@GrapheneOS @Schouten_B The Dutch government sponsoring /e/ is news to me. Where can I find information about this?

Wero was supposed to be a sovereign European alternative. But it's used to further lock in Europeans into US smartphone operating systems. For instance, the Dutch ASN bank has started requiring Google Play Integrity if you want to do a Wero transaction: https://github.com/PrivSec-dev/banking-apps-compat-report/issues/105#issuecomment-6383605937 , breaking this for users of @GrapheneOS and other non-big tech OSes.

I am not sure whether this is a Wero requirement handed down to ASN, but it is the opposite direction we should be going.

#bigtech #wero #android

This is exactly why Google Play Integrity is a farce:

https://ethannelson-moore.github.io/blog/2026/10/25/maxwest-nitro-a65-triada/

It has very little to do with security and everything with shutting alternatives like @GrapheneOS out.

Very happy to see that European models are getting somewhat competitive again. A few years ago Mixtral was one of the more popular open models, but recently most near-frontier models seem to have come from China.

Now there is Mistral Large 4, which is close to GLM-5.3:

https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large-4/

Weights are going to be released by the end of the month.

#mistral #lechonk

RE: https://mstdn.social/@barbarakathmann/117328152646484744

Great news! The majority of the Dutch parliament wants to ban spy glasses (e.g. Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses), except for medical purposes.

#Apple #sirirecap is super creepy. I don't care that it is opt-in for the user of the watch. All the people who are being 'recapped' did not give consent.

Luckily it's not going to be rolled out in the EU for now. No clue if it's due to privacy laws or the DMA requiring it to be opened to competitors (what could go wrong), but it's a good side-effect.

The other worrying thing is that other OEMs are going to want to add this feature, but with even worse privacy safeguards.

I found a competitor to the FIFA Peace Prize!

"Axel Springer [...] announced on Friday that it is awarding its 2026 Axel Springer Award to far right billionaire Peter Thiel [...] In the past, the company has awarded its prize, which is non-monetary, to other right-wing tech giants like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman."

https://truthout.org/articles/politico-owner-axel-springer-gives-prize-to-far-right-billionaire-peter-thiel/

When your LLM starts using Perl to rewrite Python imports 🫠.

What's next... SNOBOL?

(As long as it does the job I guess.)

To be clear, I dislike slopcoded PRs as much as most other people here. I just think they are throwing away the baby with the bathwater.

So, ehm, what is a good platform for hosting open source when leaving Codeberg? Asking for a friend.

(No, they are not a vibecoder.)

Yes, I know, nowadays Claude will generate a much nicer animation as a Javascript page with controls, etc. But in the stone age we'd use ImageMagick or ffmpeg to concatenate a bunch of matplotlib output images into an animation.

Found a fun animation I once made for a course.

It shows how two classes that are not linearly separable become linearly separable when using a small non-linear layer.

The task is a generated "two circles" toy dataset. It uses a very small non-linear layer (probably three neurons, cannot remember), a linear projection to 2D (for visualization), and a logistic regression layer for classification.

The animation shows optimization of random weights to a linearly separable solution.

#ml #mlp

I am surprised how many people don't now about Universal Android Debloater (NG). Even if you don't have something clean like GrapheneOS, you can uninstall most of the bloat (including Gemini, Bixby, preinstalled Google/Microsoft/Meta apps, etc.) from the user partition on most phones.

https://github.com/Universal-Debloater-Alliance/universal-android-debloater-next-generation

UAD puts apps in categories that are probably safe and/or probably not safe to remove.

#android #degoogle

Living in the right part of the country.

#summer #heat #weather

I had issues with ptxas dying when building a huge kernel with CUDA Toolkit 12.6, but CTK 12.8 has been fine.

So what do you do? Build a frankenchain with #Nix of course! nvcc from CTK 12.6 and ptxas from CTK 12.8.

https://github.com/huggingface/kernels/compare/main...make-ptxas-overridable

The kernel now builds and runs on CTK 12.6 without a hitch so far!

#nix #nixos

The flexibility of #nix and #nixos is insane.

What if you are building compute kernels with Nix, but you need them to be compatible with manylinux_2_28 (based on AlmaLinux/RHEL 8)?

Simple, you repackage the EL8 gcc toolset RPMs as Nix derivations, overlay some overrides on top to make the outputs more nixpkgs-like, and wrap it in a stdenv.

Use that stdenv in your derivation that builds compute kernels and they support Linux systems all the way back to EL8.

https://github.com/huggingface/kernels/tree/main/nix-builder/pkgs/manylinux

Cool story from the trenches:

For making an online archive of Dutch TV, they had to deal with 16:9 material from 2000-2012 that was stored in 4:3 in anamorphic format, but a lot of the material misses this in the metadata.

So they had a machine learning model built to check whether a particular broadcast is stored in anamorphic format.

Turns out Bert's head (yes, Sesame Street Bert) fools the classifier into believing it's in anamorphic format.

#tv #sesamestreet

https://tweakers.net/reviews/14906/zo-bouwde-beeld-en-geluid-zijn-immense-online-media-archief-de-schatkamer.html

Yesterday night our router suddenly died. I guess it was the heat.

Wonder how long it would last in a really hot place.

The WhatsApp monetization department is sleeping at the wheel.

Had they made disabling the AI button a paid WhatsApp Plus feature, WhatsApp Plus would have been a smash hit.

#whatsapp #whatsappplus #ai

Cat discovers airflow. #cats #ragdoll