Written with a lot of “help” from Claude Sonnet 4 LLM

Thanks, but no thanks.

I’m all for showing and discussing personal projects, but I don’t see what meaningful discussion we could have over something taken out of a black box.

To clarify, this would only have been triggered if you asked Gemini to parse your calendar events:

Once the victim interacts with Gemini, like asking “What are my calendar events today,” Gemini pulls the list of events from Calendar, including the malicious event title the attacker embedded.

Is asking the bot to read your calendar events and “summarize” them really an improvement over just looking at the calendar yourself?

An article brought to you by the leading authority on cutting-edge computer science research: BBC.

What if AI didn’t just provide sources as afterthoughts, but made them central to every response, both what they say and how they differ: “A 2024 MIT study funded by the National Science Foundation…” or “How a Wall Street economist, a labor union researcher, and a Fed official each interpret the numbers…”. Even this basic sourcing adds essential context.

Yes, this would be an improvement. Gemini Pro does this in Deep Research reports, and I appreciate it. But since you can’t be certain that what follows are actual findings of the study or source referenced, the value of the citation is still relatively low. You would still manually have to look up the sources to confirm the information. And this paragraph a bit further up shows why that is a problem:

But for me, the real concern isn’t whether AI skews left or right, it’s seeing my teenagers use AI for everything from homework to news without ever questioning where the information comes from.

This is also the biggest concern for me, if not only centred on teenagers. Yes, showing sources is good. But if people rarely check them, this alone isn’t enough to improve the quality of the information people obtain and retain from LLMs.

I realised that about a minute after I posted, so I deleted my commented right away :)

deleted by creator

You should be happy. Mine does a different thing every time, no matter the setting…

Picocrypt is a very small (hence Pico), very simple, yet very secure encryption tool that you can use to protect your files. It’s designed to be the go-to tool for file encryption, with a focus on security, simplicity, and reliability.

That’s a shame. Has the developer stated this, or is it just based on the lack of activity?

There seems to be a fork planning to continue the work. It was updated only a few hours ago.

Thanks a lot! This might just be enough to get me to actually try it!

Hi! I’m interested in trying Nushell at some point, although I keep putting it off…

Would you share your experience on a couple of items?

1. How easy was it to get started?
2. Do you find, or did you at least find in the beginning, that it is more suited for some particular tasks than using it as your day-to-day shell? If so, what were those?
3. Can you integrate it with existing tools that you know how to use from other shells, like grep or awk?

There is also duck.ai, which doesn’t required an account (and there’s no way to even have an account).

Mistral, the French AI, can also be used without an account through their chat app, and they give an option to exclude your data from training models, even for free users.

Tempo is a good open-source player for Android that works well with Navidrome.

On iOS, Arpeggi is good, but not open source (I think). It’s still under development, but I don’t think it’s missing any major features at this point.

Thanks a lot!

Hey! Good to know about the 128 kbps threshold.

What’s your take on MP3 bitrates? I’ve read some posts online claiming that 320 kbps is overkill most of, if not all of, the time. They claimed that there is little to no gain going above around 220 kbps. In your experience, is there any truth to this?

For lower bitrates, I’d suggest using a different codec than MP3. Opus is really solid, and at 128 kbps it will probably get you quality similar to MP3 at 192 kbps. Or you could go lower, and 96 kbps with Opus will be similar to MP3 at 128 kbps. I don’t know an app that will do it automatically, but the CLI tools are really simple to use: you point them at the FLAC and tell it the target bitrate and that’s it.

Alternatively, if you have access to a macOS machine, their AAC encoder is really good and likely superior to any MP3 encoder at equivalent bitrates.

So, in fact, the short answer is no.

The answer is only yes if the question is “Hibernating and booting into another OS and modifying the same partition externally: will my filesystems be corrupted?”.

2FAS and Ente are two open-source alternatives on iOS.

I don’t really get the “all eggs in one basket”

I think the argument is that if at some point Proton services get compromised, or if Proton somehow turn into the bad guys, then using fewer of their services will impact you less or give you more time to react. The same goes for any other vendor, of course, which is why the way you address this is by spreading your trust across different services/regions/owners/…

So the two-factor authentication apps shouldn’t be on desktop argument never made sense to me, mobile is the same way.

I think that argument was rooted in the assumption that the phone was a separate and smaller attack surface. The assumption is reasonable if you use your credentials mostly on desktop and only have a few apps on your phone, which was indeed the case for a lot of people in the past.

But nowadays, a lot of people use the same credentials on the phone just as well, and with everything asking to install their app, I’m not sure the attack surface really is smaller anymore. So, if you’re in this scenario, I agree with you that you may not be sacrificing much by having 2FA on desktop.

And, of course, 2FA, even in the same password manager, is still better than none. Your first factor can be stolen in more ways than just compromising your machine, for example through data breaches.