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Cake day: August 25th, 2025

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  • I’m curious: I’m currently evaluating mobile Linux OSes to transition away from Android. What I got going right now is Ubuntu Touch on a Fairphone 5, but there’s one big drawback with this one for me: the lack of a decent native Signal client.

    I’ve always planned to give Sailfish OS a spin, and I’m almost certain I can install it on the FP5 easily. But I’m not all that keen on ruining my Ubuntu Touch install, and possibly not being able to reinstall it if I want to go back.

    So before I install Sailfish OS on it, can you tell me if it has a decent Signal client? If it doesn’t, then maybe it’s not really worth investigating in the first place for me.


  • This race to displace human labor with AI is a typical late-stage capitalism race to the bottom because it ignores something fundamental: workers are also consumers. No job, no money, no purchases.

    In other words, all companies embracing AI are collectively working their ass off to destroy their own and everybody else’s markets. It’s global economic suicide.

    But… capitalism being what it is and doing what it does, it only looks at what the competition does, expenses and no further than the next quarter. So individual corporations see AI as a way to reduce expenses and get ahead of the competition that does the same thing.

    They all know AI will destroy everything eventually, including themselves, if they all do the same thing. But they can’t help it: corporations look no further than their own selfish interests with the narrowest possible set of criteria, and the bigger picture be damned. Always.






  • I don’t worry about that. There are other markers of AI that are much more reliable:

    1. Extreme verbosity.
    2. Low S/N - i.e. lots of words to say not much at all.
    3. Perfect grammar.
    4. If you drill down into the subject, often completely incorrect - but you don’t know without having to read a whole bunch of tedious text.

    And here’s how you recognize AI:

    • High-schoolers turning a paper on a subject they know nothing about often fluff up their paper - at least when students still wrote their papers themselves - and hit 1. and 2., but rarely 3.

    • Good writers always hit 3. They can be terse or verbose, and they may or may not hit 1., but never 2. or 4.

    • Internet writers don’t write like journalists. Only journalists writing for a journal that happens to also publish on the internet write like journalists. Internet writers don’t quite hit 3, knowledgeable ones don’t hit 2., and almost none of them ever hit 1. Or said another way, when you read something about Linux networking that looks like an Atlantic op-ed, it’s AI.

    Only AI hits 1., 2. and 3. AI almost always writes in a tone and form that doesn’t befit the venue.

    As for 4., if you want an example of this, try to search “NFC unlock” on DDG or Bing (same AI-laden Microsoft trash search engine): you will find scores of perfectly-written articles that explain in painful details how you should buy NFC tags (they don’t say which), program them (they don’t say how), then present the tags to your device (they don’t say what devices) to program them to unlock upon presenting the tags.

    If you know anything about NFC, you know this is all shades of wrong. But amazingly, each article on the subject is many pages long, perfectly written, and there are countless such articles.