Doesn’t Google already let you do this?? My Android phone doesn’t even have Google Play Services, I just only use 3rd party stores. If I want an app from Google Play I get it through Aurora.
The law allows local authorities to name “designated providers” of a certain scale – currently only achieved by Apple and Google – and require those providers to do three things:
Allow third-party app stores on their devices;
Allow application developers to use third-party billing services;
Enable users to change default settings with simple procedures, and offer choice screens for tools like browsers;
And it forbids them doing three more:
Engage in any form of preferential treatment of their services over those of competitors in the display of search results without justifiable reason;
Use acquired data about competing applications for their own applications;
Prevent application developers from using features controlled by the OS with the same level of performance as the one used by Designated Providers.
So Google already allows 3rd party app stores and lots of settings (although these are always hit and miss, even in the custom ROM scene - I can’t get pocket detection right now and my phone keeps doing things in my pocket), but the 3rd party billing and choice screens applies to them.
unrelated to the OP but a suggestion for your problem:
Waveup has a setting to lock the screen after X seconds with the proximity sensor covered, it’s not very sophisticated and thus it can be a bit over-eager, but if the phone being interacted with by your leg while in the pocket is driving you up the wall then this should fix that.
Ty, but I think I’m just gonna switch from my dodgy Chinese Xiaomi phone to the refurbished Pixel 7 Pro I have. I mean, I’ve had it for like e months now, one of these days I will. Although, I really will miss my IR blaster, even though I hardly ever use it it’s nice to be able to change the TV in the pub lol
Edit: lmfao I just changed the TV 10m away, had Tour de France on, but now it’s basketball.
How do you acces your bank account without an app that requieres Google Play Services running? All bank accounts in Europe require a smart phone app for 2FA even when you log-in on a browser. I can install bank apps via Aurora, but almost all of them won’t run without Google’s Software.
Run Magisk in Zygisk mode with the deny list hiding itself from banking apps.
However I would advise not using the banking app if you can help it, they’re not clean. Hell, even accessing online banking via a website seems to require connections to google.com and gstatic.com to perform hidden captcha (you don’t have to do the picture thing but it still does the server side tracking).
There’s no way anyone in Europe can use a bank account without a banking app. As I said, even if you log-in on a browser on a laptop, authentication still requires you grab your phone and use the banking app to authorize the log-in from that laptop once in a while, or any transaction.
Unfortunately, the solution you propose is technically too advanced for most people, including me. Is using GrapheneOS with its sandbox feature good enough of a protection?
I’m in Europe, and I don’t use banking apps. For the most part anyway, one of my credit cards pissed me off by switching to app only, then eventually I relented with one bank because I wanted a 2nd account that required the app.
Banks either verify by SMS (lol) or provide a passkey fob.
GrapheneOS should provide some measure of protection. You can also perhaps disable some tracking features using something like Warden (requires root) - although this hasn’t been updated in years and probably misses stuff now.
Google allows that though or do they mean access of Google Play via 3rd party apps?
Not that I am saying it might not be necessary to include Google from the start, sets a good precedence and prevents a future where they might go the Apple route.
Just hope both Google and Apple won’t restrict opening up to Japanese market only. But who am I kidding, they will.
I think this means allowing the listing of third party app stores inside the Google Play Store - so you could search for F-Droid in Google Play for example instead of downloading and installing the .apk manually.
You’re still putting complete trust into Google by using any android that isn’t thoroughly de-googled, built from scratch, and installed on a jailbroken phone. They’re integrated on the OS level they can do whatever they want.
I wish the internet archive didn’t pick that battle with these companies. I don’t have faith that they will win when the government sides with corporations so frequently. I hope they have a way to dump everything to the public to be backed up. I fear if they were taken down we would lose all that important information
It would be a massive loss for sure. One that will be felt for a long time. It’s the only way I can get around our thoroughly enshittified press up here in Canada. I mean I’d gladly pay, if it was worth paying for, which it’s not.
Years ago I found myself explaining to Chinese Room dinguses - in a neural network, the part that does stuff is not the part written by humans.
I’m not sure it’s meaningful to say this sort of AI has source. You can have open data sets. (Or rather you can be open about your data sets. I don’t give a shit if LLMs list a bunch of commercial book ISBNs.) But rebuilding a network isn’t exactly a matter of hitting “compile” and going out for coffee. It can take months, and the power output of a small city… and it still can’t be exact. There’s so much randomness involved in the process that it’d be iffy whether you get the same weights twice, even if you built everything around that goal.
Saying “here’s the binary, do whatever” is honestly a lot better for neural networks than for code, because it’s not like the people who made it know how it works either.
i feel like it’s okay that they do this, but i don’t like the term “source available”. maybe something like “Free for Non-Commercial Use” or “FOSS-NC”?
The free software banshees will call it all proprietary… It’s not that it doesn’t make sense to draw different lines, but when folks treat OSI with a lot of reverence & if they say it doesn’t match their definition, folks want want to use it or release under these titles. “Source available” is also roped in with the we-get-a-monopoly licenses & gets knocked down a peg as if “open source” is the pinnacle of freedom despite the Commons being ransacked by corporations not giving back monetary support or contributions for the labor.
This isn’t binary. If you shriek that all things that aren’t open source are the same, then you will miss all the nuance. There is a difference between what Redis just did & copyfair or copyfarleft or Creactive Common Non-Comercial are suggesting.
@toastal I don't need to compare each license to each other and get lost in wicked little words, arguing with anonymous accounts on the internet. I can instead see which change was a move towards, or away from, a world ransacked by corporations. That is clearly binary. Would you argue that Redis made the world less ransacked by their license change?
Redis isn’t doing what I would like to see more of in the world. Kicking out the profit & capital is not the same as trying to maintain your monopoly like Redis. Open source has often failed us… & instead we see compromises like AGPL which is restricting the “4 Freedoms” due to corporate exploitation. It’s a form of weak copyfarleft as far as I am concerned & everyone knows its license is a bit weird, but not looking at the root cause which isn’t network usage, but general exploitation from the capitalists.
This needs to have multiple levels of “openness” to distinguish between having access to the code, the dataset, a documented training procedure, and the final weights. I wouldn’t consider it fully open unless these are all available, but I still appreciate getting something over nothing, and I think that should be encouraged.
@vrighter@ylai
That is a really bad analogy. If the "compilation" takes 6 months on a farm of 1000 GPUs and the results are random, then the dataset is basically worthless compared to the model. Datasets are easily available, always were, but if someone invests the effort in the training, then they don't want to let others use the model as open-source. Which is why we want open-source models. But not "openwashed" where they call it "open" for non-commercial, no modifications, no redistribution
I think technically, the source should be the native format of whatever image manipulation program that you use. For vector graphics, there is svg format but the native editor is still preferable. Otherwise, whoever gets the end copy cannot easily modify or reproduce it, only copy it. But it of course depends on the definition of “easy” and a lot of other factors. Licensing is hard and it is because I am not a lawyer.
It would depend on the format what is counted as source, and what isn’t.
You can create a picture by hand, using no input data.
I challenge you to do the same for model weights. If you truly just sit down and type away numbers in a file, then yes, the model would have no further source. But that is not something that can be done in practice.
Are you sure that you can reproduce the model, given the same inputs? Reproducibility is a difficult property to achieve. I wouldn’t think LLMs are reproduce.
In theory, if you have the inputs, you have reproducible outputs, modulo perhaps some small deviations due to non-deterministic parallelism. But if those effects are large enough to make your model perform differently you already have big issues, no different than if a piece of software performs differently each time it is compiled.
I would consider the “source code” for artwork to be the project file, with all of the layers intact and whatnot. The Photoshop PSD, the GIMP XCF or the Krita KRA. The “compiled” version would be the exported PNG/JPG.
You can license a compiled binary under CC BY if you want. That would allow users to freely decompile/disassemble it or to bundle the binary for their purposes, but it’s different from releasing source code. It’s closed source, but under a free license.
The situation is somewhat different and nuanced. With weights there are tools for fine-tuning, LoRA/LoHa, PEFT, etc., which presents a different situation as with binaries for programs. You can see that despite e.g. LLaMA being “compiled”, others can significantly use it to make models that surpass the previous iteration (see e.g. recently WizardLM 2 in relation to LLaMA 2). Weights are also to a much larger degree architecturally independent than binaries (you can usually cross train/inference on GPU, Google TPU, Cerebras WSE, etc. with the same weights).
How is that different then e.g. patching a closed-sourced binary? There are plenty of community patches to old games to e.g. make them work on newer hardware. Architectural independence seems irrelevant, it’s no different than e.g Java bytecode.
This is a very shallow analogy. Fine-tuning is rather the standard technical approach to reduce compute, even if you have access to the code and all training data. Hence there has always been a rich and established ecosystem for fine-tuning, regardless of “source.” Patching closed-source binaries is not the standard approach, since compilation is far less computational intensive than today’s large scale training.
Java byte codes are a far fetched example. JVM does assume a specific architecture that is particular to the CPU-dominant world when it was developed, and Java byte codes cannot be trivially executed (efficiently) on a GPU or FPGA, for instance.
And by the way, the issue of weight portability is far more relevant than the forced comparison to (simple) code can accomplish. Usually today’s large scale training code is very unique to a particular cluster (or TPU, WSE), as opposed to the resulting weight. Even if you got hold of somebody’s training code, you often have to reinvent the wheel to scale it to your own particular compute hardware, interconnect, I/O pipeline, etc… This is not commodity open source on your home PC or workstation.
The analogy works perfectly well. It does not matter how common it is. Pstching binaries is very hard compared to e.g. LoRA. But it is still essentially the same thing, making a derivative work by modifying parts of the original.
How does this analogy work at all? LoRA is chosen by the modifier to be low ranked to accommodate some desktop/workstation memory constraint, not because the other weights are “very hard” to modify if you happens to have the necessary compute and I/O. The development in LoRA is also largely directed by storage reduction (hence not too many layers modified) and preservation of the generalizability (since training generalizable models is hard). The Kronecker product versions, in particular, has been first developed in the context of federated learning, and not for desktop/workstation fine-tuning (also LoRA is fully capable of modifying all weights, it is rather a technique to do it in a correlated fashion to reduce the size of the gradient update). And much development of LoRA happened in the context of otherwise fully open datasets (e.g. LAION), that are just not manageable in desktop/workstation settings.
This narrow perspective of “source” is taking away the actual usefulness of compute/training here. Datasets from e.g. LAION to Common Crawl have been available for some time, along with training code (sometimes independently reproduced) for the Imagen diffusion model or GPT. It is only when e.g. GPT-J came along that somebody invested into the compute (including how to scale it to their specific cluster) that the result became useful.
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