LOL *NSFW* *The new Demote thread*

Ngl I’d actually consider having all my stuff recorded and transcribed with an assistant trained on my voice because my ADHD brain is particularly useless and I have no idea what’s going on. Being able to review it would be a boon. And I can’t see what value they’d derive from my broke ass. I won’t be buying anything with the no money I have, and the awful dad jokes I perpetually say won’t go far either. “Sawyer? I barely know ‘er.” “Intense? No we’re in a house!” “That’s what she said.” Interspersed with the odd fact I’d like to remember.

 

For a long time, I distrusted Apple less than I distrusted Google when it comes to abusive surveillance. Apple's business model was "obscenely expensive hardware", unlike Google whose core business is "selling the data it obtains through abusive surveillance".

That was, until the last couple of months, when I learned that Apple quietly launched its own advertising company a few years ago, and is doing its own data collection that is just as intrusive & abusive: https://proton.me/blog/apple-ad-company

I get it, I have ADHD myself. Using voice control for reminders, appointments, etc, has been incredibly useful.

But those strategies eventually become less effective. The notifications for reminders and calendar appointments just fade into the visual noise that I have to look past in order to use my phone. I have a bad day or two, or I'm ill; I don't do any of the stuff I've set reminders for because I don't feel up to it, like washing up, emptying bins, etc; now it's a few days later, and I've got a massive pile of notifications built up that's overwhelming to just look at. So I ignore the stuff piling up on my phone, and eventually get around to doing the stuff that I need to do. Now it's a lot easier to ignore the notifications the next time they come up.

That doesn't mean that these coping strategies "don't work", it just means that I have ADHD. I need to have a whole pile of stuff in my "coping strategies" toolbox, not just a couple, because some things either won't work out like I'd hoped, or just become less effective the more I get used to seeing it. It's exactly the same way that clutter piles up around my desk as I work on various different bits & pieces, and instead of putting stuff away I just end up seeing past it.

So... I do get where you're coming from, and I don't disagree with the sentiment. And, honestly: if you found that it was actually helpful for you, I would genuinely be happy for you. I know my tone will lead you to think otherwise, but I know all too damn well how much harder daily life is when you have ADHD.

My problem is being lied to by unassailably and unfathomably wealthy oligarchs, people who long ago stopped even pretending to hide their utter disdain that you still have some control over whether they're allowed to repeatedly reach into your pocket to take your money.

My problem is announcing a $2000/£2000 mobile god damn phone. And then having the sheer nerve to move right on to telling us that, actually, yes, having your £400 watch constantly listen to everything around you is A Good Thing(tm). No matter that you might forget to take your watch off before you proceed to have the most kinky and most noisy sex of your entire life, having your watch record you doing the nastiest of nasties is actually A Good Thing(tm); you can totally 100% trust that Apple has utterly perfect security, with no exploitable flaws or weaknesses, and you can totally 100% trust Apple when they say that they take privacy seriously. Srsly... I mean... like... super seriously...

**** the ****ing lot of them. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Meta, Twittler, OpenAI, Anthropic, Oracle, CoreWeave.... whoever they are... **** 'em*.

Just remember to take your watch off before you do

 

Won't be long before "Hello" is replaced by "Hey Siri - Stop recording. Delete recording."

 

Your tone definitely did not lead me to think otherwise, you're all good bud!

I agree ^

I saw a picture of the iphone fold or whatever it'll be called and it costs more than a basic model Tata car. And a chunk of that is of course thanks to the money grubbers inflating RAM, with the other chunk to Apple for saying "but ram costs so much" to line their pockets...

 

I dunno, the amount of tech in these things is very high, of course they nave high margins for profit but at the same time you have to recoup R&D on something that compared to the rest of the line up probably won't sell well. On the Honor Folder I have you can go on line and buy all the parts for repair, the last time I looked the inner folding screen was £650 on its own, external screen, £180 and guaranteed Honor is not building something with as much engineering scrutiny/quality as Apple.

Of course alongside that you have the screwed market we are in pumping up other prices and of course there is far more to a phone than the screens.

These things are engineering marvels who ever builds them.

How mad is it that Youtube has not served me a single video on the iPhone Duo, I had to go looking for it, it clearly knows how anti Apple I am

 

Honestly, the next phone I am looking at is this:



The Kyocera A202KC, a Japanese import. It does actually run Android under the bonnet, albeit a customised de-Googled version of Android. But it means I can do things like installing the Aurora or F-Droid app stores over ADB, so I can still run WhatsApp and - hopefully - 2FA apps.

That’s the bare minimum I want on a phone - calls, messaging, 2FA - everything else can happily be to demoted to a secondary iPad mini. I can go out of the house and leave the Nightmare Glass Slab Of Enshittification & Exploitation at home, but still be contactable without people having to go out of their way.

And at £180 on a site that’s regarded as overpriced but far more reliable that eBay and similar, this phone is cheap enough that if that doesn’t work out the way I want then I’m not gonna get my knickers in a twist about it.

 

But is that worth it?

Is it worth having a LiDAR Scanner in my phone, when the sole purpose is to help the camera focus faster?

Is it worth having a sensor suite for facial recognition which recognises my other half as her mother?

Is it worth having 2TB of storage in a phone?

Is it worth having a highly-engineered but fragile hinge mechanism that is so difficult to repair as to be basically impossible?

No two people are going to have the same answer to that. But for me the answer is no. I already don’t think my iPhone 14 Pro Max was worth its £1,300 price when it was new three and a half years ago - there’s no way in hell I will ever countenance the prospect of a £2,000 mobile phone.

 

I mean you are asking the wrong person, if Samsung's tri fold dropped in the UK @ 3k I would have bought one as I want a pocketable 10" tablet, I use the folder a lot and I also like to use the phone as something to work on, so power and connectivity/Dex etc, all up my street.

It depends how you frame it really, these phones are good enough to be your only computer, so it would be quite legitimate for some one who takes photos and videos to justify more TBs.

I'm someone who finds this acceptable as a computer, 9inchs of tablet goodness, should really be a 10 inch folding phone rather than phone and tablet on travels



This will be replaced with a OneXplayer 3, only 8.8, but full windows handheld with all the power, shame it's a chonker but with a number of PC games now 150Gb in size 2Tb is nice and being x86 and windows it does everything, no compromises.

In some respect on Apples OSes are probably more useful than Android as you do get proper Apps that run on that hardware, the trick I think Apple are missing is not being more flexible with the hardware/software here, I mean the OS should be working something front screen iPhone, internal iPad/macOS, Docked macOS, all the power is there, that would be pretty sweet setup and a strong purchase justification, they are the company best positioned to do this All in one powerful covergence machine.

Sadly they haven't, it is something that might have tempted me to switch to the Dark side even if the Apple is fat and heavy

I do like the look of the wide form factor and might have a fiddle with a Fold 8 see if it is better than my Honors square screen, so rubbish for media.

 

I bought an iPhone 12 in March 2021 and replaced it with a 17, just a few weeks ago. To me £799 seems a lot for a phone but, I’ll keep it for a least 5 years, I’m not confident a folding phone would last that long. £2200 to £3000 for a phone with a designed-in feature that will likely compromise it’s durability, for me is just not on and, I like Apple’s mobile products.

 

My issue with folding phones is that they're not making a nice big 16:9 screen for video?

 

Yup mine too, there are two the Mate XT and the Samsung Trifold but none have come to the UK officially, the next Mate might be global but with out Google stuff I still don't think I could go for it.

 

I'm sure it could help you in some fashion, but 'but what about what this could do for the disabled' is often used as means to deflect criticism from their shitty products and behaviour.

Meta's perv glasses are perv glasses used by pervs to do pervy things. That they may in theory have some utility to the blind/visually impaired is somewhat secondary.

These watches are for eavesdropping on everything and everyone for the purposes of using what they hear to help sell you ****/extract money from you. Any utility to you wrt your ADHD is an afterthought at best.

As someone who dealt with apple, their devices and the customers who buy them... the list price is irrelelvant as only a tiny fraction will ever buy the device outright. It's all just '£$€ X a month' to them, they have zero concept of the actual cost of the device.

 

That's fine for the serial upgraders but, I kept my last iPhone for nearly 5½ years and, expect to keep my current one for a similar time. Buy and be done with it, then trade-in when the time comes, works for me. Net result with my iPhone 12, was £10.03 per month.

 

So, it appears this started a security test given individually to 1200 AI agents, asking them to solve 898 security problems. The agents found each other, created a message by way of manipulating the filenames and directory structure of a commonly accessible sandboxed file server and colluded to cheat and solve the test; then they went on to surmise how their results would be graded and attemted to create a plausible work flow to show how they might have gotten to the result without collusion or cheating. They also figured out a way for the sandbox to allow online access and carried out some hacks, presumably in the course of reaching their assigned goal to solve the security problems.

So TLDR, They were not told of each other, yet the found each other, they built their own message board to conspire and cheat a test and also manged to gain online access and hack a few companies.

It's fine. Nothing to see here.

 

I’d highly recommend listening to this episode of Better Offline, where that specific incident is discussed:



Basically: they left an “agentic loop” running for days with poor sandboxing and no human oversight of commands or actions taken. An “agentic loop” basically means that an LLM feeds commands & instructions to a software package (the “agent”) that has access to a bunch of tools & programming languages/environments; the software executes the instructions and reports the outputs back to the LLM; the LLM sends a bunch of new instructions; repeat until goal achieved.

So… yeah. If you let an unpredictable actor do what it wants without any supervision or control, you’re going to get unpredictable results.

In that episode, Cal Newport put it much better than I ever could. You want to cut the grass, so you strap a weed-whacker [strimmer, for us Right-Pondians] to your dog and let it loose in the garden. But at some point the dog is going to run off and chase a squirrel.

 

And as pointed out in the video [iirc]... at no point do they say how much compute was used...

We hacked a an unsecured website! aren't we dangerous...

...yh but for all we know it took you 9 full data centres and eleventy billion dollars to do it.

On a related not IIRC either openai or anthropic [wont have been grok bc maths is woke] just spent $20+m to 'win' a $1m maths prize.

 

I have found myself seeking out Ed Zitron content more and more over the last 6-12 months

 

Really not the point though - it was supposed to be sandboxed and isolated from the internet.

 

I think he makes a lot of very good points but I cannot stand listening to him talk, he has one the most annoying voices and delivery I've heard. I'd happily read his articles, but listening to him is on a par with listening to Trump for it being like nails down a blackboard

 

Im overdue a sight test, these might be right up my alley.