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bboygravity

2,425 karma · joined May 2, 2019

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bboygravity··on Did my old job only exist because of fraud?
Canadian fraud is on another level. When I worked for a Dutch company my boss forced me to take a sales pitch from some Canadian startup. They claimed to have some new magic wireless electricity technology using new unreleased quantum physics principles or whatever and had actually managed to get a significant contract from some part of the Canadian government (that was the only part of the pitch that was not a lie). The website was screaming scam with: crypto AI quantum compute, etc. The sales pitch was an actual live videocall where they just told us a bunch of lies straight to our face.

First and last time I ran into something so blatant. We didn't fall for it btw.

bboygravity··on Install F-Droid apps over USB straight from the browser
Unfortunately, yes.

My own daily driver is Firefox, so I basically only open Brave just for this website. I personally prefer managing apps on my phone through a browser on my laptop instead of fiddling with F-Droid on the phone.

bboygravity··on Install F-Droid apps over USB straight from the browser
DroidStore is a web catalog of open-source Android apps drawn from F-Droid, IzzyOnDroid, and curated GitHub releases.

Talks to the Android phone over USB. Open the page, and install APKs from the browser. It drives ADB over WebUSB, so there is no client to install, no account, and no telemetry.

I built it (vibe coded) because of Google's Android developer verification requirement. From 30 September 2026 in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand, with a wider rollout from 2027, any app installed on a certified Android device must be registered to a developer who has verified their identity with Google. That can mean handing over legal name, address, phone number, and a government ID, plus registering every app's package identifier. Apps whose authors have not verified by the deadline will not install through the normal flow in those regions.

F-Droid has refused to comply for very practical reasons. It cannot force the thousands of independent developers it distributes to register with Google, and it cannot claim those apps' package identifiers for itself without seizing exclusive distribution rights to other people's software. By its own account, the requirement would end the project and leave its users unable to install or even update apps.

The one install path Google has committed to keeping open is ADB/sideloading, for local development and power users. DroidStore wraps that in a browser so installing a known, auditable open-source app stays a single click over USB, with no command line and no F-Droid client. It is a stopgap to keep these apps reachable after the deadline. At least until Google also decides to block that route I guess.

I haven't put it on Github yet to publish the source and have others self-host this, but will do if people turn out to be interested in this. So far there was only one user (me) :P

bboygravity··on Dell UltraSharp 52 Thunderbolt Hub Monitor
It's really not that complicated: do you prefer to work at a tiny desk or a huge desk?

Same with monitors.

Either you stack huge piles of papers and work through the piles (with everything in the way all the time) or you spread them out in front of you.

bboygravity··on East Germany balloon escape
SpaceX is doing fine woth that approach?
bboygravity··on Grok is enabling mass sexual harassment on Twitter
Kinda like photoshop 2 decades or so ago.
bboygravity··on HPV vaccination reduces oncogenic HPV16/18 prevalence from 16% to <1% in Denmark
The reason it's not recommended for all ages is money. Not safety concerns.

Same reason you can't get Shingrix under a certain age.

bboygravity··on The C++ standard for the F-35 Fighter Jet [video]
Why is "no early returns" not a good rule?

I do early returns in code I write, but ONLY because everybody seems to do it. I prefer stuff to be in predictable places: variables at the top, return at the end. Simpler? Delphi/Pascal style.

bboygravity··on How the Mayans were able to accurately predict solar eclipses for centuries
I've been in towns in Mexico where the kids ONLY speak a Mayan language. No Spanish or English.

I asked for directions and just got blank stares until someone who spoke Spanish in the village explained, lol.

bboygravity··on Free software hasn't won
Meaningless. You can replace socialist by capitalist and it would be equally meaningless.

The correct word is democracy. The people (or "workers") having a say or not has nothing to do with socialism or capitalism IMO.

bboygravity··on Meta Superintelligence Labs' first paper is about RAG
AI progress has slowed down?! By what metric?

Quite the statement for anybody who follows developments (without excluding xAI).

bboygravity··on Ryanair flight landed at Manchester airport with six minutes of fuel left
"make speculative statements"

isn't this 99 percent of modern infotainment "journalism" though? making speculative statements, omitting and lying..

bboygravity··on Telegram's founder Pavel Durov sends alarmist message to all Telegram users
What are the chances that Signal is an op ran by the NSA?
bboygravity··on A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size
A single malicious infotainment outlet can fool thousands or perhaps millions of real people as that fact gets repeated in different forms and amplified with nobody checking for a valid source.

Llms are no more robust.

bboygravity··on One-man campaign ravages EU 'Chat Control' bill
Feel free to accuse the Germans. Russian bribes is basically why they have some of the most expensive energy in the world now. They're surprisingly corrupt for a "developed" "high tech" nation.

Search Gerhard Schroder for more info.

bboygravity··on Solar energy is now the cheapest source of power, study
Not if you consider that you need to either renew or add battery capacity (and panels and power electronics) after x years? Or did you take that into account?
bboygravity··on Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available
The good news is: there are still off-site backups.

The bad news is: they're in North Korea.

bboygravity··on Unbound Academy hasn’t replaced teachers with AI
This could be a quote from some Roman around the year 100 :p
bboygravity··on Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant
Another fun fact: you can remove all of the brain of a cat on threadmill except the brainstem and he'll keep walking.
bboygravity··on If you are harassed by lasers
I can highly recommend aluminum tape or copper tape. Doesn't let any light through and super easy to apply.
bboygravity··on Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image
Apple is even worse. Try searching for Grok in the app store and it will be almost impossible to find due to some deal they have with OpenAI.
bboygravity··on ChatControl update: blocking minority held but Denmark is moving forward anyway
What right wing elements?! Almost all of the EU (both at the EU level and member state level) is dominated by self proclaimed socialist parties or coalitions and has been for decades. The push for spying was always there and immediately became worse right after the Snowden revelations more than a decade ago.

Your comment makes 0 sense.

bboygravity··on ChatControl update: blocking minority held but Denmark is moving forward anyway
My only hope is Tesla bringing out a phone with it's own OS at some point.
bboygravity··on ChatControl update: blocking minority held but Denmark is moving forward anyway
Still are being called that now.

Any political party of any member state that even thinks about being critical of the EU will instantly be completely destroyed by "independent" national (state sponsored) media.

bboygravity··on Geedge and MESA leak: Analyzing the great firewall’s largest document leak
Ah, the good old "think of the children" argument. Does anyone buy that?
bboygravity··on Show HN: C++ library for reading MacBook lid angle sensor data
To save 1 byte in RAM for the 300MB electron app that will load this lib.
bboygravity··on Taco Bell AI Drive-Thru
So the solution is more AI: to replace c-suit.
bboygravity··on Garmin beats Apple to market with satellite-connected smartwatch
I feel 1200 is not that bad for what it offers. Also if we're talking Fenix 8: there's a cheaper version that has the same software and features but is like 900 or something (simpler design and hardware). The 1200 USD is the most expensive OLED + Titanium with Sapphire glass edition AFAIK.

It beats having to buy a running watch AND a scuba diving computer AND an oxygen saturation sensor AND some kind of sleep monitor. And it's nice for surfing and sleeping better and jetlag recovery tips and heat aclimation and checking the pressure sensor to see when airplane cabin pressure starts dropping and tons more. After a while I noticed tons of other random interesting things too: when HRV goes down for a few days, I'll know I'll be sick 1 to 2 weeks later, when resting heart rate is like 55 or higher (high for me) I probably did exercise too close to bed time or am having sleeping probems, etc.

IMO super cool that it does all of those and more very well.

bboygravity··on Over 80% of sunscreen performed below their labelled efficacy (2020)
Got recommendations? Here in Europe the formulations seem to be almost all the same (which I'm assuming means that they're all very bad for you).

Very hard to find any mineral sunscreens here. Decathlon has one in the most terrible packaging: a roller which means it's close to impossible to get the stuff out.

bboygravity··on Poisoning Well
I find this whole anti-LLM stance so weird. It kind of feels like trying to build robot distractions into websites to distract search engine indexers in the 2000's or something.

Like why? Don't you want people to read your content? Does it really matter that meat bags find out about your message to the world through your own website or through an LLM?

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is trying to figure out how to deliberately get their stuff INTO as many LLMs as fast as possible.

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