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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • The issue is that “AI” has become a marketing buzz word instead of anything meaningful. When someone says “AI” these days, what they’re actually referring to is “machine learning”. Like in LLMs for example: what’s actually happening (at a very basic level, and please correct me if I’m wrong, people) is that given one or more words/tokens, it tries to calculate the most probable next word/token based on its model (trained on ridiculously large numbers of bodies of text written by humans). It does this well enough and at a large enough scale that the output is cohesive, comprehensive, and useful.

    While the results are undeniably impressive, this is not intelligence in the traditional sense; there is no reasoning or comprehension, and definitely no consciousness, or awareness here. To grossly oversimplify, LLMs are really really good word calculators and can be very useful. But leave it to tech bros to make them sound like the second coming and shove them where they don’t belong just to get more VC money.






  • This!

    APK signatures exist and they’re enough for making sure the file you got isn’t modified. Warning people when they use apks for stuff like banking, I get, but if they wanna take the risk, it’s on them.

    Blocking root makes no sense because I’d argue that if the person knows enough to root their phone and got past all those bricked phone/thermonuclear war warnings, the onus is on them to not get their keychain compromised by giving root to some random app. Again, a warning is fine.

    Aside from that, people need to understand: THE CLIENT IS NEVER SECURE. NO EXCEPTIONS.

    Any self respecting secure API is made under the assumption that all the calls are coming from some malicious state actor using curl until proven beyond doubt that it’s an actual user.




  • Hardware isn’t everything. Apple has a couple of advantages over iPhone that let them do more with less:

    • iOS needs to support a MUCH fewer devices than Android. Even before they switched to their own silicon, they’ve been optimizing the OS to the hardware really well giving you devices that go toe to toe with Android flagships of the same generation with SIGNIFICANTLY better hardware and like double the RAM. Also why Apple doesn’t really care to increase RAM as much as the android side of things.
    • Apple silicon is actually really good and making their own hardware allows them to optimize on both sides of the equation and lets them do more with less.

    The selling points for Android (at least the way I’ve seen it over the years) have always been full control (talking about non-root, I’d rather not go down the root rabbit hole here) and (since iPhone 11 started doing firmware blocks on parts) reparability…but both seem to be going out the window lately.

    Prices are crap though, but then again Android phones on the top end don’t seem much better. 1-2 gen old iPhones are usually a bit more reasonable though tbh.