https://uk.pcmag.com/social-media/151330/meta-adds-interoperability-with-signals-tech-for-whatsapp-messenger-in-eu

Nah I think it will just be

const benefits = false;

Do what I did a few months back and switch to Obsidian.

Especially if you write any code. It’s way better for that.

You will need to either

• Pay for their sync at $5/m (hugely overpriced imo)
• Use your own sync solution like Dropbox, Google Drive, Resilio Sync or Syncthing.

I bought it for $90 in 2020.

You beat me to it!

Yeah this is emblematic of modern LLMs like Gemini and ChatGPT. Needlessly verbose, confidently wrong, less capable of actually doing things.

Not for me. I vaguely remember that being a thing, but it’s not with the other features at least.

Thanks bud

4 times once every few years is still way lower than using it every few weeks, once, as it works the first time.

Hmmm I couldn’t really find anything. The only way to guarantee that is to have models that run purely locally, but until very recently that wasn’t feasible.

Smaller AI models that could run on a phone are now doable, but making them useful requires a lot of dev time and only giant data-guzzling companies have tried so far.

That must be it!

2G is also gone. Edit: it’s not gone just yet. Not sure why the phone didn’t try to fall back to 2G.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/coverage-and-speeds/3g-switch-off/

The old phone was a couple years into 4G existing but before we started to send voice over it.

I assume it just wasn’t in the OS-level code. It only went up to Android 11. We could have tried LineageOS but that would have required a bunch of work including wiping the phone.

Either way, we checked and the option just wasn’t there.

We switched off 3G this year in the UK and my brothers phone stopped being able to make calls. He was using a 6 year old high-end Android phone, but it was from just before the cutoff where you could turn on VoLTE (calls over 4G).

Thankfully, I had a spare phone from the next year after that to hand him, and that one could work with some hidden menu (the type you type into your dialer) hacking.

God I wish I could completely deny internet access to some of my apps on stock android. It’s obvious why they don’t allow it though.

That would definitely be better.

For people who have not read the article:

Forbes states that there is no indication that this app can or will “phone home”.

Its stated use is for other apps to scan an image they have access to find out what kind of thing it is (known as "classification"). For example, to find out if the picture you’ve been sent is a dick-pick so the app can blur it.

My understanding is that, if this is implemented correctly (a big ‘if’) this can be completely safe.

Apps requesting classification could be limited to only classifying files that they already have access to. Remember that android has a concept of “scoped storage” nowadays that let you restrict folder access. If this is the case, well it’s no less safe than not having SafetyCore at all. It just saves you space as companies like Signal, WhatsApp etc. no longer need to train and ship their own machine learning models inside their apps, as it becomes a common library / API any app can use.

It could, of course, if implemented incorrectly, allow apps to snoop without asking for file access. I don’t know enough to say.

Besides, you think that Google isn’t already scanning for things like CSAM? It’s been confirmed to be done on platforms like Google Photos well before SafetyCore was introduced, though I’ve not seen anything about it being done on devices yet (correct me if I’m wrong).

I couldn’t actually believe this article was real. Figured it was a comedic post like that previous one about switching to Cyrillic letters in the US .

Very disappointing that Match Group, being effectively a monopoly, doesn’t give us the one benefit we would get from it being a monopoly: industry-wide bans.

Normally, you’d need a whole bunch of companies to agree on a universal standard for communicating bans between each other and agreements to stick to it (similar to standards like USB) but here they could just do it. They even collect the information, they just don’t act on it.

So to sum up the data, it sounds like:

• WD seems to have the most reliable drives of those tested, with Toshiba being a relatively close second
• Some models of drives are significantly more likely to fail than others, with some having a ~6% annual failure rate vs another model from the same company at 1%
• Seagate had a rough year when it comes to reliability
• It’s hard to tell if capacity affects drive life as the drives being tested have been in use for different lengths of time

Verbatim is doing more than just keeping the formats on life support – it also unveiled new hardware at CES 2025. Its Slimline Blu-ray Writer lets you back up 4K video to Ultra HD Blu-ray and even comes bundled with antiquated Nero disc burning software.

This is the important part imo, given that LG and Sony both pulled out of the USB Blu-ray reader-writer market

https://www.verbatim-europe.com/en/blu-ray-writers/products/external-slimline-blu-ray-writer-43890

Means we’ll be able to rip Blu-ray’s into the future. At least, that’s what I hope. Need to check there are cracks for these writers.

EDIT: Won’t link to it here, but many Verbatim writers, UHD and otherwise, use Pioneer hardware internally and are therefore crackable.