Well sure, if you’re installing CFW or aosp and you don’t need the ever increasing cruft that seems to rely on Play store authentication. Never install GApps, done.
Some folks (not you or I) need to access play store to install their apps (I think even WhatsApp and Signal need it now; I couldn’t install it on my phone), 2FA, transport apps, bank apps etc.
Catch 22 for them.
How will your phone stream movies to the TV, little billy’s tablet and Grandma’s laptop, while letting Suzie listen to her favourite music and Davey read his CBR comics?
What does your phone draw, BTW, when watching media or casting it? Is it less than 0.8 of a watt?
Can your phone fit in a matchbox?
Ya dig? :)
Like herpes, it comes back :) The second you connect to WiFi or mobile data…
If you want to avoid it - for good - you need to install CFW. Or you need to play whackamole with firewalls. But those come with other issues.
Big evil knows what they’re doing - switching it off and on again won’t fool em for long (if at all) :(
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Yes, lots. Here - try the dumb phone finder tool here; it’s region specific
I think the goal is to push it silently as a Google system service, rather than wait for manufacturers to ship an OS or app store update.
There’s a real possibility your phone already has Android Developer Verifier installed and sitting dormant until enforcement begins.
You can check for the package now:
“com.google.android.verifier”
If it’s there…well…
Removed by mod
Nah…we need digital divergence.
Dumbphone + tethering.
Let the phone manufacturers and carriers handle the “phone” part-with all the messy IMEI whitelisting, compliance and VoLTE shit.
The good stuff can live on a small Linux tablet.
No need to wait for the perfect Linux phone OS, working diallers, carrier support and all the rest of it.
The solution is already here. We just need to stop insisting that it all has to be one device.
LADB is a native android feature. Unless they plan to kill adb entirely, what’s to stop me from doing this -
Because if that works, “install from Fdroid” needs just a small tweak so that the Fdroid app submits the APK through ADB.
Not that I particularly trust Google, but they have promised to not molest the ADB pathway.
"Are ADB installs impacted by the 24-hour waiting period for advanced flow? No, there are no changes to how ADB works. You will be able to install applications using ADB as usual. The waiting period does not apply to ADB installs. Last updated: March 23, 2026’
https://developer.android.com/developer-verification/guides/faq
You’re welcome :)
I’m looking to see just how far this femto-server idea can go. Scoping it out now.
Fuck yes we’re interested. Go :)
Try this
Years ago, I had the option of the 7020 or the lenovo m93p tiny.
I chose…poorly.
Well, poorly by sane standards. Perfectly sane by “squeeze blood from stone” standards. For better or worse, I fell in love with the usFF PC and turn my nose up at anything over 2L case size now. Too big, too loud, too hot.
Speaking of, I’m having a powerful urge to replace my smart phone with this now
https://www.hackster.io/etolocka/m5stack-papers3-overview-and-getting-started-3375f3
Why? Its a sickness. But damn…how cool would that thing be with your own apps? A modern day PDA, with WiFi, LoRA, BT? Battery life measured in weeks? Hell, I could gut my old Psion 5, throw this in…chefs kiss.
(Oh lawd, hide the credit cards).
I agree with that…but I wonder if we only ever hear from the so called parasitic ones?
Suppose a kid in Africa uses Claude to code an app that tracks the spread of a disease in their community and predict the next outbreak site based on x,y,z.
That’s technically slop code too. Do they get a pass because the cause is virtuous or not crowed about? By the letter of the law…no. But by the spirit of the law, probably yes.
I guess the difference is, how much leeway do we have for genuine enthusiasm vs parasitism. It’s hard to tell sometimes on social media where too many people are doing preening displays in public - and we’ve probably all been guilty of that.
As a rule, if a thing interests me, I’ll read the post, hit the repo, and dig around the files. If I see obvious use of llm in the code (like the stupidly verbose comments that LLMs like to pepper throughout), that usually means that the person either didn’t look, didn’t know to look or doesn’t care. That’s bad.
Bad intro post + bad readme.md + weird commit history + weird AI comments = I’m out.
Honestly, I’m usually out after the first one or two these days.
That assumes prices actually come down.
On purely dollar costs, $5K for a coding / AI only PC doesn’t amortise vs subscription or API access. Not for occasional shenanigans anyways.
I’ve done the calcs, because I wanted to justify the indulgence and the numbers dont stack up. Yet.
Of course, I based that on current rates. If basic subs go to $50/month, exclude coding agents, and API skyrockets…well fuck, I’ll go back to modding and retro gaming. I still remember how to code in ARexx, BlitzBasic etc and I keep threatening to make an Amiga or C64 stuff…there are other rabbit holes :)
PS: Lemmy spying on me; YouTube just recommended this
Maybe but right now, according to the Steam hardware survey, the most commonly owned VRAM tier is 8GB - sitting at around 27% of surveyed systems, with 16GB closing the gap fast.
Even with MoE and llama.cpp tricks, you’re not running frontier anything at decent context length without significant fiddling on that - it’s possible on 8GB but you’re operating with almost no headroom, 16GB might let you scrape by with a Q4 quant MoE.
The very best local coding models (arguably the Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B MoE or Qwen 3.6-27B) need 16-17GB at Q4 quantisation, and building a system from scratch to run one is probably a $3.5K proposition. With the cost of living crisis hitting everywhere, that means the table ante gear is beyond the reach of many. Even a decent GPU is north of $1K in many local markets.
I adore small LLMs, and know a lot of tricks to leverage them, but 14B is the bare minimum for what I would start to consider competent.
We’re boned until 2030ish, when gear gets cheaper (allegedly).
Part of me thinks there’s a dark conspiracy at play here. Give people affordable access to frontier LLMs, make self hosting hardware cost prohibitive, then jack up subscription prices.
I think there’s a way out of that mess, but it needs people to stop chasing “bigger, better” and start chasing “actually, how can I use what I have to do X instead of needing bigger and better?” but that needs talented devs and a mind shift.
ICBW and YMMV.
Just to nit pick (though maybe not) is there a social contract? That usually implies in exchange for X, you get Y.
If the thing is provided as FOSS, what does the dev get, contract wise?
Isn’t that how we end up with devs walking away entirely due to “I downloaded your project, you owe me xyz, you fuck”? I’ve seen that happen more than once and it’s a real factor in projects being abandoned, even before slopcode.
Speaking for myself only: when I share something, it’s usually something I made for myself that I think others might enjoy or find useful.
As the dev, I’m happy to look at suggestions or reports, with no guarantee that your idea will be implemented. If it is, I credit it and you.
I also refuse PRs, because if I am developing for me and sharing, then I’m not developing a product for sale to spec or running a democracy. I don’t know you, you don’t know me and you likely don’t know what the long term road map or invariant constraints are, so I’d rather just not. I realise that’s not a commonly held position but it’s in the same “limited time” category.
I’m happy for you to fork it, ask questions and spin up your own tho - that’s why I like AGPL-3.
Between all that, I’ve been able to avoid the excesses of both sides but YMMV.
How’s it made?
It also says -
“So it’s all vibe-coded slop.”
The idea is over 4 years old: a trustless, decentralized network with no central entity that can censor who you connect with. I sketched it for years. What an LLM changed was the speed: the prototype came together in a day. The trigger was the release of iroh v1.
Make of that what you will.