I get that Mozilla needs to keep the lights on but… yeah.

I’ve increasingly been meaning to switch to a fork. Anyone aware of a good way to self host a bookmark (and preferably tab) sync?

so you mean unauthorized apps wont be running on android?

That is indeed the plan and what is meant by “starts restricting FOSS apps” (which is an incorrect statement but whatever)

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/google-will-block-sideloading-of-unverified-android-apps-starting-next-year/

However, making that happen outside of its app store will require Google to take a page from Apple’s playbook and flex its muscle in a way many Android users and developers could find intrusive. Google plans to create a streamlined Android Developer Console, which devs will use if they plan to distribute apps outside of the Play Store. After verifying their identities, developers will have to register the package name and signing keys of their apps. Google won’t check the content or functionality of the apps, though.

(…)

Google says that only apps with verified identities will be installable on certified Android devices, which is virtually every Android-based device

What was argued was that people can basically just compile/download and deploy their own apps via development tools. Which is unfeasible for the vast majority of users for skill reasons but also, as I said, likely to be blocked by google themselves in the not too distant future.

I’ve seen differing reports on that one. One Q&A with a google rep that made it sound like android studio (? The IDE/toolkit) could still do whatever without a key but with a lot of vague reference to other modes and programs.

Which, to me, reeks of “Sooner than later, all devs will need a key”. Because if it were really that clean cut, they would be screaming it from the mountain top.

Is this manageable for the non-dev by chance?

Not really.

I’ve not been following things super closely, but the idea would be that each user would get their own developer key and then locally compile and deploy whatever apps they want as though it were a project they themselves were working on. The first bit is not too dissimilar from how a lot of people with XBOXes made dev accounts to install emulators. But the latter is going to get real messy and REAL compromised REAL fast as people just use third party tools and binaries that will inevitably be compromised.

I’m feeling a dumbphone alt may be the only viable path

It really depends on what your use case is. If you actually just talk to people on phones? Uhm… I am not even sure where you would find a dumb phone at this point, but that will probably work for voice calls and SMS using just your carrier and MAYBE wifi. But anything that involves apps, which is a shockingly large part of the world, will be a mess. Some you can (and should) do workarounds (banking apps, for example) but others you are kind of up a creek since your options are to use a modern phone or not be able to (for example) see your kid’s daycare schedule.

Is it just me, or are the bubbles coming closer together these days?

Yes and no.

Yes in the sense that we have a lot more “fad” economies. There is something new so that needs to be EVERYTHING and the market course corrects, often at the cost of hardship for many.

But “no” in the sense of what “bubbles” tend to refer to. Things like the Japanese Bubble Economy where it causes (I forget if it is officially one but) recessions and even depressions.

The AI Bubble is not going to do that (on its own…). Yeah, a LOT of companies are going to be left holding the bag when they realize LLMs can’t solve all problems for them AND manifest a Cyber Stana Katic to give them a blowie while it does that. But what will they be left with?

1. A LOT of “prompt engineers”: This is bad because that is going to be a LOT of people who, increasingly, went to school to get a degree in something with very little utility. That said… Art History majors have been showing us how to do that for decades and at least they did something they loved on their way to service industry jobs.
2. For the companies that gutted their workforce over the past few years: A need to rapidly hire talented workers who don’t require ChatGPT to do their job: This is REALLY good for the people who have been hurting and should actually lead to a lot of job mobility… for the old hats who predated this fad
3. For the companies that purchased hardware: A lot of edge computing devices are going to be of questionable value. But for the folk who “just” bought a shit ton of GPUs from Daddy Jensen? They have a shit ton of GPUs they can either sell for cheap (not horrible) or repurpose (good)

Don’t get me wrong. There is going to be upheaval and it is going to be bad. But it is also important to remember that drawings like the above are actively misleading and bordering on manipulative. Because basically all the biggies, except OpenAI, have non-AI uses. Oracle ballooned massively because of the OpenAI injection but… they are still god damned Oracle. Same with nVidia who, when they aren’t powering every LLM on the planet, are also one of the companies that makes all the cards that power stuff like computer vision and the like in cars and what not.

Because… remember the dot com bubble? Remember how basically the entire world still runs on The Internet? It was just a case of rebalancing and pivoting for the most part.

All that said… the US is in a really bad way because the fascists have been increasingly gutting the economy and stopping basically any industry that involves manufacturing or communicating with external countries. We are gonna have a massive stock market crash when OpenAI et al pops…

In the case of Windows, it is because MS has spent the past… 20 or so years slowly phasing out old functionality while not actually adding in new ones. So you get the mess of two (three?) different control panels which each one having capabilities the other doesn’t and so forth.

I also personally hated when they got rid of the start menu but also acknowledge that for the past almost 15 years my workflow has been “winkey and then type what I want”.

But mostly it is the MS mindset of completely changing the UX sometimes mid-generation and expecting people to figure it out. Which… I am not going to pretend that neurodivergence doesn’t play a factor but I kind of fucking hate my machine rebooting and suddenly I have to figure out a new interface.

Also there is MS increasingly activating more and more monitoring and spyware (sometimes re-enabling silently) with every single update. Same with increasingly locking people into MS accounts and cloud shit.

And while I do think many of the Lemmy Linux Users are more obnoxious than Vegans What Do Crossfit… contrast that with Linux where you find a desktop environment you like and you are basically good for a decade… and then another eight years after that when everyone is “slowly migrating”. And as long as you stay the fuck away from Gentoo and Arch, you have a pretty idiot proof setup for the vast majority of people.

LMG defended DBrand making racist jokes harder than DBrand did and multiple camera facing people have accusations of being a sex pest (one with audio evidence).

Worst case scenario? Scrapyard wars again

So, let me make sure I’m understanding you. Are you saying that you think that any and all gains from bigoted or unethical sources should be thrown away and that we should have nothing to do with them?

No. As I said in the comment you clearly did not read while deciding to dismiss

The reality is that it is almost never one person saying something. And you can EASILY prioritize the other orgs that came to a similar decision. It is more about marketing and less about ideology, but people generally attribute calculus to Newton over anyone else even though it was largely an evolution and codification of existing concepts.

(…)

And if the reality is that it truly did come out of hatred and evil (e.g. a surprisingly small amount of medical research does indeed come out of the atrocities of WW2). You don’t tell someone “Hey, this medicine came from torturing and murdering Romani twins”. You give it to them, maybe think a bit if you are aware, and move on. And any historical discussion provides all the context and uses that context as a thought discussion.

As for your other comment

So tell me. Where is the line? I still think that’s a fairly difficult question, even if you don’t.

Well, in this case I think the line is pretty clear: Don’t give money to nazis. Which is what Framework Corp is doing. This is not a case of choosing to not remove a package run by known hateful bigots from a package manager. It is a case of actively giving money to said bigots.

…

I mean… this IS “the press”.

But even if you want to absolve Framework Corp of any guilt in that regard: it is still one of (if not THE) biggest “tech youtubers” with a known history of manipulating both the audience and his competitive with a financial interest in Framework Corp doing well.

Hence why people who have followed “tech reviews” for years (… decades. God damn it) have very much noticed that Framework Laptops get treated with kid gloves by a LOT of outlets.

You say it’s a solved problem in one area as though it should be a solved problem elsewhere

Yes. That is the point. This problem has already been solved. “Well we don’t do that” is not an explanation of why it is suddenly a problem here: it is an admission of incompetence.

Don’t get me wrong. There are very much reasons to consider whether that solution applies. That is not what you, and the other… moving on, are doing.

You instead continue to insist that we should… give money to known bigoted chuds because we still let the Hindus and the Buddhists use swastikas?

So how is this rub?

I tried to talk around it but I am just going to say it: You are being RIDICULOUSLY offensive by implying that people of (generally) Asian religions need to change their iconography because of a bunch of racist white people. You are being RIDICULOUSLY offensive by comparing that to giving chuds money because they wrote some code you might like.

If you can find a way to restructure your thoughts in ways that don’t imply (generally) people of color need to bend over backwards before you’ll consider anything else? We can have a conversation. Otherwise? Truth Social is that way.

And, because you seem to not understand commonly used rhetorical devices: Yes, that is me saying “please don’t do that”. Just with the words “you fucking” implicitly added on before a few more choice ones.

Welcome to the reality that there is No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism.

Some people choose to use that as an excuse to live a hedonistic lifestyle and do whatever they want. Others use that as a reason to sit and think.

Personally? I don’t like that lemmy is created/maintained by REALLY aggressive tankies or that so many of us have the “official” instance blocked for that reason. It is a big reason why when I decide to make a new account (because this one is getting old) I am probably going to use an instance running a fork.

But one way I reconcile that is by not actually giving money to lemmy development. I chip a few bucks in with certain instances to support the people running those, but not the software itself. And while I don’t like that this encourages people to use lemmy and potentially give money to the tankies behind it… I also acknowledge that most people are too stupid to even understand the concept of “it is like email. It mostly doesn’t matter which instance you sign up at” so… yeah.

At the end of the day, everyone needs to consider their own ethics and decide what they will and won’t give money to. But the key is to actually think about it and sometimes re-think past decisions.

Let me walk you through some of my thoughts on the BDS boycotts. Microsoft I fully support the boycotting of because they have a LONG list of actions that actively support the IDF and enable genocide. Odds are I am still going to pick up the new DOOM at some point on a heavy discount and I will feel bad about it but otherwise? Any situation where I have a choice, I don’t use MS products and won’t until they, bare minimum, treat the israeli government like a normal customer rather than giving white glove service every chance they get. It is an unlikely end state but it IS an end state for a political boycott.

But Disney is a bit different. I personally don’t actually like Disney and got a real chuckle out of Mandalore Gaming’s recent, kind of shitty and ableist, joke about “disney adults”. I ALSO don’t think the BDS boycott has any actionable end state and is… quite honestly, motivated by a very poor selection of rationales that mostly can’t be detected. So I had zero issue paying for Disney Plus to watch Andor and will buy the season 2 UHDs the second they are available, but the rest of me not spending on Disney products has a lot less to do with politics and more me just not liking them.

But I’ll probably also give this another think on my next long car drive. I’ll compare my personal ethics to those of the orgs calling for these boycotts and I will think through both what difference my actions are making (almost zero!) and how my actions impact my own personal opinion of myself.

Because, at the end of the day, boycotts are less about breaking the cogs of capitalism and more about being able to look at yourself in the mirror.

This is a tricky one.

It really isn’t and is, if anything, a “solved problem” in the scientific/medical community.

If a bigot says the sky is blue, they’re not wrong about that.

The reality is that it is almost never one person saying something. And you can EASILY prioritize the other orgs that came to a similar decision. It is more about marketing and less about ideology, but people generally attribute calculus to Newton over anyone else even though it was largely an evolution and codification of existing concepts.

A more timely example might be Einstein and Relativity. The Theory of Relativity (and all the other fun stuff Al did) very much came out of previous work… much of it by the German physicists who didn’t flee nazi Germany. But (again, in large part because of marketing) that tends to get ignored in favor of the Jew who got the hell out of nazi Germany and put his brain to good use.

And if the reality is that it truly did come out of hatred and evil (e.g. a surprisingly small amount of medical research does indeed come out of the atrocities of WW2). You don’t tell someone “Hey, this medicine came from torturing and murdering Romani twins”. You give it to them, maybe think a bit if you are aware, and move on. And any historical discussion provides all the context and uses that context as a thought discussion.

You don’t instead say “Okay. if we got all this great shit out of torturing people in the past… maybe we should give money to concentration camps?”

That is to say, we might deliberately use that code for anti-hate purposes, perhaps, subverting the bigot’s preferred goals.

This comes up somewhat often. And, in theory, it sounds great. HP Lovecraft was a RIDICULOUSLY bigoted bastard even by the standards of his time (look up what his cat was named…). And yet, his stories have more or less become synonymous with discussions of homosexuality and persecution. And that is awesome. But it also leads to countless people every year deciding to “read the original works” and realizing… lovecraft had a few good ideas (that were mostly REALLY offensive takes on existing religions) but was a HORRIBLE writer. But they took hold.

Which brings up folk like jk rowling who are also hateful bigots. But because everybody can’t stop glazing Harry Potter just because they grew up with it, someone who is a fairly mediocre writer who wrote REALLY generic YA continues to get more and more money to support actively hateful things.

Because the core is that this “We’ll use it even though we hate you” is just promoting the idea of a meritocracy. You can be such a good writer/coder/whatever that people will begrudgingly praise you. And, much like “you are a great coder so you don’t need people skills”, it just makes for a REALLY toxic world.

There’s a really neat and geometrically useful symbol; fourfold symmetry, previously used by Hindus, that picked up an extremely negative association around 90 years ago, for example, and short of humanity forgetting history, we’re never getting that one back.

Similarly, bullshit.

Spend ANY time in Asia or any other region with a large concentration of Hindu or Buddhist people. As a Westerner, it is always a bit of a shock to look at a map of Tokyo and see a LOT of swastikas. At which point you immediately realize “Oh, they aren’t Nazis. They are Buddhists. I am an idiot”.

Because context matters. An Indian person who has a big swastika on their wall? First off, it probably is drawn differently. But second? It very much is unlikely to mean they actually want to eradicate anyone who isn’t aryan. Whereas that white guy with a swastika tattooed on his head? Homeboy probably isn’t celebrating the idea of the Buddha stepping on his face.

Which is why fricking Germany has zero problems with swastikas to represent Hindu and Buddhist and Jainist and so forth religion. Walking down the street with one would probably result in a “… Please don’t do that” but the people who have the most reason to feel shame and hatred for that symbol? They understand it has multiple meanings.

Also: I don’t think a bunch of bigoted assholes wanting to be bigots is at all comparable to usurping/repurposing a holy symbol but you do you.

I would recommend actually talking with (I forget the fancy term) medical philosophers.

Yes, a LOT of modern medicine was created on the backs of torture and vile human experimentation. But a shockingly small amount of the data collected by Nazis et al were actually useful because so much of it was compromised by virtue of the “control” in those experiments generally being a torture victim who was in five other experiments in the past month. And a lot of said innovations boil down to “We all kind of suspected it but couldn’t think of an ethical way to confirm it”

But the key thing to understand: There is a big difference between “Okay… that was REALLY fucking evil but Unit 731 created a lot of data we can sift through and it already exists…” and “Okay, hear me out. We COULD send in Seal Team Eight… or we could wait a few weeks to see if they make a better smallpox first”

And that is the thing here. I am 100% for taking advantage of what has already been done in the world of software development… although rewrites are a thing for a reason. But I am firmly opposed to funding or supporting ongoing work by those chuds. They should be ostracized and vilified at every turn.

The thing to realize is that the reason EVERYONE knows about Framework Corp is that one of their larger investors is Linus Sebastien of Linus Media Group (most known for “Linus Tech Tips”). He/LMG have a long, well documented, history of conflicts of interest and even a few scandals (both in terms of manipulative data AND sex pestery) and have increasingly been revealed to be VERY manipulative of other channels they deem “smaller” (Rossman went off on them during one of the annual scandals)

So Framework’s social media game is on lock both between their own in-house staff and whatever they get from “investor calls” as it were.

And you know what goes together like peanut butter and jelly? Youtubers and “accidentally” supporting really shitty chuds.

As for Framework Corp itself?

I dunno. To me it increasingly feels like a company designed to create/trademark IP that would greatly improve assembly line processes that haven’t found an integrator willing to buy them out.

Because stuff like the “open source but we are the only ones that use it” proprietary “not a dongle but is something you plug into a usb c port to use different interfaces” and the pogo plug keyboards and so forth? I think Wendell at Level1Techs put it best where he acknowledged it was REALLY cool and something he would use once when buying the laptop and then as a fidget device during some meetings.

But for a “boutique” laptop integrator? That is something that can be done to really customize each laptop for each customer at minimal cost (by relying on cheap labor in a pre-Liberation Day world).

As for the rest of the laptops? Again, they look really cool. But every time I consider replacing my existing laptop I run the simple numbers. Too lazy to do it right now but basically:

Let a be the price of the laptop you want from Framework and let b be the price of just the motherboard+CPU of said laptop in the Framework marketplace. Let c be the price of a comparable laptop at Best Buy or whatever.

Framework only ever makes sense if a+b is significantly less than c*2. And every time I run the numbers? It is a few bucks cheaper, at best, and usually still more expensive. And all of that assumes you keep the same everything and are just “upgrading” the cpu. Which… considering Framework are already doing revisions of their chassis that, bare minimum, would involve heat pipe tweaks when upgrading… yeah.

And… in theory having reusable parts means you decrease e-waste. In practice? How many of us still have a box of DDR3 ram that we are totally going to need some day? There is very much an argument for donating your old laptop to an org that will reuse them or just chucking it in an e-waste bin (after wiping and preferably drilling out the drive…).

I DO think this tech would be amazing for the kind of company that provisions laptops for medium sized businesses. But their software/support and pricing keep them out of that too.

But as it stands? It feels a lot like those phones that had swappable camera modules and the like. It SOUNDS amazing until you actually price them out… and then realize the company went out of business so you never even had a chance to upgrade your camera 5 years later.

And just to elaborate a bit on the power of social media. Think about how few reviewers have ANYTHING negative to say about Framework? And then actually watch some of the better reviews. Wendell has a very good professional relationship with LMG but it is telling that even he kind of acknowledges their big “repairability” innovation is… kind of a gimmick.

Contrast that with a Thinkpad where basically every reviewer will spend a good chunk talking about how they don’t like Lenovo and the laptop has all these flaws… before begrudgingly acknowledging it is still a REALLY solid ultrabook and is, hands down, the best price to performance option for people who want to run Linux. Also the nub is love. The nub is life.

And you can see similar with the LTT Screwdriver. It is a licensed knockoff of a megapro (?) so of course it is quality. But look at reviewers like Project Farm. He is VERY good about providing the raw data and encouraging people to make their own choices based on what criteria matter to them. And then look at how he weighted the criteria to be able to say the LTT Screwdriver was, hands down, the best.

THAT is the power of social media and a rabid fanbase who are known to attack anyone who goes against their parasocial best friend. And that is what Framework has.

Which is why you farm off stuff like this to third parties whenever possible

DiscordCorp will get a slap on the wrist and give people an offer of a free six months of discord turbo (so long as you provide payment info so it can auto-renew on month seven).

But ANY meaningful consequences will go toward Zendesk Corp for not doing what they were supposed to. And… then everyone will just use ZZendesk instead

Which, again, is an issue if you need to get your McCauley on and get out the door in 5 minutes flat

Proton, in my opinion, make the best VPN for people who need both mobile device support and port forwarding so they can be a good citizen with all those linux ISOs they torrent. I don’t use their desktop client (I prefer to rawdog OpenVPN and Wireguard) but people like those.

Proton’s email is dogshit. Don’t get me wrong, it is awesome for making burners that many websites don’t insta-block (although that is shifting). But you don’t own your data unless you regularly run their nonsense client to tunnel into their servers. So if Proton goes shit tomorrow? All your emails are gone. Not a HUGE issue if you regularly fetch those but… yeah.

I’ve been backburnering it for other reasons but folk like (Not That) Will Smith and many others have been very big supporters of Fastmail and, looking at it, it seems pretty nice. And it fits my use case of using an email address at a domain I own so that I can just move between services depending on pricing and how evil corporations are in a given month.

Just to elaborate a bit. Migrating from JohnSmith@gmail to JohnSmith@hotmail to JohnSmith_75151515@proton is a massive undertaking.

Migrating from John@SmithDotOrg hosted by Foo to John@SmithDotOrg hosted by Bar is potentially under an hour depending on how you manage that domain and so forth.

Pass phrases for things that need to be human readable/rememberable.

Generated strings for everything else.

Because a pass phrase is inherently vulnerable to a dictionary attack because… it is words. You can obfuscate that but all the ways that would actually not compromise the readability are also pretty well known (whether that is “a=@” or “every ‘e’ is a ‘b’” and so forth.

Is a 96 character pass phrase meaningfully more vulnerable than a 16 character generated string? That gets into the realm of hypotheticals and “one day we’ll have quantum computers” but you are generally looking at a situation where everything is fucked anyway or there is a very targeted attack on you… at which point “hmm. 96 characters? Must be a pass phrase”. So… not the venue to discuss.

But, at that point… if you are using a password manager/vault anyway…

Also the reality is that anyone who has ever dealt with a bank or some other “legacy” website rapidly learns that there are max lengths for passwords because they are more afraid of allocating a few extra megabytes for the SQL database than anything else. At which point your pass phrase goes out the window and you are back to “p@$$w0rd” level bullshit (or, better yet, you have a mental model/style of password).

Yeah. There are a few useful websites I end up at that serve similar purposes.

My usual workflow is that I need to be able to work in an airgapped environment where it is a lot easier to get “my dotfiles” approved than to ask for utility packages like that. Especially since there will inevitably be some jackass who says “You don’t know how to work without google? What are we paying you for?” because they mostly do the same task every day of their life.

And I do find that writing the cheat sheet myself goes a long way towards me actually learning them so I don’t always need it. But I know that is very much how my brain works (I write probably hundreds of pages of notes a year… I look at maybe two pages a year).

One trick that one of my students taught me a decade or so ago is to actually make an alias to list the useful flags.

Yes, a lot of us think we are smart and set up aliases/functions and have a huge list of them that we never remember or, even worse, ONLY remember. What I noticed her doing was having something like goodman-rsync that would just echo out a list of the most useful flags and what they actually do.

So nine times out of 10 I just want rsync -azvh --progress ${SRC} ${DEST} but when I am doing something funky and am thinking “I vaguely recall how to do this”? dumbman rsync and I get a quick cheat sheet of what flags I have found REALLY useful in the past or even just explaining what azvh actually does without grepping past all the crap I don’t care about in the man page. And I just keep that in the repo of dotfiles I copy to machines I work on regularly.