Neither of those can stream video in real time AFAIK. They will back up the video file on some unpredictable schedule after you’re done recording. So not ideal for a situation where your phone might be seized or destroyed.

But if that works for you, there are lots of open-source options that work similarly. SyncThing can sync to any server, and all you’d need to do is make sure your sync destination is network-accessible somehow (VPN, internet-facing server, whatever). Lots of cloud drive apps can auto-upload photos and videos, and some of those are open-source.

A better off-the-shelf proprietary workflow might be a Zoom call with cloud recording enabled. Then you’d be protected against a sudden (and perhaps permanent) loss of network connectivity.

Buy a dozen and you could fit a good chunk of LibGen.

I’ve never replaced a watch (smart or otherwise) in less than 5 years.

Wat.

How’s navigation with Pebbles? If I start bike navigation in Google Maps on my phone, can I get turn-by-turn directions on the watch, and does it not suck?

According to the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, 2013, the median score for the US was “level 2”. 3.9% scored below level 1, and 4.2% were “non-starters”, unable to complete the questionnaire.

For context, here is the difference between level 2 and level 3, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_the_International_Assessment_of_Adult_Competencies#Competence_groups :

• Level 2: (226 points) can integrate two or more pieces of information based on criteria, compare and contrast or reason about information and make low-level inferences
• Level 3: (276 points) can understand and respond appropriately to dense or lengthy texts, including continuous, non-continuous, mixed, or multiple pages.

Geany is a nice GUI option. It’s a bit more capable but still lean.

It’s probably time for me to re-evaluate the host of coding editors out there. For the most part I just use good text editors. Though I do love Spyder, I only use it for a certain subset of tasks.

I think they reached a point where their user base was predominantly mainstream, not tech-savvy enough to know the difference.

I mean, how else can any site survive on advertising when the ads are so obnoxious and it’s so easy to block them? Either the site is great and the ads are non-intrusive enough that I’ll make an exception in uBlock, or I’m never seeing the ads in the first place.

Gemini might be good at something, but I’ll never know because it is bad at all the things I have ever used the assistant for. If it’s good at anything at all, it’s something I don’t need or want.

Looking forward to 2027 when Google Gemini is replaced by Google Assistant (not to be confused with today’s Google Assistant, totally different product).

In case anyone is unfamiliar, Aaron Swartz downloaded a bunch of academic journals from JSTOR. This wasn’t for training AI, though. Swartz was an advocate for open access to scientific knowledge. Many papers are “open access” and yet are not readily available to the public.

Much of what he downloaded was open-access, and he had legitimate access to the system via his university affiliation. The entire case was a sham. They charged him with wire fraud, unauthorized access to a computer system, breaking and entering, and a host of other trumped-up charges, because he…opened an unlocked closet door and used an ethernet jack from there. The fucking Secret Service was involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosecution

The federal prosecution involved what was characterized by numerous critics (such as former Nixon White House counsel John Dean) as an “overcharging” 13-count indictment and “overzealous”, “Nixonian” prosecution for alleged computer crimes, brought by then U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Carmen Ortiz.

Nothing Swartz did is anywhere close to the abuse by OpenAI, Meta, etc., who openly admit they pirated all their shit.

Joplin is great. I have its data stored locally with encryption, and I sync across devices with Syncthing. It also has built-in support for some cloud providers like you mentioned, and since it supports local encryption, you don’t need to depend on the cloud provider’s privacy policy.

Setting it up on multiple devices was a bit complex, but the documentation is there. Follow the steps, don’t just waltz through the setup assuming it will work intuitively. I made that mistake and while it was not the end of the world, it would’ve saved me 15 minutes if I’d just RTFM.

Again: What is the percent “accurate” of an SEO infested blog

I don’t think that’s a good comparison in context. If Forbes replaced all their bloggers with ChatGPT, that might very well be a net gain. But that’s not the use case we’re talking about. Nobody goes to Forbes as their first step for information anyway (I mean…I sure hope not…).

The question shouldn’t be “we need this to be 100% accurate and never hallucinate” and instead be “What web pages or resources were used to create this answer” and then doing what we should always be doing: Checking the sources to see if they at least seem trustworthy.

Correct.

If we’re talking about an AI search summarizer, then the accuracy lies not in how correct the information is in regard to my query, but in how closely the AI summary matches the cited source material. Kagi does this pretty well. Last I checked, Bing and Google did it very badly. Not sure about Samsung.

On top of that, the UX is critically important. In a traditional search engine, the source comes before the content. I can implicitly ignore any results from Forbes blogs. Even Kagi shunts the sources into footnotes. That’s not a great UX because it elevates unvetted information above its source. In this context, I think it’s fair to consider the quality of the source material as part of the “accuracy”, the same way I would when reading Wikipedia. If Wikipedia replaced their editors with ChatGPT, it would most certainly NOT be a net gain.

99.999% would be fantastic.

90% is not good enough to be a primary feature that discourages inspection (like a naive chatbot).

What we have now is like…I dunno, anywhere from <1% to maybe 80% depending on your use case and definition of accuracy, I guess?

I haven’t used Samsung’s stuff specifically. Some web search engines do cite their sources, and I find that to be a nice little time-saver. With the prevalence of SEO spam, most results have like one meaningful sentence buried in 10 paragraphs of nonsense. When the AI can effectively extract that tiny morsel of information, it’s great.

Ideally, I don’t ever want to hear an AI’s opinion, and I don’t ever want information that’s baked into the model from training. I want it to process text with an awareness of complex grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. That’s what LLMs are actually good at.

I agree. Of all the UI crimes committed by Microsoft, this one wouldn’t crack the top 100. But I sure wouldn’t call it great.

I can’t remember the last time I used the start menu to put my laptop to sleep. However, Windows Vista was released 20 years ago. At that time, most Windows users were not on laptops. Windows laptops were pretty much garbage until the Intel Core series, which launched a year later. In my offices, laptops were still the exception until the 2010s.

Google as an organization is simply dysfunctional. Everything they make is either some cowboy bullshit with no direction, or else it’s death by committee à la Microsoft.

Google has always had a problem with incentives internally, where the only way to get promoted or get any recognition was to make something new. So their most talented devs would make some cool new thing, and then it would immediately stagnate and eventually die of neglect as they either got their promotion or moved on to another flashy new thing. If you’ve ever wondered why Google kills so many products (even well-loved ones), this is why. There’s no glory in maintaining someone else’s work.

But now I think Google has entered a new phase, and they are simply the new Microsoft – too successful for their own good, and bloated as a result, with too many levels of management trying to justify their existence. I keep thinking of this article by a Microsoft engineer around the time Vista came out, about how something like 40 people were involved in redesigning the power options in the start menu, how it took over a year, and how it was an absolute shitshow. It’s an eye-opening read: https://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html

This is really cool! I like the idea of pen and paper as a supported UI. I’ve never found handwriting on a touchscreen to be an effective or enjoyable experience, across the myriad devices I’ve tried it on (including an iPad with an Apple Pencil). And app-based form entry is often a drag. By the time I’ve even opened the app and clicked the “new entry” button, I often could’ve been done already with a simple pen and paper.

Disgusting and unsurprising.

Most web admins do not care. I’ve lost count of how many sites make me jump through CAPTCHAS or outright block me in private browsing or on VPN. Most of these sites have no sensitive information, or already know exactly who I am because I am already authenticating with my username and password. It’s not something the actual site admins even think about. They click the button, say “it works on my machine!” and will happily blame any user whose client is not dead-center average.

Enter username, but first pass this CAPTCHA.

Enter password, but first pass this second CAPTCHA.

Here’s another CAPTCHA because lol why not?

Some sites even have their RSS feed behind Cloudflare. And guess what that means? It means you can’t fucking load it in a typical RSS reader. Good job!

The web is broken. JavaScript was a mistake. Return to monke gopher.

Fuck Cloudflare.

Defaults matter. Every time you open a private browsing window, that’s what you’re going to get. Every time you use LibreWolf or Firefox Focus or any other browser that disables/clears cookies by default (which is a good practice), that’s what you’re going to get.

I don’t want anything I search for going into OpenAI. Ever. I’d feel fine about this if they hosted their own models.

Thank you for the correction.

Sender and recipient can’t be encrypted e2e. How would the server know to whom deliver the email if those are encrypted and not visible to it?

“End-to-end” is a bit of a misnomer in this case. Both Proton and Tuta apply encryption after receiving email in the general case, since email is not sent with E2EE across different providers (in general). Both Proton and Tuta can see your incoming email (body and all) from external servers in the general case — they just don’t store it that way. (This is different when sending email between two Proton users or two Tuta users.)

Proton does not use end-to-end encryption for email headers. That includes the subject lines, senders/recipients, and other potentially sensitive information.

Tuta uses E2EE for email contents AND headers.

Consider for a moment what someone with access to your contacts and subject lines would know about you. For me personally, they would know which political campaigns and causes I donate to, and when. They would know when I see various doctors, and who they are. They would know my travel dates and destinations. They would know what newsletters I read (many of which are also political). Etc.

“One mistake” would be if he didn’t double-down on it, and if Proton addressed their customers’ concerns in any meaningful way. Instead, they deleted posts and are now withdrawing from the community entirely, and directing users to three of the worst corporate hell-holes on the internet.