I have a Samsung phone and I take great pleasure in ignoring the weekly reminders that I still haven’t agreed to their latest privacy policy (or any previous version since the very first one which I was forced to accept while setting up the phone). Refusing to do this probably doesn’t accomplish anything, but it’s my own private act of rebellion while I eagerly await those new Motorola phones with first-party Graphene OS support.

This is exactly what I said about Windows Recall. It’s not a bad idea per se, but it requires the user to trust a company which has repeatedly and publicly screwed over its customers; a thing which no sane person would do.

Doesn’t US Mobile offer all the of the major networks? I’ve also been looking at them recently, and my understanding is that the three networks they offer are (despite their silly codenames) in reality just verizon, t-mobile, and at&t. You can pick which one you want to use and even switch between them without too much hassle.

Even in the wide world of dubiously useful AI chatbots, Copilot really stands out for just how incompetent it is. The other day I was working on a PowerPoint presentation, and one of the slides included a photo with a kind of cluttered looking background. Now, I can probably count the number of things that AI is genuinely good at on one hand, and context aware image editing trends to be one of them, so I decided to click the Copilot button that Microsoft now has built directly into PowerPoint and see what happens. A chat window popped up and I concisely explained what I wanted it to do: “please remove the background from the photo on slide 5.” It responded on that infuriating obseqious tone that they all have and assured me that it would be happy to help with my request just as soon as I uploaded my presentation.

What?

The chatbot running inside an instance of PowerPoint with my presentation open is asking me to “upload” my presentation? I explained this to it, and it came back with some BS about being unable to access the presentation because a “token expired” before requesting again that I upload my presentation. I tried a little longer to convince it otherwise, but it just kept very politely insisting that it was unable to do what I was asking for until I uploaded my presentation.

Eventually I gave up. The photo wasn’t that bad anyway.

In case you’re wondering how to get a list of all the apps installed on your phone, these instructions worked for me https://www.javathinking.com/blog/how-to-get-the-list-of-all-apps-on-android-device-using-terminal/

I just wrote a quick script to check my list against the google doc. The official Merriam Webster app and the official Letterboxd app both got flagged.

Every time I see a headline like this I’m reminded of the time I heard someone describe the modern state of AI research as equivalent to the practice of alchemy.

Long before anyone knew about atoms, molecules, atomic weights, or electron bonds, there were dudes who would just mix random chemicals together in an attempt to turn lead to gold, or create the elixir of life or whatever. Their methods were haphazard, their objectives impossible, and most probably poisoned themselves in the process, but those early stumbling steps eventually gave rise to the modern science of chemistry and all that came with it.

AI researchers are modern alchemists. They have no idea how anything really works and their experiments result in disaster as often as not. There’s great potential but no clear path to it. We can only hope that we’ll make it out of the alchemy phase before society succumbs to the digital equivalent of mercury poisoning because it’s just so fun to play with.

TBH I just use the Feeder app on my phone. Fully self-contained. No account, no server, no middleman of any kind. Just the app.

I’ve been meaning to set up something more elaborate, but this really does work fine, and I like to mention it in these threads for anyone who’s interested in RSS but thinks it’s a big lift to set up. It can be complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Download an app and start adding publications that interest you. That’s all it takes to get started.

Time to quote Dan Olson again. This was originally written about NFTs, but just replace “crypto” with “AI” and it’s still 100% relevant:

When you drill down into it, you realize that the core of the crypto ecosystem … is a turf war between the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy. Techno fetishists who look at people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, billionaires that have been minted via tech industry doors that have now been shut by market calcification, and are looking for a do-over, looking to synthesize a new market where they can be the one to ascend from a merely wealthy programmer to a hyper wealthy industrialist.

From the incomparable line goes up

I feel the same way about AI as I felt about the older generation of smartphone voice assistants. The error rate remains high enough that i would never trust it to do anything important without double checking its work. For most tasks, the effort that goes into checking and correcting the output is comparable to the effort I would have spent to just do it myself, so I just do it myself.