LLMs are a subset of AI though. They’re a use case of generative AI, which is a subset of deep learning, which is a subset of machine learning, which is a subset of AI.

$13 billion for a company with $150 million annual revenue. 86x revenue is a crazy valuation.

I wonder how long until Nvidia tweak the site such that you can only download models if you’re using Nvidia hardware, or something like that.

Do you disable SMS too? It’s far, far less secure than RCS so I’m not sure why you’d avoid RCS but not SMS.

My wife upgraded from a Samsung S21 Ultra to an S25 Ultra but uses it mostly same way.

The one new feature I have seen her use is the AI person/object removal in the gallery. Samsung’s AI tools can run entirely on-device, which is nice (avoids sending the photos to the cloud and using an AI data center for the processing). I tried them while in airplane mode to confirm they do indeed work with no internet connection.

She upgraded because the old one had a pretty scratched screen (we installed a screen protector on the new one!) and the battery wasn’t lasting long any more. The official repair store that Samsung use in the US, UBreakIFix, don’t stock S21 batteries any more, and I didn’t trust myself enough to replace it myself.

I really hope some phones are released with support for MicroSD Express.

One of the practical reasons companies started removing MicroSD slots is because SD cards were far slower than the internal storage, and installing apps onto them could make everything laggier. That’s mostly solved with MicroSD Express which is up to 9x faster than the legacy MicroSD standard.

Of course, there’s also the financial aspect, which the manufacturers love. If you can’t insert an SD card, you have to pay the manufacturer for more storage.

Here’s hoping the EU mandates that phones need to support removable storage.

I usually use Clonezilla and have it verify the data after cloning. It works for local drives, but it can also clone a drive over the network by running it on both the source and destination system, which is very useful for remote servers (eg moving a VPS to a different location).

I usually use rsync -avHXS --numeric-ids --progress --delete

It’s not way more than they thought because it’s within the limits they set for the subscriptions. They wouldn’t have set the limits that high if they didn’t think people would use it.

cost of AI going up

The highly subsidized Anthropic and OpenAI subscriptions will go away, but open weight models are getting much better over time - GLM-5.2 and Kimi K3 are both very good.

The most expensive part by far is training the model. That’s why OpenAI and Anthropic are losing so much money (well, that and the subscriptions).

With an open weight model, someone has already trained it, and you just have to cover the cost of inference, making it a lot cheaper. Any company (or individual!) with powerful enough equipment can host the model, which means there’s competition in terms of price, compared to something like Claude Opus where the only four hosts (Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, and Azure AI Foundry) use Anthropic’s pricing.

I agree that AI slop is bad, but I don’t really agree with their method of determining if an app is abandoned (no updates in 2-3 months).

Sometimes apps don’t need updates. Some Linux apps don’t receive major updates for years. I used backupninja (https://0xacab.org/liberate/backupninja) for long time even though sometimes there’s 2-3 years between releases, because it did what I needed. (I switched to Borgmatic at some point though).

I didn’t update one of my apps for over a year because it already did everything I needed, and I wasn’t receiving any major feature requests. There’s still some bugs I need to fix but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Ahh, interesting, thanks for the info.

It would require either every app developer on F-Droid to comply as well

Has this been mentioned anywhere? I haven’t seen it.

That’s a separate thing. As far as I know, there’ll be no difference between third-party app stores installed via Google Play vs third-party app stores installed via APK in terms of the apps in the store itself.

IIRC they’re going to force verification for all apps but have an opt-out that you just need to do once, and wait 24 hours after enabling it.

It would increase visibility of F-Droid (people that might have never heard of it might start seeing it in the Play Store) so I think they’ll give in to Google’s requirements even if they oppose them…

You currently have to install F-Droid manually via APK. This change will allow F-Droid to be listed in the Google Play store.

And I don’t ever know if it’ll get better because you need to know why you want to build something someway.

The major issue I’m seeing with junior (and even intermediate) developers is that they trust that the AI will always do things the correct way and don’t question its approach, and they don’t develop proper debugging skills and just rely on the AI to attempt it.

To get decent quality output out of an AI model, you need to have critical thinking skills, at least basic knowledge of the overall architecture for whatever you’re trying to build, and enough knowledge to question the model when it does something wrong.

Blindly trusting AI is why so many old security issues are coming back - stored/reflected XSS, SQL injection, exposing databases directly to the internet with no password, things like that. Newer frameworks mostly got rid of them, and now AI is bringing them back. It’s a fun time for red teams at least.

Does Patchmon not have a setting to look for the Docker socket in a different location?

I could be wrong but I don’t think there’s any security issues making a symlink to a socket, since permissions/ACLs on the socket would still apply.

Proton’s server is closed source so I don’t trust it as much as Bitwarden.

My Epyc 7702 does have onboard TPM, but my supermicro H11DSi-NT doesn’t pass it through to the OS, for some reason

Huh… That’s interesting. At my workplace we have Linux EPYC servers with working TPM (it’s mandated that all computers, both clients and servers, must have TPM 2.0), but I’m not a hardware person and don’t know exactly how they’re configured.

This is good to know. I haven’t had issues with using a USB drive though, since it doesn’t receive many reads or writes - the system is copied to a RAM drive on boot and runs off that rather than the USB.

I assume this means I’d need another drive to boot it from? My current setup is that I have 2 x 22TB drives in a ZFS mirror for data storage, and 2 x 2TB NVMe SSDs in a ZFS mirror for things like VMs, Docker containers, documents, etc.