Right. It’s different in that it lacks Google Framework Service, and adds a bunch of privacy controls, like additional quick toggles to control the cameras, and microphone, the way other Android can quick toggle the flashlight and location servcies and bluetooth.

The biggest thing is substantially more granular per app permissions, controlled from a calentral interface in settings.

Nice write up.

I feel like everyone under-sells the speed difference, though. I haven’t seen performance differences this impressive from an OS switch in many years.

For those that know the feeling of switching a tired old x86 to Linux and getting a peppy performant device - this is better.

Maybe it just feels better from being a pocket device, or maybe my last phone was more deeply bogged down with vendor crap than I can fathom.

Either way, my affordable older Pixel is running GrapheneOS substantially more responsive for daily tasks than the most expensive phones I have ever bought before.

Return the internet to the pre-“smart” phone era, in which a minimum bar of effort and knowledge needed to be present in order to connect and participate on the web.

Yeah. I think that’s happening now. The public will discover the Fediverse, but I’m not sure if they’ll be welcomed into every community here.

History tells us there’s also a release valve of a swift brick to the side of the head, one brick per billionaire.

It sounds messier than paying taxes, to me. But I’m not a billionaire, so I can’t say I understand their motives.

This is particularly interesting, since modern organizational theory tells us that Boeing’s primary customers would be much better off with a shift in power toward Boeing’s workers, away from it’s current leadership.

Purchasers of huge airplanes cannot afford to purchase airplanes built under leadership that cuts corners the way Boeing’s leadership lately has.

The striking workers may have an unusual ally here - in Boeing’s customer base, which notably includes the US Government and parts of it’s Armed Forces.

This is a good list. Another, often overlooked is:

Sometimes we just get incredibly unlucky and interview at the same time as someone wildly unusually more qualified.

I setup a mail forward, and check the ‘to’ address to all incoming messages for about a year.

Some other good answers already but here’s a sound byte version:

It’s currently expensive to borrow money, and then the borrowed money isn’t as useful as it used to be.

People will assume you work on Cybersecurity.

Edit: Also, people will use this method to verify an email is from you.

Interesting! I learned something here. Thank you.

Interesting bit from Wikipedia:

Had Metternich not stood in the way of “progress”, Austria might have reformed, dealt better with its problems of nationality, and the First World War might never have happened.[94] Instead, Metternich chose to fight an overwhelmingly fruitless war against the forces of liberalism and nationalism.[95] Heavy censorship was just one of a range of repressive instruments of state available to him that also included a large spy network.[72] Metternich opposed electoral reform, criticising Britain’s 1832 Reform Bill.[96] In short, he locked himself into an embittered battle against “the prevailing mood of his age”.[97]

Sounds familiar. He’s certainly not the last person to do so…

Lol. Thank you. Sometimes when rational thought and optimism are at ods, I choose optimism.

• The largest e-commerce platform in latin america and the most used in my country requires FR to use it.

I minimize my use of the largest eCommerce platform in my country. It’s a pain, but it can be done, and I feel good about my money going to organizations that better match my values.

• The bank is now pressing me to use their app with FR as a 2fa when using homebanking from its website, something that wasn’t necessary up to some weeks ago.

Sounds like a great opportunity to check into joining a credit union. All banks are predatory. There’s lots of other great reasons to minimize your exposure to banks.

• The telecoms demands FR from now on if you want a new SIM card in case you lost your phone or it’s been stolen.
• The government is in the same direction as it’s moving to digitalizing many burocratic procedures and also requires FR.

I imagine you may be stuck with these. Sometimes we can’t win them all.

I wouldn’t take that as a reason to give up. Having your face on file in fewer places is very lively to save you future headaches.

Ideally this will be less of a concern in the future, when the vast majority of organizations no longer have utter shit for Cybersecurity.

But that day is not today.

I mean some of us aren’t programmers…

I think…

… Looks around…

…yet.

Isn’t this still engineering a solution?

If we drop the word “engineering”, we can focus on the point - geometry is another case where rote learning of repetition can do a pretty good job. Clever engineers can teach computers to do all kinds of things that look like novel engineering, but aren’t.

LLMs can make computers look like they’re good at something they’re bad at.

And they offer hope that computers might someday not suck at what they suck at.

But history teaches us probably not. And current evidence in favor of a breakthrough in general artificial intelligence isn’t actually compelling, at all.

Sometimes even researchers reach new results by having a machine verify many cases

Yes. Computers are good at that.

So far, they’re no good at understanding the four color theorum, or at proposing novel approaches to solving it.

They might never be any good at that.

Stated more formally, P may equal NP, but probably not.

Edit: To be clear, I actually share a good bit of the same optimism. But I believe it’ll be hard won work done by human engineers that gets us anywhere near there.

Ostensibly God created the universe in Lisp. But actually he knocked most of it together with hard-coded Perl hacks.

There’s lots of exciting breakthroughs coming in computer science. But no one knows how long and what their impact will be. History teaches us it’ll be less exciting than Popular Science promised us.

Edit 2: Sorry for the rambling response. Hopefully you find some of it useful.

I don’t at all disagree that there’s exciting stuff afoot. I also think it is being massively oversold.

Great question.

is there any legit reason anyone should learn advanced coding techniques?

Don’t buy the hype. LLMs can produce all kinds of useful things but they don’t know anything at all.

No LLM has ever engineered anything. And there’s no sparse (concession to a good point made in response) current evidence that any AI ever will.

Current learning models are like trained animals in a circus. They can learn to do any impressive thing you an imagine, by sheer rote repetition.

That means they can engineer a solution to any problem that has already been solved millions of times already. As long as the work has very little new/novel value and requires no innovation whatsoever, learning models do great work.

Horses and LLMs that solve advanced algebra don’t understand algebra at all. It’s a clever trick.

Understanding the problem and understanding how to politely ask the computer to do the right thing has always been the core job of a computer programmer.

The bit about “politely asking the computer to do the right thing” makes massive strides in convenience every decade or so. Learning models are another such massive stride. This is great. Hooray!

The bit about “understanding the problem” isn’t within the capabilities of any current learning model or AI, and there’s no current evidence that it ever will be.

Someday they will call the job “prompt engineering” and on that day it will still be the same exact job it is today, just with different bullshit to wade through to get it done.

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you’re wrong.

I’m a fan of powerful assistive solutions, but I’m not comfortable with something closed source and proprietary running this intimately.

There’s likely some outright criminals who can’t easily send their dirty traceable money into politics directly to buy favors. Seems to me that this helps “solve” that.

I, personally, imagine high odds of a combination of:

• overt intentional crime happening in un-subtle ways
• disallusioned operational staff with no real reason for loyalty
• failure to stop at various “don’t do this or we will get caught” lines

If I were any kind of federal investigator, I would look into this with great interest.

He can live out his remaining time in Russia as a wanna-be oligarch, and Putin will treat him like a leader-in-exile

Yep. Except that’s only until he runs his mouth and has a tragic fall from a window.

If I where to place a bet, I would say 3 months, tops.

Yeah! They missed investing with several known fraudsters already. Sure is lucky that yet another one is here to fill the gap!