James Comey pleads not guilty to criminal charges sought by Trump
James Comey trial set for Jan. 5 on charges sought by Trump
"My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump," former FBI Director James Comey said after being indicted.Dan Mangan (CNBC)
How Israel and its 'digital army' work to silence the truth about Gaza
How Israel and its 'digital army' work to silence the truth about Gaza - Ricochet
In Canada, groups weaponizing claims of media bias are being used to intimidate journalists and reshape coverage of Israel and Palestine under the quiet complicity of Canadian newsroomsZahra Khozema (Ricochet)
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You can feel this in other sites. For example, in Y Combinator’s Hacker News, most posts about the Palestinian genocide get flagged within minutes.
There’s no mad people there commenting that Israel is the people of God, because the discourse there is much more mature than most social aggregators, so the flagging is the only sign some people are watching and “sanitizing” these topics.
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in Y Combinator’s Hacker News, most posts about the Palestinian genocide get flagged within minutes
It's a programming/technology forum. It's very off-topic and I expect that kind of subject to stay away from it. The bane of the modern internet is newbies posting random stuff all over the place without RTFM and without lurking more.
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I don't give a fuck about politics or nazi regimes. Politics are off-topic on tech forums. You're deluded if you think that's my argument.
The internet is filled with noobs who think their opinion on any subject is worth spamming every forum since the 90s and that's annoying. We already had that on newsgroups in the beginning. You're not worth it. Eternal September and stuff...
The ADL nazis knows how to trigger people like you wherever you are. They are the 4chan of the politics and it works. If we banned them everywhere, their job would be useless. By arguing and downvoting me, you proved them right. Keep on talking about them if it suits you.
And right now the top ten has 7 tech links, one article about mediocre scientists advancing science, one about a very old car, and one about the Texas Stock Exchange.
All these are on-topic and actually encouraged in HN.
Listen MacFlaggy, how about you read the site’s guidelines before making such sweeping statements?
What to SubmitOn-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity.
It’s obvious in HN because of the wide range of obscure topics (eg installing scaffolding on old British smoke stacks) that occasionally arise to the front page, all the ones on that topic are quickly flagged to oblivion.
You don’t have to be a genius to see the pattern 🤷♀️
Paraglider bomb attack by Myanmar military kills at least 20 at protest
Paraglider bomb attack by Myanmar military kills at least 20 at protest
Dozens more injured by night strike on anti-government demonstration held during national holidayCarmela Fonbuena (The Guardian)
'Unprecedented dieback': Alarming report warns Earth reached 'point of no return'
'Unprecedented dieback': Alarming report warns Earth reached 'point of no return'
Less than two years after researchers at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom warned that the world was nearing numerous climate tipping points, a report out Monday warns that one such “point of no return” has already been reached, with war…Julia Conley, Common Dreams (Raw Story)
The only way I can survive all the news about Gaza is to read it as "Gazza"
Optus: Telecoms company sent emails to wrong addresses during deadly outage
Optus: Telecoms company sent emails to wrong addresses during deadly outage
The outage in Australia has been linked to four deaths as people could not reach emergency services.Kelly Ng (BBC News)
German industrial output falls to 2005 levels as auto sector craters
cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/50548487
archive.md/QW2r4
German industrial production fell back to 2005 levels in August as output in the country’s all-important car industry cratered by 18.5 per cent compared with the previous monthOverall, industrial production fell 4.3 per cent in August compared with the previous month, seasonally adjusted data showed on Wednesday. Economists had predicted a smaller drop of 1 per cent in a Reuters poll.
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Tariffs in USA and tough competition from China, means EU car manufacturing is caught between a rock and a hard place.
I know both Japan and Korea are also tough competition, but China is extra competition on top of that, and is taking marketshare from everybody else. And USA is a market where access is now somewhat denied through tariffs.
It's hard to see a scenario where EU manufacturers won't lose both global and EU marketshare. Competition now is harder than any time for the past 50 years, even the invasion of the efficient Japanese cars during the oil crisis was not this bad AFAIK.
In both cases there was a problem of increased competition, but this time there is an even worse problem with increased R&D cost and investment in producing BEV cars for the upcoming market, and ICE cars for the markets with slow uptake of BEV.
This is however a good time for consumers, because it seems car prices continue to drop, even after they've been dropping for a year now.
Sure, but they also suffer the consequences of their own focus on pushing out more and more SUV's instead of focusing on EV. Volkswagen actually made the correct choice going fully for EV's, but then backtracked under shareholder pressure. And the EU as a whole failed to protect local battery production and technology, allowing itself (although this also goes for the US, Japan and South-Korea) to become completely dependent on Chinese raw materials refinement and battery production and technology.
China on the other hand, not suffering from fair and free elections, had a much easier time keeping its eye on the ball and sticking with a coherent long term vision.
That being said, I do think it's good for Germany to become less dependent on their car industry. They have a lot of industries screaming for highly qualified employees and the car industry has been vacuuming up a majority of those. These people becoming available for other industries will provide significant benefits as well.
/s
Most of what you write I agree with, but the situation in China is absolutely not fine and dandy. (Although what they have achieved is impressive)
China has huge problems too, the competition is harsh in EU, but it's way worse in China, the competition level among BEV makers is absolutely insane. You can buy a Xiaomi SU7 for less than € 30.000,- a close equivalent to an electric Porsche Taycan, and the cheapest Taycan cost € 155.000,- And the SU7 has more features and is faster.
It would be very strange if some of the Chinese manufacturers don't go under. The government has tried to intervene to dampen the competition to make car makers and suppliers to the industry more profitable. But it seems to have had no effect.
As it is, car makers typically don't pay suppliers for ½ a year! Most suppliers can't do without the money for so long, so car manufacturers issue vouchers to them that can be traded. It's a huge credit house of cards, and more likely than not, one side will fall.
When they are in the EU market, they are absolutely here hoping to make money on a less competitive market.
I honestly feel no pity for them. As a spaniard, their cheapest offering which is usually around 20000€ is simply a rob.
I hope they get their priorities straight and forget about making SUVs
This.
Why would I buy a computer on wheels that I really don't seen to own even though I paid for it?
I'd rather buy a pre-2020 Toyota and drive it to the oblivion.
Discussion: Long-term need for automation tools for moderation
I think QoL tools for moderators need to become more of a Fediverse priority. This burns people out. Key moderators of communities quit and communities become abandoned.
Ideas :
- Automatic removal option to remove posts and/or comments for specific keywords. This would be most useful for automatically removing posts and comments when people slur. Piefed already has a keyword filter for visibility. This could be expanded to community settings. Have it also fire-off a report to the moderators when someone triggers it.
- Automatic URL removal. Allow communities to blacklist specific urls. Useful for politics or news communities that want to negate sources known for misinformation.
- Automatic removal for repeat URL posting. Very useful for politics or news communities to prevent double-posting.
- Make it so a community can set itself up to only accept text posts, video posts, or image posts. This should prevent tedious janitorial cleanup for communities that only allow links, or text posts (the most common two).
- Post Delay Restrictions. Some communities, perhaps not many, might be interested in posting cooldowns for users. So you can only post 1 post every hour, or 2 posts every hour - or whatever the chosen limit is. This would help negate spammers and over-enthusiastic posters flooding a topical community.
- Post Formatting Requirements. This one could be trickier and more effort than most of the others, but setting conditions for the formatting of new posts would be useful.
Now, not all communities would make use or have any need to make use of all of these - but many would to varying degrees - and it would help them.
I think going down this road is important to prevent moderators burning out over the drudgery of moderating communities.
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This burns people out. Key moderators of communities quit and communities become abandoned.
Are you referring to something specific? I haven't seen a trend of a lot of mods quitting, modding is just not that attractive in the first place
If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.
By now I've written four bots using the lemmy API.
Any one of your ideas is doable in a weekend if I ever feel the need for a modding bot. But I haven't. Several communities and instances already have them.
Honestly that's how it should be. Modding can have such diverse needs depending on community that just implementing every possible eventuality into lemmy itself, is a huge ask.
Any large community on discord, reddit and other platforms, make extensive use of automod bots. Because using the API, you can write bots that do whatever you can think of.
Modding is volunteer work, but it is work.
If you need tools, find them. If they don't exist, create them. If you don't have the skills or time, then don't volunteer.
Asking some volunteers to do more than they already are because you think they are letting down another set of volunteers just risks burning out a different set of volunteers.
To be clear, I'm not thinking about Lemmy here specifically. But in any case, however its done - either via the settings, or an easy to access official or officially endorsed mod-bot - access and knowledge to and of these tools should be easy and well-known for community owners.
If you need tools, find them. If they don’t exist, create them. If you don’t have the skills or time, then don’t volunteer.
Not every would-be moderator of a community has the skills or knowhow to make and/or host these things. Even Reddit now, at its size, lacks some capable tools not consistently covered in automod tools.
I'm not against any of that.
What I disagree with is that this is a priority. It's a nice-to-have.
Once mod actions are supported, and an API exists, any imaginable automation can be implemented by anyone with the impetus to do so.
As such, the priority of further integration drops drastically and platform developer attention can and should move elsewhere.
Mod tools are best created by the people who use them. Even better when they are created for the needs of a specific community. As such, more advanced features should be deferred until later.
Once communities grow large enough that there are a significant number of moderator-developers around, it might be worth creating a generic bot that can be configured as needed. (As has happened with reddit, discord, etc.)
Asking for these tools before then, is inefficient, because the people who ideally should be working on them, haven't shown up yet, and the platform developers time is better spent on other things.
In Skavau's defense, they aren't a programmer, but are probably one of the most active people on piefed's chat server/matrix room as well as the codeberg repo providing ideas and feedback. So they are volunteering time that way (in addition to being site staff for piefed.social).
Some of the ideas in this post are good imo, but are currently not possible yet using the piefed api due to it being much less complete compared to lemmy's. So, it helps us figure out prioritization on what kinds of endpoints would be useful to flesh out next.
Parola filtrata: nsfw
Indeed.
My core point is that when it comes to moderation, I would prioritize actual mod actions (such as a mod being able to mark posts nsfw instead of deleting them outright) and API support for those actions, over built-in automod features.
Once you have an API, anyone with the skills can implement whatever automation they need.
After that, I would priotize a bunch of other things, too, before ever coming back around to built-in automod features.
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There are a lot of people who make excellent mods who are not programmers. It's already a small enough pool that requiring a particular skill only further narrows the pool. It also has a secondary effect that good mods may be unwilling to take on larger communities, or additional responsibilities.
If we want better moderation, the fediverse has to become more friendly to non technical people.
That's not what I'm saying.
Obviously not everyone needs to code. Once I write a bot, it could potentially be used by anyone.
Only a small percentage of mods need to also be developers. But since that group isn't big enough yet, the solution is growth.
Not asking the platform devs to do even more. They too, are volunteers.
Automatic removal for repeat URL posting
That seems like the best of these ideas. But it would be better for the originating instance to warn the poster that their url has already been seen and stop them posting it unless they really really want to.
For the first option, if possible, having it be manually whitelisted per post/comment or user, would also be handy.
Not directly related, but I'd also like to know where and how to donate to the Lemmy devs and instances, to support the fediverse.
May I suggest instead donating to the Piefed project if you wish to donate at all - given its faster development cycle currently.
And since you're from blahaj, your own instance also has a piefed.blahaj variant.
Yes, piefed is independent in the same way as lemmy is.
Piefed has tools that Lemmy does not: Flairs, user flairs, hashtags, custom feeds/topics, scheduled posts, poll posting, events - word filters for users.
You can donate for Lemmy development through the link below. Thank you in advance 😀
The platform should provide some of these out of the box, in my opinion.
I am trying to build a new activitypub powered platform just for user scriptable moderation bots, but I am stuck on the modular federation design.
This is my third attempt now.
Well, my initial idea was to build this only for lemmy and yes it would be easier that way if I didn't care about scalability.
However, the API was not good enough for my use case.
Polling new posts and comments was my main issue with it. So mostly scaling issues.
You could miss some posts and comments. The amount of API requests would get bigger with the amount of communities the bot moderates. There are also some problems with the rate limits.
They can be solved by directly querying the database, but who's going to give you database access? So you'd have to host lemmy yourself just for the bot. And I'd imagine the database would grow pretty fast with the number of communities. I explicitly do not want to store any posts or comments.
Another solution would be using Lemmy's new webhook system, but I don't know how reliable it will be.
So I stopped halfway through and started a new project with new goals:
- Make a new federated platform
With federation, the problems above would be solved.
This also allows it to be hosted without having to find a suitable Lemmy instance for it or even self host one yourself.
- Stronger integration with platforms via a modular federation system
If I made it depend on Lemmy, a strong integration with other platforms wouldn't be possible.
Piefed has features that Lemmy doesn't, for example. People can maintain a set of platform specific activitypub structs and enable the bot to federate with that platform.
Not really answering your question, but I'd like to make a clarification: The bots will only be able to operate within the boundaries of the communities they are appointed to (or I guess groups). They cannot manage any instances. Furthermore, my main intention is for them to be used primarily as moderation bots, but they can also be used as general purpose bots within the community.
To get new posts and comments for all known communities you only need to make regular requests to /api/v3/post/list?limit=50&sort=New&type_=All and /api/v3/comment/list?limit=50&sort=New&type_=All. Its not necessary to make separate requests for each community. The default rate limit allows 180 read requests per minute so you can comfortably poll this every second (in practice every 30s or so should be enough). If you miss an item (ie post or comment id was skipped) just load the following page.
The plugin system in 1.0 would be another option. It will still take some time until that is released, but there shouldnt be any reliability issues.
Youre right that federation solves these problems, but instead you get another problem of writing all this federation code and making sure it is compatible with different platforms. Lemmy's federation code has around 12k lines so that is a lot. It seems much simpler to use the API for Lemmy, Piefed etc and write abstractions for common functionality.
Anyway this is my opinion. Its your project so in the end its your decision how to implement it.
Yep. I did use those endpoints with the ModeratorView (The bot doesn't need posts or comments from communities it doesn't moderate) on my first attempt. I went with the federation approach at last because of future scalability issues. Though that is probably an exaggeration. If the default rate limit is 180 read requests per minute, that would be more than enough, honestly. The scale at which the scalability issues I mentioned would appear at about more than 4500 comments/posts per minute. Frankly, I think we'll never reach that in the near future. So actually the rate limiting issue is practically not an issue for the foreseeable future.
The plugin system would work. The fetching problem would disappear.
Though I don't think the federation code would be huge. I am not trying to make it compatible with all platforms. For example I'll write the required Lemmy ActivityPub structs to send moderation related activities and actors. The Group's instance would handle distributing the activities, so even though this project might not federate with Piefed for example, it would still receive the activities the bot sends to the Group's inbox through the instance's software, Lemmy.
If someone wanted to get the bot to work on another Ap platform that supports groups, they would have to write the necessary Ap actors, activities, and a bit of glue code, and that would be it... or at least that's how I'm planning it.
I guess I'll try to work with the plugin system if I can't achieve what I want and keep it simple. It would at least be a learning experience, if nothing else. Thank you for the info.
With 4500 posts per minute you will probably get a lot of other scaling issues too, like with your database or the processing of incoming and outgoing activities. In any case its a good way to learn how Activitypub works. Is the code open source? Dont see it on your codeberg.
Using the plugin system you basically just need a way to get notified about each new post and comment, right? I expect that will be one of the major use cases for plugins. We will likely provide various official plugins, eg push notifications for Android and iOS. The same thing should also work for you.Version 1.0 will let you subscribe to communities to get notifications for all new posts and comments (code).
Notifications rewrite and post following (fixes #3069) by Nutomic · Pull Request #5604 · LemmyNet/lemmy
Rewrites the notification system to be more flexible and extensible Removes the tables inbox_combined, person_post_mention, person_comment_mention and comment_reply replacing them with a single not...GitHub
True. I am just mostly trying to make a record of this stuff for the future. Obviously in the event of these tools existing, mods wouldn't have to turn them on.
I definitely think there needs to be some rough guide on making your community federated and then advertising it effectively so communities can get that early kick.
there needs to be some rough guide on making your community federated and then advertising it effectively so communities can get that early kick.
We can draft something on !fedigrow@lemmy.zip
Return of Jared Kushner: Netanyahu's friend and Gulf business ally reappears for Gaza talks
Return of Jared Kushner: Netanyahu's friend and Gulf business ally reappears for Gaza talks
Among Hamas officials, Qatari and Egyptian diplomats, and a Turkish spy chief huddling for Gaza peace talks in Egypt's Sharm El-Sheikh resort is a key American interlocutor: US President Donald Trump's son-in-law.Sean Mathews (Middle East Eye)
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Trump's NPSM-7 Memo Could Enable Crackdown on Opposition
Donald Trump is upping his rhetoric about cracking down on anyone who opposes him, and his new NPSM-7 memo is a terrifying look at how he could do it.Tessa Stuart (Rolling Stone)
We require the headline match the article, in this case "Return of Jared Kushner: Netanyahu's friend and Gulf business ally reappears for Gaza talks".
Please make it match or we'll have to remove it.
Now he is one of two US interlocutors tapped with ending Israel's genocide in Gaza
Yeah, pick someone pro-genocide to end the genocide. That'll work.
EU to double steel tariffs amid influx of Chinese imports
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They're just following the same market trend thats been happening since before the 90'. You cant buy the steel from a mill cheaper than you buy the finished product from China. American manufacturing has been dead for half a century. Itll prolly happen in Europe too. So here's your get rich EU scheme: start fuckin fabricating. You buy the manufactured parts from China because the quality is really hard to fuck up when it comes to machined steel parts that ship with MTRs. You take those parts and weld them into your finished product that you sell for 100x's the actual cost to make.
All the more reason slapping tariffs on imported goods was and will go down in history as one of the fuckin dumbest economic decisions every made by any controlling power.
While expensive for the EU, tariffs on Chinese products are probably sensible.
There are a few actual sane reasons for imposing tariffs, and one of them is protecting critical industries that you can't afford to lose because doing so would expose you to greater risks. Steel, due to its impact on downstream sectors, can reasonably be taken to be one of those. Look at the pain on relying on Russia for energy and how much weaker it made the response to their invasion of Ukraine. Losing critical industries to China makes it harder to exert pressure on China in the future, and easier for them to exert it on the EU.
Germany's AfD seeks closer ties with the MAGA movement
Germany's AfD seeks closer ties to Trump and MAGA movement
Far-right Alternative for Germany's Beatrix von Storch and other party leaders seek to strengthen ties to the Trump administration with Washington visits.Hans Pfeifer (Deutsche Welle)
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They recently lost one of their top talent for effective online propaganda.
Wouldn't be surprised if they needed strategic assistance to help further rot the minds of germans.
Yeah they like it, they're a bit late to the party though. Even maga is waking up, the issue is that they have nowhere else to go, for a decade they were told that democrats are literal demons. So we need to come together and drop partisanship if we want to survive.
Look, I love Germany, I love Germans, a few of my ex girlfriends were German, my best friends are German, I used to live in Germany. But they truly, on a viscerally deep level, do not understand Americans. They don't understand our values, they don't understand our humor, they tiptoe very carefully around race-issues, but they don't understand how we can actually integrate and mix rather than maintaining strict racial neighborhoods organically, (aside from a few places, like Berlin but that's a special place) they don't understand what makes us do crazy things or why we help people we don't know, why we start conversations with strangers if we don't have some goal in talking to them. They don't understand us. And they want to use us. They see racism which basically aligns with theirs, and they hope to form an alliance, but it will never sway the American public at large. Talk all the shit you want about Americans being propagandized by FOX, it's true, but so is your country and everyone else's. Now they have to find out the hard way that deep down, and at a number much higher than any other demographic in the entire nation, we fucking hate Nazis and authoritarianism. Federal agents used to know better than to even walk into some states. That feeling never went away.
You have any guns in your house from the last time your relatives had to fight the government over authoritarian tendencies over there in Germany? I do, everyone I know does, and I'm just some dude from a small-town. We never stopped buying them, because we still remember. My grandfather REFUSED to buy a rifle if it had a registration. My grandfather on the other side was at the Ford strike where the government opened fire into the picket. He never put money into a bank even. He made sure I understood that the government is not there to help us, and he gave me his guns. My neighbor used to get drunk and let off his AK into some dead car in his back yard. There are millions of him. Millions. You'll find racists in the US, but 90% of us fucking hate them too. They're just the loudest whiniest little bitches that exist, doing their gay little color-coded marches because daddy never hugged them enough, and their crimes are heinous, so they occupy a far larger online footprint than they do in the real world. How many videos of Nazis getting rocked in the US can you find? How many videos of them backing down at the slightest resistance? How many videos of nazis rocking opponents in the US? Exactly. They are bitch-boy cosplayers who think that after their shitty homoerotic fascist state is implemented, that they can just go and take women like in caveman days. They can't get laid not because they suck, but because society precludes the natural way of doing it. (I've heard these freaks talk like that) Thing is, there's at least a 50% chance it would be a girl that smoked them in this situation. more like 80%. Everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And I've seen girls fuck up guys who look like your average y'all-queada marcher. These guys haven't been punched in the mouth enough yet. They think they want it, because any pussy can hold a gun and they assume that they are the only ones who have them, but they really, really don't. The poor fuckers need love, but they've spent their lives creating the most unlovable persona possible. So in short, they need to grow the fuck up and stop being such whiny bitches. Nobody's gonna do it for ya, not even that cool older dude at the paintball place with a lil ss sticker on his gun who invites your teenage friends to his place for practice. Ya know, the neo-n*zi militia recruiter. We know, and if we know, you better get smart before it's too late.
There might have been a time, a few years back, where they could have jumped on the train and taken advantage of the confusion, but now it's too late. Their open nazis are getting ousted and facing real legal consequences and they know they can't hold on for too much longer. Nobody gives af about Czech president, the tide has turned fully against Putin and Trumpsim, now the only issue is watching which sandcastles last the longest against the inevitable eroding flow of the social pendulum.
EDIT: Sorry, these guys rile me up. No bad vibes intended.
Missouri attorney general demands Planned Parenthood hand over abortion patient records
Missouri attorney general demands Planned Parenthood hand over abortion patient records
The office of Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway is subpoenaing patient medical records, incident reports, “adverse event documentation” and more from Planned Parenthood.Anna Spoerre (KCUR)
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Not sure about the US but where I live, all medical records need to be stored for thirty years, mostly so you have legal protection in case complications arise.
Imagine that a woman has an abortion, then years later she is pregnant again, this time with a child she wants to keep. She has a miscarriage and tries to sue the abortion clinic because she thinks they permanently damaged something during the abortion.
Also in case someone claims that a medical procedure was performed against their will or they were not informed about the risks.
And this works both ways. Because the clinics (and also all other medical professionals like midwives) must keep those records, the patients can demand them to be used as evidence to back up their claim.
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Anti-immigration politics contribute to racism in Germany
Far-right gains, economic stagnation and increased political focus on migration can be major drivers of racial discrimination in European countries such as Germany.
The ongoing political focus on migration in Germany could have spillover effects. Decades of progress in making the country more inclusive of Black people could be rolled back, Tahir Della, of the rights organization Initiative of Black People in Germany, told DW.
"We already notice that, especially when there are debates related to migration, the presence of Black people and people of African descent in Germany is called into question," Della said.
Germany, the European Union's most-populous country, has had the bloc's biggest reported increase in anti-Black racial discrimination, according to the 2023 "Being Black in the EU" report by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights.
How Black Germans fight for recognition of Nazi-era crimes
The Nazis targeted Black people living in Germany, excluding them from society through forced sterilization and denial of citizenship. Activists and historians still strive for recognition of these injustices.Okeri Ngutjinazo (Deutsche Welle)
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You're missing the fact that water wets itself*, and is thus wet. The only non-wet water is that where the molecules are far enough apart to not interact with each other. That's very hard to achieve even in the vapour phase.
* Yes, yes, I see you laughing. "It needs new underwear" ha ha ha. But seriously, though.
I was about to say that they have the causality backwards but then I thought about it and realized that it's both ways:
Racist demagogues complain about immigrants, which makes people more racist, which makes people more anti immigrant, which makes people more racist etc until everything is so fucked that fascists take over.
The only way to stop the process is to have highly influential politicians and journalists who are both ethically principled and at least as skilled at effective rhetoric as the fascist demagogues and their astroturfed echo chamber.
Which means that the US, Germany, the UK, India, Russia, Israel, and several other influential countries are COMPLETELY fucked right now.
FIX THE AI CHAT
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UK plastic waste exports to developing countries rose 84% in a year, data shows
UK plastic waste exports to developing countries rose 84% in a year, data shows
Campaigners say increase in exports mostly to Malaysia and Indonesia is ‘unethical and irresponsible waste imperialism’Karen McVeigh (The Guardian)
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Young lives cut short on an unimaginable scale: the 18,457 children on Gaza’s list of war dead
Young lives cut short on an unimaginable scale: the 18,457 children on Gaza’s list of war dead
Every name on a list compiled by health authorities in Gaza of the child victims of Israel’s offensiveGuardian staff reporter (The Guardian)
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install issues?
Hey there! Loaded POP OS to replace Windows on my daily driver:
Dell G15 5530 (I7 - NVIDIA Geforce RTX - 64GB RAM)
and it seems to brick itself? If I refresh OS everything seems to work fine. But as soon as I update UEFI firmware 480 - 20241101 it will not only not find nor update firmware, but I'm having to frequently hard reboot my machine. It might work. It then becomes unresponsive (won't load past disk encryption password, mouse stops working) until I get to the point of refreshing the OS. Rinse and repeat.
Am I doing something wrong? Is it my machine? Anyone else run into this
This post is phrased in an incredibly confusing way that doesn't make parsing the problem possible.
Please rephrase in steps to illustrate the issue you have, such as:
1) This thing
2) Then this thing
3) Then this thing
Ecuador arrests five for alleged presidential assassination attempt
Ecuador arrests five for alleged presidential assassination attempt
A large group of people threw rocks at Daniel Noboa's car, which bears "signs of bullet damage", an official says.Ione Wells (BBC News)
Chad cuts ties with wildlife charity linked to Prince Harry
Chad cuts ties with wildlife charity linked to Prince Harry
The government says the charity African Parks displayed an arrogant and disrespectful attitude.Mayeni Jones (BBC News)
King Vegeta: "Chad as in the country, the organization or the person?"
Nappa: "Yes."
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World's first resort hospital opens in gambling hub Macau
Gambling hub Macau bets on healthcare tourism
Beijing has been pushing for Macau to diversify its economy away from gaming to healthcare tourism.Osmond Chia (BBC News)
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At least 24 killed as paraglider drops bombs at Myanmar Buddhist festival
Myanmar: At least 24 killed as army paraglider bombs Buddhist festival
Locals tell the BBC the carnage has made it hard to identify victims of the military attack.BBC Burmese (BBC News)
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Myanmar's military government bomb small protest against them, with victims including children
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I'm of the view that there'd be more productive discussions if we collectively started to use the word "terrorism" in a more nuanced way that allowed for the possibility that not all terrorism is necessarily morally bad.
What got me started thinking this was that there is a character in Star Trek: Deep Space 9 who is open about the fact that she used to be a terrorist — except this was in the context of resisting a brutal occupation of her planet. I have recently been rewatching the show, and it's interesting to see how the narrative frames this as an overall morally good thing whilst also reckoning with the aspects of the resistance that were morally bad. Makes me wistful for that kind of nuance in real world discussions of violent resistance.
It might also make it easier to vehemently condemn senseless acts of state sanctioned terrorism such as this bombing. Though based on the long history of interactional inaction towards multiple genocides, that probably wouldn't make much difference.
I fly a paraglider. I was paranoid about getting shot before the Hamas attack on October 7. This just worries me more.
It's all so sad.
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Not trying to put myself or my own worries above the obvious travesty and senseless murder.
I'm just sharing my perspective and not making any political points.
I posted this story from Irrawady yesterday: lemmy.ca/post/52965387. The numbers are much higher.
Myanmar Junta Strike Kills at Least 32 on Buddhist Festival of Light
cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/52965336Several children were among at least 32 people killed and over 50 injured on Monday night when junta paragliders bombed a peaceful candlelight vigil in Sagaing Region’s Chaung-U Township.
irrawaddy.com/news/burma/myanm…
So, 32-min dead, 5 from the people who'd been providing protection, some from the non-violent group & some from the junta-resistance group,
& the rest were all just candlelight-vigil Buddhists, participating in a normal periodic festival,
AND the junta also returned to bomb again,
AND the junta also bombed other 2 other regions in the Northern Shan State, according to that story..
Given today's "journalism", I don't expect this to even exist according to the West's reporting.
For context, for people who don't follow the violences in Buddhist regions of the world, in this case I'm defaulting to siding with the Buddhists, but .. please keep in mind that the Buddhists in Sri Lanka apparently have been good a genociding Tamils, & the "Buddhists" of Pol Pot's regime certainly made effective/murderous communists, or whatever they were "identifying" as ( that country was as Buddhist as any country could be, until then, ttbomk ) .. so, same as with Africa, the only default-position that automatically is going to be right, is that line from the youtuber of Africa who tries explaining African politics/wars/genocides for the outside-world.. "it's complicated".
< digging >
brookings.edu/articles/myanmar…
Right.
So, the junta's dismantling gov't-by-the-people-for-the-people.
Their action demonstrates that they're the bad-guys, then.
That article, however, caused me to see that IF a government isn't ruling entire-regions of a country, THEN .. it shouldn't be recognized as government of those regions, should it?
Shouldn't locally-legitimate government be a global civil-right, at some point/degree of dispute?
Making international-law so the rabies that Assad was enforcing in Syria, automatically can't be treated-as "legitimate" by world governments?
( he was ethnic-minority, genociding Syria's majority, because as soon as he caved, then the ethnic-majority would be retaliating against his ethnic-minority again..
which means that the country has, objectively, to be carved into ethnic-regions, & deemed to be distinct countries, instead-of kept in its if-this-side-is-ruling-they-are-genociding-the-other/if-the-other-side-is-ruling-they-are-genociding-the-1st-side political-rabies.
Obviously, this also indicates that enforcing non-partisan gov't, UN-neutral, would be also strategic & wise, & could even prevent carving-up-countries, if held long-enough, but .. it costs outside-countries, so they aren't likely to be investing in that, are they?
but since when has either world-strategic or wisdom had ANY say in human geopolitics??
Bah and Humbug, on all this ego-driven butchery-addiction! )
_ /\ _
Myanmar’s junta doesn’t have to ‘win,’ it just has to wait
While control of many areas in Myanmar are contested, the ruling military junta does not need to control the entire country to “win”.Brookings
the “Buddhists” of Pol Pot’s regime certainly made effective/murderous communists
Your post shows a lot of errors and erroneous logic. Pol Pot wasn't "Buddhist" Pol Pot was a communist. Conflating conflicts in Sri Lanka to the conflict in Myanmar into a "violence in Buddhist regions around the world" is a logical fallacy, and intellectually stupid as can be. A brief look at your post history shows your interest in colouring every conflict into a religious one is rather disturbing.
The culture that Pol Pot was of, was Buddhist.
The country was Buddhist.
The regime took people from Buddhist culture & created that.
Cultural-roots do count.
Ideological-roots do count.
That is exactly why Trump is succeeding in his religion's possessing of the US of A: cultural-roots are leverage.
To me, the "Christians" of Trump's regime, the "Buddhists" of Pol Pot's regime ( was the country culturally communist-party, before his regime, for the 3-4 generations required, to define the culture? No? then there had to be many still "Buddhist" people in that regime ), the "Jews" of Netanyahu's regime, etc, are all playing the same game:
they are having motivation opposite-to what they are purporting to be.
That is significant, in my view.
Historically significant, & significant in whether our-kind survives this century, or not, too.
_ /\ _
I realized that my incompetence-in-communicating probably added this mis-communication:
The inquisitors were Christian, right?
The fact that what they were doing went against everything their root-guru's religion was made-of, doesn't have any bearing, to them.
Nazism is Christian, in identity.
The KKK is Christian, in identity.
Identity has deep roots.
Cambodia's Buddhist.
Has been for centuries.
Yes, I know that Pol Pot was Communist, but when you raise communism in a country as deeply Buddhist as Cambodia, .. you end-up with many of the people in the ruling-regime having "Buddhist" identity, fundamentally in them.
THAT is what I meant:
it was the underlying Buddhist-identity, that I was attacking, and not, in any way, pretending that Pol Pot was claiming Buddhism ( which not-even an idiot would claim ).
You simply can't raise an institution in any culture, without having that-culture being the underlying identity in the people of that regime.
That is why Chinese Buddhism is to me partially an oxy-moron:
Confucianism ( form/tradition/authority/establishment ) is sooo much of the bedrock of the fundamental Chinese mind, and Buddhism is the opposite ( essence, instead-of form, centered ), that the 2 modes of mind are fundamentally mutually-exclusive.
( this doesn't mean that Chinese Chan Buddhism is somehow worthless: it's got some excellent insights for us!
However, if one is working at dissolving-beyond-form, then being fundamentally of the form-and-establishment-and-authority-are-LORD religion that Confucianism is, & I've linked on other sites to a pair of legal-cases which show Confucianism's bedrock instinct..
both in Japan & in China, both Confucian-culture ( Japan's fundamentally more Buddhist & also Shinto ), people have been convicted of murders that they confessed-to, .. and then the person they'd "murdered" returned to town, or was found alive.
In Confucian culture, authority is the LORD.
Authority beating people into confessing is "valid" ( and cost authority some "face" in those cases, when accountability came knocking ), for authority to do.
In OUR culture due-process is more real, in Confucian culture .. it inherently isn't.
Same with truly-Buddhist cultures, like Cambodia.
Any truly-Buddhist culture which is temporarily ( for a few generations ) highjacked by some physicalist/materialist ideology .. the underlying identites of the people staffing the regime is going to remain rooted in the underlying-culture, isn't it?
That goes all ways, not just to the traditional-religions, it goes to moneyarchy, it goes to legalism-archy, it goes to physicalism's religion, it goes to fundamentalist-atheism, it goes to all axiom-based, system-of-meaning that rejects falsification
( which is my definition of "religion" ).
You can't instantly get the underlying identity out, no matter how you change the apparent identity: it takes generations to do that.
( the Soviet Union lasted long-enough to change the fundamental-underlying-identity in people, not completely, but significantly )
So, you've proven I'm incompetent at communicating:
I meant underlying identity, underneath the party-affiliation or otherwise "flag carrying" "identity",
but I appeared to mean something fundamentally-different.
Typical..
My inability to think the way proper, acceptable, valid, western-minds think, keeps creating miscommunications & problems.
That isn't likely to cease, as long as I continue earning more-complete understanding, instead of remanufacturing me to make me be acceptably-conforming/"belonging"/etc.
That underlying-level & surface-level both affect outcomes, is to me sooo obvious as to be automatically-assumed.
Normals don't assume any such thing.
Incompetence-at-communicating can have many causes.
_ /\ _
Malaysia rejects Fifa accusations it forged players’ citizenship and says it will appeal sanctions
Malaysia rejects Fifa accusations it forged players’ citizenship and says it will appeal sanctions
Malaysia’s football association says it will appeal Fifa sanctions and fine after seven players on national team suspended for one yearIma Caldwell (The Guardian)
Burning down the house: Milei plays rock star as Argentina economy crashes
Burning down the house: Milei plays rock star as Argentina economy crashes
Facing protests and scandal, Argentina’s ‘rock star president’ performs in Buenos Aires, saying: ‘I’m human’Facundo Iglesia (The Guardian)
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There are 3 categories of game:
- Positive-Sum game: win-win alliance
- Zero-Sum game: competitive-narcissism
- Negative-Sum game: competitive-nihilism
Mass-shooters, Accelerationists, street-gangs butchering life for kicks, & dictators-committed-to-making-CERTAIN-that-nobody-amounts-to-anything-once-they're-gone: the entire country is their epitaph, .. these are playing negative-sum game.
Know it for what it is.
Competitive-nihilism is becoming more & more normal among world "leaders", while our whole judging-everything-paradigm is pretending that everyone is within the competitive-narcissism/zero-sum-game category.
Stampeding off a cliff, "to 'make our [ political/ideological ] statement', exterminating everyone in the world with us", kind of commitment..
Treat it as it actually is, not as the false-god "status quo" is committed to pretending that it is.
Status-quo doesn't have a soul of its own: it can't die.
We can.
Break such highjackers-of-our-world from ruling-authority,
XOR Universe's NaturalSelection's going to be awarding us with our very-own entire species wide DarwinAward, later this century.
That's objectively humankind's choice.
_ /\ _
Macron under pressure to call snap parliamentary elections or resign
Macron under pressure to call snap parliamentary elections or resign
French president’s former allies join opponents in demanding he act to end a spiralling political crisisJon Henley (The Guardian)
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Alleged ‘kill team’ charged after arrest en route to hit near Sydney daycare
Alleged ‘kill team’ face court after arrest en route to hit near Sydney daycare
Police allege they identified the trio ‘mobilising’ to kill a man near a childcare centre in city’s south-westNick Visser (The Guardian)
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They weren't incompetent, they were under active surveillance because of their link to organized crime, and the surveilling cops realized they were going to carry out a hit on a target at the daycare - probably chosen purely because they knew that the target was gonna pick up their child at a specific time - and rang the alarm bells. The daycare center itself wasn't a target, but if something were to go wrong at the hit it might have caused collateral damage (it might even if nothing went wrong, if the children were to see someone burning to death - the 2 gas cans spell out that this thing was to send a message)
The cops did actually good this time, doing real police work instead of mass surveillance of the whole population.
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Emmanuel Macron: I won’t resign, I was elected ‘to serve, to serve, and to serve’ 🤡
Emmanuel Macron: I won’t resign, I was elected ‘to serve, to serve, and to serve’
Sebastien Lecornu will face a no-confidence vote this week after being reappointedAlessandro Parodi (The Independent)
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That was a beautiful read.
But do i find myself conflicted about dismissing it as a potential technical skill all together.
I have seen comfy-ui workflows that are build in a very complex way, some have the canvas devided in different zones, each having its own prompts. Some have no prompts and extract concepts like composition or color values from other files.
I compare these with collage-art which also exists from pre existing material to create something new.
Such tools take practice, there are choices to be made, there is a creative process but its mostly technological knowledge so if its about such it would be right to call it a technical skill.
The sad reality however, is how easy it is to remove parts of that complexity “because its to hard” and barebones it to simple prompt to output. At which point all technical skill fades and it becomes no different from the online generators you find.
I think there’s a stark difference between crafting your own comfyui workflow, getting the right nodes and control nets and checkpoints and whatever, tweaking it until you get what you want, and someone telling an AI “make me a picture/video of X.”
The least AI-looking AI art is the kind that someone took effort to make their own. Just like any other tool.
Unfortunately, gen AI is a tool that gives relatively good results without any skill at all. So most people won’t bother to do the work to make it their own.
I think that, like nearly everything in life, there is nuance to this. But at the same time, we aren’t ready for the nuance because we’re being drowned by slop and it’s horrible.
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All of that's great and everything, but at the end of the day all of the commercial VLM art generators are trained on stolen art. That includes most of the VLMs that comfyui uses as a backend. They have their own cloud service now, that ties in with all the usual suspects.
So even if it has some potentially genuine artistic uses I have zero interest in using a commercial entity in any way to 'generate' art that they've taken elements for from artwork they stole from real artists. Its amoral.
If it's all running locally on open source VLMs trained only on public data, then maybe - but that's what... a tiny, tiny fraction of AI art? In the meantime I'm happy to dismiss it altogether as Ai slop.
If you download a checkpoint from non trustworthy sources definitely and that is the majority of people, but also the majority that does not use the technical tools that deep nor cares about actual art (mostly porn if the largest distributor of models civitai is a reference).
The technical tool that allow actual creativity is called comfyui, and this is open source. I have yet to see anything that is even comparable. Other creative tools (like the krita plugin) use it as a backend.
I am willing to believe that someone with a soul for art and complex flows would also make their own models, which naturally allows much more creativity and is not that hard to do.
"not that hard to do"
Eh, I'm not so sure on that. I often find myself tripping up on the xkcd Average Familiarity problem, so I worry that this assumption is inadvertently a bit gatekeepy.
It's the unfortunate reality that modern tech makes it pretty hard for a person to learn the kind of skills necessary to be able to customise one's own tools. As a chronic tinkerer, I find it easy to underestimate how overwhelming it must feel for people who want to learn but have only ever learned to interface with tech as a "user". That kind of background means that it requires a pretty high level of curiosity and drive to learn, and that's a pretty high bar to overcome. I don't know how techy you consider yourself to be, but I'd wager that anyone who cares about whether something is open source is closer to a techy person than the average person.
I should nuance,
For a person who already actively uses comfyui, knows how the different nodes work,
Makes complex flows with them,
Making their own checkpoints is not a big step up.
I have not gotten to this level myself yet, i am still learning how to properly using different and custom nodes, and yes
In the mean time yes, i experiment with public models that use stolen artwork. But i am not posting any of the results, its pure personal use practice.
I have already seen some stuff about making your own models/checkpoints, if i ever get happy enough with my skills to post it as art then having my own feels like a must. The main reason i haven’t is cause it does take a lot of time to prepare the training data.
People that don’t use their models while calling themselves artist are cheating themselves most of all.
Collage art retains the original components of the art, adding layers the viewer can explore and seek the source of, if desired.
VLMs on the other hand intentionally obscure the original works by sending them through filters and computer vision transformations to make the original work difficult to backtrace. This is no accident, its designed obfuscation.
The difference is intent - VLMs literally steal copies of art to generate their work for cynical tech bros. Classical collages take existing art and show it in a new light, with no intent to pass off the original source materials as their own creations.
The original developers of Stable Diffusion and similar models made absolutely no secret about the source data they used. Where are you getting this idea that they "intentionally obscure the original works... to make [them] difficult to backtrace."? How would an image generation model even work in a way that made the original works obvious?
Literally steal
Copying digital art wasn't "literally stealing" when the MPAA was suing Napster and it isn't today.
For cynical tech bros
Stable Diffusion was originally developed by academics working at a University.
Your whole reply is pretending to know intent where none exists, so if that's the only difference you can find between collage and AI art, it's not good enough.
Stable Diffusion? The same Stable Diffusion sued by Getty Images which claims they used 12 million of their images without permission? Ah yes very non-secretive very moral. And what of industry titans DALL-E and Midjourney? Both have had multiple examples of artists original art being spat out by their models, simply by finessing the prompts - proving they used particular artists copyright art without those artists permission or knowledge.
Stable Diffusion also was from its inception in the hands of tech bros, funded and built with the help of a $3 billion dollar AI company (Runway AI), and itself owned by Stability AI, a made for profit company presently valued at $1 billion and now has James Cameron on its board. The students who worked on a prior model (Latent Diffusion) were hired for the Stable Diffusion project, that is all.
I don't care to drag the discussion into your opinion of whether artists have any ownership of their art the second after they post it on the internet - for me it's good enough that artists themselves assign licences for their work (CC, CC BY-SA, ©, etc) - and if a billion dollar company is taking their work without permission (as in the © example) to profit off it - that's stealing according to the artists intent by their own statement.
If they're taking CC BY-SA and failing to attribute it, then they are also breaking licencing and abusing content for their profit. An VLM could easily add attributes to images to assign source data used in the output - weird none of them want to.
In other words, I'll continue to treat AI art as the amoral slop it is. You are of course welcome to have a different opinion, I don't really care if mine is 'good enough' for you.
Stable Diffusion? The same Stable Diffusion sued by Getty Images which claims they used 12 million of their images without permission? Ah yes very non-secretive very moral. And what of industry titans DALL-E and Midjourney? Both have had multiple examples of artists original art being spat out by their models, simply by finessing the prompts - proving they used particular artists copyright art without those artists permission or knowledge.
Getting sued means Getty images disagrees that the use of the images was legal, not that it was secret, nor that it was moral. Getty images are included in the LAION-5b dataset that Stability AI publicly stated they used to create Stable Diffusion. So it's not "intentionally obscuring" as you claimed.
I don’t care to drag the discussion into your opinion of whether artists have any ownership of their art the second after they post it on the internet - for me it’s good enough that artists themselves assign licences for their work (CC, CC BY-SA, ©, etc) - and if a billion dollar company is taking their work without permission (as in the © example) to profit off it - that’s stealing according to the artists intent by their own statement.
Copying is not theft, no matter how many words you want to write about it. You can steal a painting by taking it off the wall. You can't steal a JPG by right-clicking it and selecting "Copy Image". That's fundamentally different.
An VLM could easily add attributes to images to assign source data used in the output
Oh yeah? Easily? What attribution should a model trained purely on LAION-5b add to an output image if prompted with "photograph of a cat"?
In other words, I’ll continue to treat AI art as the amoral slop it is. You are of course welcome to have a different opinion, I don’t really care if mine is ‘good enough’ for you.
You can do whatever you want (within usual rules) in your personal life, but you chose to enter into a discussion.
From that discussion it's clear that your position is rooted in bias not knowledge. That's why you can't point out substantial differences between AI-generated images and other techniques which re-use existing imagery, why you make up intentions and can't back them up, and why you prefer to dismiss academics as "tech bros" instead of engaging on facts.
Sidestepping the debate about whether AI art is actually fair use, I do find the fair use doctrine an interesting lens to look at the wider issue — in particular, how deciding whether something is fair use is more complex than comparing a case to a straightforward checklist, but a fairly dynamic spectrum.
It's possible that something could be:
* Highly transformative
* Takes from a published work that is primarily of a factual nature (such as a biography)
* Distributed to a different market than the original work
but still not be considered fair use, if it had used the entirety of the base work without modification (in this case, the "highly transformative" would pertain to how the chunks of the base work are presented)
I'm no lawyer, but I find the theory behind fair use pretty interesting. In practice, it leaves a lot to be desired (the way that YouTube's contentID infringes on what would almost certainly be fair use, because Google wants to avoid being taken to court by rights holders, so preempts the problem by being overly harsh to potential infringement). However, my broad point is that whether a court decides something is fair use relies on a holistic assessment that considers all four of pillars of fair use, including how strongly each apply.
AI trained off of artist's works is different to making collage of art because of the scale of the scraping — a huge amount of copyrighted work has been used, and entire works of art were used, even if the processing of them were considered to be transformative (let's say for the sake of argument that we are saying that training an AI is highly transformative). The pillar that AI runs up against the most though is "the effect of the use upon the potential market". AI has already had a huge impact on the market for artistic works, and it is having a hugely negative impact on people's ability to make a living through their art (or other creative endeavours, like writing). What's more, the companies who are pushing AI are making inordinate amounts of revenue, which makes the whole thing feel especially egregious.
We can draw on the ideas of fair use to understand why so many people feel that AI training is "stealing" art whilst being okay with collage. In particular, it's useful to ask what the point of fair use is? Why have a fair use exemption to copyright at all? The reason is because one of the purposes of copyright is meant to be to encourage people to make more creative works — if you're unable to make any money from your efforts because you're competing with people selling your own work faster than you can, then you're pretty strongly disincentivised to make anything at all. Fair use is a pragmatic exemption carved out because of the recognition that if copyright is overly restrictive, then it will end up making it disproportionately hard to make new stuff. Fair use is as nebulously defined as it is because it is, in theory, guided by the principle of upholding the spirit of copyright.
Now, I'm not arguing that training an AI (or generating AI art) isn't fair use — I don't feel equipped to answer that particular question. As a layperson, it seems like current copyright laws aren't really working in this digital age we find ourselves in, even before we consider AI. Though perhaps it's silly to blame computers for this, when copyright wasn't really helping individual artists much even before computers became commonplace. Some argue that we need new copyright laws to protect against AI, but Cory Doctorow makes a compelling argument about how this will just end up biting artists in the ass even worse than the AI. Copyright probably isn't the right lever to pull to solve this particular problem, but it's still a useful thing to consider if we want to understand the shape of the whole problem.
As I see it, copyright exists because we, as a society, said we wanted to encourage people to make stuff, because that enriches society. However, that goal was in tension with the realities of living under capitalism, so we tried to resolve that through copyright laws. Copyright presented new problems, which led to the fair use doctrine, which comes with problems of its own, with or without AI. The reason people consider AI training to be stealing is because they understand AI as a dire threat to the production of creative works, and they attempt to articulate this through the familiar language of copyright. However, that's a poor framework for addressing the problem that AI art poses though. We would be better to strip this down to the ethical core of it so we can see the actual tension that people are responding to.
Maybe we need a more radical approach to this problem. One interesting suggestion that I've seen is that we should scrap copyright entirely and implement a generous universal basic income (UBI) (and other social safety nets). If creatives were free to make things without worrying about fulfilling basic living needs, it would make the problem of AI scraping far lower stakes for individual creatives. One problem with this is that most people would prefer to earn more than what even a generous UBI would provide, so would probably still feel cheated by Generative AI. However, the argument is that GenerativeAI cannot compare to human artists when it comes to producing novel or distinctive art, so the most reliable wa**y to obtain meaningful art would be to give financial support to the artists (especially if an individual is after something of a particular style). I'm not sure how viable this approach would be in practice, but I think that discussing more radical ideas like this is useful in figuring what the heck to do.
I completely agree on pretty much the whole sweep of this. AI just exposes another way in which copyright law is insufficient for the digital age.
On a personal note, a couple of years ago I tried to use chatgpt to write a story. It was shit so I wrote my own. I've taken up drawing again and want to properly learn digital painting.
In my mind, AI doesn't threaten any of this because the enjoyment I get from these things doesn't depend on selling what I do. Artists have been stereotypically starving for a long time because the innate human desire to create exceeds the desire of people to pay.
Allowing people to satisfy that desire without literally starving should be a societal goal.
I get what you're saying.
I often find myself being the person in the room with the most knowledge about how Generative AI (and other machine learning) works, so I tend to be in the role of the person who answers questions from people who want to check whether their intuition is correct. Yesterday, when someone asked me whether LLMs have any potential uses, or whether the technology is fundamentally useless, and the way they phrased it allowed me to articulate something better than I had previously been able to.
The TL;DR was that I actually think that LLMs have a lot of promise as a technology, but not like this; the way they are being rolled out indiscriminately, even in domains where it would be completely inappropriate, is actually obstructive to properly researching and implementing these tools in a useful way. The problem at the core is that AI is only being shoved down our throats because powerful people want to make more money, at any cost — as long as they are not the ones bearing that cost. My view is that we won't get to find out the true promise of the technology until we break apart the bullshit economics driving this hype machine.
I agree that even today, it's possible for the tools to be used in a way that's empowering for the humans using them, but it seems like the people doing that are in the minority. It seems like it's pretty hard for a tech layperson to do that kind of stuff, not least of all because most people struggle to discern the bullshit from the genuinely useful (and I don't blame them for being overwhelmed). I don't think the current environment is conducive towards people learning to build those kinds of workflows. I often use myself as a sort of anti-benchmark in areas like this, because I am an exceedingly stubborn person who likes to tinker, and if I find it exhausting to learn how to do, it seems unreasonable to expect the majority of people to be able to.
I like the comic's example of Photoshop's background remover, because I doubt I'd know as many people who make cool stuff in Photoshop without helpful bits of automation like that ("cool stuff" in this case often means amusing memes or jokes, but for many, that's the starting point in continuing to grow). I'm all for increasing the accessibility of an endeavour. However, the positive arguments for Generative AI often feels like it's actually reinforcing gatekeeping rather than actually increasing accessibility; it implicitly divides people into the static categories of Artist, and Non-Artist, and then argues that Generative AI is the only way for Non-Artists to make art. It seems to promote a sense of defeatism by suggesting that it's not possible for a Non-Artist to ever gain worthwhile levels of skill. As someone who sits squarely in the grey area between "artist" and "non-artist", this makes me feel deeply uncomfortable.
We are on the same base,
I actually had a friend who jokingly mocked me for liking ai because i was initially very exited ablut Dall-E and ChatGPT 3.5
Back then i could only see the potential that it continues to have. OpenAI appeared to have altruistic goals and was a non profit. Trojan horse it turned out to be.
Had to make pretty clear to my friend that “ yes, but not like this, everything but this” about the current slop situation.
This was a great read! As someone who was initially excited about the possibilities of AI art, it's been hit or miss with me.
I've come to realise over time that I like the connection that art offers. The little moment of 'I wonder what the artist was thinking when they imagined this and what experiences did someone have to get to a place where they could visualize and create this?'
And I think that's what missing with AI art. Sure, it can enable someone like me who has no skill with drawing to create something but it doesn't get to the point of putting my actual imagination down. The repeated tries can only get to point of 'close enough'.
For me, looking at a piece and then learning it's AI art is basically realizing that I'm looking at a computer generated imitation of someone's imagination. Except the imitation was created by describing the art instead of the imitator ever looking at it. An connection I could have felt with original human is watered down as to be non-existent.
I made a comment about a week ago about how copying people's art is still art, and it was a bit of an aha moment as I pinpointed for myself a big part of why I find image generators and the like so soulless, inwardly echoing a lot of what Inman lays out here.
All human made art, from the worst to the best, embodies the effort of the artist. Their intent and their skill. Their attempt to make something, to communicate something. It has meaning. All generative art does is barf up random noise that looks like pictures. It's impressive technology, and I understand that it's exciting, but it's not art. If humans ever end up creating actual artificial intelligence, then we can talk about machine made art. Until then, it's hardly more than a printer in terms of artistic merit.
It's impressive technology, and I understand that it's exciting, but it's not art.
I would add that a lot (most?) graphical elements we encounter in daily lives do not require art or soul in the least. Stock images on web pages, logos, icons etc. are examples of graphical elements that are IMO perfectly fine to use AI image generation for. It's the menial labour of the artist profession that is now being affected by modern automation much like so many other professions have been before them. All of them resisted so of course artists resist too.
The impact on livelihoods is important, but it's ultimately unrelated to defining what art is. My consideration of art is not one born of fear of losing money, but purely out of appreciation for the craft. I don't think it's entirely fair to suggest all the criticisms against generated art is solely borne of self-preservation.
In regards to corporate "art", all the things you listed, even stock images, are certainly not the purest form of artistry, but they still have (or, at least had) intent suffusing their creation. I suppose the question then is - is there a noticeable difference between the two for corporations? Will a generated logo have the same impact as a purposefully crafted on does? In my experience, the generated products I've noticed feel distinctly hollow. While past corporate assets are typically hollow shells of real art, generated assets are even less. They're a pure concentration of corporate greed and demand, without the "bothersome" human element. Maybe that won't matter in their course of business, but I think it might. Time will tell.
I'd argue that logos are a hugely expressive form. It's just that 90% of them are basic ass shit tier stuff.
AI has basically raised the level of "shit tier" pretty high. I sometimes go check out Hotone Audio's Facebook page to see if there are new firmware updates for my device, but they mainly peddle pointless AI slop marketing images. I'm sure there are tons of companies like this.
It's the literal example of the marketing person being able to churn out pictures without an artist being involved, and thus the output is a pile of crap even more vapid than stock photos.
the how is really quite irrelevant
That's our point. The how is entirely relevant. It's what makes art interesting and meaningful. Without the how and why, it's just colors and noise.
it's just colors and noise.
But that's exactly my point; logos, icons, stock images etc. are already nothing but noise meant to just catch the eye...might as well just get it auto-generated.
You've stated as much already. If we're just repeating ourselves here, I'll just copy-paste.
That you can’t see or appreciate the intent of the artist behind those doesn’t mean it’s not there or not important.
Not really. It's the equivalent of ordering a "build it yourself" sandwich where you specify type of bread and content, and having someone else make it. Yes you didn't actually assemble the sandwich yourself, but who cares how that happened, you have the sandwich you wanted, it contains what you wanted, it tastes and looks like you intended.
I'm not arguing that people using AI generated images can call themselves artists, I'm arguing that AI generated can have a useful purpose replacing menial "art" work.
and having someone else make it.
No, having a soulless machine make it.
Then claiming that you made it yourself even though all you did was select a few things on a menu.
Way to shit on everyone who's job it is to make those things.
Why do you think logos and so on have no artistic value? What defines value? Because if it's influencing people and culture, then logos definitely do.
Corporate art sucks ass but it's still made using choices, which ai doesn't do.
Your example is shit. It would be more appropriate for when you commission a piece of work from someone, where they are using their skills and choices and you're telling them what you want and don't want on the sandwich.
AI doesn't make choices when creating an image. It generates an image based off of other images and you hope that it gets something that follows some aesthetic principles that it's lifting from other images. Just because you reroll the die doesn't mean you're choosing shit.
That "menial" process when you're making art is literally the best part. When you're painting a sky for the background of something you don't want that just filled in, that's where you can experiment and maybe even add an element that you weren't thinking of before when you started the piece. AI can't do that for you.
I've been practicing at being a better writer, and one of the ways I've been doing that is by studying the writing that I personally really like. Often I can't explain why I click so much with a particular style of writing, but by studying and attempting to learn how to copy the styles that I like, it feels like a step towards developing my own "voice" in writing.
A common adage around art (and other skilled endeavours) is that you need to know how to follow the rules before you can break them, after all. Copying is a useful stepping stone to something more. It's always going to be tough to learn when your ambition is greater than your skill level, but there's a quote from Ira Glass that I've found quite helpful:
"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it's normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."
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I want to touch on how he mentions hitting the button to automatically make music on a Casio keyboard.
I fully realize I'm being reductive to the point of being offensive but that's not my intent and I preemptively apologize, when I say: that's at least in part, the very first seed to becoming a professional DJ. That's not nothing.
Using AI to generate images can be the same thing if it's extrapolated out into complexity and layered nuance. It might not make you an artist exactly, in the same way that a DJ might not be a musician but it IS a skillset that potentially has value.
And even if you think I'm totally off-base in saying so? I liked pretending with the little automatic music button on the keyboard.
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All good, was just wondering.
I do DJ (non-professionally). I generally think there are two skills with DJing:
- Taste, library management and music choice, which is not a technical skill, but does take a bit of effort in preparing for a set
- Actual technical mixing skills, which many DJs (including me) barely have, but some take to a level that is on basically a form of musicianship.
I don't think AI can really help you do either.. but I guess it could make a mixed set and you could pretend to play it, like a Casio keyboard
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I was kinda against their argument at first, then I was with them and continued reading. But then they went into all sorts of detail, weighing pros and cons etc., and after reading more than half I evtl. gave up.
It seems all "why AI is bad" articles seem to go this way.
It seems all "why AI is bad" articles unwillingly even support the hype.
Fuck AI "art", it's not art you morons, it's automation, which takes away real people's jobs. The current implementations made by greedy companies also very obviously steal. 'nuff said.
I know that art is an art of it's own and a way to express human creativity.
However people also complained once the loom was invented. It took lots of jobs.
The job argument is usually a stupid one.
The lack of creativity and quality is of course a much better argument against AI art.
The job argument is usually a stupid one.
The what? It's the only one that objectively makes sense.
Ok imagine this:
You are an construction worker. The job is hard but the pay is okay.
Now robots replace your job slowly. They are cheaper and more accurate.
You can now:
- Complain about the robots stealing your job
- Be happy that you don't have to do the hard work anymore.
Many people will go for 1. But the actual issue is that the social security net isn't existent or so weak that no job means no food.
That is not the fault of technology though.
Remember that when you vote and when politicians want to cut costs by reducing payments for the unemployed.
Option 2 is soulless.
Option 3. Destroy the capitalists owned robots and bring the robots under the control of the working class.
I liked it, personally. I've read plenty of AI bad articles, and I too am burnt out on them. However, what I really appreciated about this was that it felt less like a tirade against AI art and more like a love letter to art and the humans that create it. As I was approaching the ending of the comic, for example, when the argument had been made, and the artist was just making their closing words, I was struck by the simple beauty of the art. It was less the shapes and the colours themselves that I found beautiful, but the sense that I could practically feel the artist straining against the pixels in his desperation to make something that he found beautiful — after all, what would be the point if he couldn't live up to his own argument?
I don't know how far you got through, but I'd encourage you to consider taking another look at it. It's not going to make any arguments you've not heard before, but if you're anything like me, you might appreciate it from the angle of a passionate artist striving to make something meaningful in defiance of AI. I always find my spirits bolstered by work like this because whilst we're not going to be able to draw our way out of this AI-slop hellscape, it does feel important to keep reminding ourselves of what we're fighting for.
As a passable quality 3D artist who does it for a living I've found AI art (which can do 3D now to some degree) has kind of narrowed the scope for me. If you want generic Unreal style pseudo-realism or disney toon then AI can do that for you* I've had to focus much more on creating a unique style and also optimizing my work in ways that AI just doesn't have the ability to do because they require longer chains of actual reasoning.
For AI in general I think this pattern holds, it can quickly create something generic and increasingly do it without extranious fingers but no matter how much you tweak a prompt its damn near impossible to get a specific idea into image form. Its like a hero shooter with skins VS actually creating your own character.
**Right now AI models use more tris to re-create the default blender cube than my entire lifetime portfolio but I'm assuming that can be resolved since we already have partially automated re-topology tools.*
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I often hear AI enthusiasts say that AI democratized art. As if art weren't already democratized. Most anyone can pick up a pen, draw, write, type, move a mouse, etc. What AI democratizes in art, is the perception of skill. Which is why when you find out a piece of art was made by inputting some short prompt into a generator, you become disappointed. Because it would be cool, if the person actually had the skill to draw that. Pushing a few buttons to get that, not so much.
Edit:spelling and spacing
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What makes you want to do art? I'm just curious, because I am also someone who has bounced off of attempting to learn to do art a bunch of times, and found tracing unfulfilling (I am abstaining from the question of whether tracing is art, but I do know it didn't scratch the itch for me).
For my part, I ended up finding that crafts like embroidery or clothing making was the best way to channel my creative inclinations, but that's mostly because I have the heart of a ruthless pragmatist and I like making useful things. What was it that caused you to attempt to learn?
I like and admire visual arts. I wanted to try to be able to do the thing. I have a strong imagination and extremely good visualization skills, so I wanted to be able to take things from my minds eye to reality.
I have found much of my art/creative outlet in dancing and crafting.
What AI democratizes in art, is the perception of skill.
I was a professional artist for many years, and often noted a strong preference for photo-realistic art among non-artists, often to the exclusion of any other style or aesthetic. The people around me who tried to draw or paint or sculpt, even just one time, often had an appreciation for a more diverse array of approaches and media.
To me, most AI 'art' feels like the product of 'artists' who don't even really like art.
What a beautiful read. I feel the same about AI art and I remember a longer talk I had with my tattoo artist: 'I need the money so I will do AI based tattoos my clients bring to me. But they have no soul, no story, no individuality. They are not a part of you.'
I feel the same.
Also I like Oatmeal's reference to Wabi Sabi: The perfection of imperfection in every piece of art.
At least by redrawing it, the tattoo artist is injecting (pun intended) some of the human skill and decision-making into it?
But, ugh! Who would get an AI tattoo?
And what's the point? Let's say I have an idea of a tattoo I want (Jack Sparrow, dressed in a McDonald's uniform, fighting off a rabid poodle, in the style of Baroque painting), but I cannot draw. So I use AI to render it, how clever!
But wait - a tattoo artist will be physically drawing it anyway. They know how to develop concepts into sketches, don't they?
Just get them to do it! Skip the pointless AI step!
It was an ok read for me, but mostly because I enjoyed the art rather than relating to the entirety of the sentiment.
I'm an artist and I find AI art evocative and illustrating things in a way that I wish that I could illustrate, but feel that is only because it comes from real human artists. I agree that it is a void in terms of difficulty to process, but there is still skill involved in both using search engines and describing something to an llm. A minute amount of skill, but still a skill.
I hate AI art because it is stealing from artists, not because it doesn't feel right. It can have a million iterations and only needs to get it right once to count as feeling right to me. The relationship between the content and their artists to the ultimate product is removed, this to me is the wrongfulness of claiming new art from it. It is just stealing in a more wind-about manor. This isn't like generating fractal art or something.
After all these years of corporations fucking up the literal social fabric and and how we communicate over IP law, for them to turn around and steal everything and just get a pass is an extra slap in face. Stealing only gets allowed2 one way in our society, and AI is just another example of that.
I'm honestly surprised to not see this take more from others and felt like i needed to mention it.
edit: emphasized that by making AI art taking skill, I only mean just a minute amount.
I think AI art serves a different purpose from the art we talk about when we say "real art has heart" or "the process of creating the art affected me when I looked at it".
I think about how I feel when I'm scrolling through pictures in some app on my phone - some will be memes, some will be cats, but then some will be there for artistic purposes. As I'm scrolling through, such a picture will spark a brief glimmer of emotion - "huh, that looks neat" for example. I'm not looking close and examining the brush strokes, not thinking about what troubles the artist went through, and not thinking about the process of its creation at all.
In that context I don't think it makes much difference that it's AI-generated. I'd kind of like to know, and I don't want to see a dozen different outputs of the same prompt because whoever hit the button couldn't even apply the modicum of effort require to pick their favourite, but AI-generated images are just as able to instigate that glimmer of "hey that looks cool" that any image can.
There's zero need to throw insults around; I made the context absolutely clear in my comment and it has nothing to do with what I do when at an art gallery or something.
Maybe some people are having an experience like they are looking at a Rembrandt when they scroll through /c/pics or something, but I'm not. Do you also shit on people for being unable to appreciate music because they put something on in the background? Is it only OK to go to concerts and immerse yourself in it? If you're in a shop and a tune you like comes on, do you park your cart to really appreciate the depths of emotion it's inspiring in you?
Of course you don't.
Well I'm not going to slap you on the back and praise you for saying the equivalent of "I just eat potato chips anyway I don't care if the new chips are made of styrofoam they still got flavor blasted".
Also, I totally disagree with you. If I see a neat picture someone took from getting dropped onto earth from low orbit, I'm gonna think that's way cooler than an ai image trying to emulate the same thing, even if I'm only looking at it for a second. I'm going to think a crudely drawn parody of a meme is funnier than an ai generated imitation of a meme, even if all I'm doing is making that little exhale with the nose instead of laughing.
There's a difference. You can tell. If you're so Internet addled you genuinely are saying you don't think there's a difference, then you've got like, negative skills in art appreciation.
what’s the point of taking art classes?
The point is the same as taking classes for any other skill, from baseball to carpentry: you have to learn technique before you can engrain the skill through practice. Some people can pick it up on their own if they're motivated enough, by studying other people's art, watching artists working, reading books, etc., but it's more difficult and time-consuming without an instructor's feedback. Sometimes they even figure it out wrong, and develop a very difficult and time-consuming method of doing something when a much simpler one exists.
So it's optimal to both have the classes and do extensive practice outside of them. One is not a substitute for the other.
I think this is completely missing the point when it's talking about "the minutiae of art". It's making two claims at the same time: art is better when you suffer for it and the art is good whether or not you suffered. But none of that is relevant.
When Wyeth made Christina's World, I don't know if he suffered or not when painting that grass. What I do know is that he was a human with limited time and the fact that he spent so much of his time detailing every blade of grass means that he's saying something. That The Oatmeal doesn't draw backgrounds might be because he's lazy, but he also doesn't need them. These are choices we make to put effort in one part and ignore some other part.
AI doesn't make choices. It doesn't need to. A detailed background is exactly the same amount of work as a plain one. And so a generated picture has this evenly distributed level of detail, no focus at all. You don't really know where to look, what's important, what the picture is trying to say. Because it's not saying anything. It isn't a rat with a big butt, it's just a cloud of noise that happens to resemble a rat with a big butt.
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it's just a cloud of noise that happens to resemble a rat with a big butt.
I’d like this on my tombstone
Your ghost: "It's about AI art."
Visitor: "...I still don't get it."
Ghost: "That's because you're a robot. Everybody's just robots now. Us ghosts are all that's left of humanity. All that you know is based on what we suffered to learn and create."
Robot visitor: "...but why a rat with a big butt?"
Ghost: "Draw one, and reflect on the cloud of noise that you produce instead."
Robot: *draws a rat with a big butt
Ghost: "...AI wasn't as good back then. Fuck you." *whisps away
It was a good read until he started with the art is a skill and anyone can do it. He's kind of in his bubble there making assumptions about people. People have various levels of aphantasia, it's not binary. Those that are good at visual imagination do art, people without can't draw a fucking apple from memory reasonable art is beyond many, even if they had the time to dedicate to it.
Everything else he said was on point. well eventually on point, that was a long ride.
Edit: Man, look at all these talented people telling me I could be talented too if I just tried. Some of you might find a shocking revelation in thevfact that not everyone has the ability to perform the skill you perform. Some people, like me, have put several thousand hours into trying to improve my ability to draw, and while it has improved slightly, I am still not capable of drying anything above rudimentary. Talented people find it easy to project their skill onto other people but that's not how it works. It's not just a feeling that you can't do it, it's trying for years and not being able to do anything appreciable with it. My seven-year-old had more skill out of the gate than I had after scoring around with it for 30 years. So keep on telling me that I could just do it if I'd just invest the time and make yourself feel better that you invest at the time. That's truly helpful to me.
One of the things I find most awesome about art is seeing how so many people with different capacities find ways to make art.
I likely have aphantasia, and whilst I call myself an artist, there are times where I see a particular shape or form within the world and think "damn, that's beautiful". I find myself taking a mental note of it, because whilst I don't make art, I do enjoy making clothes. Aphantasia does make it hard to take those experiences and make cool stuff out of them, because without a mental image to work from, it may take me many attempts to correctly mark out the shape, where my only guiding sense is whether a particular attempt looks right though. It hasn't stopped me from making things I'm truly proud of though, and a key thing that drives me to keep creating is that sense of fulfillment I get from taking something beautiful from the world and reusing it in a manner that allows me to share that slice of wonder with other people.
I feel like I've only been half decent at that in recent years though; before that, I tended to focus on the more technical aspects of the craft, but that doesn't mean it wasn't creative. I made a chainmail hauberk for myself once, because the base technique didn't seem hard and it seemed like it would be fun (turns out the hard part is sticking with it long enough to make a whole item). Part of my quest was that I knew that wearing a sturdy belt over a chainmail hauberk is essential for the weight to be properly distributed, and I thought it might be cool to use an underbust corset in place of a belt. The creative part of that required little, if any, visual imagination — I mostly just enjoyed the juxtaposition of the traditionally masculine armour with the femininity of the corset.
Beyond my own personal experiences, I've been awed by seeing so many examples of creative people working with what limitations they have, and honing their skills in whatever way they can. A close friend has such poor vision that they legally count as blind, but their paintings have such incredible colours — they have a beautiful diffuseness to them, which is apparently how they see the world. Seeing their art makes me feel closer to them. Unfortunately, they've recently suffered injury to their hands, so they can't paint like they used to — so they have found new ways to paint that don't rely on their hands so much. And there's even more examples of this kind of persistence if we consider music to be art too.
I don't really give a fuck about art — not really. I care about the people who make it. I get that it's frustrating to try something creative when your skill can't match up to your figurative creative vision, but that's also a problem that even experienced artists struggle with. If you made something that required little to no skill, but it was something that you had cared about, then that's enough to make me care. That might sound silly given that you're just a random person on the internet to me, but that's precisely why I care; art makes me feel connected to people I've never even met.
People who make the point that you're making are often people who have within them the desire to make art, but they feel that it's inaccessible to them. I know, because I was one of them (years before AI hit the zeitgeist). I realise that this may not apply to you, and you might be speaking in a more general sense, but if it does, then I would hope that you would someday feel able to give things a go. I think it'd be a shame if someone with a desire to create never got the chance to see where that could go. I'm not saying "maybe you could start a career as an artist", because even highly proficient artists often struggle to make a career out of art that doesn't kill their soul (most working artists I know use their paid work to support work that's more artistically fulfilling to them). Just know that if you make things that you care about, there will always be people who will care about what you make.
I say this as someone who has just written out a veritable essay full of care in reply to someone I'm probably never going to speak about. And hey, if you've gotten this far, then that is surely evidence towards my point about how making stuff you care about causes people to care about what you've made — either that, or you've jumped to the bottom in search of a TL;DR. Regardless, people like me care so much about art because human connection helps us to survive this pretty grim world, and art is our most reliable way of doing that. I'd love to have you here with us, if you'd like to be.
But... It is a skill... And anyone can develop that skill. That's how skills work. Nobody is born good at anything. It takes practice and education.
And aphantasia does not stop one from being able to draw. There are a lot of artists, authors and other creatives that have aphantasia.
Uh, lots of really great painters have aphantasia. It's very prominent in the population and 100% not a medical disability. Art is a skill. There's people without arms that paint. Deaf people who make music. There's blind people drawing. There's this cool japanese girl without an arm that plays the violin. There's all sorts of people who make art, because humans can't not make art.
Are you going to win prices and sell work for millions of dollars, or feature at the MOMA, or play at the Superbowl half time show? Or achieve any of the inane arbitrary goalpost that people like to set for calling stuff real art. Most assuredly you won't. Because less than 0.1% of all the people in the planet will achieve any of that. But every single child has and will be born an artist. Every child draws, sings, dances and plays spontaneously. All that is art.
If you think only people born artists can make art, congratulations, you were born an artists, every human is, go do your art. If you think only specific people with extraordinary characteristics get to make art. I'm sorry you were hurt so bad to develop such bleak worldview and poor self image.
If you do art, you'll get good at art. If you don't do art and instead make the slop machine manufacture expensive Styrofoam for you to chew on, then you'll never get good at art. Regardless of your biological makeup. Being shit at doing something is the first and mandatory step for becoming good at doing something. Do it poorly until you can do it decently, then do it some more. Art is the experience of doing art. Even bad art is superior to mass consumption generated pixels.
While I appreciate the pep talk, I truly think your heart is in the right place. You just claim that my artwork is better without having any view of my artwork or knowledge of my skill.
This is a very common thing that people do. You can't conceive that someone can't do something, so you blame them on their persistence, or their ID or their ego. I don't know what your skills are, but it feels an awful lot like projection.
It's not like I'm useless at art, I can sculpt 3D objects from 3D objects. I can even, with limited success, use Zbrush.
It was none of those things actually. It's impossible to objectively judge our own artworks. We can analyze it, tell others what we think are the strong and weak points, but it's extremely common for most people, especially when it comes to art, to judge it with a much higher degree of scrutiny that we do not reserve for others.
It's something I've had to work through myself, both with my art and myself as a person. And with that comes an inherent distrust of others opinions of themselves and their work, especially when it's excessively dismissive or pessimistic.
Trump reportedly ends remaining diplomatic channels with Venezuela, frustrated with Maduro’s reluctance to relinquish power
Donald Trump has reportedly ended all diplomatic outreach to Venezuela, instructing envoy Richard Grenell to cease all efforts as he grows frustrated with authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro's reluctance to relinquish power.
Trump is also frustrated that Maduro keeps rejecting any ties with drug cartels, The New York Times reported. Officials told the outlet that the administration has drawn up multiple military plans for an eventual escalation.
Trump Reportedly Ends Remaining Diplomatic Channels With Venezuela, Frustrated With Maduro's Reluctance To Relinquish Power
President Donald Trump has reportedly ended all diplomatic outreach to Venezuela, instructing envoy Richard Grenell to cease all efforts as he grows frustrated with authoritarian President Nicolas...Demian Bio (Latin Times)
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He can use the distraction to get people looking away from one of his new failures.
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he grows frustrated with authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro’s reluctance to relinquish power.
Pot, meet kettle.
Of course all of this was orchestrated since the beginning. It was just a show for the people. The administration was already decided on military intervention.
Now, for the reasons. I can think of some, though I can be wrong of course:
- A way to increase Trump's popularity ratings. A strong leader defending the US that are threatened by drugs.
- Oil. Venezuela is well know for its oil deposits. And the oil extraction is nationalized there.
- Trump's opinion of Putin has been falling. Attacking one of Russia's ally might be a way to attack him.
War... if we are "at war" elections cant happen. See Ukraine.
How can you possibly say we should have elections but not Ukraine?
See no elections in 26 or 28. And if you disagree it is wrong thought you commie trans DEI illegal immigrant pronoun liberal. You are aligned with our enemy and have been awarded a fun fishing trip on this boat. Please ignore the drones with missles above they are for your safety.
So, militarily-enforced "regime-change" is going to happen in Venezuela, for Trump's regime's satisfaction.
But will militarily-enforced "regime-change" be tolerated when Trump proves "reluctant" to relinquish power, when he disallows the 2028 elections?
Of course not!
2-facedness is shameless, nowadays.
Too bad it's on humankind to do the enforcing-of-correction: the cost is going to be .. close to 99% of the human population, it looks like, throughout the rest of this century, given how bad the balance-of-power ( between corruption vs integrity ) is..
shrug
99% gone or 100% gone: those look to be the only actual possibilities, for next-century, now: corruption's eradicated integrity from sooo much of the world, that it really is the vast-majority position, now.
"Majority-rule" means integrity/justice cannot rule: the 2 "centers" are mutually-exclusive.
So long as herd-style majority-rule outranks integrity, then .. integrity has no right to rule.
Integrity's breaking corruption-majority from ruling, including oligarchy, dictatorship-backed-by-obedient-"votes", etc, would be minority-but-upright rule, which is .. prohibited, by majority-rule, isn't it?
shrug
Natural-selection'll decide, & Universe'll keep the accounting-books accurate.
Universe doesn't "need" our species to live: our assumed entitlement has no power over universe, & it never had any.
If we won't grow-up, then .. our world's remains will serve as a warning to others, of the consequences of indulging-in-toddler-mentality while having global-scale militaries.
Which is a socially-"valid" choice, obviously..
The herd-beasts who lie broken & dying at the bottom of a cliff they just stampeded off of .. their "going along with the herd's opinion" is every bit as valid as humankind's doing the same thing.
_ /\ _
Yeah it is pretty fucked up. I want to throw up everytime I hear a conservative say the President has a mandate.
Last time I checked no one voted for Miller, a white supremacist, to be running the country. Didn't we used to vet people to prevent this kind of shit.
What fucking mandate!? 90% of deported people don't have a violent record. It was all big fat fucking lie so we can all live out Miller's KKK fantasy.
Repeat after me, no one voted for this shit show. Stop blaming the victims and start messaging the fucking truth.
He's so fucking stupid. And now that he's demented, we're seeing the unfiltered reactions.
How weak the entire world must know the United States is right now.
Hackers can steal 2FA codes and private messages from Android phones
Hackers can steal 2FA codes and private messages from Android phones
Malicious app required to make “Pixnapping” attack work requires no permissions.Dan Goodin (Ars Technica)
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The new attack, named Pixnapping by the team of academic researchers who devised it, requires a victim to first install a malicious app on an Android phone or tablet. The app, which requires no system permissions, can then effectively read data that any other installed app displays on the screen. Pixnapping has been demonstrated on Google Pixel phones and the Samsung Galaxy S25 phone and likely could be modified to work on other models with additional work. Google released mitigations last month, but the researchers said a modified version of the attack works even when the update is installed.
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"Our end-to-end attacks simply measure the rendering time per frame of the graphical operations… to determine whether the pixel was white or non-white.”
This is a prime example of something that is so simple, yet elegant, and brilliant. Fantastically cool and scary.
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requires a victim to first install a malicious app
Let me stop you right there... and leave.
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So it could be hiding in, what would you call them…….malicious apps?
The relevant code isn’t going to be in a non malicious app.
Because if it’s doing this it’s a malicious app….
Google also said they’ve found zero apps doing this.
Because if it’s doing this it’s a malicious app….
OK, how would you know?
Google also said they’ve found zero apps doing this.
So what? There are millions of apps on the Play store, they aren't all being reviewed with this level of scrutiny. This means basically nothing.
Man in the middle an app download or find some kind of exploit to inject the code from a website, ta da.
I mean, obviously there's more to it than this but.
That's how these things work. They're chained.
Having cleaned a bunch of old folks phones in the past years this is far more common than we ”advanced” users think. It often starts with clicking an advert or some spam mail or message from (infected) friend, which to them, looks absolutely legit. Then the installed app spams the user with notifications to install more ”PDF readers”, ”phone cleanup apps” and whatnot. In best case these just flood the user with ads but just as easily can do more malicious stuff.
After some schooling (”never click anything that is offered to you” etc.) and putting up defencew like AdGuard (system level) the instances of ”my phone is slow”, ”what does this message mean” etc. have radically decreased. Apple devices have their own issues but this kind of troubles are next to non-existent there.
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This is especially true if you are installing apps from the play store.
fixed that small mistake
Even if this particular attack is against Android phones, it should be noted that iPhones have their own security issues.
Stay safe out there, regardless of what type of phone you use.
Edit: lol, looks like I ruffled some feathers, with a few people really going the extra mile to take the wrong message from it
That’s an insane take. Sure, Google is less thorough on checking the garbage that gets on the Play Store, but if that was a factor, malware that has made it on the Apple app store would have done it too. They have never been able to bypass permissions because they’re built into the OS and security hardware.
Edit: People having such a poor understanding of security and buying Apple’s propaganda, ON LEMMY, is so disappointing
Lawl “exploit developed for android phones”
You: UK AKSHULLY IPHONES AREN’T SECURE THOUGH
Alternately: I was mentioning this to pre-empt anyone marching in here and puffing up about iPhone. Or thinking that they don't need to worry about security issues.
Of course you know and understand the intent of my comment. Your bad-faith response fails to impress.
As someone already pointed out it's a lost game regardless of platform as long as closed source software is used on any machine anywhere it's fundamentally unsafe. Black market operators like Israel's Pegasus have been selling ios day 0 exploits for years and there are probably hundreds that exist out there for every single platform.
The good part is that these rare exploits will not be used on you because they are too valuable the bad part is that the only way against them is full system transparency which is not happening anytime soon.
Never ending side channel attacks. Stallman was right, only 100% FOSS gives you control over your device.
And given that a lot of this stuff is relying on timing the only reliable cure is to make everything slow. But no one wants that. Or maybe getting rid of precise timers in userspace. It would be funny if stopwatch precision was bound to screen refresh rate.
You can implement a counting-thread that's even more precise than the CPU's timer (TSC on x86) platforms. This was shown in attacks on Intel SGX, where the rdtsc instruction to access the time-stamp counter is unavailable.
link.springer.com/chapter/10.1…
If you remove access to the timer, attackers will simply build one.
Malware Guard Extension: Using SGX to Conceal Cache Attacks
In modern computer systems, user processes are isolated from each other by the operating system and the hardware.Michael Schwarz (Springer International Publishing)
...and there you go:
ccs25files.zoolab.org/main/ccs…
misc0110.net/files/exfilstate_…
From sigsac.org/ccs/CCS2025/accepte… (#378)
Literally published less than a day ago:
ExfilState: Automated Discovery of Timer-Free Cache Side Channels on ARM CPUs
At the same conference (CCS) that the paper referred to by the ars technica article was accepted.
This is a very big hypothetical.
They'd need to already have access to your account credentials (email, password or at least something that is regarded the same) then have you install this malicious app, then you'd need this app to be open at the same time as your 2FA app
It's possible, yes, it's an awesome find, yes, and this should be patches, yes yes yes, a thousand yes
Having said that, I'm not too worried about the potential impact of this, it'll be fine.
The Right's Secret Plan to Help Billionaires Buy Elections
J.D. Vance and the Right's Plan to Help Billionaires Buy Elections
J.D. Vance and other MAGA interests are working to get the Supreme Court to end restrictions on campaign spending limits.David Sirota (Rolling Stone)
Denmark plans social media ban for under-15s as Prime Minister warns phones ‘stealing childhood’
Denmark plans social media ban for under-15s as PM warns phones ‘stealing childhood’
Mette Frederiksen links social media use to anxiety, depression and lack of concentrationMiranda Bryant (The Guardian)
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When I called my federal representative about the laws and the miles wide holes in Australian privacy laws and more particularly who would be responsible for covering the costs associated with helping citizens recover in the cases of rampant identity theft these laws are going enable, I got assurances that the eSafety Commissioner would be able to hold large tech companies to account. I pointed out that if Meta was to suffer a breach that exposed the details of say a thousand Australians I could see them ponying up the fine, just cost of doing business, if the details of 2 million Australians got leaked then with potential fines stretching into the billions why would they even fight it, so much simpler to cut Australia off like a gangrenous limb. I was assured that the eSafety commissioner would be monitoring these large companies to ensure their data security was up to standard, I laughed. I was told that our parliament may be looking in to strengthening data protection laws and was promised an email with details about this (3 weeks ago with not even a message to say sorry for the delay). I was thoroughly disgusted, this I'll thought out plan to scrape as much data as Australians can be tricked into handing over is going to result in massive costs to the tax payer before too long. Discord has already leaked data related to age verification and Australia hasn't even got its law started yet.
I really think we need remove a lot of the protections from Politicians: "You want to spy on the Australian public at the behest of a shadowy cabal of Intelligence Community wonks? Ok we can do that, but you are personally liable for it when it goes wrong, you will be personally paying all the costs associated with the following scenarios we are categorically stating will occur if you proceed with this nonsense. If you do not have sufficient money to cover these costs all of your assets will be sold and you will become an indentured servant of the Australian public until your debt is cleared."
I got an interesting response when I told the guy at the MPs office that I would shutdown or abandon any app, website or service that demanded my ID. There is no service online which is worth providing a drivers license or sufficient photos to create a reasonable reproduction of my face.
I dont even think this is related to the intelligence community, who are happy to spy on anyone regardless of age, I think it's just a poorly thought out law.
They definitely need to own the responsibility though. When these ID databases leak, and they will, hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people are going to be caught up in the mess, such as:
- Closeted LGBTQ individuals, who may get outed.
- Domestic violence victims trying to escape.
Doxing/Outing these people will result in significant harm, upto and including death. These inevitable deaths with be on the politicians hands.
And the worst part? It won't stop kids getting online or bullying each other.
Personally, I may just intentionally leak my drivers licence online, and get it reissued or something. Give plausible deniability to anything that happens associated with the ID. Not sure exactly what the ramifications are for doing that though.
I think pretty solidly this is being driven by business and intelligence communities, our police and spy agencies have been trying to get around encryption and online anonymity for years. They desperately want to be able to tie every bit of data that moves around the internet to an individual without getting the courts involved, and bear in mind since Australia is a Five Eyes nation not all of that pressure is onshore. It is getting the limpest push back from these big tech companies though because how much more valuable is your advertising profile if they can associate it with tour government ID, or birth certificate, or confirmed validated biometric data.
I know of a Telco that had to pay to move a family to a different state after they provided their address to a man who posed a credible risk to their lives. They had to buy this family a new house, pay movers, and buy then a new car. The telco preempted the court on this so it wouldn't become a national story in the media and they could minimise the eventual fine they faced.
That one incident 2 decades ago cost more than half a million dollars to fix, uprooted a family and caused unknown amounts of trauma. Do we seriously think Twitter will take a similar incident as seriously? Google? Facebook? But I guarantee they will slurp up every bit of data they can.
You could just not have Internet access on your phone... A smart phone is more then just the internet. It's a camera, a Gameboy, an mp3 player, and other useful tools.
Feels like giving up all the usefulness just because it has internet access might be the best example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
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Yeah, this worries me a lot.
What happens to the queer teenager who has no friends at school who understand them, can't tell their homophobic parents, but found vital and life-saving connections online.
I recognize that social media can be a tool for harm, but it can also be a tool for a lot of good. We should be working to teach teens to engage with online spaces in a way that's healthy, not just shutting off access altogether.
“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we’ve been too naive. We’ve left children’s digital lives to platforms that never had their wellbeing in mind. We must move from digital captivity to community.”
Powerful words.
Small question: Why are you giving these horrible platforms more leverage over their digital captives instead of just banning them or outlawing the worst parts of their business models?
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Smart phones are by them self fine. It's no different then when we were kids with a gameboy and a cheap prepaid flip phone
Like what's actually fucking the problem with smart phones? It's a camera phone and Gameboy all in one. There's nothing inherently problematic with that
Every problem people always bitch about are various apps and companies and have absolutely fucking shit and all to do inherently with the phone it self.
Proper parenting, and bitch slapping the dipshits companies shoving additive and invasive software at kids is the solution.
Not getting rid of a useful tool that kids should learn to properly utilize and one of the single largest tools of safety for kids.
As usual, here are my (extremely) unpopular opinions:
1: This ban is made to extend to smartphones for children overall, allowing some abuse situations to be carried out without risk. Furthermore, this might (later) extend to some workers, women overall, then lower “castes” and classes.
2: This is another way for Chat Control to also be implemented later, by setting the roots for such.
Oh, another thing: using age as a metric is darn stupid — aren't some of the worst leaders actually quite… elderly?
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I'm not, he's not comparing cigarettes to social media, he's saying that social media has replaced cigarettes as the vice of choice for young people.
Hes does compare it to Radium poisoning though.
He literally makes an analogous comparison in the first sentence to cigarettes and social media.
So I say again, why were you ignoring the obvious comparisons that I was referencing with my reply?
And for the record, I completely disagree with your apples vs oranges dismissal.
They are not apples and oranges, as both cigarettes and social media use are directly linked to statistically significant poor health outcomes in people who use them.
But, if you really have a problem with that comparison, you should have replied to the person who introduced that lengthy line of conversation and not just people quickly responding to it.
I think it's clear that there are problems with children's use of social media today.
But a blanket ban is not the way to go. Especially since it will most likely just lead to age verification and all the issues that brings.
Sounds like someone is trying to avoid regulating social media platforms.
How about "User must be subscribed to see an activity" so the algo doesn't just roll you into a rabbit hole.
Subscriptions can still recommend other subscriptions and people can share stuff from their subscriptions but liking something shouldn't qualify.
Between a revolution and a whisper
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Google Confirms Non-ADB APK Installs Will Require Developer Registration
Google Confirms Non-ADB APK Installs Will Require Developer Registration
After the news cycle recently exploded with the announcement that Google would require every single Android app to be from a registered and verified developer, while killing third-party app stores …Hackaday
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Google can go fuck itself.
Hopefully this will put some jet fuel into the Linux phone development.
I'm checking out Graphene OS next week and pretty pumped about it. This Google ratfucking has been just the push I need to get off Android.
And obviously I haven't stopped telling people around me haha
I don't see why it would need to be affected.
The constraint to require a valid signing isn't something imposed by the license on the Android code. If you want to distribute a version of Android that doesn't check for a registered signature, that should work fine.
I mean, the Graphene guys could impose that constraint. But they don't have to do so.
I think that there's a larger issue of practicality, though. Stuff like F-Droid works in part because you don't need to install an alternative firmware on your phone --- it's not hard to install an alternate app store with the stock firmware. If suddenly using a package from a developer that isn't registered with Google requires installing an alternate firmware, that's going to severely limit the potential userbase for that package.
Even if you can handle installing the alternate firmware, a lot of developers probably just aren't going to bother trying to develop software without being registered.
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But if Graphene chooses not to do this, they diverge from the Android project. Which will take more time to maintain the project which will ultimately lead to more developers burning out and dropping out of the project.
It doesn’t need to be affected, but most open source projects don’t have the resources to keep going against big companies when most of their users aren’t contributing.
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But I do know that users of open source projects expecting changes to come out of thin air, and filing bugs when they don’t, is hurting the volunteers behind open source projects.
So we should all make sure to volunteer some of our own time or money to keep the projects we love going, instead of just expecting them to fix the things we dislike.
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F-Droid works [...][...]
[...] that's going to severely limit the potential userbase for that package.
I don't think most developers who are putting their Open-Source apps on F-Droid have any minimum user threshold.
Developer ID verification will be part of Google Play and won't be present in GrapheneOS
Straight from the horse's mouth. The rest of the post is a good reminder that GrapheneOS are morons.
But why would you lie about this?
Graphene is bult on top of android AOSP, which is owned by google... And of course they are fucking it over.
Check calyxos.org s recent blog posts, it is basically dying (and graphene is the same)
calyxos.org/news/2025/06/11/an…
Thats what I was referring to, but yeah, that is also a thing.
For mobile phones that works as a daily driver? Gobbling up iOS. Or gobbling up what's becoming of Android.
I really wish we had open phones that "just work". I'd even go with slightly quirky but functional. Unfortunately, that requires strong cooperation between hardware maker and software developers; and it will require a lot of work. But that's not the main issue. The direction we're headed toward is "everything need an official app", and those will mostly only work on "official" phones made by big manufacturers.
Even today, making some bank apps work on non vanilla Android is not always straightforward, and it's still relatively open and easy to do. The move by Google is going to tighten this even more, and I have no doubt, if they pull through, that this will go in the requirements for the "play protect" validation BS. Meaning if you want that bank app, or whatever state digital ID app (meh) to work, you'll need a "real" Android or an iOS device. And those apps are becoming more and more mandatory (I can't log-in to my bank's online website without their app and proprietary 2FA…).
A niche, open-source OS, Linux or modified AOSP or whatever, will have a hard time filling that gap as things keep moving. Which is really sad.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Han…
Google doesn't "own" Android. They (and the OHA) are the maintainers. AOSP is open source.
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Most F-Droid users are NOT custom ROMs.
This means that as long as F-Droid does not get their own developer key - it will become useless.
F-Droid is privacy focused - both dev and user, and they oppose requiring devs to essentially give up their privacy and sign the APK with their own dev key.
Now, if F-Droid is dead, GrapheneOS becomes useless. Who would want to develop apps for the 0.0001% of the population (i.e custom ROM users)
This.
I am the person you are talking about. I've looked into graphene before and I do host some of my own services at home. I also work full time and I don't want to spend all of my free time managing things. I use F-Droid, but I am on stock android on my pixel.
I appreciate the privacy and FOSS nature of F-Droid, but I use things like Android auto Google maps for work, I use banking apps on my phone as well. I know technically micro G and blah blah blah, but like I said: work full time.
Shizuku provides this fully on-device for android 10 or 11 and above, and droid-ify supports using shizuku to install apps.
The one main downside is that it only works when you're connected to wifi.
GitHub - RikkaApps/Shizuku: Using system APIs directly with adb/root privileges from normal apps through a Java process started with app_process.
Using system APIs directly with adb/root privileges from normal apps through a Java process started with app_process. - RikkaApps/ShizukuGitHub
All APKs will need a valid Google developer signature.
Doesn't matter if it's installed from GitHub or F-Droid, no signature, no installation.
I haven't used revanced in a while, but Fennic + ubo + sponsor block should get you to basically the same place unless they've added new features since I used it last.
No separate app required.
All APKs will require a signed developer certificate.
I doubt they will be signing keys for developers who circumvent Google's services, or that violate their ToS.
They're copying this scheme from Apple in Europe, when it was forced to allow other app stores.
In that case, Apple revoked certificates for apps it didn't like, such as P2P/torrents. Mind you, these were NOT apps that were not hosted on Apple's App Store.
They're doing the same thing Apple has been doing for years, I used to run a self-signing application which ran every week or so by itself.
Workarounds are going to exist plenty, it's just a slap in the face. Especially because the Play Store is filled with malware. Apple's strict rules are horrible for developers, but at least it's not as riddled with malware.
Big gov and big corp are essentially the same thing. And while the people jump ship to be at the mercy of the "better side", the elites are sharing a cocktail in secret.
The scale still remains, however one side tilted more so than the other.
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Luckily it's not the same body in the EU who's in charge of enforcing AND setting up proposals.
The EU is not a "one opinion" government body.
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They usually sue if the practice doesnt stop for over a year. They do send warnings before anything official comes out FYI.
But I dont know if they want to do anything though. No one but them and Apple knows for sure.
That's actually a really interesting question.
I understand that Apple takes issue with packages that can themselves "take packages". But historically, I don't believe that Google has. Of course, Google also hasn't done the registration thing historically, either.
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You don't need a credit card for a dev account. You do, however, need to have a "business" attached. Luckily, that business they're asking for doesn't need to be verified, so it can be just a random string of letters.
Still bs that you have to go through all of that just to install apps you want.
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Just about. There used to be more, but if im honest, if it works in iOS then its a decent experience most of the time.
But my custom apps makes or breaks my phone. Its so convenient.
Ill probably get a uconsole or something. Or keep my current phone til all this blows over.
iOS is infinitely more polished than Android. It's rather stable and at least the main notification system isn't that bad for privacy.
Edit: I want to inquire: what exactly is wrong about my comments. Android is a piece of shit. iOS is a piece of shit. iOS is smoother because Apple can engineer the parts more smoothly. Android lets you run software. I hate them both but I need to run Termux.
Its terrible for security haha. We were able to 0 day it a couple of times without trying all that hard. So many CVEs that are repeatable. I wil admit the UI is phenominally better (in my opinion). And the official apps (as long as you dont want to do something specific) are perfect at what they do.
Android is a bit better but you can exploit it because people dont update their phones. Google is actually VERY good at keep those up to date...but if no one updates, its kinda a wash.
Again my opinion, im not too attached to either. They both suck in their own unique ways. #1 is you have to use their tool sets which is unique instead of any other computer system. Its such a hassle to keep up with as a software developer.
Really depends which spin of Android you have. I have a Nothing Phone 2 and the OS is arguably more polished than on my SO's iPhone 14, which frequently has bugs, lag, and crashes. You can't really generalise about Android when there are so many versions of it.
That being said I'll probably be looking into Linux phones in the next few years because I'm tired of corporations trying to control my devices.
Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see what phone you have in that post.
Could you clarify?
I wasn't denying the fact that you're experiencing this issue, but since this is the first I've heard of something this bad in my 3 years of using GrapheneOS, this does appear to be a fairly unique case.
Provided you are using an otherwise well-functioning and currently supported device (and not an emulator), and that you are using a stable release installed via an official method (and there were no install issues), your best bet would be to ask for help in one of the community chats or forums:
grapheneos.org/contact#communi…
You will be asked to share which device you are using though, which you did not seem comfortable doing in the post you linked to.
Unrelated, but I learned about the Android "task manager" (Running Services) from that post of yours, so thanks for sharing that.
Yeah that unfortunately seems to be the only option if you don't want to completely reset your device or remove apps one at a time to find the culprit. And there's no guarantee either of those will work anyway.
I've actually found a small number other users reporting a similar issue, though dev responses all seem to believe the issue is likely caused by apps rather than the OS. The fact that the issue is exclusive to GrapheneOS doesn't appear to have swayed them into looking into it unfortunately.
If I were in your position I'd probably use the Auto Reboot setting so at least you don't have to do it manually every day. It reboots after a specified number of hours without an unlock, so it's ideal for when you're asleep.
I guess it depends on the specific apps we use. Some can be pretty massive, but I have heaps of APKs that are <30MB, and even several that are <1MB.
Maybe a couple of large enough apps could be the issue if you always have them open, or if they are running services on your phone.
"It works on my machine"
The fact of the matter is that Android is hacked on top of Linux and there's endless problems because of it. One part is that there's no task manager and system apps eat up well over half my memory which means that once I open one app, the other needs to be immediately evicted from RAM
Fuck google and every piece of shit implementing this for them.
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I was able to set custom APN settings on my Pixel to bypass the tethering block that MetroPCS puts on their cheapest plan.
There is nothing in iOS that lets you do that.
I also can't run WiFi scanners on iOS.
And Android will still have ADB sideloading. On iOS I have to run shit like Sideloadly to re-sign applications every 7 days.
If you're a true Android fan, there is still a lot to keep you on the platform.
Get a fairphone, install Ubuntu touch and stop rolling over like a good little dog.
And their flagship costs more than the iPhone 17 Pro but has performance closer to the iPhone 11 and they still sell your data off the back end.
Android was a fine alternative to iOS for a minute… like in 2012 with the Galaxy S3 and Jellybean. Now? I don’t get it. You pay more, you get less, all because — what? Gmail was once cool?
They took your headphone jack. They took your memory card slot. They took your back button. (Anyone remember the menu button?) Now they’re taking sideloading.
What is even the point of Android? It isn’t freedom. I see it as capitulation to Big Data.
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I'm not sure where the thought that it's clunky comes from, but the advantage to me is that I like the Android OS way more the the Apple OS. I don't care about integration across devices because I don't have more than one android device. Anytime I switch phones I login and everything loads in from my latest back up and it just works. I can connect to my computer with KDE connect or plug in with USB C if needed.
I'm not claiming it's a better functioning product, I'm just saying the Android UX > Apple UX. The pixel has the advantage of flashing something like grapheneOS which no iPhones can do. Even with locking down side loading apps, there is still more freedom on Android devices than there are on iOS.
Also, I don't like the feel of iPhones. I'm sure it's something I would get used to, but it's not my first choice.
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I agree about Graphene OS, of course.
I’ve used Android since launch and occasionally switched back and forth with iOS. One of my main complaints is in virtue of Android’s versatility, which makes it less reliable and straightforward to use — no integrated password manager, no easy wireless connection to external computers, less smooth and pleasant (and easy) to use. Honestly, I’m just lazy. I want my text messages and calls migrated to my computer automatically, screen sharing, file sharing, passwords and security codes populating instantly, and so on.
I'm the complete opposite with respect to wanting all of those apps and features built into the OS, but I understand that's what most people seem to want, which is largely why iPhones are so popular.
To me, all of that built-in stuff is bloatware that I have to remove just so I can use whichever software I want.
I'll take a bit of jank if it means I have the freedom to do what I want on my device (and choose a device with the specs that matter to me within my budget). That's why so many people are upset at this news.
The Apple ecosystem is perfectly suitable for the needs you described, and it's not something Google will be able to match due to their lack of a real competitor in the desktop OS market. Microsoft had their chance with the Windows Phone but, knowing Windows, I doubt it would ever have had the same level of polish as iOS.
What about it is better? Honest question, from someone who uses both.
So yeah, on Android you can do a little more with home screen customisation. It used to be a lot more — I can't believe it took Apple how many years to figure out how to place an icon to the right of or below an open space? It's closer now, they both steal from each other, but you can do a lot more. My Android phone is partly a cosplay prop: it's a real-life NookPhone, from Animal Crossing. My icons are huge, they're the ones from the game, but they open real apps, and they're in a 3x3 grid. Definitely can't do that on iOS. But I don't need that on my daily driver. And many people say — and I'm inclined to agree — that when an app is on both, it's better on iOS due to fewer hardware configurations to support.
Also, we have Delta, the emulator that backs everything up to, ironically, Google Drive. So I can show you this app on my iPhone. I can also AirDrop you any game I have. Long press, share, AirDrop, find your iPhone, you open it with the same app, you got it now. Super easy. But I can also uninstall the app, it removes all the files and whatnot. I can go into Files, double check all my games are gone. Saves, all of it. Then I reinstall it. Nothing... but as soon as I sign into Google Drive, it re-downloads everything. I just wish the emulator ran on the Mac, too — I'd have cross-device sync. Also, the emulator is Nintendo only, no PlayStation, no Sega, nothing like that.
And then the privacy issue. I think it's wild so few people care about their private information being sold. Then again, Facebook, TikTok, and others are huge. So I might be the outlier caring about that. But I still do.
And all those things were "taken" because they followed apple's lead who took all those things first. Losing sideload capability is yet another fallow the leader act they're doing to be like apple.
As for more expensive, disagree there. That's only the case if you go with high end sansung phones, but you can get android phones for much cheaper with still decent hardware, and it (currently) can do all the things apple does. You cant buy a cheaper apple 17 then the 2 models they give you. Also the hardware differences are so minor between Samsung and Apple, its laughable to call one "better" so your ppst really comes off like a fanboy talking about something you dont understand.
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Actually, the first phone to do a lot of things was actually an Android — good and bad! The first fingerprint reader, I think may have been the Motorola Bionic? But it was like an electric razor, it had these things you roll your finger across. It was weird. Not like what we have now. Likewise, I'm pretty sure an Android phone was the first one to pull the headphone jack. It was just because Apple did it right when they brought out the AirPods that people cried foul (rightly so). Memory card? Apple never supported them (they're too slow), and Android phones famously didn't support them... I think the Nexus phones? Pixel too. I don't think any Google-branded phone had a memory card slot.
More expensive does include the foldables, and you can't say they don't count because they exist. I wouldn't count the diamond-crusted Android phones, those are super limited edition. But anyone can go buy a fold or a flip, so they have to be considered. Right now the top iPhone costs $2000 in the US. It's a 2TB iPhone 17 Pro Max. Android gets higher, albeit with folds, but it does get higher, and the performance isn't any better.
As far as Samsung specifically: the chip in the Galaxy S25 is faster than the one in the iPhone 16 Pro/Max, but it also loses more power when it throttles for getting too hot. That really only means anything in high-end gaming, though. For day-to-day usage the Samsung will clock higher. It's only going to get 3-4 years of support though, if that, and they still sell your private information. You can't even use Samsung Health without agreeing to let them sell your private medical data (whatever you put in it). So no, it can't do everything an iPhone can do. It can't keep your medical information private, which is enshrined in law in many countries, but if you agree to let them sell it, that goes out the window. Why would you give that up when you don't have to?
- Cost. You can get performant brand new phones for $200 that will last you 2+ years
- OS-wide adblock. I cannot comprehend how iOS users live with out it. I see my GF using her phone and every other scroll of something is an ad.
- Some other sailing-of-the-seas things that I'm not comfortable posting online about, but it saves me a lot of money on subscriptions from big corporations.
- You got me there. I can probably get a gently used iPhone from a generation or two back and maybe get down to $300, but I dunno about $200. You're 100% right on that one, and more to the point, mid-range Android isn't nearly as bad as it used to be. One of the biggest secrets in mobile is that performance has plateaued.
- You can only block ads OS-wide on Android if you're rooted. AdAway (and I suppose others like it) edit the HOSTS file which trumps DNS. DNS is what iPhone users use, and what unrooted Android users use. The problem with DNS isn't that it doesn't work — it does — it's that bad actors can tunnel around it. So Google, great example, the app I mean, has its own DNS. They have various reasons but what it boils down to is "we can tunnel around your ad blocker." They definitely do this on iOS. They probably do it on Android. But editing HOSTS can beat that. And no, I don't get ads on YouTube, either — but I do not use the app. You can, if you're on Android and you're rooted and you have a good HOSTS file. I can block YouTube ads with Safari and uBlock Origin (yeah, we got it now) but it's just DNS. I will concede that the best way to browse on a phone is Firefox for Android with uBlock Origin. Us iPhone users wish we had that. We don't. But we can get close. Really, the only ads I see are in the App Store. It's become a cesspool of shit.
- I don't sail on my phone. I've tried, a few things don't work. I have computers for that. I have a good/decent emulator that works good. As far as movies, music, shows, audiobooks, I have a Plex server and my iPhone has no problem accessing that. I bet you could use an Android phone as a Plex server though. Not that I'd want to. But you probably could. Maybe. Like with root? I dunno. But anything on my iPhone (not counting Plex stuff), I can get on your Android phone. And vice-versa. I mean, not to use your Android phone as an example, that's kinda hostile, I mean if I have an iPhone in one hand and an Android phone in the other, I got no problem getting stuff from one to the other. Either way. Best if they're on the same WiFi, but I can make one a hotspot in a pinch.
They took your headphone jack.
Are we talking the nebulous They, the royal They, or do you mean "Android took your headphone jack?" Because uhh,
Delusional apple fanboy.
I don't need a my phone to be a 'flagship'. I am not an influencer. I also wonder what loads are you running on a phone that you meet performance issues.
You can get an android with microSD and 3.5mm jack for 250€.
You can still run all the software you want. Adblockers, torrent clients, emulators, even... browsers! There will still be new android phones that won't suffer those limitations. They will also be cheaper than iphones.
Don't get me wrong android is in a bad trajectory, it's true that's Google has been enshitificating as much as it can get away with. It's still light years ahead of iOS.
If anybody cares for privacy or control of their devices, saving Android, even in alternative versions/vendors, is a much more viable option than switching to iPhone.
this seems to be going the shittitest direction it could...fuck Google
ps: loving the apple simps coming out to claim iPhones aren't perfect just because you can't "sideload" lool
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loving the apple simps coming out to claim iPhones aren't perfect just because you can't "sideload" lool
Confused ape noises
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Thankfully I have root, I'll just simply hook into it runtime via Xposed to bypass this nonsense.
Seriously anyone who doesn't have root on their Android devices these days and age, well may Google have mercy on you lol
Recent AOSP repo added lines of code to Package Installer to handle enforcing restricting whether Package Installer installs an APK file or not based on dev signatures, as well as denying installation if internet isn't available so it can't contact Google's servers for dev signature verification.
So this is enforced by Package Installer, which is already how Google enforces their ridiculous minimal SDK version requirement for installing APK packages, as well as for blocking app update with an APK package with mismatched signature or blocking downgrading an existing app with an APK package, which I already have bypassed via Xposed this way.
Besides, rooting gives YOU total control over your own device like when you have sudo on Linux, even if Google tries some new BS there will be a way to counter it when you have root
I used to root every phone, but by 2025 I've given up. Hard to unlock bootloaders, random apps (especially banking) thinking you will get hacked and stops working, the entire community around rooting and mods is like 10% of what it used to me, hardly any modern phone still gets custom roms, etc.. Recently saw some statistic about custom roms - on average, around 50 phones 5-8 years ago had support for custom roms. By 2025, that number has fallen to 4.
Android is not what it used to be
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You said it like banking apps will be happy to work with a Linux phone lol, the banks always have their interests inherently conflict with user control anyway. And rooting and getting a custom ROM (one which exists or otherwise) are two completely different things that have nothing to do with each other, and you shouldn't support manufecturers who choose to make it difficult to unlock bootloader anyway.
By 2025, rooting still empowers you to make your own Android device however you like it to be.
Also not many people care about custom ROM these days because Android stock ROM got much better in average, so there's much less a need for creating a brand new ROM just to get basic features. Why making a brand new ROM instead of modding the pretty good one you already have now. And root empowered ROM modding tools that are developed as Magisk module or Xposed modules still have a pretty big community, there's a long list of pretty big repos with hundreds of modules each, and with how sophisticated Magisk and Lsposed have evolved it's easier than ever to write your own mods
XDA is dead, and you just described one of the symptoms of a forum being dead.
That said there are still a small amount of people posting detailed posts for rooting Xperia phones, for how to flash OS updates with unlocked bootloader without losing your user data, for how to bypass carrier restrictions to get international model to work with the 5G bands in the US via build.conf edit and baseband flashing, etc. There are perks of a community being small and niche, and I guess not everyone is brained washed by Samsung's propaganda they use to justify permanently locked bootloader on their phones lol
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He's not wrong in a way. If ADB is overwhelmingly used and "undesirable" apps (vanced and "streaming apps") don't see any drop in support or usage, or if governments see a massive number using this to fly under the surveillance radar, they'll restrict ADB too...
Likely they'll pull what Meta did and make everyone who wants to enable "developer mode" will actually need to prove they are indeed, a developer.
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I was about to switch to android but ended up with another iPhone because of Google killing the only reasons to use android.
I like my air but I’m still waiting for what I really want. A viable Linux phone.
Google is building a walled garden, so I went with this other walled garden instead.
You people have zero logical consistency and I've seen so many such comments on reddit. I want to pick your brain and figure out how you can roll over THAT easily for corpos.
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Because one walled garden does not exist yet.
Because it's possible to get around the proposed walled garden.
Because there are android manufacturers that ship phones that are not going to be affected by this.
But no lets just promote the whole iOS and Android are 100% the same (not Apple and Google, those are the same) and give up on fighting those changes.
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I’m all for supporting an alternative, however it’s done.
But between the google walled garden and the apple one, I slightly prefer the apple one for having marginally better privacy.
Though as a dev with dev accounts for both, I already can run whatever the hell I want on my own devices, so i admit to having no real skin in that game.
Apple's walled garden vs Google's future wall garden is a false dilemma.
I was looking at a pixel fold running grapheneOS. Google is making changes that I dislike and realistically cannot avoid so why jump ship from my existing walled garden into one that’s just now starting to from, with even worse privacy and a business model totally dependent on violating as much of your privacy as possible?
The future of graphene and other third party roms is uncertain but I needed to upgrade my phone. My screen was cracked but usable but once I remove it to replace the battery I won’t be able to reinstall the single piece of glass and by that point I’m halfway to a new phone anyway.
For now, I’m okay with my air, but I know me and Apple are on not going to be together long term. I’m pulling off the cloud and breaking up dependancies one by one so, but as far as phones go, there isn’t a viable option quite yet. It’s definitely coming but it’s not here yet.
We need to break free from both Apple AND Google. Borrowing from Google to make another rom but still being dependent on them to keep your project alive and supported is no longer an option. We need a clean break away from them.
I can foresee a phone-like pocket computer running Linux that doesn’t have cellular capabilities at all. American cell phone companies weren’t crazy about supporting windows phone a many even blocked them from joining their networks. We are starting to see the same shit with Linux phones now. But most people don’t need data everywhere. There’s wifi where people like me actually use it. And so I can see a market for a voip service for phones that lets you use them like mobile landlines. For simple texts, a network of Lora packet radios would suffice and reticulum seems to be up the task of serving that need.
Costs are increasing and our dependance on these devices are changing so not every problem we have with Linux phones will need to be solved by the time that such devices get off the ground. We have options for tomorrow.
But today, the iPhone air was fine for me.
A viable Linux phone.
I am eyeing the Jolla C2. Gonna use GrapheneOS for as long as possible, but if all else fails I will use the shittiest Linux phone over this Google/Apple nightmare.
Sensitive content
Shizuku?
EDIT: I didn't notice it was mentioned already. XDD
Can someone "redpilled by corporate" explain me how this policy actually increase security?
It's trivial for a malware developer to pay $25 with a stolen card and a stolen id
Look at the "verified" bots on xitter, they didn't solve the bots problem, rather just monetized it
You don’t think Google have better tech than banks?
Oh boy. You have no idea how old and bad the underlying tech that banks work on is.
Google is doing this to comply with EU regulations supposed to increase security. Now imagine that Google was pushing back against this instead of complying. As per usual, Lemmy would be up in arms against Google for failing to protect people's data and not complying with our laws and culture. You'd be downvoted to oblivion for asked that question and called a corporate bootlicker.
I think these rules come from German legal culture, which traditionally has a strong need to control information exchange and processing.
I'm sure the EU is not the only jurisdiction demanding this sort of thing, but I doubt Singapore has the pull needed to get Google to move.
Brussels effect. Imagine Google were to still allow unverified apps in the US. Most devs would still opt for verification so as not to lose the EU market. The proportion of malware is probably going to be higher among the few remaining unverified apps. Sooner or later, some US scam victims would sue Google for failing to protect them like it protects Europeans. Hard to refute.
The vast majority of malware isn't delivered via play store because of the existing measures and protections they have. Same reason you see very little app-store-based malware on iOS. DISCLAIMER: YES MALWARE EXISTS ON APPLE HARDWARE PLEASE DON'T SHOUT AT ME. Talking specifically about anything installed via first party stores on both platforms.
Their main issue is this: dumb people install apks from spurious website and infect their phones. The least controllable and most pervasive factor here is the intelligence and knowledge of the user which cannot be controlled for by Google. So by eliminating the ability to exploit this entirely, it will eliminate that specific vector.
It's a sledgehammer solution that naturally comes with many downsides like disrupting intelligent and knowledgeable users that just want to hack around with FOSS and such.
Google is relying on It being too expensive for malware creators to have to guide each individual user through adb installation and usage process just to get access to their phone. Most scammers only do that level of interaction to extract actual cash/gift cards from the target.
I am personally and directly affected by their decision in many negative ways, but I'm not so dense as to not understand why they're doing it.
/corpodronespeak
EDIT: bots help Xitter maintain inflated usage figures which justify people's jobs, share prices, etc. Bots are a feature, not a bug.
yes, of course malware is distributed via apk.
But what's the difference between:
- malware that is signed anonymously and then, when its signature is identified, it's removed via play protect
- malware that is signed with a stolen identity and then, when its signature is identified, it's removed via play protect
?
Isn't exactly the same stuff? Or there's someone that is actually thinking that criminals will use their real ID card for the verification?
Does not change anything for malware distribution, except bother them for a dozen minutes meanwhile they "verify" their stolen ID
Because it can be invalidated. That's the difference.
It's absolutely not foolproof, but nothing is. Most actions corps take for this stuff only slows down the spread. Hackers and bad actors innovate way faster than companies can keep up with. So companies cast a wide net with their solutions. And the cycle continues.
with the new system, you must go online to check if the license for that app is still valid or revoked. But the current system works almost the same: if there's an internet connection play protect checks the signature against an online malware db and prevents installation.
From a couple years ago, google has the power to remotely install/uninstall any apk on your phone without your consent
Their main issue is this: dumb people install apks from spurious website
No they don't. Most people don't even know what an apk even is.
Most people don't know what a bootloader is. They still turn their devices on and off every day.
This whole conversation is about adding obstacles to prevent non technical users from doing things they don't fully understand.
Yes you're right. If they knew, it would likely come with the knowledge that, if someone asks you to do this, you're probably being scammed.
That's what makes them most vulnerable to these kinds of scams.
It's not about stopping malware; it's about being able to act on malware.
Making a new account with a new phone number and new credit card is a minor barrier to entry.
That said, it's a cool story, but I think they're looking to stop vanced style patching.
Man, I miss my jailbroken iPhone 5.
It was like having your cake and eating it, and somehow its stock (much less tweaked) UI is less clunky than whatever TF Apple has done to my discount 16. Maybe it’s because I was using Android in between, but still…
Google will become the exact same as apple, third party stores are technically "allowed", but requires Google's official stamp (digital signature), it's same with Apple. Its probably legal since Apple is already like this.
A corporation like Epic Games will be left alone since they can afford lawyers. An open source volunteer dev making a Youtube alternative client will get their certificates revoked under dubious "ToS Violation" claims and they won't have money to sue.
dug my pinephone out of a drawer yesterday and gave it a whirl. still pretty rough unfortunately even after updating postmarket os.
Cool being able to SSH into my phone though
tbh part of the rough experience for me may be down to the hardware. the ubports version of the pinephone i have is quite low power. 2GB memory and a little ARM Cortex-A53
tis sluggish
The main issue will be application support.
Linux running on the desktop in 2025 is helped immensely by everything being web based. So long as you have a browser you are fine for a lot of general computing.
The phone space is ruled by apps. The phone makers and the companies developing apps prefer it this way.
Getting a banking app, or Uber or Facebook Messenger to work on a Linux phone is going to be a massive pain in the ass (ignoring the rest of the OS which is definitely not even close to useable for the general public).
I would love a Linux phone but we are so far away.
The phone space is ruled by apps. The phone makers and the companies developing apps prefer it this way.
That's true, but for everything non-free, they always end up having a perfectly working web app that will accept my money.
Cool being able to SSH into my phone though
I thought you could do that on Android?
Plain AOSP is already pretty brutal. An alternate OS is practically a non-starter. Phones aren't just web browsers and SMS.
- Tap-to-pay
- Including transit fares
- Bank apps
- RCS messaging
- MFA and security apps
- Work profiles
- Streaming media that's not 480p
Not to mention that the camera is going to suuuuuuuuck.
Forking or improving AOSP is more viable but none of the more mainstream ROMs want to piss off Google. That's why most LineageOS forums forbid talking about defeating Play Integrity.
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On a mobile device? It's more likely that only OSS drivers work and the binary blob driver only worked with a pre-Pandemic aged kernel. Or it needed a very specific userspace library that doesn't work with a minimal libc.
"Free software enough" usually means "has a snowball's chance of actually working".
So now 3rd party app stores need an ADB loopback to work around that.
Not hard to do, but uselessly annoying.
I believe F-Droid signs the packages it distributes so that creates a painful choke point. Revoke F-Droid's key and it will break all of F-Droid instantaneously. The only exception for F-Droid's signing is if the build is reproducible, which is a high bar for a lot of projects, and then F-Droid will use the upstream signature.
Also, they're trying to close the ADB loophole.
Ok, fuck this crap. This was the main reason to prefer Android over iOS. Going to start trying out some of the FOSS Android forks
Another example of Embrace, extend, and extinguish
I'm just skimming through the license on my phone and they include LGPL, apache, BSD, Mozilla public license, eclipse public license, w3c, MIT, apple, and GNu.
IANAPOLL (The extra POL is for patent or licensing) so I don't know the intricacies of each type.
But there are a lot.
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Honestly at this point they actually likely need to be EVEN MORE strict to deal with how bad the app store is and how many scam apps are floating around.
My grand father has been given like 30 scam apks to install via email that we're just crypto ransomware basically, and he's had to reformat his phone at least 10 times this year from installing scam shit from the playstore it self too.
Both the playstore AND scammers are target android like crazy
There's basically no way to crack down on it short of what they are doing and frankly it's still not enough.
Anyone who thinks this is just Google being evil is massive fucking out of touch with the reality of what elderly and less it savvy people have to deal with. It fucking SUCKS.
And I fucking hate these changes too, but even I cant say it's enough. There's too many fucking shit bag assholes ruining all the good things.
They also already have installation from external sources turned on by default.
Why the hell are we babying people who turn it off? They read the warning, they know the risks.
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Sorry for the downvote, but I see this take repeated here on Lemmy so often and it just makes no sense. This will not kill the FOSS app "ecosystem". Nothing whatsoever changes for FOSS ROMs like LineageOS or GrapheneOS. And as long as there are FOSS operating systems, apps will be developed for them. If anything, this could drive mainstream adoption of free/libre Android forward, re-invigorating the scene through public outcry.
And to the people who propose fully jumping ship from Android to "Linux phones" because of Google's recent changes, you would only make the app support matter worse. As someone who daily drives both a phone with LineageOS and one with postmarketOS (mainline-ish Linux), mobile app support is endlessly worse on Linux than the fallout from Google's developer registration could ever be. That is not to say that Linux phones will not eventually get to a point of reasonable maturity, but it is way too early and frankly utterly irrational to bury AOSP Android or needlessly hate on it.
Normal people aren’t flashing custom ROMs. The audience for some FOSS software will shrink by several orders of magnitude.
But the pain really kicks in when your government/bank/streaming apps require attestation of a signed boot chain and Google Play services running.
So, will an app like this
codeberg.org/muntashir/AppMana…
which uses (w)adb, be able to install apk as I currently do?
Or will they also fuck this up ?
They won't fuck this up YET. If AppManager doesn't currently use ADB to install APKs, it can be made to. So can any F-Droid or Aurora Store client.
However, I'd say that the odds that Google will stop at this certificate demand and will not eventually try to paywall ADB somehow are currently 0% in my estimation.
It's high time someone created an independent fork of Android. Very soon, custom ROMs won't be enough.
I didn't read the terms but I think this is against Google terms of services, so sure you can patch this out but as a company you would suffer legal actions or would be forced to remove Google services from your devices.
Samsung will just ask Samsung Store devs to be registered
Literally TODAY someone I know installed an application called "PDF viewer for android" that had a green adobe icon and it started wrecking absolute havoc on their phone with pop ads and redirects to scam support sites.
The AppStore is full of this shit.
I smell revival of jailbreak days 😁
And maybe a peak of smuggling china android phones running chinaDroid with crapChecks
Mastodon: Our ideas about Packs
Our ideas about Packs
Sharing our thoughts and plans behind sharing collections of accounts in the Fediverse.Mastodon Blog
Seems like a good idea, although a simple, configurable algorithm would also be nice.
You select one or several topics, and it shows you popular posts in that category.
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I guess in a way that's what it offers, just that instead of an algorithm it's human curated. Mastodon is a lot about boosts, so following someone doesn't mean just following them, but also being subjected to whatever they boost (unless you silence their boosts of course). So if you're interested in pottery and you follow a pottery starter pack, chances are that feed will end up a curated channel of pottery content.
The great thing is that it has quality control and cannot be abused the same way algorithmic feeds always end up being. The funky thing is, of course, that you also end up being exposed to everything else those people are interested in. But I think that's part of what makes Mastodon feels so nice.
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Congratulations, you've been included in the "Assholes" pack.
If you wish to be removed from the pack, you must write a letter explaining why we should remove you and mail it to the address listed below with an attached blood sample in a crystal vial packaged in a refrigerated container with proper padding fit for shipping.
Mastodon Inc,
228 East 45th Street Suite 9E
New York, New York 10017
::: spoiler Spoiler
Disclaimer: this is a joke not intended to convey anything.
:::
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Bluesky pioneered a brilliant solution to this “empty feed problem” in 2024, with the introduction of “Starter Packs”, a feature that allows users to curate and share their own collections of recommended accounts.
Bluesky pioneered, eh? I distinctly remember using a feature called "circles" on Google+ back in 2011. It allowed people to create arbitrary "circles" of people, share them and have others bulk-follow/unfollow the people from a circle. It worked incredibly well and Google+ became a lively social network even with its small userbase at the time.
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I really don't understand the point of packs when Mastodon has hashtag follows. Mastodon is already winning in terms of discovery here and in fact I still don't use Bluesky because its impossible to discover content there.
On Bluesky you get a pack of people but in linear timelines the power spammers just take over and then you have to do all that personal curation anyway but it's often even a worse starting point than just blank slate. With hashtag following I just subscribe to #fediverse and discover new content and creators organically.
Instead I'd like to see Mastodon commit more to organic discovery rather than consolidation of power users by expanding post classification system like using AI classification that attaches topic hashtags to posts etc to help users discover content they actually want to see not follow personalities.
Re: Mastodon: Our ideas about Packs
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Physics Nobel awarded to three scientists for work on quantum computing
Physics Nobel: Three win prize for paving way for very powerful computers
The announcement was made by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.Georgina Rannard (BBC News)
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Frezik
in reply to acargitz • • •SGGeorwell
in reply to Frezik • • •