I’m also on Mastodon as https://hachyderm.io/@BoydStephenSmithJr .
I agree with all your points, BUT I do think Signal could be slightly less “user-hostile” with the reminders, maybe?
I get annoyed at the pop-ups in my Linux system, too, and all of them are got similarly legitimate reasons. Getting the way of my current task (or worse stealing focus) doesn’t ever seem like the “right” way for computers/tools to behave.
Proton has the disadvantage of having to work with other email services as well, so there’s protocol limitations. When mailing from one Proton mailbox to another, they do intentionally avoid SMTP for this reason, but Signal has the advantage of “owning” the whole protocol, too.
I imagine if you donate with a CC to Signal, they might also be forced to turn that over. The weakness is not in Signal or Proton, but in the Visa/Mastercard duopoly and CC processing in general. Cryptocurrency has some advantages here, but they are outweighed by the abuse, fraud, speculation, and general dishonestly (and just general failure to be good currencies for “normal” purchases.)
I’d imagine there have been more nonsensical (than AI = public domain) legal decisions that have had the full force of law for decades.
I recently dug around for a while, and if the copyright of works in the training data affects the copyright of outputs, no popular model can output anything that would even be close to acceptable for a contribution to an open-source project. Maybe if you trained a model exclusively on “The Stack” (NOT “The Pile”) and then included all the required attributions – but no ready-made model does that. All of the “open source” model frameworks that I could find included some amount of proprietary “pre-training” data that would also be an issue.
If AI output is NOT affected by the copyright of training data… there might not BE a (legal) person that can hold any copyrights over it, which is pretty close to public domain.
I was a professional, and I didn’t have a backup of my personal system for about 2 decades. I just didn’t have another 4TiB of storage to copy my media library onto. I’m now on backblaze, but there was a long time there when I did not have a backup even tho I knew better.
Also, even in a professional setting, I’ve seen plenty of “production support” systems that didn’t have a backup because they grew ad-hoc, weren’t the “core business”, and no one both recognized and spoke up about how important they were until after some outage. There’s virtually never a test-restore schedule with such systems, so the backups are always somewhat suspect anyway.
It’s very easy to find you (or your organization) without a backup, even if you “know better”.
Fidelity, Banks, Coinbase (before I got out of cryptocurrency entirely).
But, basically, only when government regulation does (or SHOULD) impose KYC requirements.
Age and ID verification might be good in a very few cases, but it should definitely be a deviation from the norm.
Also, my preference shouldn’t matter to anyone else. If you want to increase your proof assistant skill (even from nothing), I suggest lean. Probably the same if you want to increase programming skill in a dependently typed language.
Honestly, I should get more comfortable with it.
Right now, I’m spending more time in Idris. It’s not a great proof assistant, but I think it’s a lot easier to write programs in. Rocq is the real proof assistant I’ve used, but I don’t have a strong opinion on them because all the proofs I’ve wanted/needed to write where small enough to need minimal assistance. (The bare bones features that are in Agda or Idris were enough.)
Yes, I’ve written some Lean. It’s not my favorite programming language or proof assistant, but it seems to have “captured the zeitgeist” and has an actively growing ecosystem.
Yeah, software is already not as deterministic as I’d like. I’ve encountered several bugs in my career where erroneous behavior would only show up if uninitialized memory happened to have “the wrong” values – not zero values, and not the fences that the debugger might try to use. And, mocking or stubbing remote API calls is another way replicable behavior evades realization.
Having “AI” make a control flow decision is just insane. Especially even the most sophisticated LLMs are just not fit to task.
What we need is more proved-correct programs via some marriage of proof assistants and CompCert (or another verified compiler pipeline), not more vague specifications and ad-hoc implementations that happen to escape into production.
But, I’m very biased (I’m sure “AI” has “stolen” my IP, and “AI” is coming for my (programming) job(s).), and quite unimpressed with the “AI” models I’ve interacted with especially in areas I’m an expert in, but also in areas where I’m not an expert for am very interested and capable of doing any sort of critical verification.
I reject the claim that natural is good. Appeal to Nature is a common logical fallacy.
… the best kind of correct.
Are the new winners listed of the Indie Game Awards site?
I’m not going to uninstall or demand a refund, but I fully support the Indie Game Awards decision on this and will not refer to CO:E33 as a winner of any of the Indie Game Awards. I will still call it IMO the best JRPG in many years, but I thought that before it started receiving awards.
I hope this event serves to scare game studios of all sizes from the mere appearance of using AI at ANY scale or part of the process. Hell, I hope it causes the whole damn bubble to burst, but it’s just not that important.
Honestly, I don’t even like using the word “cheat” to describe customizing a single-player gaming experience in a way not blessed by the developers. Terrafirmacraft (and maybe even just Gregtech) isn’t cheating at Minecraft; certainly the experience isn’t “easier”.
So, yes, I will play the game is whatever way makes for the most fun for me, whether that’s “cheating” or not to you.
For experiences that aren’t single-player, including (e.g.) anything with a global leaderboard (even at third-party one), I can understand why someone might choose to cheat, but I think I could deny myself those temptations. But, I’ve never been a “simple” cheat away from the top of a leaderboard or any other sort of acclaim or reward.
Enshittification will continue until morale improves.
The first one does tell you how to “completely remove Gemini from your smartphone” under that heading. I do not have the Gemini app installed.
The second one says:
Can you fully disable Gemini on Android?
No, and that’s by design. While you can turn off activity tracking, revoke permissions, and even uninstall the Gemini app on some devices, Google is actively replacing its Assistant app with Gemini.
But, I’ve also disabled Google Assistant across all applications, so I don’t share data with Gemini/Assistant. I had to lose some features to do so.
Overall, your reply serves to confirm for me that I have disabled Gemini on both of my Android devices. Still, I appreciate the links!
Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me either way. There IS a lot of telemetry and other BS that is definitely still on my phone, included in OS updates, and not uninstallable (I can “uninstall updates”, but that would also give me back any security issues). But, I don’t think that it is Gemini, or at least predates that naming convention.
To get free of Google telemetry, I’d have to install a non-Google ROM, and I haven’t ever tried that.
Telemetry certainly can be abused, and Google should be legally (by regulation) required to provide a simple opt-out. BUT, telemetry really is a fairly normal thing to include in “web-scale” deployments and is primarily used to discover issues that have escaped into production without affecting a testing environment–or, at least, that what the telemetry systems I’ve interacted with as an software developer were for. So, I’m not too worried about non-personalized data collection.
EDIT: I confirmed that Google says I have no Gemini activity to delete, so while I’m sure my phone is reporting stuff, it’s not to Gemini.
Do you have some sort of evidence for this claim?
Android and desktop. I’m no UX designer, so I don’t know what the ideal is, but when I’m using the software with a purpose, anything that gets in the way of that purpose is (at best) an annoyance. I’m probably wrong, but I think I’d prefer a passive notification to verify pin / donate / whatever that triggers after/as I leave Signal for something else – a indicator I’m done with my purpose (albeit flawed; maybe I just need to copy info from FF or whatever.)