• 36 Posts
  • 141 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 8th, 2023

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  • xia@lemmy.sdf.orgOPtoMemes@lemmy.mlyoink
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    1 month ago

    The competition doesn’t need to be open, they just need to motivate Google to be open.

    …but could that actually happen? I’m not sure what WOULD motivate Google to be open. Even if there were three or four more major mobile players (all with equal market share), and Google had the only platform that allowed unblessed software to be installed, I’m not sure that would pressure Google to continue to be “the open choice”, but more likely to take this same action as “the odd man out”.

    At a fundamental level, there is an illusion/concept planted in the human mind that “force answers everything”, and when they run out of ideas (or all the ideas that they have would require too much [re]work to their liking) the tendency is to fall back onto “just use force” as an easy “solution”.


  • xia@lemmy.sdf.orgOPtoMemes@lemmy.mlyoink
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    1 month ago

    If I had to guess, I would speculate that their motivation is a long-term play to squash the general perception that Android has more malware (and is therefor less secure) than iPhone. Just about every article I’ve seen to that effect includes (1) enable unknown sources, and (2) install this malware app; so they probably see the current hurdles as insufficient and intend to perma-ban dev accounts that they find signing malware apps.












  • I imagine that it is theoretically possible to successfully vibe-code, but probably not with a conventional project layout nor would it look much like traditional programming. Something like your interaction primarily being a “requirements list”, which gets translated into interfaces and heavy requirements tests against those interfaces, and each implementation file being disposable (regenerated) & super-self-contained, and only being able to “save” (or commit) implementations that pass the tests.

    …and if you are building a webapp, it would not be able to touch the API layer except through operational transforms (which trigger new [major] version numbers]. Sorta like MCP.

    Said another way, if we could make it more like a “ratchet” incrementing, and less like an out-of-control aircraft… then maybe?!?



  • I would say simply to avoid buying phones from ad-companies, but more generally… if you buy hardware from vendors that respect ownership (i.e. that have user-unlockable bootloaders) then you don’t really have to worry about this kind of thing, as even if the company turns evil later, you can probably flash the phone with a 3rd party rom.


  • xia@lemmy.sdf.orgtomemes@lemmy.worldFound in the wild
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    3 months ago

    In theory, yes. There is a first-stage bootloader (that actually finds, loads, verifies, and jumps-into fastboot) baked into the hardware (implemented in fuses and ROMs [like REAL roms, not “flashable” ROMs]), and AFAIK it cannot effectively be modified after the phone is manufactured, so they try to keep it as simple as possible.

    So if it were real, the psuedocode would be something like this:

    var fastbootPartition=locateFastbootPartition();
    
    if (fastbootPartition == null || !verifySignature(fastbootPartition))
    {
         // AFAIK, this code block is already a thing in production, but the
        // message is more like a "signature failed" or "corrupted" than
        // a "you done goofed".
        displayRudeMessage();
        halt();
    }
    
    var fastbootAddress=load(fastBootPartition);
    jumpTo(fastbootAddress);
    

  • I don’t know if this is what you mean, but I find that “Westworld” hits a lot harder post-ChatGPT.

    I remember it taking a lot more suspension of disbelief on release, but now much of it falls into the realm of plausible.

    Maybe not the “computable consciousness”, but the glitchy hand-wavy “we don’t know how it works either” aspect… at the time it seemed like a mcguffin cop-out, and now that’s like all the new business models.