the "digital euro" that is planned in europe, and if it works and as they say brings digital, anonymous, online and offline transactions, that are not dependent on a private bank, I think it could be an amazing example that other countries could later follow

That's interesting, I'm sure when I read the article it didn't specifically attribute those claims to Amodei.

Apologies, I didn't mean to highlight Amodei in those quotes, I just selected the sentence to have enough context but not be too long, it was a coincidence that they both started with Amodei. I'm not sure if those claims came from Amodei or not, nor I have any specific feeling about him.

Furthermore this was prefaced with "As one person briefed on the exchange recalled" so it isn't even a first hand account

I'll admit I somehow missed that part, but we don't know how much of this event was in "Amodei's notes" and how much was from the "person briefed on the exchange"

The phrasing "..." is very close to the pattern I described above where someone interprets a claim as something different

The second claim is potentially even more of a match for the example I gave regarding people misreading legal documentation

I think our difference in point of view here lies on how much trust we put in the author, with what I seen so far I feel I have enough trust in the author to think he investigated these claims properly and made sure they weren't just misunderstandings, and that many of those checks he did weren't included in the article for any technical/legal reasons. Much more so reading some of his comments:

As is always the case with incredibly precise and rigorously fact-checked reporting like this, where every word is chosen carefully (the initial closing meeting for this one was nearly eight hours long, with full deliberation about each sentence), there is more out there on that subject than is explicitly on the page.

You try to reach a critical mass of detailed, rounded understanding of a central question, integrating the most meaningful perspectives, interrogating the weak points and blind spots, and backing up the assertions with documentary evidence or strong sourcing. Eventually, you reach a point where enough sources and materials are reliably triangulating toward the same truths.

The fact-checking process at the New Yorker is exhaustive, and can span weeks. Every sentence, assertion, and piece of underlying sourcing get scrubbed by multiple independent pairs of eyes. This story had four fact-checkers working on it for the better part of a two week period, pulling very long hours.

As I said I'm happy to agree to disagree on this point.

So many of the claims seem to fall into the pattern that requires the person reporting the claim to judge the sole meaning of what was said

I guess that's the nature of communications between humans. Even examples of written discussions seem contentious. The only type of claims I can think about that could be outside this category are the ones about written contracts, but it's understandable we don't have access to the actual contracts, and even if we did we couldn't really prove what was verbally agreed to be put in the contracts.

To say that's where he sits is to buy into the premise that whoever is the head of OpenAI controls our future. OpenAI is but one of many enterprises working on this

This might start a whole new discussion, but I think being the CEO of one of the companies that produce state of the are models is enough to have a high concern. My worry is that he(or any other company) won't say "stop" if a new AI is found to be more powerful but have considerable negative impacts on society. As an example it doesn't matter who has the "strongest" atomic bomb, any country that has one is a potential treat to humanity and should have rigid controls in place.

I commented specifically on Altman because the article seems to suggest he's more power-greedy, persuasive, possibly deceptive, and with strong-leverages/contacts than the average person, or even the average CEO.

(edits: formatting)

Sorry I didn't mean that the artice has proofs he lied, just that some of the situations presented cannot be simple misunderstandings.

The pieces in the article I was referring to are:

Amodei’s notes describe escalating tense encounters, including one, months later, in which Altman summoned him and his sister, Daniela, who worked in safety and policy at the company, to tell them that he had it on “good authority” from a senior executive that they had been plotting a coup. Daniela, the notes continue, “lost it,” and brought in that executive, who denied having said anything. As one person briefed on the exchange recalled, Altman then denied having made the claim. “I didn’t even say that,” he said. “You just said that,” Daniela replied. (Altman said that this was not quite his recollection, and that he had accused the Amodeis only of “political behavior.”)

Amodei discovered that a provision granting Microsoft the power to block OpenAI from any mergers had been added. “Eighty per cent of the charter was just betrayed,” Amodei recalled. He confronted Altman, who denied that the provision existed. Amodei read it aloud, pointing to the text, and ultimately forced another colleague to confirm its existence to Altman directly. (Altman doesn’t remember this.)

I agree it's very easy for 2 different people to understand or to remember something differently, and that meeting minutes are not always a reliable source, but for me in the 2 scenarios above is almost impossible for 2 people in good faith to disagree:

In the first case, if you say something, and a big deal is made of it, and 5 minutes later the other person claims that you said some specific words and you deny it, then someone is lying, either you or the other person.

In the second case, if there is something written in a contract, and someone presents that contract to you, reads it out loud, and asks a collegue to confirm, either that person made up the provision, or you are lying, there is little room for misunderstanding.

Given there are no proofs, I can't say he's 100% culprit, and I appreciate your rigor on this because we don't want to result judging everyone by a sort of "trial by public opinion".

However, outside of trials, the judjment can be more nuanced than a boolean "culprit/innocent", and to me the reasons below(*) are enough to distrust Altman and to prefer he wasn't the person at the head of a revolutionary technology that could have huge negative consequences on the society, or on human kind as a whole.

(*) the reasons being:

- amount of people interviewed and their very similar experiences

- the author and the type of journalism he does

- the professionalism he shown in calling out in his article the not-backed allegations other rivals made(for example of murder and sexual assault)

- the power dynamic that is usually in place between someone with enormous power and whealth, and a journalist that could be intimidated by being sued multiple times

Of course the amount/type of reasons needed to distrust someone is very personal, so we might need to "agree to disagree" on this

I think sometimes you have to look at the patterns rather than at the single claim. If a large amount of people, that are completely unrelated, tell you very similar experiences they had with Altman, you can take that as a good indicator of his general character.

And if this tendency to misunderstand/be misunderstood always results it Altman gaining more power, even if we give him the reason of the doubt and say that doesn't do it on purpose, it's still a big problem, given the responsibility he has.

The article also mentions many moments where apparently Altman straight out lied, as opposed to being "very persuasive, if you believe those sources then I don't think it's also possible to think he's sincere. I cannot open the article again to get the exact quotes, but the few I remember were: - one time he was claiming he didn't send a message, while people were literally showing him the message he sent, with the confirmation of another OpenAI employee - another time when he accused people of organising a coup, and that someone from the board informed him, and after the person from the board was called in the meeting Altman claimed he never said those words and never accused anyone

These cases can't be put to persuasion, that Altman changed their view, or that someone misremembered, they either happened or they didn't

I don't know enough about how people lived in the past but I would tend to agree with you that they might have had less control than us on many things. But what I meant was that it depends on how much control you *think* you have rather than the control you actually have. So I think a lot of it is about perception, in 100 years time people might wonder why we weren't all depressed because we had a life expectancy of "just" 80/90 years, but for us it's just normal and expected

I guess there are different types of "life sucks" that can or cannot contribute to depression, my current understanding is that a lot of it depends on whether you feel you have some control over the situation or if you think you have absolutely no power over it

I'm also trying Gcore and so far, apart for an intial problem with payments, has been good. It has a lot of services

That's because not everyone thinks that the trade deals were lop-sided, and it's difficult to objectively determine if they are, given that trade deals are just another lever in the relationship between 2 countries, one lever among millions of levers, one that is constantly calibrated and moved depending on the other ones. In a system like this I think it's pretty difficult to say who's getting more and who's getting less. But Trump doesn't care what is true of false, so for him it's easy to just say what suits him best.

Regarding the war, I can assure you that Trump not excluding to take Greenland my force has been seen by the EU as threat of starting a war, giving that Greenland is part of the EU. Also applying tariffs when European NATO countries sent some troops in Greenland has been perceived as: "Trump wanted to invade Greenland, he felt like EU countries wanted to defend it, so he imposed tariffs because he wanted to invade".

I'm not saying everyone in EU is thinking this, but I think a lot of people did, and this is some context for you to try and understand europe's point of view.

Appimage exists that packs linux applications into a single executable file that you just download and open. It works on most linux distros

If you are in europe you might be able to force them to give you a reason, for an actual human to respond, and who knows maybe even get unbanned.

I have a friend that had a similar experience with amazon, and using an european online platform specific for this he actually got amazon to reopen his business account.

There is a useful list of these european complaints platforms at the bottom of this page: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/dsa-out-co...

And if you prefer to learn well how to do it without AI, you can always try to do it manually the old way but then use AI at the end to review your config and spot any security issues

But let's be honest, right now it's big tech with their algorithm that's deciding for you. Of course you are still free to find the content you want (unlike what would happen with banning) but most people minds can be influenced by the political view of who owns the platform if they wish to do so.

Maybe a bit of this is already happening (obvious suspect being X) or maybe not, I guess we'll never know for sure, but there is clearly an huge issue here that needs fixing as soon as possible.

I recently started to learn Scala and I love it, also for it's functional aspect. Regarding your comment, it feels like scala is generic enough to be used also in other ways, and definitively for DSLs. What do you think it's missing?