MudMan

Man, that was a time, with all the weird pop up cameras. They all mostly sucked and kept phones from actually useful features like water resistance, but it sure was fun.

I’ll even take an under-display camera, although you can almost always see it and it’s still unnecessary, when the actual camera lens can be crammed into a couple of mms of space at the top and that also gets you better speakers and room for additional sensors. The insanity is that now all that nonsensical innovation is in foldables instead, where you have a second full screen you can use to take much better selfies with the main camera package… and they’re still putting punch holes in the large screens for some reason. Samsung went to all the trouble of going under-screen in one of those. It’s insane.

I’m holding on to my older Xperia 1 and will consider upgrading if they do release the 1 VII this year, if only because I’ll be shocked if it isn’t the very last one. I have major gripes with some parts of their software, but at least the phone itself makes sense and, as you say, maybe if I sit on it long enough someone will make a compatible replacement ROM after I’ve migrated all my Google hostage apps and see what happens.

You know, for all the complaints about phones all being the same, I don’t see anybody trying to get rid of the stupid punch hole anymore. I haven’t taken a selfie since 2014, Sony is certainly looking like it doesn’t have many more Xperias in its back pocket and I really, really would like a replacement that isn’t afraid of having a thin forehead where you can put sensors without defacing the display. I would take something with expandable storage and a headphone jack for the complete package, but let’s start with a usable screen without holes in it. It’s gotten to the point where I haven’t seen a single phone in years I didn’t look at and immediately go “nope, not for me”.

You know it’s bad when I had to click all the way through to the body of the article to verify this isn’t a The Onion thing. Do we still have a “Not The Onion” space here?

The answer is patience.

And no, it’s not.

I know, I’m horrified by this, too.

That does not seem to be the case at all, actually. At least according to the GrapheneOS devs. The article quotes them on this and links a source tweet.

Since… you know, Twitter, here’s the full text:

Neither this app or the Google Messages app using it are part of GrapheneOS and neither will be, but GrapheneOS users can choose to install and use both. Google Messages still works without the new app.

The app doesn’t provide client-side scanning used to report things to Google or anyone else. It provides on-device machine learning models usable by applications to classify content as being spam, scams, malware, etc. This allows apps to check content locally without sharing it with a service and mark it with warnings for users.

It’s unfortunate that it’s not open source and released as part of the Android Open Source Project and the models also aren’t open let alone open source. It won’t be available to GrapheneOS users unless they go out of the way to install it.

We’d have no problem with having local neural network features for users, but they’d have to be open source. We wouldn’t want anything saving state by default. It’d have to be open source to be included as a feature in GrapheneOS though, and none of it has been so it’s not included.

Google Messages uses this new app to classify messages as spam, malware, nudity, etc. Nudity detection is an optional feature which blurs media detected as having nudity and makes accessing it require going through a dialog.

Apps have been able to ship local AI models to do classification forever. Most apps do it remotely by sharing content with their servers. Many apps have already have client or server side detection of spam, malware, scams, nudity, etc.

Classifying things like this is not the same as trying to detect illegal content and reporting it to a service. That would greatly violate people’s privacy in multiple ways and false positives would still exist. It’s not what this is and it’s not usable for it.

GrapheneOS has all the standard hardware acceleration support for neural networks but we don’t have anything using it. All of the features they’ve used it for in the Pixel OS are in closed source Google apps. A lot is Pixel exclusive. The features work if people install the apps.

Man, I used broccoli all the time. Just chuck it in the over for a bit, or stir fry it. No stink, delicious, crisp, bright, crunchy.

These days I don’t cook as often and people who do just insist on boiling it or steaming it into mush, which is like dropping a stink bomb in the kitchen and turns it into puree. Broccoli is meant to be green, not brown, you guys.

On the plus side you can recycle that absolutely gross overdone broccoli into vegan burger patties and it’s actually good like that. Still, you have to get through the stinkbomb part first.

Oh, so it’s an on-device service initially used to stop accidental sharing of nudes and available as a service call to other apps for that and other types of content.

Look, I’m not saying you can’t be creeped out by phones automatically categorizing the content of your photos. I’m saying you’re what? Five, ten years late to that and killing this instance won’t do much about it. Every gallery app on Android is doing this. How the hell did you think searching photos by content was working? The default Android Gallery app by Google does it, Google Photos sure as hell does it, Samsung’s Gallery does it. The very minimum I’ve seen is face matching for people.

This is one of those things where gen-AI panic gets people to finally freak out about things big data brokers have been doing for ages (using ML, too).

And it worked.

Every time.

Goes to show the different standards for different device types. MS is getting a beating out of stopping Windows 10 updates for some users after a decade.

I want to say I get why and that my phones cycle faster than my PCs, but these days I’m not sure that’s the case.

I… well, yes.

I mean, normally these “adult hot take” things on children stories are forced to present a cynical joke, but… yeah no, that’s the entire point of the story. Like, that’s the plot. It’s what the movie is literally about.

Yeah, no, it’s not that it isn’t enough time, it’s that I’ve been eating broccoli and beans all this time, I would have noticed.

I mean, we all noticed the tomatoes becoming water balloons, it’s not like it’d be unheard of.

I don’t know, man, this was the 80s and 90s, it’s not that long ago. It still tastes like I remember if you overcook it.

I think that’s where the reputation comes from. Overcooked broccoli is inedible, and I know people who refuse to leave any bite to it at all, which seems insane.

I feel like crunchy, fresh broccoli is a relatively new trend. I found out about it on my own, at my place as a kid it always looked like green boogers and tasted the way you imagine that would.