There is no way to be sure. Either case, it can be a case of Hanlon’s razor. “Never attribute to malice [in this case: baiting] what can sufficiently be explained by stupidity”.

Amongst the apps mentioned as bloated on Windows were Teams, Discord (major offender) and WhatsApp. The latter is a curious case because a Universal Windows app existed (now being deprecated I guess?) that was more memory efficient than the Web wrapper.

And in case, someone in interested there is a terminal client for WhatsApp (and Telegram) called nchat. Sure, it is not at feature parity with web client (images is a big problem, for obvious reasons) but the simple fact that a third party client taking so little resources exists is a damning indictment of Meta. It shows that resource efficient clients are possible (provided the parent company junks the metaverse).

It is a generic one at a forum. The screenshot is from the comment section of Windows Latest site.

Back in the day on Reddit, some subs had a rule where names had to be blurred or removed. Since then, it is reflex for me to just cut out the author’s name (not that it mattered in this specific case).

First NSA started snooping, but I didn’t care because it did not affect me.

Then Israel started snooping, but I didn’t care because I was not the target.

Then India followed in the footsteps but I didn’t speak and instead tacitly supported it.

And then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.

state-owned cyber security app that cannot be deleted

I think it’s called malware.

Sheer uselessness. It will do as much to reduce fraud as the UK law has done to reduce porn content for non adults. What it will mean is that people with multiple SIM, will need to have an always active plan on that number, something telecoms will really like.

Also, it essentially means the death knell for WhatsApp Web (in India) because as stated in article, who wants to log in every SIX hours.

This isn’t new. Just search for Glance. US/EU users may not have heard of this but entry level smartphones in India have long come bundled with this piece of spam, irrespective of OEM. From Chinese manufacturers to even Samsung/Motorola was guilty of bundling this.

Last I heard of Glance, they had embraced AI (because why not?). Either case, it was nothing more than an ad infested bloatware and whilst possible to toggle on/off (default state was on), removing it was usually tougher (if at all possible via adb, I am not sure of this part).

Glance walked so Nothing could run :p

The web is designed for humans to use, so if Atlas can monitor us - how we book train tickets for example - it can learn how to better navigate these kinds of processes.

That is called malware. Or at the very least, Open AI should be paying the users for basically getting their browsing data for free, not other way around.

Second, I object to it being called a Google killer in the article. It is based on Chromium whose future is basically in Google’s hands right now for all Intents and purposes. The days of multiple Web browsers are gone. We have the same thing in new clothing. Opera ditched it’s rendering engine for Chromium, MS ditched Trident for Chromium.

Currently, there are basically only three real browser engines : Chromium, Gecko which powers Firefox Derivatives and Safari(Blinkit? I am not sure of its exact name). Even if Open AI’s new browser (or Perplexity 's for that matter) takes market by storm, they will remain dependent on Google because the underlying code is. They can’t be truly independent unless they have their separate engine. And if the new Ladybird project shows one thing, it is that shipping a new browser might be easy, but a new rendering engine is very tough.

Feel free to DM.

I wasn’t expecting tommydan from YouTube to be mentioned here :p. Best of all he does, what companies themselves couldn’t do, maintain the original aspect ratio. I remember that Shemaroo restored certain old Hindi films but the original aspect ratio for them was 4:3 whilst the restored ran into 16:9.

In fact, I have been seeing the odd old Hindi film from an unexpected source. The Russian site Ok. I am still not sure if it is a social media site or not since the English UI is not there for me but for all Intents and purposes, it is used to upload videos only. Some guy ended up uploading whole filmography of Rajesh Khanna on the site (much of it mirrored later to Archive.org). Whilst the irony remains that there is probably not a single legal hub to see the lesser known films.

Heck, I was hunting an out of print (like literally unavailable to stream or purchase anywhere short of anyone having the original CD/DVD) 1996 film and the only way was to pirate it (from a single source).

In some cases, piracy becomes an act of media preservation ( cues back to when BBC wiped some Doctor Who episodes in the late sixties and only way few were gotten back was because some folks had gotten audio transcribed or something at home).

From Kinks to Camel to obscure Krautrock stuff like Dissidenten, Out of Focus, Embryo. Ironically I have < 50 Hindi songs in my collection because the era I like the most [50s - 60s], good quality stuff is hard to come by. Like the files even on Soulseek or torrents are so incredibly compressed that it is a pity. The vocals sound so tinny that one wonders that how did the original masters sounded like.

I didn’t knew foobar2000 was available for mobile as well. I only knew it because it was so popular as a lightweight modular player for Windows. I used to be on Strawberry, a Clementine fork on Linux before moving to Deadbeef, which is like Foobar2000 but misses few features.

It is law of diminishing marginal utility. There would be more sonic distinguishness between a 64 kbps and a 128 kbps file, than say when making the same upgrade to 256 kbps. It becomes less and less obvious as one approaches 44.1 kHz/16 bit flac (beyond which it is useless to hoard unless one is mastering the albums themselves).

I have a DAC paired with Sennheiser IE 600 which is not audiophile level, but ought to be decent enough.

Either case, my point was not about audio quality and whether or not a person can distinguish a flac from say, 320 kbps mp3. Countless threads are made on that and viewpoints presented. My argument was that YouTube Music does not present first, to stream music in high quality and second, even if the quality was indistinguishable, there is no way to manage a library since most of the desktop third party clients remain without login.

Once can stream audio from YouTube via terminal on Linux but problem is all of that is limited to 128 kbps AAC. There is no way to stream proper 256 kbps AAC that YouTube Music Premium provides. One can download such streams via yt-dlp (it needs to be given authorization cookies) but there is currently no way to stream high quality audio from YouTube without using the webpage.

Could you tell me an alternative that allows for third party clients? On Spotify, I can configure a terminal client even on Linux and stream music with very low overhead [contrast with YTMusic with required a permanent browser tab opened]. Yes, local media streaming can do that but there is only so much space at one time on my HDD.

I heard of it. It is shipping in two variants, right? I just hope it makes general availability worldwide and not just a handful of countries (looks at Fairphone).

Pocketcasts really is trying folks towards it’s subscription driven model though I have no qualms with the UI. AntennePod relies on gPodder service to sync but that is slow and clunky sometimes.

There is Podcast Republic as well I think, which is still a one time purchase.

I didn’t even try using YTM as a podcast client. Streaming music players doubling as podcast players always have a hindrance (but at Atleast Amazon Music has some ad free content from Wondery in some regions in case one is a Prime subscriber).

AntennePod is a good FOSS alternative whilst Pocketcasts is a decent cross platform one (but the latter basically is subscription based if one wants desktop and watch playback which is a downer).

Podcasts was good. Lightweight, cross platform and basic. YTM is a sink hole as a podcast alternative.

Apple Podcasts lives on as a far superior alternative whilst Google has left it’s users in the lurch. In an alternate world, Google would still be developing Podcasts not only on mobile but also on Wear OS

I moved to weechat. It is terminal only. I had setup some keybindings either ways on hexchat to navigate faster via keyboard between channels / servers and weechat can replicate them (albeit it takes a little time to read documentation in this case). Many folks also are hard on users of irssi but weechat met my simplistic needs.

Not to mention almost any distro will have a packaged version of weechat in its repos.