The Slate Truck has them, so assuming that that goes into production, it’ll be an example.

The Slate Truck’s base configuration, called the “Blank Slate”, does not include an infotainment system, speakers, or power windows.

On Wayland, it’s really a compositor rather than an X11-style window manager. Has to handle more tasks.

Though it looks like the River compositor is trying to reintroduce the window manager paradigm.

It sounds like it has experimental support as of six months ago.

https://itsfoss.gitlab.io/post/cinnamon-60-release-debuts-experimental-wayland-support/

Cinnamon 6.0: A Bold Leap Forward with Experimental Wayland Support

Last update – 2025-08-12

I suspect that @[email protected] really meant to say “with a non-silent ‘G’”.

The word is typically pronounced (“There are gnomes in the forest!”) with a silent ‘g’.

I mean, you can use something like the lightweight containers generated by firejail, where the program just lacks write permission to the filesystem or network access, stuff like that.

You can get wrong answer with 100% token confidence, and correct one with 0.000001% confidence.

If everything that I’ve seen in the past has said that 1+1 is 4, then sure — I’m going to say that 1+1 is 4. I will say that 1+1 is 4 and be confident in that.

But if I’ve seen multiple sources of information that state differing things — say, half of the information that I’ve seen says that 1+1 is 4 and the other half says that 1+1 is 2, then I can expose that to the user.

I do think that Aceticon does raise a fair point, that fully capturing uncertainty probably needs a higher level of understanding than an LLM directly generating text from its knowledge store is going to have. For example, having many ways of phrasing a response will also reduce confidence in the response, even if both phrasings are semantically compatible. Being on the edge between saying that, oh…an object is “white” or “eggshell” will also reduce the confidence derived from token probability, even if the two responses are both semantically more-or-less identical in the context of the given conversation.

There’s probably enough information available to an LLM to do heuristics as to whether two different sentences are semantically-equivalent, but you wouldn’t be able to do that efficiently with a trivial change.

I love all open source desktops equally

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment

Our last, best hope for the subsidy model was Valve, a company that famously rakes in money hand over fist and launched the original Steam Deck at the unbeatable price of $399 through a “painful” amount of subsidy. If Valve did the same for the upcoming Steam Machine, it could have legitimately competed with the PlayStation and Xbox for your living room TV.

But Valve has all but dashed those hopes through a series of moves. In late December, it discontinued the $399 Steam Deck, raising the starting price to $549. In early February, it announced that the Steam Machine had been delayed due to the memory shortage and that the company would have to reset expectations on pricing. And now, even the $549 Steam Deck OLED is out of stock specifically because of the memory crisis.

I was pretty confident that Valve was not going to subsidize the Steam Machine from the start, even before Valve said that it would be priced comparably to a PC and even before it said that it was delaying determining pricing (which was a good sign that it hadn’t locked in a contract price on components). I commented along those lines here.

Consoles can do the razor-and-blades model because they are a closed platform. If you buy a Playstation, it doesn’t do you much good unless you use it to buy Playstation games. So each Playstation purchase is very, very probably going to be used to purchase Playstation games. Sony can crank up prices on those and make their initial loss back.

But the Steam Machine is open. I can go run whatever on it. I can just take the thing and, say, make it a media server or whatever. And if Valve subsidizes it, people will just buy it instead of a comparable PC and then run whatever they want on it. Doesn’t make much sense for Valve, just because of the nature of the machine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_mobile_phones#Devices_with_formal_support

An operating system cannot brick a piece of hardware.

Sure it can. It may not have in this case, but there’s plenty of hardware that can be bricked by an OS.

Interesting. I wonder if it’d be practical to containerize them by default.

That’s also a solution for Windows users if they can’t get some future version of Windows to work with the thing. You get a dinky Linux box, like a Raspberry Pi or something, and just set it up as a print server.

Wooldridge sees positives in the kind of AI depicted in the early years of Star Trek. In one 1968 episode, The Day of the Dove, Mr Spock quizzes the Enterprise’s computer only to be told in a distinctly non-human voice that it has insufficient data to answer. “That’s not what we get. We get an overconfident AI that says: yes, here’s the answer,” he said. “Maybe we need AIs to talk to us in the voice of the Star Trek computer. You would never believe it was a human being.”

Hmm. That’s probably a pretty straightforward modification for existing LLMs, at least at the token level.

You can obtain token probabilities, so you can give some estimate out-of-band confidence in a response, down to the token level. Don’t really need to change anything for that, just expose some data.

And you could make the AI aware of its own neural net’s confidence level, feed the confidence back into the neural net for subsequent tokens, see if you can get it to take that information into account.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_neural_network

In artificial neural networks, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are designed for processing sequential data, such as text, speech, and time series,[1] where the order of elements is important. Unlike feedforward neural networks, which process inputs independently, RNNs utilize recurrent connections, where the output of a neuron at one time step is fed back as input to the network at the next time step. This enables RNNs to capture temporal dependencies and patterns within sequences.

I guess that’d make open-source firmware illegal.

AAA studios are doubling down on micro transactions, “performative” social justice, AI slop, and live service slop. - AC Shadows

I think that one factor driving either microtransactions, freemium, free-to-play stuff that does data-mining, or “incomplete” games with expansions is resistance to a higher initial price. I mean, if a studio isn’t making their return on the initial price, they’re going to look for alternate routes. AAA games cost more than ever to make these days. If people say — and I’ve seen plenty of people on here do so — “I absolutely will not buy a game with an up-front price of more than $N”…but then they’re okay playing freemium stuff or games with microtransactions, I mean…that’s what game studios are going to do.

I’m generally okay with an expansion model, because I like the idea of giving the studio the option to expand really popular games, and it de-risks things for both the player (you just buy the base game and get expansions if you want) and the publisher (you don’t put down a ton of money to create massive amounts of stuff for a flop). Plus, some of my favorite games (including indie and open-source games, like Caves of Qud) have very long development cycles, and selling expansions is one way for larger developers to do a long development cycle…though honestly, I do agree that I miss the “just pay and get a complete game” approach, for a lot of games.

I don’t care about the gambling (if it’s for money — I’m fine with variable-ratio schedule reward stuff in games, like having random loot drops in games). We know that that strongly appeals to humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement

Variable ratio schedule (VR) – reinforced on average every nth response, but not always on the nth response.[16]: 88   (ex. Gamblers win 1 out of every 10 spins on a slot machine, however this is an average and they could hypothetically win on any given turn)

Variable ratio: rapid, steady rate of responding; most resistant to extinction.

…and I’m amazed that people would be dicking around with cryptocurrencies as a form of recreation, but if you put out good games that have erotica that appeals to me in 'em, I’ll buy those. Video games are not incompatible with erotica. There are a lot of really bad video games with erotica out there, too.

In just the US consumption of Tiktok is up 39m hours a day compared to pre-COVID figures.

I really don’t like short-form video, but I do appreciate that a lot of people do like it.

In the 2025, American consumers spent roughly $5bn on Onlyfans.

My suspicion is that streamed pornography is likely presently more of a substitute good for stuff like static pornographic movies than video games, though I’m willing to believe that I could be wrong.

During this 2025 period, AI apps that allowed for “role play, erotica, and art” have soared. The latest tracked statistic for installs for this software came to just under one billion worldwide.

Well, yeah. That’s new tech.

My bank requires a phone for its device token (2fa).

In most cases (at least in the US…I suppose that there might be places that require use of a state bank or something) one can pick their bank. None of the banks I bank with require this, and I have never installed a banking app (though I think that they all have an app as an option). One may need a phone of some sort to respond to a voice call or an SMS to validate oneself, but not an app. I believe that Bank of America has the most customers in the US, and they’ll even do YubiKeys via a browser.

The food and cab ordering platform is also exclusively on mobile only.

I think that GrubHub and Uber Eats are the most-common food delivery options where I am. It looks like both permit ordering from the Web (though I’ve never used their services).

Waymo, which in the US is, I think, the most-advanced robotaxi service (and probably currently the only really practical one where I am), does require an app, so I don’t know if there’s a good Web-based robotaxi option. Lyft looks to me like it requires use of an app. Uber looks like it permits Web-based ordering. I’ve never used anything but traditional cab companies (not that I especially object to the newer services, just never bothered to use them), and I’ve never run into one of those that requires an app — I just call up a human.

This isn’t to say that the same situation is true of where you are. But just pointing out that for many people, there are options…though it may require using an alternative service. Those services will be aware of how many people are ordering in what way, so if people are using different methods of ordering, that will cause them (and others) to tend to provide that route.

[email protected]

They aren’t competitive with Android or iOS phones presently — don’t have the scale of userbase — but there’s only one way that that’s going to change, and that’s people starting to use them.

(“Linux” here as in “GNU/Linux”, as opposed to “the Linux kernel”, which Android phones also use.)

EDIT: Another option is to try to shift software use off of mobile devices as far as is practical, if you’re willing to carry a second, larger device like a laptop. Just use the smartphone as a phone and as a modem for Internet access via tethering. I’ve generally been aiming to do that myself. I realize that that’s not practical for everyone.

That approach does have some perks — you can get your audio jack, because the space constraints of a phone go away. You aren’t dependent upon your hardware manufacturer for N years of updates before your hardware is forced to become out-of-date software-wise. The devices are generally a lot more capable and upgradeable. The hardware is more modular, and there are considerably more options. You can run whatever software you want.

But…it’s bigger, the software library isn’t generally optimized for small touchscreen use, so one-handed use while waiting in line isn’t generally ideal, and it consumes more power. You can run some Android software via stuff like Waydroid, but I’m sure that software that requires a trusted hardware stack won’t accept that.

Unless it makes use of MAC randomization, they can track it.

I’d also add that I’d be far from sure that even devices that are randomizing them are using a cryptographically-secure PRNG and reliable source of entropy to seed that PRNG. Even much-more-expensive and capable-of-obtaining-entropy personal computers with software that can be more-readily-inspected have had a spotty record of using solid randomization. I’d give pretty good odds that there are devices out there using a fixed seed and non-cryptographically-secure PRNG for MAC randomization, and that someone like Google, with a vast database of MAC/time/location data and a bunch of smart computer scientists on staff, could probably break the randomization if it wanted on at least some devices.

But you gotta crawl before you can walk, and today, we know that we aren’t even crawling.

I’d say that it is Bluetooth, because the Bluetooth guys didn’t build resistance to tracking and leaking data into the base protocol. There were efforts to patch over these protocol problems that came later.