> Let's say you want to plan a trip to Thailand with your family. You could use the fancy AI to do it for you, or you could build a stupid frontend with minimal natural language understanding.
Except it isn't. Someone else could build that stupid frontend, and essentially create a better booking.com. Or you could ask the robot to make you a stupid frontend. It remains true that a well-designed MCP server goes wildly against the interests of sites like booking.com.
Yes, almost every website on earth is enshittified to the point that it’s user hostile.
Even something as simple as a recipe blog. That one is already solved by chatbots, and it’s glorious. I never have to look at a shitty recipe site full of ads with the recipe buried beneath a mile of fake stories again. LLM finds some, reads reviews, I pick one, if it’s good import to paprika, and that’s that.
There’s at least a chance that enough people demand it, combined with AI hype, that we could end up with a slightly better experience.
And if not, then there’s always the brute force approach of something like grok bot
> skipping the expensive phone network and re-routing calls over the cheap internet instead.
I find this such a bad idea, if I want to use the cheap internet for a call I would use an internet based voice call system directly, rather than messing around with telephone numbers and I guess potentially accidentally doing an expensive phone call (same with RCS/SMS vs. just using an internet-based chat directly).
People with POTS brains trying to make them do Internet things leads to a neverending stream of bad... no actually, terrible ideas. Look at H.323 for example, something that could only be created by someone who has no clue how the Internet (with firewalls, NAT, etc) works, and that's just the tip of the iceberg for the ITU-T standards stream.
It seems to be random, I tried it a few times during the last few weeks due to people talking about it, and sometimes it lets me use old.reddit.com, while other times it redirects to the login page.
GrapheneOS or other custom ROMs don't solve the actual problem that you can't just buy a smartphone and install any operating system like you can with an actual computer, despite technically being one.
Also, GrapheneOS supports device attestation (the non-google kind at least), which is still ridiculous as such systems have no benefit to people, only to technofeudalist corporations.
Device attestation is how you can use private keys you don't actually have access to. It has a lot of value to literally anyone who wants to store tokens or use one time authentication codes. Linux folks need to implement the full stack and offer an open alternative to payments, secrets, and tokens. In the age of LLMs there is no excuse. It is annoying as hell that I can't buy a System76 or Framework laptop with a fingerprint sensor but a Lenovo comes with one that works on Linux perfectly.
"Device attestation is how you can use private keys you don't actually have access to."
Read that phrase back and then ask "is this the future of computing that we wanted?"
The likes of passkeys, essentially user-hostile ssh keys that live on your device but aren't accessible by you, would have been an unbelievable dystopia to us in the 90s.
"Linux folks need to implement the full stack"
Nah it's fine thanks, I'd rather opt out of corporate serfdom than compromise my principles.
> Read that phrase back and then ask "is this the future of computing that we wanted?"
It is what I want.
If you own a mobile phone it's unavoidable. The physical SIM is a guarded area with secrets you can't know or touch - the secrets it holds prove you paid for access to their network.
If you want to carry a zillion others devices you can't access the innards of that prove something about you then good for you. But don't assume the rest of us think that's a good idea. We no more object to carving out a little bit of firewalled memory for the exclusive use of the bank than we object to the electricity meter in our houses. It's also a locked down piece of equipment we can't modify or touch that lives on our property. Most people are happy to grant that intrusion on their personal space in exchange for having the electrity connected.
It's no different on your phone. In return for your phone protecting its details from you, you no longer have to carry a credit card, or driver's licence, or prove you paid for ads to go away in some app, or access your works VPN. I honestly can't see much difference between carrying a credit card the hides some information from me, or putting the same info in the phone and it hiding the info. Except for having one less device to haul around, of course.
That's just your opinion. Has nothing to do with Linux. And yes I would like a device like a soldered in tpm device that can generate private keys and verify signatures signed with the public key. Your misunderstanding of the technology not withstanding it does appear to me to be quite a valuable technology since it's in basically every computer these days.
Lots of laptop vendors do. Very few integrate fingerprint scanners into any kind of secure authentication flow, though. There are decent fingerprint drivers for various brands, but connecting fingerprints to authentication beyond basic login requires manual setup.
You don't actually need biometrics to use key material, that's what (f)TPMs are for. They're not set up to be usable out of the box in any Linux distro I've tried, though.
It needs to come stock on every Linux laptop from now going forward period. Like you expect a screen to come with your machine. Every Mac has one now and I'm not going back to typing my password in every single time.
If this is your stance it's trivial to have your cake and eat it. You can easily build your own GrapheneOS based image, which will then be unable to use attestation (because your own keys you'll use for the secure boot won't match).
And I'm not trying to be snarky, if that's the only thing, it's solvable right now. Everything else will work.
And concerning "you can't just buy a device and install is" - android and iOS are far more secure than any desktop os, and both pixel/iPhones are far more secure than any computer (or any other phone as well (we'll get the third one next year)). GrapheneOS actually explains "whys" in their hardware support faw section.
Generally maintaining an os is a hard work, so that perhaps explains why there's not many mature offerings.
A piece of wisdom I read here is that "install any operating system like you can with a [PC]" is something that you can only do with a PC. PC's are the exception. Every other device is controlled by the manufacturer.
> GrapheneOS supports device attestation (the non-google kind at least)
they have an app that does GOS to GOS attestation.
they also run a remote attestation proxy to a google attestation intermediary (doesn't really accomplish anything).
they unfortunately don't provide you with the option to disable the Android APIs that can be used to get a unique hardware identifier from your device (cryptographic identity burned into the silicon) with some extra steps. APIs such as remote attestation and DRM handshake initiation.
the "whatever ROM"s are all Android, what difference does it make? Many bank apps have this SafetyNet thing and will refuse to run on non-official ROMs, that too.
Well, there's various linux options like postmarketOS. So long as you have the fundamental freedom, that is, an unlocked bootloader, everything else follows. If you decide to write a new OS for a phone, notning is stopping you.
The linux distros support very few devices officially. Even including community maintained ports, it's always old devices that you would not buy if you wanna maximize specs to run as a server. That is one of the reasons you want linux in the first place.
I have several old Android phones, the newest one is s10e from 2019, decent specs but only supports an abandoned version of UBports, not the current one, and no port for postmarketOS.
I'm aware. But I've never found it difficult to get a phone with an unlocked bootloader. Also, to my knowledge, bootloader locking is more common in the US.
And it's not just desktop _linux_ that's not allowed, but any desktop operating system, since this only works with "smartphones" not general-purpose computers.
(and of course even if they were to support computers, an age/id verification system either won't work at all or only work to be abused by those in power)
Allowing third-party "app stores" is completely useless when all apps must be approved by the operating system company.
It's also being abused by google (technically, will be, very soon), I guess they saw that since the legal framework for this kind of thing has now been written, they can do it too.
There was no oversight. The EU told Apple the CTC did not comply with the law. Apple's new scheme still seems bad but I don't think this is the end of it.
Google just got fined €430 million for a very similar fee scheme, practically copied from Apple, so it's highly unlikely that Apple will get away with it forever. Theoretically Apple should have a monster fine brewing since they're a repeat offender and it should be retroactively applied.
> Why do you need AI then?
(from this HN comment, worth a read in full: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43679585)