Joplin is great. I have its data stored locally with encryption, and I sync across devices with Syncthing. It also has built-in support for some cloud providers like you mentioned, and since it supports local encryption, you don’t need to depend on the cloud provider’s privacy policy.

Setting it up on multiple devices was a bit complex, but the documentation is there. Follow the steps, don’t just waltz through the setup assuming it will work intuitively. I made that mistake and while it was not the end of the world, it would’ve saved me 15 minutes if I’d just RTFM.

Again: What is the percent “accurate” of an SEO infested blog

I don’t think that’s a good comparison in context. If Forbes replaced all their bloggers with ChatGPT, that might very well be a net gain. But that’s not the use case we’re talking about. Nobody goes to Forbes as their first step for information anyway (I mean…I sure hope not…).

The question shouldn’t be “we need this to be 100% accurate and never hallucinate” and instead be “What web pages or resources were used to create this answer” and then doing what we should always be doing: Checking the sources to see if they at least seem trustworthy.

Correct.

If we’re talking about an AI search summarizer, then the accuracy lies not in how correct the information is in regard to my query, but in how closely the AI summary matches the cited source material. Kagi does this pretty well. Last I checked, Bing and Google did it very badly. Not sure about Samsung.

On top of that, the UX is critically important. In a traditional search engine, the source comes before the content. I can implicitly ignore any results from Forbes blogs. Even Kagi shunts the sources into footnotes. That’s not a great UX because it elevates unvetted information above its source. In this context, I think it’s fair to consider the quality of the source material as part of the “accuracy”, the same way I would when reading Wikipedia. If Wikipedia replaced their editors with ChatGPT, it would most certainly NOT be a net gain.

99.999% would be fantastic.

90% is not good enough to be a primary feature that discourages inspection (like a naive chatbot).

What we have now is like…I dunno, anywhere from <1% to maybe 80% depending on your use case and definition of accuracy, I guess?

I haven’t used Samsung’s stuff specifically. Some web search engines do cite their sources, and I find that to be a nice little time-saver. With the prevalence of SEO spam, most results have like one meaningful sentence buried in 10 paragraphs of nonsense. When the AI can effectively extract that tiny morsel of information, it’s great.

Ideally, I don’t ever want to hear an AI’s opinion, and I don’t ever want information that’s baked into the model from training. I want it to process text with an awareness of complex grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. That’s what LLMs are actually good at.

I agree. Of all the UI crimes committed by Microsoft, this one wouldn’t crack the top 100. But I sure wouldn’t call it great.

I can’t remember the last time I used the start menu to put my laptop to sleep. However, Windows Vista was released 20 years ago. At that time, most Windows users were not on laptops. Windows laptops were pretty much garbage until the Intel Core series, which launched a year later. In my offices, laptops were still the exception until the 2010s.

Google as an organization is simply dysfunctional. Everything they make is either some cowboy bullshit with no direction, or else it’s death by committee à la Microsoft.

Google has always had a problem with incentives internally, where the only way to get promoted or get any recognition was to make something new. So their most talented devs would make some cool new thing, and then it would immediately stagnate and eventually die of neglect as they either got their promotion or moved on to another flashy new thing. If you’ve ever wondered why Google kills so many products (even well-loved ones), this is why. There’s no glory in maintaining someone else’s work.

But now I think Google has entered a new phase, and they are simply the new Microsoft – too successful for their own good, and bloated as a result, with too many levels of management trying to justify their existence. I keep thinking of this article by a Microsoft engineer around the time Vista came out, about how something like 40 people were involved in redesigning the power options in the start menu, how it took over a year, and how it was an absolute shitshow. It’s an eye-opening read: https://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html

This is really cool! I like the idea of pen and paper as a supported UI. I’ve never found handwriting on a touchscreen to be an effective or enjoyable experience, across the myriad devices I’ve tried it on (including an iPad with an Apple Pencil). And app-based form entry is often a drag. By the time I’ve even opened the app and clicked the “new entry” button, I often could’ve been done already with a simple pen and paper.

What this expression refers to is a pervasive false equivalence: the idea that anything that isn’t perfect isn’t worth bothering with, or that doing something small somehow hampers a greater task (even if when it actually contributes to that greater task). It is a statement against apathy and binary thinking.

This comes up in politics and activism all the fucking time. Like “Why should I care about car emissions when freight ships produce more emissions than all the cars in the world?” The answer is simple: because you can. Do what you can, even if it’s small. That doesn’t mean forgetting about the big polluters.

some sort of labor movement, a geopolitical shock, a massive strike, etc

If anybody is avoiding Amazon as an alternative to those things, then I agree that they need a kick in the pants. But I doubt there’s anyone out there thinking to themselves “I don’t need to take part in the revolution because I bought my cat food at CVS instead of Amazon”.

I affect a British accent

Lower-effort life hack: wear a Canadian maple leaf prominently. Put a patch on your bags, get a baseball cap, wear a t-shirt. Project “Canadian” any way you can.

Disgusting and unsurprising.

Most web admins do not care. I’ve lost count of how many sites make me jump through CAPTCHAS or outright block me in private browsing or on VPN. Most of these sites have no sensitive information, or already know exactly who I am because I am already authenticating with my username and password. It’s not something the actual site admins even think about. They click the button, say “it works on my machine!” and will happily blame any user whose client is not dead-center average.

Enter username, but first pass this CAPTCHA.

Enter password, but first pass this second CAPTCHA.

Here’s another CAPTCHA because lol why not?

Some sites even have their RSS feed behind Cloudflare. And guess what that means? It means you can’t fucking load it in a typical RSS reader. Good job!

The web is broken. JavaScript was a mistake. Return to monke gopher.

Fuck Cloudflare.

Defaults matter. Every time you open a private browsing window, that’s what you’re going to get. Every time you use LibreWolf or Firefox Focus or any other browser that disables/clears cookies by default (which is a good practice), that’s what you’re going to get.

I don’t want anything I search for going into OpenAI. Ever. I’d feel fine about this if they hosted their own models.

Thank you for the correction.

Sender and recipient can’t be encrypted e2e. How would the server know to whom deliver the email if those are encrypted and not visible to it?

“End-to-end” is a bit of a misnomer in this case. Both Proton and Tuta apply encryption after receiving email in the general case, since email is not sent with E2EE across different providers (in general). Both Proton and Tuta can see your incoming email (body and all) from external servers in the general case — they just don’t store it that way. (This is different when sending email between two Proton users or two Tuta users.)

Proton does not use end-to-end encryption for email headers. That includes the subject lines, senders/recipients, and other potentially sensitive information.

Tuta uses E2EE for email contents AND headers.

Consider for a moment what someone with access to your contacts and subject lines would know about you. For me personally, they would know which political campaigns and causes I donate to, and when. They would know when I see various doctors, and who they are. They would know my travel dates and destinations. They would know what newsletters I read (many of which are also political). Etc.

“One mistake” would be if he didn’t double-down on it, and if Proton addressed their customers’ concerns in any meaningful way. Instead, they deleted posts and are now withdrawing from the community entirely, and directing users to three of the worst corporate hell-holes on the internet.

Almost certainly, yes.

People on Mastodon are not happy about those statements, and called Proton out on it relentlessly with every post Proton made. This is Proton running away with their tail between their legs, back to platforms where they have more control and/or are already full of right-wing nutjobs.

If anyone’s looking for secure email, look at tuta.com instead. The email service is very similar in terms of UX and offers better encryption. They don’t offer the rest of Proton’s suite, but…maybe that’s a good thing? I mean, do you want to get locked into an ecosystem?

Lots of recent (meaning past 20 years or so) research shows that our gut bacteria play quite a large role in our mental functions, too.

The concept of “the self” as a single, indivisible, unchanging thing is simply not compatible with observed reality. To be alive is to be in a constant state of flux.

Is there such a thing as an eternal soul? Uh, maybe…but if there is, it’s not going to be responsible for the things we typically associate with individual living people. It’s not going to have your sense of humor, or your memories, or your opinions, or your math skills. We know enough about all of those things to confidently say they are not eternal.

Generally true. You would want to use DNS-over-TLS (DoT) or DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) to be sure your DNS queries are encrypted in transit.

If someone was uninformed and misinformed enough to think voting for Trump was even remotely in their own self-interest in the first place, then there is almost no disaster Trump can cause that will not be instantly reframed as “just imagine how much worse it would be under Dems!”

Dying of COVID? Well at least you’re not dying from forced vaccination!

Layoffs due to tariffs? LOL what’s a tariff?

Can’t get benefits you need to survive? Well clearly the Welfare Queens left him no choice! It’s their fault!

It’s no coincidence that Trump in particular and Republicans in general relentlessly attack education and free information. They’ve already brainwashed enough of the population to win elections, and they want to make sure the general population has no way out of that hole. This is why they’re attacking Wikipedia and Internet Archive. This is why Project 2025’s first order of business is to eliminate the Department of Education. This is why Musk bought fucking Twitter in the first place, most likely. This is why they’re now trying to repeal Section 230 (with the help of some Judas Dems), so they can bully any web site into taking down any information they don’t like.

The information apocalypse is upon us.

Apple has three realistic options:

1. Submit to the UK’s demands and grant them a backdoor to encrypted backups.
2. Disable encrypted backups in the UK.
3. Leave the UK market entirely.

They went with #2, which is probably the least user-hostile option available.

From 1500GMT on Friday, any Apple user in the UK attempting to turn it on has been met with an error message.

Existing users’ access will be disabled at a later date.

I am very interested in seeing what the UX around this will be. Ideally, they should give users direct notice well in advance, so they have time to plan a migration or mitigation. Of course, Apple makes it basically impossible to perform a full backup through any mechanism except iCloud, so…one more example of how vendor lock-in is inherently a security and privacy risk.

Neat, I didn’t know that. I currently use Joplin this way, synced across my devices with Syncthing. Joplin also supports directly syncing to Google Drive or Dropbox (with optional encryption).

I’m sure there will be workarounds.

I think there are plenty of people who would be pirates if it were more convenient, but I suspect the point of diminishing returns for legislation has already been passed. If you’re savvy and dedicated enough to use a VPN in the first place, then this probably won’t stop you. Non-tech-savvy people are already turned off of torrents for half a dozen different reasons.

DNS, though? That will block a lot of people from accessing things like Z-library, which is currently easy enough to access for anyone who knows how to use Google.

China’s measures have been largely successful, unfortunately. It’s still possible to VPN out, but it’s a risk a lot of people are unwilling to take since it could realistically get them in trouble. I’ve lost contact with some friends in China because we have no shared platforms and the increasing blocking measures over the past 10 years finally passed their tolerance threshold.

I guess I could figure out how to use iMessage, which AFAIK is the only end-to-end encrypted messaging service that still works (or at least the only moderately popular one). Makes me wonder how secure it really is if China hasn’t banned it…