EU is going down the same path. The “EU alternative” stuff is just bogus. It’s just a matter of time before EU starts doing the same.

It’s not bogus if you are yourself European or if the alternative is Big Tech. But I feel you. There are lots of shitty European companies that are not that much better. I avoided the switch to Spotify because even though they are “European” they gave a lot of money to Joe Rogan and to Trump on his inauguration.

Also, the EU did recently reject the chat control proposal so at least that’s something…

For me there was only 1 breaking config change in the past year or so if i recall correctly. Maybe 2?

Valve is a shitty company.

Does valve make some good things? Yes. Do they make shitty things? Yes. Not hard.

You just stated the exact nuanced position I was defending from the very beginning, while simultaneously insulting me for holding it 😂

It’s not.

Look, you are not necessarily wrong in holding the opinion that Valve’s monetization practices are so horrible, that they ruin the company’s entire reputation. It’s a valid moral boundary. But at the end of the day, it’s just an opinion, not some objective law of the universe and other people can weigh the scales differently without being an evil person. Yet you portray it as the TRUTH. And it’s a bit ironic, that when people disagreed you started talking about echo chambers and attacking the community. This is why you got downvoted.

I feel like you’re straw-manning here.

I never said it’s okay. All I’m saying is that a mega-corporation can simultaneously exploit psychological loopholes for profit (loot boxes) while actively pushing open-source ecosystems (Linux), providing great value to consumers and fighting other pc gaming monopolies (Microsoft). Look at the whole picture.

Maybe just maybe it’s because it’s not as black or white as you make it seem? Especially talking about a company that did so much for Linux and looking at what their competition is doing…

Last week, we published our team’s findings about an exposed Elasticsearch cluster that contained over 160 indices and held 8.7 billion primarily Chinese records, ranging from national citizen ID numbers to various business records.

Last December, the team uncovered an unprotected database containing 4.3 billion records, some of which included LinkedIn-derived personal information. The 16TB-strong instance contained emails, photos, employment histories, and other personal data. A single collection alone contained 732 million records, including photographs.

In July, Cybernews covered one of the largest data leaks in history, after researchers discovered several collections of login credentials, containing 16 billion records. The team found 30 exposed datasets, each containing tens of millions to more than 3.5 billion records.

The leaked data included login info for just about every online service, including Apple, Facebook, Google, GitHub, Telegram, and even government platforms.

Damn…

I wonder is this something to actually worry about outside of the US?

SOON

I used Discrub to delete all of my messages from certain groups and 1:1 DM’s before leaving them. Worked great, not the fastest thing but it works. Also has Firefox extension.

It was…oh my god. Do you have ANY idea how awful the vanilla youtube experience is?

Whether or not that matters depends on how much and how you watch it.

Ads while I listen to music = annoying

I want to navigate fast to different videos on PC to find something and almost every time an ad appears on a new video = annoying

I’m watching some chill drive or walk while reading a book and a loud ad appears = annoying.

But when I just go and watch 1-3 videos before bed on my ipad? I don’t care if I get those 2-4 ads, I just mute and wait those couple of seconds. I have no youtube adblockers or different clients on ipad / phone for that reason.

“Based on these reports, users see a message stating “Comments are turned off,” which appears across a wide range of videos”

Seems like a win to me.

I haven’t been following much of the new developments of these self-hostable AI. Can you actually self-host anything decent?

I have played around these smaller models in the past and honestly anything smaller than LLama 4 Scout was just not very useful. Now Llama 4 Scout was “17B Active parameters, 16 experts and 109B Total parameters” so not sure what that even means.

Terry Davis was right…

Edit: For anyone that don’t know : https://youtu.be/3HD43lvNvCA?t=2084 He was mentally unwell but he called it !

Thanks for taking the time to share

I don’t think so. From what I gathered, the only thing Play Services can see on GrapheneOS is the list of other apps you have installed. That’s it. They can’t see anything else unless you grant access to it. You’re not giving Google root access to your phone, you’re just installing an app that happens to be made by Google, and it’s locked down like everything else.

Edit: https://youtu.be/YB01HHFitFA?t=625 I just saw this video apparently apps can still communicate with each other so you might want to isolate if that’s something you’re worried about.

Edit 2 : Another relevant link https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/28558-google-can-still-see-my-app-activity-on-grapheneos/2

The threat level for google play services is different in graphene as it runs in what they call an “appbox,” which basically means Google Play is just another app that’s sandboxed like everything else.

One thing I haven’t understood properly I feel is how notifications work. They talked there’s basically 3 ways of sending notifications on android. FCM (googles system) , websockets, unifiedpush. Most apps use FCM so you need play services installed to get notifications, right?

How does that work through profiles though? Some commenter in this thread said you can forward them from another profile if that profile is running in the background? But if I have google play services installed on profile B but not profile A? Do I have to install them on every profile?

I may not fully understand how profiles work yet.

Yeah, as they said most banking apps now work, however, Google Pay doesn’t.

There are alternatives to it like curve pay but I haven’t done the research whether they’re trustworthy enough. EU company I think.

Yeah I apologize, I incorrectly assumed that GrapheneOS’s BFU state is more secure and requires you to enter your passphrase by default and not PIN and that this is not available on stock android which some people pointed out it is.

On a related note though, Graphene does have an interesting feature where if phone hasn’t been unlocked for some time it will force reboot to get into that BFU state. Metroplex sets it to 8 hours.

I think they also have some aggressive USB port control, but I haven’t looked into it. Where you can only charge phone in BFU state or something like that. Haven’t had time to read into it : https://grapheneos.org/features#usb-c-port-and-pogo-pins-control