I’d like to share your optimism, but what you suggest leaving us to “deal with” isn’t “AI” (which has been present in web search for decades as increasingly clever summarization techniques…) but LLMs, a very specific and especially inscrutable class of AI which has been designed for “sounding convincing”, without care for correctness or truthfulness. Effectively, more humans’ time will be wasted reading invented or counterfeit stories (with no easy way to tell); first-hand information will be harder to source and acknowledge by being increasingly diluted into the AI-generated noise.
I also haven’t seen any practical advantage to using LLM prompts vs. traditional search engines in the general case: you end up typing more, for the sake of “babysitting” the LLM, and get more to read as a result (which is, again, aggravated by the fact that you are now given a single source/one-sided view on the matter, without citation, reference nor reproducible step to this conclusion).
Last but not least, LLMs are an environmental disaster in the making, the computational cost is enormous (in new hardware and electricity), and we are at a point where all companies partaking in this new gold rush are selling us a solution in need of a problem, every one of them having to justify the expenditure (so far, none is making a profit out of it, which is the first step towards offsetting the incurred pollution).
Hi. I’m thinking about switching to Linux on my smartphone. The only reason I can’t is because in my country WhatsApp is everywhere and I’m expected to have it for various school/sport things. I’d like to setup whatsapp on my laptop, but I don’t know how....
You can always give a shot at using a third party client (possibly acting as bridge for other/better protocols, like e.g. slidge.im>xmpp or the buggy matrix equivalent), but you need to keep in mind that they will all require you to authenticate (and remain authenticated) using a smartphone, and that usage of 3rd party clients is forbidden from WA’s terms and conditions (which may lead to your account being blocked/deleted).
It’s part of the reason why I think decentralized services could be the future. Lemmy or Mastodon can have a lot of small servers with reasonable costs spread across many admins, instead of one centralized service that costs a significant amount to run.
Ohh, absolutely, or rather, it is the past. I mean, internet was built that way, as a resilient federation of networks and protocols. Lemmy could be seen as us just rediscovering emails after the tech giants almost succeeded in killing it. We should approach all the services we use by asking ourselves basic sustainability questions:
is that thing opensource?
self hostable?
does it federate/interoperate with equivalent services?
can I pull my data out of it/relocate to another provider on a whim?
if not, is this a trustworthy and ethical business?
is it profitable?
are there open financial records available showing where/for what the money is going?
Until i can give a laptop with linux to my neighbour without also needing to also provide support, its not there yet.
I mean, isn’t your neighbor already getting Windows support from his son or nephew anyway? Let’s not pretend that there exists a magical and perfect OS for those who don’t want to learn one. Some learning is required, whichever the OS, and I would be hard to convince that a current preinstalled Linux is more difficult to handle than a current preinstalled Windows.
Windows has for itself that it’s a devil most people know/got exposure to (thanks to Microsoft schemes and monopolistic practices), there is nothing inherently better or easier about it (and arguably quite the opposite).
Atuin replaces your existing shell history with a SQLite database, and records additional context for your commands. With this context, Atuin gives you faster and better search of your shell history!...
Been using it for months, haven’t gotten to use the sync yet, my only regret so far is that it doesn’t support case insensitive search which is a pretty big deal for me unfortunately.
What I found compelling about the sync is that you can have your other machines’ histories there with you, but in the background, behind a different shortcut, just in case you need to re-run or check that command you ran somewhere else few years ago…
As I said, I haven’t used that yet, but that’s in many ways more appealing than having to SSH onto said machine (assuming it’s even possible).
Analysts have warned Windows 10 end of life plans could spark a global torrent of e-waste, with millions of devices expected to be scrapped in the coming years....
What is “old arse” to you might be blazing fast and great for someone else (potentially in a less fortunate area of this world), and besides that, no matter your or my sensobilities, if it works, it works and should be kept that way as long as it has a purpose and the hardware permits it.
We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.
If you are curious, you should give XMPP a shot, it’s equivalent to Signal in terms of encryption, but anyone can host their own. Signal is ideologically opposed to anyone but themselves being in control of your account, and because of that I don’t want to trust them.
I don’t believe Matrix is better positioned than XMPP to succeed. On a technical aspect, Matrix hasn’t managed to stabilize its protocol, and they’ve been a decade into it. This has resulted in only a single organization being in charge of the protocol, the client and the server implementations. This isn’t sound, this isn’t sustainable. And now, unsurprisingly, this organization is in a financial crisis, has lost important customers, has no budget secured to maintain its staff in the next years, and recently underwent a major licensing change that we can only interpret as a shift towards an opencore model at the detriment of the regular user.
Neither XMPP nor Matrix will ever become “the next WhatsApp”: the current internet has seen too much consolidation for the tech majors to permit it (and open and federated protocols can’t compete, do not have the marketing budget nor the platforms to promote their software, but I salute the EU’s Market Act attempt to shake-up the status quo).
But that doesn’t really matter IMO. What (I believe) is important in the grand scheme of things is that such protocols remain alive, maintained and secure, so that:
small-scale instances can flourish and contribute to a more resilient/efficient internet (think of family-/district-level providers ; this is the kind of service I personally offer: family members and friends at large appreciate that the messages and data that we exchange aren’t shared over some cloud or facebook server for no good reason)
IM identities can persist over time: if you are a business or an individual, you may want to look into having a stable/lasting contact address, that will survive the inevitable collapse of facebook/whatsapp/instagram/… If you are old enough, your current email address probably existed before facebook. Why not your IM address?
And yes, I hear you, this is rather niche, but what got me there (and on XMPP in particular) is having been long-enough on the internet to become tired of the never-ending cycle of migrations from service to service. More and more people will have a similar experience as time goes, so this niche will only grow :)
I assessed XMPP vs Matrix about 8 years ago, and strikingly, the basis on which it didn’t make the cut still applies today. Here’s what I responded to a sibling post: programming.dev/comment/5408356
In short, Matrix dug themselves into a complexity pit with an inadequate protocol, survived for a while on venture capital money (upscaling servers and marketing at all cost), all of it dried up, and now they are in financial trouble. Matrix won’t disappear overnight, but is definitely losing the means to run the managed instances and the client/server ecosystem.
Please, don’t recommend pidgin, it’s a security hellhole, and a pretty terrible XMPP client at that. If you want something with a similar vibe, check-out dino.im or gajim.org if you are more on the “power-user” side of things :)
If you read between the lines, Matrix 2 is practically about handing the client state over to the server (what they refer to as “sliding sync”). Realistically, this is an admission that the protocol is too complex to be handled efficiently on the user’s devices. I’m not saying there are not clear benefits (and new trade-offs) to the approach, just that in the grand scheme of things the complexity is shifted elsewhere (and admins foot a larger bill).
I can’t pretend to know the future, but if you read between the lines and the justifications provided, this isn’t really about AGPL per se, but about Element brokering AGPL exceptions. Practically we can expect all kinds of forks with opencore options that might enshittify the user experience in different ways, and further solidification of Element’s single-handed control over Matrix (which had been a prime concern for many years). Matrix is by the day closer to the closed-source centralized silos it was first pretending to oppose.
A subsidy-fueled boom helped build China into an electric-car giant but left weed-infested lots across the nation brimming with unwanted battery-powered vehicles.
Don’t be too worried about AGI being a thing in the short. And the only thing which I find to suck with respect to consolidation is that contemporary AI requires a lot of hardware thrown at it while cloud services (providing this hardware on demand) are practically the same triopoly. That sucks if you want to be the next AI startup. But academia is mostly unaffected, and far from lagging behind (multiple open source LLMs are compelling alternatives to chatgpt and not benefitting from OpenAI’s millions of marketing and hype doesn’t make them less valuable)
To help you out with the monopolistic/capitalist concern: simonwillison.net/2023/May/4/no-moat/
tl;dr: OpenAI’s edge with ChatGPT is essentially minor (according to the people from within), and the approach of building ever larger and inflexible models is challenged by (technologically more accessible and available) smaller and more agile models
Imagine a future where most fast food jobs have been replaced by AI-powered kiosks and drive-thrus.
Imagine a future where most customer service jobs have been replaced by AI-powered video chat kiosks. Imagine a future where most artistic commission work is completed by algorithms.
The end-game is pretty clear: we have reached the limits to the model on which our current society is built (working jobs to earn money to spend money to live). We now have excess supply of the essential goods to sustain lives and scarcity of jobs at the same time. We will have soon to either accept that working isn’t a mean to an end (accept universal basic income and state interventionism), or enter a neofedalism era where resources are so consolidated that the illusion of scarcity can be maintain and justify the current system (which essentially the bullshit-jobs is all about).
It’s perhaps the most important societal reform our species will know, and nobody’s preparing for it :)
Imagine a future where all the news and advertising you read or watch is generated specifically to appeal to you by algorithms.
And this is already weaponized (e.g. TikTok’s algorithm trying to steer the youth towards education and science in China and towards … something completely different in the rest of the world).
It doesn’t really matter if Microsoft/OpenAI are the only ones with the underlying technology as long as the only economically feasible way to deploy the tech at scale is to rely on one of the big 3 cloud providers (Amazon, Google, Microsoft).
Yup, but as the “no moat” link I posted implied, at least for LLMs, it might not be required to spend very much in hardware to be almost as good as ChatGPT, so that’s some good news.
Are you saying you’re cool with neofeudalism? Or just agreeing that this is yet another inevitable (albeit lamentable) step towards it?
Oh, crap, no, sorry if I wasn’t clear. I believe we are at the crossroads with not much in the middle between our society evolving into extensive interventionism, taxation and wealth redistribution (to support UBI and other schemes for the increasingly large unemployable population) or neufeudalism. I don’t want billionaires and warlords to run the place, obviously. And I’m warry about how the redistribution would go with our current politicians and the dominant mindset associating individual merit to wealth and individualistic entrepreneurship.
Signal just isn’t as private as its marketing wants you to think it is
A tip (but you do you, of course), use something federated (XMPP!): the time for trusting a central organization to do no harm is over if you have kept tabs of anything internet over the last 40 years or so…
I want to add “federated” to your list, as the only thing that actually matters long term. Signal checks your requirements but has already started to turn user-hostile (e.g. it mandates its own client so you get to have crypto payments whether you like it or not), and, as the single point of control, is an easy target and a single major liability.
Remember the days when WhatsApp was nice to its users? There is no technical guarantee that other centralized systems won’t go the same path, which is largely mitigated when the network is made of smaller interoperable actors (i.e. a federation).
I would love to see XMPP be rediscovered and massively adopted as that next gen messenger. I don’t trust Matrix to ever be reliable or get past their neverending funding troubles.
There’s no reason to trust Signal more than WhatsApp long term: the flaw isn’t whether it’s opensource or not, or whether it operates as a nonprofit today or not. The core issue is centralization: as soon as you accept that a single organization owns the whole network, you lose all leverage and freedom, and you should only expect that it will eventually turn against your interests with no recourse. Favour federated protocols (e.g. XMPP) which are by design largely immune to this, if you search for a stable and safe place for the long run.
Don’t buy into this, this is just marketing. I’m not saying that Signal is acting in bad faith, only that they chose to design a communication silo with themselves at the helm instead of a federation of servers/providers united by the same protocol. Because of that, they own all accounts, and have the monopoly of messages being routing on the network. Of course there is no difficulty for them knowing who’s addressing whom, how often, with what kind of payload, by topology. “Sealed senders” and “secure enclave contacts discovery” is just techno babble meaning “trust us, bro. Especially because you have no choice, anyway”.
And as it was one of the few messaging platforms to be (in the future) paid at all, I cannot understand why it ever got popular…
Because that way people thought they were directly paying for the service they were using, instead of being the product of said platform, having their personal data harvested and sold to the highest bidder?
Well, sure, Meta cancelled the subscription plans later but to me it sounded a red flag in the first place.
The red flag is to look at a free meal and not wonder what the catch might be. Especially to this day, with all we learned about what the tech majors do with all the data.
WhatsApp is based on XMPP, hence why it works so well, but with the difference that nobody “owns” XMPP (it’s a network of account providers, just like email where you can be a @outlook.com and exchange messages with @yahoo.com).
You can start there and see how well it works for you and whether you want to embark your contacts with you. For me the main motivator is that XMPP, as a decentralized and extensible protocol, will still be there long after I’m dead. I’m done telling people around me to install this or that App, all I want is the confidence that whatever I’m using is the last messaging system I will ever need (won’t go bankrupt, won’t turn against me, will remain secure, will have all the desired features …), and that’s the only one that qualifies.
Moxie is the megalomaniac behind Signal, of course you would expect him to back it up, but cherry picking facts doesn’t make a good nor convincing argument. Here’s a rebuttal by an XMPP developer. The current state of XMPP practically proves Moxies’ post to be FUD: XMPP has multiple compatible, secure and maintained clients and server implementations, and by its decentralized nature, is more preserving of its users’ metadata, and more resilient than today’s Signal.
Is your source for “what privacy experts say” a sad jpeg meme, really?
Also, no matter what some distracted expert might say, the only fact that matters is that none of Signal’s marketing claims are verifiable: the feature you are referring to happens server-side. Nobody but Signal knows what runs server-side. The guarantee of “not knowing who’s talking to whom” isn’t built into the protocol itself. This is where trust enters the picture.
The dominant paradigm in cybersecurity is that trust is not proof of anything. Math is. And “sealed senders” isn’t that.
For cross-protocols messaging? Sure! But it has its flaws (for instance, only message bodies are encrypted, which makes XMPP’s OMEMO a superior solution in 1:1 and small groupchats). Also, it tackles only a small part of the problem, the larger picture (and problem) is about how the different protocols should inter-operate (exchange handshakes, keys, …), and this is nowhere near ready yet: datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mimi/about/
I realized that my previous post didn’t embed the rebuttal link I was meaning to send, so please give it a look, sorry for that.
But decentralization also means it takes a long time, sometimes a very long time, for the that particular product’s benefits to become known and widespread.
This is true: one can’t possibly come up with a new chat product within few months would they want it to be an internet standard (which XMPP is) and having diverse parties implementing its components (which XMPP has). My question to that is, do we really need new chat products every other month? I personally consider that instant messaging was a solved problem 25 years ago when AIM/MSN & al. were ubiquitous and used by everyone and their aunt. Arguably, current generation’s messengers pack less features, not more, than those they precede, and that’s a trend we also observe within XMPP: old specs defining how to game together, share tunes, share whiteboards, … are slowly fading into obsolescence.
Nowadays XMPP has all the relevant features one would expect, in spec and implementation. There was a time when XMPP had problems with mobile use, not because it wasn’t adequate (it was successfully used over extremely low bandwidth before), but because Google and Apple had decided that they would silently kill clients and a new protocol had to be figured-out for that event. That’s perhaps a “once in a decade” evolution, which happened at a time the XMPP ecosystem wasn’t as vibrant as it is today.
I believe that’s what happened to XMPP, IRC and so on.
IMO what happened has nothing to do with “features” nor “moving with the times”, what happened was a lot of venture capital money to answer every tech giant building their own walled-garden messaging platform. Again, all current “modern” messengers can do pretty much the same thing, look the same, and came-up roughly at the same time (and yes, this applies to Telegram, too).
This is a danger that applies to Mastodon and Lemmy/Kbin too […] become obscure
This is not a danger, this is inevitable. Don’t expect Lemmy/Mastodon (and the Fediverse in general) to become mainstream this generation: the internet doesn’t work on merit, people don’t spontaneously lean towards what’s “best”, even for themselves. Only tech enthusiasts do, and as it happens, they have a negligible political and societal impact compared to the (tech) majors. IMO no amount of persuasion by the geeks will change that. What I believe matters is, on one side, to define and standardize future-proof protocols and have them audited for security (XMPP is uniquely positioned here), and on the other, to lobby politicians so they make use of the existing legal framework (forbidding anti-competitive practices and monopolies, mainly) to level the playing field and compel the majors to become interoperable using said protocols. Mozilla may play a role in that, but what’s going on with the EU and the Digital Markets Act is worthy to keep a close eye on.
Because that way people thought they were directly paying for the service they were using, instead of being the product of said platform, having their personal data harvested and sold to the highest bidder?
Are you saying that people perceived WhatsApp as better than SMS or better than Facebook?
As it happened, both.
The red flag is to look at a free meal and not wonder what the catch might be. Especially to this day, with all we learned about what the tech majors do with all the data.
That’s not my point. My point is why would the majority of the world do this when they knew it was going to be paid.
Back then, the norm was to pay for a service. When it’s good and the price is fair, people use it, especially when the alternative was feature-limited SMS paid by the message at inadequately high cost. And Facebook isn’t free: you trade privacy and exposure to customized ads in exchange for access to the service, so your comparison is biased.
But then you end up with the downsides of having both and none of the upsides? Wouldn’t that incur an enormous effort on the software side to make it all possible, so you could run a less efficient chip in the end (practically two instead of one)
Web publishers brace for carnage as Google adds AI answers (www.washingtonpost.com)
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Use WhatsApp without a smartphone?
Hi. I’m thinking about switching to Linux on my smartphone. The only reason I can’t is because in my country WhatsApp is everywhere and I’m expected to have it for various school/sport things. I’d like to setup whatsapp on my laptop, but I don’t know how....
Twitch "isn't profitable" admits CEO, in wake of recent layoffs (www.eurogamer.net)
Why Linux is Best for Most People (medium.com)
Atuin is an open-source shell command history app for Linux with syncing, unlimited history, and with contextual search (beehaw.org)
Atuin replaces your existing shell history with a SQLite database, and records additional context for your commands. With this context, Atuin gives you faster and better search of your shell history!...
Windows 10 end of life could prompt torrent of e-waste as 240 million devices set for scrapheap | ITPro (www.itpro.com)
Analysts have warned Windows 10 end of life plans could spark a global torrent of e-waste, with millions of devices expected to be scrapped in the coming years....
Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive (signal.org)
We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.
China’s Abandoned, Obsolete Electric Cars Are Piling Up in Cities (www.bloomberg.com)
A subsidy-fueled boom helped build China into an electric-car giant but left weed-infested lots across the nation brimming with unwanted battery-powered vehicles.
Microsoft hires former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman (www.theverge.com)
Well, this escalated quickly. So is this the end, or will the mods create an OpenAI megathread? ;)
Signal tests usernames so you can avoid sharing your phone number (www.theverge.com)
WhatsApp head confirms ads in the messaging app are still in the works (www.theverge.com)
Intel doesn’t think that Arm CPUs will make a dent in the laptop market (arstechnica.com)