Commercial software is dying and open source is winning. Regular people with access to incredibly powerful AI models are making functional copies of commercial software without all the bloat, ads and telemetry. The quality of these recreations aside, the fact that you can point AI at a piece of software and reproduce some approximate version of it for insanely cheap, one that will not pester you about subscriptions, that will not lock basic features behind a paywall, and that will not purposefully become...

I am sure everyone has noticed this. You google something to learn about it, find a medium/substack or even an independent website that looks very nice on the surface, but as you keep reading the super familiar AI prose seems very apparent.

Did they just get a chatbot to generate all the text? Did they generate their own text and just use the chatbot for formatting and grammar? Or is that just their natural writing style? I am stupid, I can't tell.

But this type of text is everywhere now. You...

The privacy <---> convenience spectrum is talked about often - where the more privacy and security focused you want to be, the more convenience you sacrifice. We've sort of just accepted this, and the people who want to be more privacy focused are willing to sacrifice on some of the convenience. But they're so few of us that the corporations don't really care and continue to make the inconveniences worse. They continue to overreach as corps always do and the 'Normies' don't really care because...

How to dumbify your smartphone (or) How to mitigate your smartphone addiction

Preamble:

1. This will be Android focused. I have 0 experience with iPhones or the Apple ecosystem so I cannot comment. But the philosophy should still apply.
2. I am not an expert, nor do I always practice everything written below. I'm just some guy. I still struggle.
3. This guide is not exhaustive, it does not include every possible scenario and every possible edge-case. Obviously you must make modifications...

Offline, privacy focused open source android apps I use on a daily basis:

Basic phone apps from the 'Fossify' collection - https://search.f-droid.org/?q=fossify&lang=en (texts, calls, calculator, notes, clock)

**uLauncher. **Tiny, fast, minimal app launcher. - https://f-droid.org/packages/de.jrpie.android.launcher/

Aegis for 2FA -...