john61

WhatsApp just implemented cross messaging using the open Signal Protocol forced by the EU. We will see if the Signal messenger enables interop with WhatsApp, they are not forced to do this.

WhatsApp uses the open Signal Protocol.

same story here :-)

A relevant talk from 39C3 Congress regarding Russia:

https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-coding-dissent-art-technology-an...

Coding Dissent: Art, Technology, and Tactical Media

This presentation examines artistic practices that engage with sociotechnical systems through tactical interventions. The talk proposes art as a form of infrastructural critique and counter-technology. It also introduces a forthcoming HackLab designed to foster collaborative development of open-source tools addressing digital authoritarianism, surveillance capitalism, propaganda infrastructures, and ideological warfare.

In this talk, media artist and curator Helena Nikonole presents her work at the intersection of art, activism, and tactical technology — including interventions into surveillance systems, wearable mesh networks for off-grid communication, and AI-generated propaganda sabotage.

Featuring projects like Antiwar AI, the 868labs initiative, and the curatorial project Digital Resistance, the talk explores how art can do more than just comment on sociotechnical systems — it can interfere, infiltrate, and subvert them.

This is about prototypes as politics, networked interventions as civil disobedience, and media hacks as tools of strategic refusal. The talk asks: what happens when art stops decorating crisis and starts debugging it?

The talk will also introduce an upcoming HackLab initiative — a collaboration-in-progress that brings together artists, hackers, and activists to develop open-source tools for disruption, resilience, and collective agency — and invites potential collaborators to get involved.

This is open core. An old free fork: https://tryton.org

I would call it the ELIZA bubble. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

It is just the Eliza effect on a massive scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

Reading Weizenbaum today is eye opening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Power_and_Human_Reaso...

In Vienna, a hospital is heated by a neighboring data center using a heat pump, while the hospital cools the data center.

https://www.wienenergie.at/blog/fernwaerme-zukunft/#Abw%C3%A...

There is a huge heat pump running in Vienna since 2019:

https://www.wienenergie.at/blog/staerkste-grosswaermepumpe-m...

a bigger one is planned:

https://www.wienenergie.at/ueber-uns/meilensteine/2022-spate...

> The only options to get around was the expensive train system

can be cheap when you book early. Vienna -> Graz -> Vienna: ~20€

LLMs are calculating probable text/code. A lot of it in very short time. Probable text/code is not the same as correct/proper text/code. It is a huge mass of probable and maybe correct/proper text/code. That is very dangerous as it looks correct but maybe it is not. It is likely that the cost of software will increase because of the unmanageable mess that this creates.

> The distinction between code, config and data is being erased.

This distinction never existed in LISP. Greenspun's tenth rule in action.

The year of the Linux phone in India is coming.

> The argument that computational complexity has something to do with this could have merit but the article certainly doesn’t give indication as to why.

OP says it is because that predicting the next token can be correct or not, but it always looks plausible because that is what it calculates. Therefore it is dangerous and can not be fixed because it is how it works in essence.

Stallman's take on the issue: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed...

I am happy to live in a country that values data safety for critical patient data.

This is meant to be used in hospitals. Where I live no hospital personal uses phones to manage healthcare data. They have PCs.

We united coders have the power to change that. We have done it in the past. We are going to do it again.

Austria

The solar panels are connected to a converter which is connected to the normal grid with a standard plug.

I have cut my warm water costs by 80% with balcony solar panels. I have a warm water heating pump with 600 W electrical power. My little server turns it automatically on when the solar access power is greater than 540 W (measured by the smart meter). This generates usually enough warm water for our household. Also the solar panels cover to idle power of the house of 50-100 W very easily during daytime. This pays off in a few years and it reduces my carbon footprint and that of my neighbors.

There is also jolla / sailfishos built by ex Nokia engineers. The Russians forked it and are useing it in government / industry.

The year of the Linux Phone is coming!

Maybe a sufficient number off hackers are offended enough now and contribute to really free platforms, like PostmarketOS or Mobian. There has been great work there in the last years. I think we are not very far away from a really usable free phone, we need device drivers and android emulation / f-droid as long as native apps did not catch up.

Based on my experiences with LLMs and the hype around it, we will need more experienced programmers. Because they will have to clean up the huge mess that will come.

Depends. If you reuse otherwise wasted electronic it is efficient in avoiding extracting resources / energy building new hardware and avoids recycling energy or waste polluting earth. A big picture analysis of reusing old hardware would be very interesting.

Thank you for the post, very informative. I do this half manually. I have a cgi script on the always on very power efficient sbc server that wakes up the bigger server if someone needs it. The big server powers itself down when no backup is running at a time everybody using the server usually sleeps. I thought about improving this and measure server usage and solar power generation to decide the shutdown, maybe with an additional warning email. for example: "The server shuts down in 5 minutes due to no demand and no solar power, if you want to prevent this click this link: http://server.lan/cgi-bin/keepalive "

There has always been a very old method to learn music without sheet music. It is called playing by ear. It is incredible that we have a word for that. Because nobody is saying he is learning to talk by ear. Because talking and making music is an acoustic thing, and the natural thing is to use primarily your ear for that. The eye can be helpful, be it sheet music or a midi visualisation like this app. But an eye can not hear music.

My very, very old Telefunken FM Radio in my workshop full of dust and dirt works flawlessly. I tried to replace it with a modern, shiny one. But this new one broke after a few months. Now I placed the old one where it was for centuries and now it happily plays my favorite program again.

Do you play an analog instrument?