Ha! Made ya look!

99% of what I do on my phone is done through open source F-Droid applications. I have very little from the play store. Essentially, I have my built-in apps, Hearthstone, and then a few apps forced on me by modern society. Otherwise, my phone is a pocket linux machine with a bunch of F-Droid apps thrown in. So essentially, my platform is about to die. It's not so much that I am changing ecosystems as it is that Google is about to poison my ecosystem. So I'll simply be starting fresh in a new environment, and I would not choose Android over iOS.

Right now, you are correct. Once google locks out all independent apps, that will no longer be the case. If my phone will be reduced to officially allowed functionality, there is no need for much RAM, storage, or any sort of spec. It'll just be a terminal to which I can tether devices that I can control. So that just leaves the user interface and device packaging. In my opinion, iOS is the clear winner in that department.

Well if it weren't for the apps shackling me to a certified device, I would just run lineage os and be done with it. Unfortunately, my banking app and my employer's 2FA apps do not work with non-certified devices.

I could see this, but the fancy equipment is useless if it doesn't do what I tell it to. I'll be coming off a flagship Samsung to the crappiest iPhone that the market can provide. I'll bank, text, and pay my parking meter with it. What a good little citizen I will be.

If I'm going to be forced to wear handcuffs, I am going to have the shiniest handcuffs on the market and that is not Android. I tolerate android because it grants me the freedom to *gasp* run programs of my choosing on a computer that I own. Take that away and the value proposition is gone. iPhone here I come!

Well I, for one, had no idea just how many online services Microsoft offers. But when I let copilot take over, after teaching it my credit card info, I'm now subscribed to them all! :)

The rule for us has always been that as a private citizen, we can say anything we like. If we are acting as a government agent though, like if I am in the classroom or on a news program with my university logo proudly displayed under my talking head, then we are more constrained. Honestly, that is as it should be.

But yeah, there seems to be a push in the direction of because our paychecks are derived from the government then that extends into all sorts of other controls. Like giving to Wikimedia or a political party.

I think it's just a poorly formed sentence. Wikipedia gets no tax dollars, as far as I know. Unless you count the fact that they are a non-profit organization and so they don't pay some taxes.

I believe the subsidized people are the academic institutions which receive subsidies. Read that way they are alleging that people who work at publicly funded institutions are using wikipedia to influence the public. Probably part of their general crackdown on people like me (I'm a public university professor.) Hey! I guess that means some of your tax dollars indirectly go to wikipedia. My university gets tax dollars, out of which I get paid a salary. I turn around and give like $50 a year to the wikimedia foundation.

My wife has Ehlers-Danlos - weak stretchy connective tissue. It's a spectrum syndrome running from very loose joints on the low end to crippling joint/ligament problems with lots of other stuff thrown in. She's on the low end, thank ghod.

Ehlers-Danlos is highly correlated with sleep apnea that has nothing to do with overweight.

If you can ship and deploy 100x bigger or faster, you are exposing 100x as much interface to adversaries.

You'd better hope your LLM was trained on very carefully vetted example code, as opposed to the highest rated posts on StackOverflow, or maybe even all posts there.

It's a $300.00 raspberry pi powered smart speaker that can rotate and tilt from side to side. That's not really disruptive. Really, I struggle to call this thing a robot. I could go as far as "toy robot", but then that makes it one of the most expensive products of its kind.

Bell Labs (cosmic microwave background radiation, among other things) did its best work while it was a state-authorized monopoly.

Good old fashioned AI used to be hands-on - your dissertation code had to at least work for the examples in your thesis, and your code was under development for long enough that it had to survive OS and language updates.

Being wary of code by theoreticians is definitely valid - I believe it was Knuth who said something like "I have only proven this code correct, not tested it".

I first heard this comparison back when IDEs were young (kudos to Larry Masinter, at Xerox PARC at the time).

Amplifiers don't really know or care what they are amplifying.
If you tell them to create good, bad, immoral, or dangerous code, they'll try to comply.
Laws against bad uses of LLMs just make them illegal - they don't make them impossible.

Mediocre programmers with IDE/LLM support will create reams of mediocre code, at best.