steelframe

Whenever I start feeling smug about how cagey I've been about data brokers in the past, I remind myself that enough of my relatives have handed over their DNA to operations like 23andMe so as to render my efforts futile.

It's not just those without smartphones who are penalized. It's those without Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and spying imposed by Apple or Google on their devices.

I run GrapheneOS on an older Pixel. It does everything I need it to do: alarms, offline maps and navigation, end-to-end encrypted communications, podcasts, audiobooks, music, photos, weather, and even phone calls. All without any DRM or spying.

Now let's talk about the downsides in this article: shopping discounts, parking, entertainment, fast food, and banking.

Shopping discounts: The deal is that they get to track me and advertise to me, and they cut some percentage off a purchase here and there. No deal. I've discovered so many great products by moving away from big retail shops that engage in this kind of activity. I mostly shop at Trader Joe's, which has no coupon/discount/loyalty nonsense. For the occasional trip to another supermarket, I simply key in <local area code>-867-5309. Works every time.

Parking: I ride my bicycle or take public transportation almost everywhere, so parking is a moot point for me. But for the rare occasion when I drive to a place where I have to pay for parking, most everything accepts a credit card. If it doesn't, most everything else has a website that I can go to in Vanadium or Waterfox. It's actually very rare that I find I actually have no choice but to download and install a DRM'd app in order to park somewhere. In fact I don't recall that ever actually happening to me. Not to say that's not a possibility in the future.

Entertainment: I despise large crowds, and almost everything that's exclusively done through Ticketmaster et al. is of absolutely no interest to me. If I'm not sitting down in a cozy venue within 10-15 or so feet from the performers, I'm just not interested.

Fast food: I don't eat fast food. Discounted Big Macs isn't my idea of a good time.

Banking: My bank's web site works fine on Waterfox. But if I'm going to be managing my money I'd much prefer to do it on my computer. If I want a reasonable return on my deposits I simply park most of my cash in a money market ETF. It's plenty convenient and is simply not a big issue for me.

I'll add a few more.

Rideshare: I find traditional taxis are everywhere I've recently visited, tend to be driven by more interesting people, and they accept cash, no problem. I've had plenty of bad experiences with rideshares and have never had a bad experience since switching to traditional taxis. Knock on wood.

Audiobooks: I get ODM files from my local library. The audio files you download via ODM aren't DRM'd.

Ebooks: My offline Kobi reader works great. Kindles can be cracked with WinterBreak. Again, the library. DeDRM is your friend.

Email: Fastmail app from apkcure.com.

Chat: Signal.

Airlines: Check in on Waterfox, take a screenshot of the ticket/QR code. If that doesn't work, check in at the airport and get a printed boarding pass.

> Then you print a boarding pass at the kiosk?

Those kiosks are gone from many airports. You're going to have to wait in line to get anything printed. And if you fly Ryanair it will cost you over 50 euro.

> That's not a thing. They're literally just cameras looking for a QR code.

And yet for me one time earlier this year said QR code on my Graphene OS phone scanned fine at the TSA checkpoint but refused to scan at the gate, leading to mayhem as the crew couldn't figure out for nearly an hour why the number of people sitting on the plane wasn't equal to the number of people who they registered as boarding.

> It's more about some weird incompatibility between my device and the scanner.

I think I held up an entire flight for nearly an hour because the QR code on my Graphene OS Android phone scanned fine at the TSA checkpoint but didn't scan at all at the gate. They ended up letting me on the flight without properly registering that I boarded in their system. That triggered some crazy security hold that prevented the crew from obtaining permission to pull back from the gate.

Apple Express Mode lets you use certain Wallet cards when the phone is very low battery and turned off.

> It's often €50 now to print boarding pass at the counter in Europe.

I was about to respond, "No way this is true. I don't believe you." But then I found an article claiming that yes, indeed you can be fleeced like this for simply showing up and asking for your boarding pass. Unreal.

https://www.the-independent.com/travel/news-and-advice/check...

Printing a boarding pass at home works for the flight out. But what about the returning flight?

Just last week I flew back home from SFO. I needed to change the flight at the last minute. The app failed to update with the new flight. The airline had removed all the boarding pass kiosks from that airport and only seemed to have luggage drop service. I asked an airport employee how I could get a boarding pass printed, and he pointed to a poorly-marked lane with a sign about "special accommodations" or something, like I was blind. I waited in that line for about 20 minutes along with people who were trying to check their bags. Eventually I got to someone who seemed really put out that I hadn't checked in yet and that they'd need to push a few more buttons on their computer to do that for me.

I'm all-in on this. If the only way for me to attend an event is to deal with an app on my phone, I automatically assume there are a few dozen other activities or events I'd enjoy doing more during that time and choose to go do one of those instead.

There's a restaurant my parents take me to when I come to visit that requires you to scan a QR code to get to a website and then order and pay for your food on your phone. You are prompted to provide a tip up front before anybody has even done anything. Then when the food's ready your phone alerts you, and you have to get up and grab the food from a shelf outside the kitchen. So if you do tip, you end up tipping... the management, I suppose.

It's just about the most cynical dining experience I've ever had the misfortune of enduring.

> > 1. Parking apps are worse than parking meters.

> I certainly don't agree with that one. I really don't miss having to pay for a fixed number of hours and then having to figure out what to do if I'm running late (or wasting money if I get back early).

The last time I tried parking in downtown Salt Lake City the city's app wouldn't even install on my phone, complaining about being built for an older Android version. Fortunately the web site still worked. Sort of. I had to try a couple of different browsers before I found one that functioned with the site.

When riding Caltrain I get charged for the maximum amount I could possibly pay (all stops) when I board. Then when I get off at my stop I tap again and get refunded for all the stops I ended up not getting to. It works fine. Seems a meter could be a "tap in/tap out" thing. If it's 5 hours until it's free to park, put a hold for 5 hours of time. If you get back in 2 hours, release the hold and only charge for 2 hours when you tap out.

It's even possible to do this with cash. Imagine a machine that calculates your change and spits out bills and/or coins. Oh wait, yeah, we've had that technology since around 1959. It would just need to print out a ticket with a bar code or something to authenticate that you're the one who paid in the first place. Did you lose your ticket? Sorry, looks like you're paying for the rest of the day. But that's still a lot cheaper than a citation.

I suspect it's not "pay max/get refund" because municipalities can't stop milking those sweet sweet citations from people who fail to correctly guess how much time they'll need up front.

I'd like to take a dig into this notion of "purpose" and "primary goal." To me, LLMs are a phenomenon. They have not intrinsic purpose or goal -- they just are.

Purposes and goals come from you and me. An LLM is a tool, and we get to decide what the tool is good for or how to use it.

If you want "a smart creative," there's nothing wrong with that. It's as good a purpose or goal as any.

However for me I don't want an LLM to try to be "a smart creative." I instead want it to give me cold, hard facts in precisely the format I want them, in precisely the context I am interested in, and with precisely the conciseness that I require to make a specific decision or learn a specific thing. Traditional web search can eventually get me what I want, but I have to sift through the cruft and make associations among a plethora of content to get to the meat of what I want.

I've found that using a good web search (Kagi) together with an LLM processing the results has given me information I needed and then pointed to the sources so I can validate those statements. I wouldn't exactly characterize those results as a "simple" summary. They're usually synthesizing a variety of sources to generate something that no one source had, exactly.

> very limited 250W/15mph pedelec class of e-bikes

Meanwhile in the Wild West (a.k.a. the United States) we have children hurling 100+ lb 750W throttle-controlled motorcycles (I'm sorry, "e-bikes") at up to 28 mph on mixed-use pedestrian trails. The best we can do is put up plastic signs on the trail begging them to slow down and be careful around other people.

Here is that same exchange with paid Kagi Assistant using Claude 3.5 Haiku:

Me: Who is Trump's paternal grandpa?

Based on the available information, Frederick Trump is Donald Trump's paternal grandfather. Here are some key details about him:

Born as Friedrich Trump on March 14, 1869, in Kallstadt, Germany (then part of the Kingdom of Bavaria).

He immigrated to the United States in 1885.

He was a German-American businessman who amassed considerable wealth during the Klondike Gold Rush by running a restaurant and brothel for miners.

In 1901, he returned to Kallstadt and married Elizabeth Christ the following year.

He is considered the patriarch of the Trump family.

He passed away on May 30, 1918.

Interestingly, the Trump last name has been recorded in Kallstadt since the 18th century, and Frederick Trump is credited with being the founder of the family's initial fortune.

Me: Who is Trump's maternal grandpa?

Based on the provided information, Malcolm MacLeod (also spelled Calum MacLeod) is Donald Trump's maternal grandfather. He was born on December 27, 1866, in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland

While the information provided is limited, it confirms his identity and place of birth. Unfortunately, the passage does not provide additional details about his life or occupation.

---

That looks pretty good to me. Of course Kagi's strategy seems to be to retrieve search results first and then bias the LLM with those results. The LLM then parses, distills, and contextualizes the answer in a succinct and easily-consumable manner. In my opinion this is The Way to go about doing it at the moment.

> If you don’t like them, don’t apply.

Due to the prevalence of the practice this is tantamount to suggesting constructive unemployability.

People were up in arms about widespread doping during the Lance Armstrong era. But the only viable alternative to doping at the time was literally to not compete at all.

> They just say, well the AI picked this, as if that means something in and of itself.

In any other professional field that would be grounds for termination for incompetence. It's so weird that we seem to shrug off that kind of behavior so readily in tech.

> In a world today, where your a LinkedIn profile is literally essential to your means of livelihood

Several years ago I removed nearly all content from my LinkedIn profile and set it to private. Lo and behold my career has been doing just fine. The rate at which recruiters are reaching out to me hasn't changed one bit. I've also interviewed and gotten offers.

I've always resisted normalizing having any kind of social media account. Whenever there was something going on that "required" a Facebook account, I simply wouldn't participate, and I'd let whoever needs to hear it know that I'm not participating because I don't use Facebook. Whenever I'm at a conference and people ask me for my LinkedIn info, I simply reply that I'm not on LinkedIn, and if they want to get in touch with me they can try sending me an email. Sometimes they stare at me like I just walked out of a space ship, which is fine. If you can't grok that I'm not on LinkedIn, I probably don't have any interest in whoever you are or whatever you're selling.

Thanks, but all the same I'm not going to jump through arbitrary hoops set up by people who think it's okay to just capriciously break email. They simply won't ever get me as a customer and/or advocate in the industry. Same thing goes for any business that is hostile toward open systems and standards.

For me that sort of thing actually dilutes the prestige. If I'm interviewing someone, and they have "I was an author on this amazing paper!" on their resume, then if I open the paper and find 1k+ authors on it, at that point it's complete noise to me. I have absolutely no signal on their relative contributions vs. those of anyone else in the author list. At that point it's not really a publication, for all intents and purposes. You may as well have just listed the project as a bullet point. Of course I'll dig deeper during the interview to get more details -- if you have something else in your resume that gets you the interview in the first place.

In short, I won't give your name on that notable paper equal weight with someone else's name in another notable paper that has, say, 3 or 4 authors.

I tried signing up, but it gave me some bullshit "this email domain isn't supported in your region." I guess they insist on a GMail account or something? Regardless I don't even trust US-based LLM products to protect my privacy, let alone China-based. Remember kids: If it's free, you're the product. I'll give it a while longer before I can run something competitive on my own hardware. I don't mind giving it a few years.

I installed a Swytch conversion kit on a couple of my bicycles in the U.S. I did have to file down the axles by about 1mm to get them to fit in the drops, but after that everything has been working pretty well. The ring with the magnets around the crank sometimes shifts out of alignment with the sensor, which results in the motor not kicking in sometimes. The extra weight on the front also makes it more squirrely, and I generally prefer to ride my mid-drive e-bike for distances longer than 3 or so miles.

At that time I ended up just buying a gaming PC packaged with the card. I find it's generally worth it to upgrade all the components of the system along with the GPU every 3 years or so.

I used to work with someone who was arrested for having a beer in his possession when he was 20 years old. The circumstances were pretty colorful, and so it made the local news. He had since worked his way into management at the company we worked for. One day he mentioned that the article about his arrest finally fell off the Google index after more than a decade, and he was relieved about that. One of his reports in the room immediately jumped on Google and used their tool for re-indexing sites to get the article back in the results for his boss, and then he proudly announced how he "solved that problem!"

Of all the career-limiting moves I've witnessed in my lifetime, that one was pretty near the top.

When an app rots you're left completely helpless. When a website rots at least you can try with multiple browsers until one of them works.

In 2015 Robin Hutcheson partnered with a vendor, ParkSLC, to deploy an iOS and Android app that is the only possible way to pay for street parking in many areas of downtown SLC. She seemed awfully proud of herself in this announcement, bragging about how it hasn't really fallen over much in the first few months in the field:

https://archive.org/details/Press_Conference_-_ParkSLC_Mobil...

But that's not the bar. For public infrastructure it needs to continue to function for the life of the system. So let's fast-forward to Kubecon 2024 in SLC. I'm staying with a friend further south, so I had to rent a car. I pull up to a restaurant where I'm meeting some business partners and park right here:

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7647761,-111.8938564,3a,75y,...

In a past life there would be a parking meter right there at the stall where I could drop in some coins and be on my way. Now let's talk about how Robin's fancy new parking system is going now that we're in the app-infested future.

It's November in the early evening, so it's not exactly warm and cozy. The first problem is that the little blue post you see in the Google Streetview back in Oct 2022 isn't there now. So I have no idea what the stall number is. Fortunately the blue post for the spot behind it is there, and I determine it's counting up going north. I guess the stall number is one higher than the one behind it, and that's all I have to go with.

I walk up to the super-advanced new fancy kiosk and hit the button to turn on the screen. Icons on the screen invite me to start tapping away to register. No response. The touchscreen functionality is completely broken.

There's a sticker with a QR code and a website, parkslc.com. Okay, maybe I'm not being phished here. Better do a quick web search to make sure. Yup, ParkSLC appears to be The Thing. So I go to parkslc.com to get the link to the app and discover that it's only distributed via Google Play. But I'm running GrapheneOS because I don't want Google spying on me. So it looks like the only way I can park on W Temple in downtown Salt Lake City is to allow Google to spy on me?

Great. Well, I do have another dummy account on the phone with a sandboxed install of Google Play with a temporary account I created just for that user on that phone, so I was able to attempt to install the app. It still "phones home" to Google but maybe without enough information for Google to determine who I am. But at that point I'm greeted with an error like, "This app was designed for an older version of Android. Go pound sand."

Great. So this app isn't even being updated, I guess. I wonder if other people with newer Android devices are getting this same error. Regardless, by then it's been about 7 minutes while I've been sitting on a concrete bench in the cold trying to pay to park so I can go to my business meeting. So far both the kiosk and the app have been dead ends.

My last option, it seems, is to browse to parkslc.com and see if there's a way to pay via Firefox. After scrolling around more than I should have had to I finally find a "Pay Online" link and follow it. It asks me for a phone number, so I punch that in. I get an SMS. I have to create a pin. It asks me for a "Zone Number." I punch in what I guess it's supposed to me. Then it prompts me for my credit card. I start punching that in, but when I get to the drop-down menu to select the year of expiration... nothing. No response to my taps. No ability to just type in the year.

Great. So the website doesn't work with Firefox. Another 3 or 4 minutes wasted on another dead end. Okay, so I launch Vanadium and restart the whole process again. This time around the drop-down menu worked, and I was finally able to complete the process, after futzing around with a broken kiosk, a broken app, and a broken website for 12-13 minutes out in the cold night air of Salt Lake City.

As the app-based system she deployed in SLC fell into ruin behind her, Robin has since flown on to be the administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Good for her! I'm sure there's blame to be passed around here, as it's in the current transportation administration in SLC to maintain the system in working order. I just wonder how many spare kiosk touchscreens they have lying around from a system built in 2015. And I wonder if anyone still has the source code for the app that doesn't work with newer versions of Android. Or if there's anyone around who can even push an update any more. Obviously Robin didn't seem to do enough to ensure the system she deployed would end up being robust and reliable public infrastructure just 10 short years down the road.

And not to pick on Robin too much, this is endemic in our institutions everywhere. As an industry we need to do much, much better. One lesson from my anecdote is that there should always be a website, and it should be as simple and compatible as possible, especially if it serves as public infrastructure.

> aggressive technicians trying to convince me to install their bloatware on my computer

I still remember the look on the tech's face back around 2002 when he saw a text login prompt on my FreeBSD box.

> I’m repeatedly asked SEVERAL TIMES EVERY TIME I USE THE APP.

You know what doesn't do that? The local cab company when I call them to ask for a pick up.

Point taken about preferring Apple over Google. I buy Pixel phones and immediately install GrapheneOS, which does a pretty good job of keeping Google at arms' length. So I guess the answer to your question is that there is another alternative.

I run LineageOS on an Xperia Z1 Compact that I use as a cycling computer and GrapheneOS as my daily driver. If any business excludes my phone, I exclude that business.

The only trouble I run into is when (pseudo-)public institutions such as airlines or municipal parking authorities arbitrarily require apps that only Apple or Google distribute through their DRM-infested frameworks.

I'm still of the opinion that an Xperia Z1 Compact running LineageOS handily outcompetes any cycling computer that Germin or Wahoo has shipped in the past 10 years.

Another software engineer chiming with QModem being one of his childhood core memories. Sorry for your loss.