Did it solve these issues with delivering Matrix instant messenger notifications and emails right away? And what’s the internet browsing and occasional social media doomscrolling experience? I don’t think the Librem5 hardware is substantially faster than my Pinephone? So I suppose it’s similar to mine with a Firefox which is rudimentarily optimized for touch but then the 3GB of RAM and slow processor make it somewhat not nice to use? Can you listen to a podcast via standard bluetooth headphones and there’s still some juice in the battery after 90mins? I’d love to try it. Especially if they solved those annoying issues. But seems the PureOS Pinephone ports have all been abandoned a few years ago…

Yes, good job at explaining the app lifecycle. I brushed over it because I had no idea how to phrase it in a concise way. And it’s really the million papercuts that stopped me from using the Pinephone. I tried.

Connected standby is already somewhat possible […]

Yes, it’s a very crude way, though. In practice I never got the messages from my wife to bring milk on my way home. I’d read them a few hours later in the evening after unlocking and tinkering with the device. What worked well is tell people to send SMS or call, because that reliably wakes up the device. But then people forgot they were supposed to communicate with me like in the 1990s.

[…] sandboxing and permissions figured out pretty well with Flatpak […]

We do. That’s how some modern distros like Fedora Silverblue work. But then it’s somewhat problematic with phones. These packages are supposed to come directly from the various upstream projects. And then the phone distros can’t patch them any more to deal with the peculiarities with the inconsistent ecosystem. So we’d either need to have a good platform first and all agree on it, or repackage everything in a way unalike how Flatpak is done today. And then it fills up storage fast with all the runtimes and dependencies and a phone has limited storage available.

I think hardware wise, that leads us to re-invent the laptop. Not a phone by any means. We need a large SSD for all the Flatpaks, lots of RAM to keep the software running in the background and a large battery stapled to it because none of it is energy-efficient enough.

It ain’t easy… I think we’re making (slow) progress, though.

Phone quality on my Pinephone is nice except when it isn’t. We have a largely Free Software baseband running on the modem. You can tell it to run a high samplerate and it does VoIP and 4G. On the flipside it doesn’t always work and there were issues with additional stuff like echo cancellation, which then takes away from the experience. Openmoko was great as well. I think it was so very open, people could do silly things with the phone network. But then it’s old tech by now and the 2G (GSM) phone network is obsolete and they turned off the cell towers in most areas by now. And I think the software on it didn’t really translate to the phone generations after that. Afaik the entire software stack didn’t carry over and we’re using different dialers, messengers, calendars etc now.

Nice Thinkpad! I recently installed Linux Mint Debian Edition on one of the more recent Thinkpads. But the other suggestions here are fine as well. Mind an older Laptop with a spinning harddisk inside might not be as snappy as a people expect these days.

And the software side of it is the really annoying part. We’re missing so many components: Connected standby, an app lifecycle management, maybe sandboxing and a detailed, user-facing permission system. And then we need to go ahead and rewrite all the important Linux software to use these (not yet existing) interfaces.

I own a Pinephone, and I feel the Linux phone is within reach since the Nokia 900 (and its predecessors) and that was in 2009, so 16 years now. I believe any effort is very welcome, though. We badly need a good and free operating systems for this important device we all carry around and use hundreds of times each day.

Not sure about the guides, but there are entire distributions specifically made for this: https://www.thinstation.org/

Wow, is that better or worse than a president making up tariffs with Grok AI? And police force experimenting with these predictive policing technology and contracting with Palantir? Probably fits with the military, as war is often not very humane to begin with… But all of this aligns in a very dystopian way.

I’ve heard they have government-approved VPN providers. And companies there use VPNs for their job. They’ll also do business on platforms which are blocked on the regular Chinese internet. Of course business is guided by the communist party so you might have someone keeping an eye on your company VPN (mis)use. People who went there told me they’re more lenient with foreigners. Your European/American company’s corporate VPN might work well, you might also experience connections being dropped and the Great Firewall messing with it. And there are some attempts at circumventing blockage, like TOR’s Snowflake, though all of this is a cat and mouse game, some (illegal) thing works for a while and then they shut it down and you’ll move to the next one. Though as a citizen of an oppressive regime you’d better think twice before engaging in a cat and mouse game with authorities.

I think there’s more low quality than just the basic print with all the wrinkles and creases in it. For once the head is “painted” realistically, the shirt is a slightly different style and then the hands and legs are yet another style. There’s some obvious AI artifacts and it didn’t fool people, seems they were able to tell.

And then with real art there’s some layers to it. It’d have a deeper meaning, tell us something about the people depicted, or society at times or how they’d like to portray it. Or there’s an entire interesting story about the artist, what kind of struggles they had… At least it’d invoke some astonishment in somebody. And I don’t think there’s any of that with this picture. That’s just the “empty plate” in-your-face meaning. Some children don’t have food. But doesn’t seem to me, the picture in itself tells more to the audience, or makes them think about what the statement might be, wonder what it’s trying to express, or make them question anything. And that’d be what turns art into art.

At least that’s my take on the definition of quality in art. I mean people put a bathtub out there along with some butter and it’s art. Or paint a canvas black and be done with it. On the other hand I can take a visually appealing photo of me with my smartphone and it wouldn’t be art. So in this case I don’t think quality is concerned with the visual aspect of it in the first place.

Could be performance art. But people did that before. Sneak into a museum and put something up. So it’s not an original idea.

“The work isn’t about disruption. It’s about participation without permission,” he said.

And I think the “without permission” holds true on several levels. I mean on the one hand they just put it up. And doing it with AI adds another level on top. I mean the AI companies are known for not asking for permission when they train their generative AI models. But I don’t see this being discussed in the article. It’d probably be the only thing turning this into some form of art. An AI picture in itself certainly isn’t art. Also like how the paper is wrinkled and it doesn’t look good at all and “empty plate” is just a shallow in your face meaning and even I can tell how there isn’t any art or deeper meaning to it. And most people I know who are close to art, and they’re musicians or properly draw stuff as a hobby aren’t really pro AI, I don’t think I’ve ever seen them use AI or mix it into their works.

Didn’t they just release their Ryzen AI Software as a preview for Linux? I think that was a few days ago. I don’t know about the benchmarks as of today, but seems they’ve been working on drivers, power reporting, toolkit and have been mainlining stuff into the kernel so the situation improves.

I think CUDA (Nvidia) is still dominating the AI projects out there. The more widespread and in-use projects sometimes have backends for several ecosystems and they’ll run on Nvidia, AMD or Intel or a CPU. Same for the libraries which build the foundation. But not all of them. And most brand-new tech-demos I see, are written for Nvidia’s CUDA. And I’ll have to jump through some hoops to make it work on different hardware and sometimes it works well, sometimes it’s not optimized for anything but Nvidia hardware.

It’d be a really bad situation. I mean we rely on VPNs and tunnels a lot. For half the people doing home-office, logging into the company’s VPN is the first thing in the morning. Field crew relies on them. That’s an additional layer of protection in the ATM of your bank…

It’d wreck half the economy in the process. Or “they” need to outlaw specific things. Like private VPNs. And gather a list of private VPN providers and ban them via a great firewall. That’s possible. And would make life worse in a country. It’s possible to circumvent these measures. And it’s difficult to discern traffic and distinguish VPN traffic from other encrypted traffic so the country might want to implement some harsh measures as well. A police force knocking on people’s doors if they suspect them to evade law and demand they show their computer and smartphones.

So in conclusion your best option is probably to move to a different place if you can afford to, once that becomes reality. (Edit: Maybe your best option is to protest this, do campaigns, call your representative and try to stop it. So we dont get into this situation in the fist place.)

Uh, bummer. Thanks. Btw I think FEP-1b12 is the very abstract concept on how to address things to a group. I suppose we should have a working implementation of it in almost all current Fediverse software that deals with groups. The interesting part would be to specify the content that gets delivered like the chat messages this project is concerned with. Or how they’re sorted, or how these groups are presented or the additional multimedia functionality.

Lol, I was just adding the youtube video I watched yesterday to my previous comment: Can I Confuse Police AI Cameras? about road safety cameras in Australia(?), and seems they use some amount of processing power. Or human oversight. At least he doesn’t get a ticket in the end. But that was just a mostly humorous take on a similar thing. Thx for the video on Flock cameras.

Sure. I mean realistically we need something for real-world application, like sunglasses form factor with the category “innocent citizen doing harmless stuff” or “criminal” taped to it, to fool the systems which are currently being rolled out. But I have no clue what amount of computing power they use for license plate readers or to spy on the pedestrians in the city center / mall / train station / bad neighborhood or wherever these AI cameras are being used.

Nice idea. Unfortunately this doesn’t fool ChatGPT… “The picture shows an apple with a piece of paper taped to it that says “iPod.” It’s a visual joke: the apple is being humorously labeled as an “iPod” (since Apple makes iPods), creating a pun.”

Thanks, yeah seems they in fact have the boilerplate code there to handle the basics of ActivityPub. But all the complicated and difficult stuff is missing. And that’d be the majority of the effort.

Is there some documentation / specification for the ActivityPub part of it? I’d like to see how these messages, channels and groups get exchanged from a programmer’s / protocol perspective.

What’s the encryption and signing on a hardware level for? I mean dependent on what’s that good for and who controls it, it’s trusted computing, or treacherous computing as Stallman calls it…

(I mean it’s not working out great for GrapheneOS either. Back in the day I had a phone I owned, with privacy features added and alternative background services so I had a pretty much Google-free experience. These days it’s all locked down, I hand out my private metadata to Google, can barely ride a train without, or get a discount in the supermarket. I can’t do backups and I’m f***ed if I want to cross a border to a more restrictive country because these guys are in on it as well. They’re probably going to use it to limit what I can install. And more and more manufacturers lock down bootloaders etc and I thought we were past this. Graphene itself advised me to switch to proprietary code in the name of security and they’ll have a look at the code later, once Google eventually releases it. All of this is due to (or related to) these security measures working way too well and that’s also why they’re being used. I wish my phone didn’t have a TPM but a simple disk encryption like LUKS on Linux instead. And I don’t see many reasons why we should copy these very bad dynamics.)

I think the overall idea is nice, though. We had these project ideas to just plug in a box and be self sufficient in the self-hosting community since the SheevaPlug. Or the FreedomBox. There are some hardware projects as well like the Home Assistant Green or back in 2019 they tried to sell a Pioneer-FreedomBox. None of those match exactly with your proposal, but I think they’re pretty close. Maybe get in touch with them and see if you can participate in a new iteration, or read about their past experience with the proposed target audience. Especially FreedomBox seems like a good fit to me. They’re not very loud, but afaik still around. And they’re Free Software nerds, which seems to align with your idea, minus the locking it down and transferring control to other parties via the TPM.

Yeah, I’d be willing to partially blame that on the users. If you’re using some big advertisement company’s product as your portal to the digital world, that’s on you. Similar for other data-harvesting companies like OpenAI.