lrvick

Decompile. Write tests. Delete de-compiled code. Write new code that passes tests with a fresh context agent. Huzzah. Clean room.

We can play this game forever. IP is dead.

What a detailed and thoughtful point. It is "shit" so we should all use corpotools?

You do realize there are like a dozen clients for Matrix right? You can literally have any UX you want or even ask your favorite LLM to make a Discord UX clone that uses matrix protocol under the hood. That is how open networks work.

I have been an IRC operator for over 25 years, and never funneled any data to any third parties.

That is the beauty of open systems. One can choose an operator that reflects their values.

What functionality? Someone technical can do literally anything Discord can do with FOSS tools.

The functionality that should matter to free software projects is... freedom. I can forgive laypeople for not knowing any better, but it is pretty hard to overlook FOSS devs that should know better that -still- endorse Discord for FOSS development.

People use Apple products because they want to delegate all authority over their operating system to a corporation that knows best. If you trust Apple, you should clearly also trust eMudhra.

If you are finding yourself not trusting eMudhra anyway, then you might want to choose an OS that lets any well vetted and capable security researcher in the world contribute to it.

I am all in on (local and sovereign) AI, but people still call me Amish because I do not use a smartphone which has greatly increased my attention span and happiness. I imagine there will be plenty of people that are more productive at some tasks by choosing to abstain from one or more almost universally used technologies.

I am sure popular public Discord servers get their own share of spam, but with Matrix you can host your own, or join one of a friend you trust. That is what freedom looks like. E2EE is optional.

OTR supports IRC, but in practice either solution beats the privacy of Discord, which requires all traffic to be sent in plain text to their corporate owned databases.

IRC and Matrix are self hostable and end to end encrypted. There is no good reason for tech communities to lock themselves into Discord and exclude anyone that does not agree to their corporate terms of service.

> and the hardware requirements for any kind of LLM

You can run bonsai2 27b on basically any gaming GPU from the last 15 years including on game consoles.

Everyone has access to this stuff now if they bothered to look beyond the marketing from big labs trying to collect subscription revenue.

I work on compilers, kernels, and operating systems using exclusively consumer GPUs.

I give it about 50/50 the internet goes down or becomes effectively unusable for weeks, maybe months, at some point in the next 5 years given abysmal commitment to cybersecurity from almost every company that exists.

Some kid with the right prompt will supply chain attack a dependency of a dependency of firmware for border routers just to watch the world burn, or runaway AI swarms will saturate all bandwidth. Or a Linux kernel zero-click vuln. So many ways this can happen.

Better to prepare a bit and never need it.

Hey, I am that guy that founded that one obscure Linux distro. And yes, it is better than whatever one you use at supply chain security if nothing else. ;)

Really though, I do think people often equate popularity with being a healthy default solution for society.

A lot of people enjoy mcdonalds, and hell even I cave and buy it once in a while, but popular does not mean it is a healthy default for society.

The corpos are incentivized to addict you and trap you. Not to give you the best solution.

If one actually does research beyond "but all my friends use it" they would see Discord is objectively one of the worst things to happen to sovereign and privacy preserving communication on the internet in a long time. Tech communities using it should know better.

Whenever I see an open source project that says "Join my Discord" without any alternatives, I close the tab. If a technical project cannot find an hour to figure out how to setup a chat with their community without mandating use of a surveillance capitalism product, our goals are already too far apart.

> The need for proprietary code for firmware and hardware is the same on desktop.

The Linux distro I founded has zero blobs. Built completely from source and boots and runs on real laptops and desktops. That is what 100% open source looks like. Meanwhile every Android distro requires a vendor partition with dozens of black box blobs.

I hope they open source it before someone else decompiles it and does it for them. Just charge for binaries that most will pay for anyway. Then things like Linux support could be handled by the community.

GrapheneOS is only 100% open source if you do not count a giant pile of proprietary and privileged binary blobs required for it to function on any supported hardware.

This is not the fault of the Graphene team so much as a fundamental problem in the mobile chipset market.

Desktop/Laptop CPUs give you dramatically more control, especially with OpenSIL etc.

There are simply are no sovereign software solutions for modern mobile hardware.

> ...if you're primarily concerned with security. Most people are not.

Obviously. Most people also were once not concerned with basic sanitation at hospitals, or with avoiding lead paint, or avoiding giving their kids alcohol to help them sleep.

The evidence these things were really bad came decades before public behavior changes.

Humans are so tribal that most will put fitting in and social norms before objective evidence to the point of killing themselves, and even their kids, so we should never assume the popular choices are the least harmful and well informed ones.

It is an evolutionary advantage that some of us do not weigh social norms so much.

My argument is there actually are very few actual experts in the field because there are very few standards in this industry. Anyone can call themselves an infosec worker and probably even get a job as one if they learned burp suite a few months ago and did a CTF that one time.

But look at people like Bunnie that actually reverse engineer things down to the metal. He made his own mobile device from scratch, from OS to metal, exactly because all existing options are garbage. These are the types people we should be paying attention to IMO.

Never claimed otherwise. I just want to always make it clear people have a valid third choice in threads where people are talking as though Apple and Google are the only options. It is a prolific false dichotomy and I do not mind being That Guy.

I make an actual case for the things I advocate for and actually live my convictions.

Why everyone would is better off electing Apple or Google or Meta to decide what software we are allowed to install, what content we can share with our friends, when our data should be deleted, and when it should be sold to the highest bidder that wishes to manipulate us at scale?

I am convinced surveillance capitalism is a net negative for society, but if you really think otherwise, please make an actual case for your own view instead of complaining about me making mine.

Plenty of ways to build credit without revealing where you live or what locations you frequent and what you buy at the drug store. You can get a line of credit, take it out as cash, spend it privately, then pay it back. They learn nothing about you except you pay back your loans, which is the signal they need to give you more credit.

Stop marketing to them to kids or normalizing kids using them?

This is really not that hard. Modern app culture is highly addictive and provably poison for our brains over time. Adults can choose poison if they wish but when they give it to their kids it is called child abuse.

> Many people's employer's use of MFA (including my own) says otherwise

yubikey/nitrokey. Much more secure by a mile and works when your phone battery is dead. I switched multiple past employers from apps to these, joining as an SWE.

> tracking elderly parent (e.g., location tracking)

meshtastic asset tracking tag which will work even in emergencies when cell towers are down.

> children's school be able to reach them for emergencies

call-to-one-way-pager bridge, or voip-to-meshtastic bridge. Cheap to free solutions that will also work when cell towers are down.

Hit me with more perceived blockers if you are actually interested. Give me your gotchas. I have probably heard it all and am passionate about engaging people on this topic.

My wife and I have lived without a cell phone subscription for going on a decade and live a modern life as silicon valley tech workers.

Most have the choice to enjoy mostly the same lifestyle they have today, without Apple or Google or proprietary software or cell phones or even debit cards. There are reliable solutions for everything outside of the US surveillance capitalism bubble for those that actually want them.

Exiting surveillance capitalism is possible without major lifestyle changes.

Read Digital Vegan by Andy Farnell.

I do not use any Meta products, or any of the products they buy data from, so betting they know a lot less about me than most.

I do not use proprietary software at all to live my life.

Ah, so because second hand smoke exists, we should all smoke?

You seem obsessed with conformity and your arguments read as "Just stop being weird!"

I have a family, active social life hanging out at events or with friends weekly. I travel the world often, been to 6 countries in the last year. I am also a serial tech founder, and security researcher with piles of finds that impact nearly every fortune 500 company.

If anything I live a much more active and successful life than most of my haters, and I do not need to agree to the terms of service of any corpo-tech to do any of it.

People should make decisions based on personal conviction, not crowd conformity.

And if Apple decides not to fix it? Like when I have multiple times broken their DRM to help users have more freedom? I would never agree not to share such things as I like.

So make it kid mode by default, and require technical expertise to unlock it. Stop making excuses for corpos stripping freedoms from everyone because tech illiterate people exist.

Go to Defcon or even Linux Summit in the US and you see nothing but Macbooks and people that agree with you. Go to FOSDEM or CCC or European conferences, and almost exclusively Linux machines and most I talk to self-host anything they can. They must all be autists too.

You read to me as someone in an American tech bubble suffering from cognitive dissonance so profound you cannot even engage with the substance of a single viewpoint not shared by you or those in your bubble, except to mock and insult.

I do not carry or use a cell phone at all, and most people are probably better off with a dumb phone or no phone either over the current options, IMO.

I rarely leave home with any electronics at all. Sometimes a portable music player.

My only portable computers are sub 10 inch laptops running QubesOS, but will be replacing that with an OS of my own design soon based on stagex, which I founded.

Any software I absolutely need to -trust- is built with stagex and run in dedicated enclaves, servers, and VMs.

https://stagex.tools

So rather than address the substance of my comment, you hand waive it away and argue we should just let people give up freedoms to choose what software they install without even trying to educate them on risks or alternatives.

Tech CEOs will always do the right thing and act in public interest before profits or political favors, right?

They would never censor an app that the public largely wanted, right?

Fortnite did not pay their Apple tax, so no one got to install Fortnite. For safety.

To be clear, Google is just as bad. I do not use or recommend any products from either company.

I use laptops, desktops, or nothing, and get along just fine.

I have interviewed countless infosec workers who have never compiled an operating system from source, or even comfortable installing an OS on their own hardware, let alone any clue how to harden one or how basic Linux syscalls work... these are mostly not people we should be looking to for operating system advice.

As an serial OS architect and infosec worker myself with over two decades of experience in OS hardening, and many critical public finds impacting nearly every fortune 500 company, I do not use Apple or Google products at all. They are both complete shit at security and privacy, among other reasons.

Skill issue.

I do not own a cell phone, but I build my operating systems from 386 bytes of machine code all the way up to dual hardware anchored remotely attestable servers with memory encryption and hardware anchored disk encryption, and can do whatever I want on them with confidence.

I even rack my own GPUs at home and own my own AI and "Cloud" too for less than the price of a used car.

The motivated and technical can do virtually anything with tech with total sovereignty and privacy. It has never been easier.

Ah. So Apple -must- take freedoms away from everyone to install any software they want, to protect us. They could not possibly have a "format and void your warranty to unlock all features" switch on the motherboard like chromebooks have. Or the "get a one time warranty-voiding code from manufacturer" code like Samsung and other Android vendors have. Apple must make sure the path to freedom does not exist, for Grandma.

Grandma does not need the freedom to install the DeFlock or ICEBlock to help protect herself and her neighbors, right? Tim Cook is a Trump doner but of course has no political bias, and remains confident ICE and law enforcement always behave ethically so there is nothing to fear.

A corporation takes away basic freedoms of people over the tools they use to communicate with society, and then consumers get on the internet in public forums and -defend- them for it. Unbelievable.

I really hope you do not vote with this type of thinking.