Real tired of doing these, but here’s another Android developers vs Google update, this time there’s both good and bad news.

The good:
-Users will be able to enable “sideloading” for all current and future devices, attached to their Google account, rather than having to undergo the tedious 24 hour wait including process, on each device.

-Rather than these changes to “sideloading” and “advanced workflows” being implemented at random different dates, in different countries, we’ll all get them come 2027.

The bad:
As GrapheneOS developers recently mentioned “Google replaced pushing Git tags for certain source code with obtaining source code via Google Drive after making a request through Google Forms. It’s completely ridiculous and they’ve gradually become very slow at handling requests. They’re in clear violation of the GPLv2 now.”

whole thread: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117057099753905023

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hmm! I expected worse. 😅 (Never heard Czech in person.)

https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=cs&text=good%20morning%2C%20how%20are%20you%20today%3F%20my%20name%20is%20katharina%20and%20I%20am%20eating%20a%20banana%20and%20hopefully%20also%20an%20apple.%20everything%20I%20say%20is%20a%20consonant.%20Or%20maybe%20not!&op=translate

Germans love consonants – and it’s the opposite with Scandinavian languages, isn’t it? 😅 This is so crazy for me to listen to:

https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=no&text=good%20morning%2C%20how%20are%20you%20today%3F%20my%20name%20is%20katharina%20and%20I%20am%20eating%20a%20banana%20and%20hopefully%20also%20an%20apple.%20everything%20I%20say%20is%20a%20blur.&op=translate

Love me some Finnish:

https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=fi&text=good%20morning%2C%20how%20are%20you%20today%3F%20my%20name%20is%20katharina%20and%20I%20am%20eating%20a%20banana%20and%20hopefully%20also%20an%20apple.%20everything%20I%20say%20is%20crystal%20clear.&op=translate

XMPP greatest peak was when Google Talk was around. Being able to chat with thousands, if not millions, of Google users at that time, using your own domain, and your own XMPP server was amazing. Then Google, in all its wisdom, and as it does very often, decided to kill it.

I might be on the minority, but can care less about video calls. Heck, even calls! Text is King. 🤪

@arne@uplegger.eu You have Matrix at work? No Teams, Google Chat, Slack, Discord, whatever, but Matrix? Really? Where do you work, is this Socialist Russia?!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org simplified it a little bit. Using only *bot* will bring collateral damage I want to avoid (there are, still some “good” bots):

@aibots {
      header_regexp User-Agent (?i)(GPTBot|ChatGPT|OAI-Search|anthropic|Claude|Google-Extended|FacebookBot|CCBot|Perplexity|Applebot-Extended|cohere|Omgili|Bytespider)
}
abort @aibots

A low-carbon computing platform from your retired phones
Article URL: https://research.google/blog/a-low-carbon-computing-platform-from-your-retired-phones/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515336

Points: 6

# Comments: 1 ⌘ Read more

A German Court Has Ruled That Google Is Liable for False Statements Generated by AI Overviews
The ruling holds that a company that designs, trains, operates, and manages an AI system must assume legal liability for any damages caused by the responses it generates. ⌘ Read more

Signal Alums Reveal ‘Encrypted Spaces,’ a System for Making Private Collaboration Apps
The new open-source project could serve as the basis for a future of apps with features as complex as Slack, Discord, or Google Docs—but with added protection against surveillance. ⌘ Read more

Aws.com and google.com don’t have DNSSEC enabled
Article URL: https://gist.github.com/acetousk/3c17d2aefde9175ffef21a8ec4673053

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48484475

Points: 5

# Comments: 1 ⌘ Read more

Artificial Intelligence Sneaks Into the World Cup Thanks to Google Gemini
The Argentine national team will be Google’s test bench and technological showcase during the World Cup. ⌘ Read more

Google Chrome is killing all uBlock Origin bypasses, Edge, Opera to follow
Article URL: https://www.neowin.net/news/google-chrome-is-killing-all-ublock-origin-bypasses-microsoft-edge-opera-to-follow/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471970

Points: 17

# Comments: 4 ⌘ Read more

German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews
Article URL: https://the-decoder.com/landmark-german-ruling-declares-googles-ai-overviews-are-googles-own-words-and-makes-it-liable-for-false-answers/

Comments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48470248](https://n … ⌘ Read more

Google’s 20% ‘project’ has become AI’s 120% ‘attention’
Article URL: https://joe.dev/posts/new-20pct-time/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48466917

Points: 5

# Comments: 0 ⌘ Read more

The Untold Story of the Google Buses That Took Over San Francisco
A decade ago, commuter buses attracted big protests in San Francisco. Years later, the city is still feeling the repercussions. ⌘ Read more

Everything Apple Announced at WWDC 2026
Updates include a new souped-up Siri, lots of iOS enhancements, and some inkling on how an AI partnership with Google has come to power Apple’s products. ⌘ Read more

Apple’s New Siri AI Is Ready to Get Personal
From a standalone app to a Google Gemini partnership, here’s everything you need to know from WWDC 2026 about Apple’s upcoming overhaul of Siri. ⌘ Read more

Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers
Article URL: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/google-to-pay-spacex-920-million-a-month-for-xai-compute-capacity.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417490

Points: 15

# Comments: 0 ⌘ Read more

5 Best Smart Speakers (2026): Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri
Looking to add a smart speaker to your house? Here’s which to choose, whether you’re an Alexa, Siri, or Google fan. ⌘ Read more

This App Makes Google TV Actually Usable
The app AT4K turns the messy Google TV interface into something closer to the Apple TV interface, making it cleaner, more customizable, and less frustrating to use. ⌘ Read more

Google Workspace Promo Codes: 14% Off for June
Boost your productivity and save with exclusive Google Workspace coupons from WIRED. Get up to 14% off plans for three months, including Starter, Standard, and Plus tiers. ⌘ Read more

Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model
Article URL: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/introducing-gemma-4-12b/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48385906

Points: 47

# Comments: 10 ⌘ Read more

Data Center Operators Are Trying to Fix Their Water Use Problems
Google, Microsoft, and other hyperscalers have come under scrutiny for their impact on water quality and availability. ⌘ Read more

Android Is Fighting Phone Scams With a New Feature to Prove Who’s Calling
Available for Android 12 and later, the anti-scam feature is baked into Google Dialer, which sends a silent “confirmation signal” to ensure whoever’s calling you is who they appear to be. ⌘ Read more

Massive debugging project: Why Google plans to release 32 million mosquitoes
It’s a plan Australia might need to replicate with the arrival of a new and aggressive species. ⌘ Read more

ChatGPT for Google Sheets Exfiltrates Workbooks
Article URL: https://www.promptarmor.com/resources/gpt-for-google-sheets-data-exfiltration

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48349487

Points: 5

# Comments: 0 ⌘ Read more

Sergey Brin told Google staff that working 60 hours a week is the ‘sweet spot’
Article URL: https://fortune.com/article/sergey-brin-60-hour-work-week-ai-rto/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48347531

Points: 8

# Comments: 2 ⌘ Read more

6 Best Prepaid Phone Plans (2026): Tello, Boost, Google Fi, More
Forget the pricey, postpaid cell plans and two-year contracts. Save with one of these WIRED-tested options from US Mobile, Boost, and Google Fi. ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Well no. Some of us don’t. Let me point you at some research on the subject 😅 Some people don’t have an inner monologue

@bender@twtxt.net Now that’s an interesting philosophical viewpoint right there. But this assumes that the “AI” we seemingly have available to us today is actually telligent, understands and has cognitive reasoning. It does not. All of these LLM models from big-tech companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Alibaba are all just very powerful, very large multidimensional neural networks with attention that are very good at statistical probabilities of ‘what comes next”. I think we get really upset over the wrong things sometimes. We need to continue to be upset that these 🤬 companies have basically destroyed any meaningful value of the concept of Copyright and Intellectual Property and Works of art. The so-called “AI” we have today is just a tool. Can you say for certain that the typewriter and the computer ruined our ability to write? Perhaps yes, but we still learn how to do so, likewise, I still think that learning to write code, research, read and write are all valuable skills to learn. Later on once you have the basics, you can defer some of the “tedious” work to these models, because frankly, they’re far better at inferencing and pattern matching than you or i will ever be, not because they’re better at pattern-matching per se, but because they have been trained on a very large corpus and they are much much faster at doing the same basic things we are far superior at.

Hands-On With Gemini Spark: I Gave It Access to My Life and It Friend-Zoned My Boyfriend
Google’s new AI agent combed through my emails, documents, and calendar to plan a birthday party and still didn’t clock the person most important to me. ⌘ Read more

Google Hates You
Article URL: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/new-google-ai-22279112.php

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48313538

Points: 37

# Comments: 14 ⌘ Read more

Illinois Lawmakers Just Passed America’s Strongest AI Safety Bill
The bill requires companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to have third parties confirm they’re following safety standards. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker says he’ll sign. ⌘ Read more

Google Security Engineer Arrested in Million-Dollar Polymarket Trading Scheme
According to federal prosecutors, Michele Spagnuolo made more than $1 million on the prediction market platform using confidential information about Google Search traffic. ⌘ Read more

DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
Article URL: [https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/duckduckgos-ai-free-search-saw-nearly-28-percent-more-visits-in-the-week-following-googles-insistence-that-people-love-ai-mode/](https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/duckduckgos-ai-free-search-saw-nearly-28-percent-more-visits-in-the-week-following-googles-insistence-that-people-love-ai-mode/ … ⌘ Read more

uiii ui só chove

Image

Google Fitbit Air Review: Barely There, Always Running
Google’s latest Fitbit strips away the screen without sacrificing features, delivering the most approachable and affordable wearable yet. ⌘ Read more

The FBI Wants ‘Near Real-Time’ Access to US License Plate Readers
Plus: Google publishes a live exploit for an unpatched flaw, the feds arrest two men accused of creating thousands of nonconsensual deepfake nudes, and more. ⌘ Read more

Google Is Killing ChromeOS: Aluminium OS, Its Android-Based Replacement
Article URL: https://techjournal.org/google-aluminium-os-replacing-chromeos

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48244476

Points: 13

# Comments: 3 ⌘ Read more

You can no longer Google the word ‘disregard’
Article URL: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/22/you-can-no-longer-google-the-word-disregard/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238351

Points: 29

# Comments: 10 ⌘ Read more

Even If You Hate AI, You Will Use Google AI Search
The search giant’s AI-crafted answers are so convenient, you’ll be sucked in—to the detriment of the web and the artists and thinkers behind it. ⌘ Read more

Google Workspace Promo Codes: 14% Off for May
Boost your productivity and save with exclusive Google Workspace coupons from WIRED. Get up to 14% off plans for three months, including Starter, Standard, and Plus tiers. ⌘ Read more

Meta Is in Crisis, Google Search’s Makeover, and AI Gets Booed by Graduates
In this episode of Uncanny Valley, we unpack the mass layoffs at Meta, big announcements at Google I/O, and the latest backlash against AI. ⌘ Read more

I Cloned Myself With Gemini’s AI Avatar Tool. The Result Was Unnervingly Me
I used the Gemini app to generate lifelike videos featuring a digital clone of myself. Google sees this as the future of creation. I’m still creeped out. ⌘ Read more

Everything Announced at Google I/O 2026: Gemini, Search, Smart Glasses
Google is sprucing up its Gemini models, revamping search, and enabling AI agents in everything. There are also some spiffy new smart glasses coming this fall. ⌘ Read more

Google Makes It Easy to Deepfake Yourself
Google’s overhaul of its AI creation software, Flow, includes a new video model and a tool for generating selfie videos called avatars. ⌘ Read more

Hands-On With All of Google’s New Upcoming Android XR Smart Glasses
Here’s your first look at smart glasses coming from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, powered by Google and Samsung’s XR platform. ⌘ Read more

Google Search Goes Agentic—and Doesn’t Need You Anymore
Vibe-coded results! Super widgets! Bots that never sleep! Google’s vision for the future of Search is hyper-personalized, automated, and extremely AI. ⌘ Read more

Demis Hassabis Thinks AI Job Cuts Are Dumb
The CEO of Google DeepMind tells WIRED that companies should use the productivity gains of AI to do more, not lay people off. ⌘ Read more

Google’s Response to OpenClaw’s 24/7 AI Agent
Google’s always-running, data-hungry AI agent is designed to spend your money and send your emails. ⌘ Read more

Google I/O 2026 Live Blog: All the Gemini and Smart Glasses Updates as They Happen
Follow our live coverage of Google’s annual developer keynote, where the company will announce updates to its Gemini suite of AI tools and more details about Android XR smart glasses. ⌘ Read more

How to Watch Google I/O
Google I/O is back with updates to Search, Android, Gemini, and a fresh peek at upcoming Android XR smart glasses. Here’s how to watch the announcements live and what to expect. ⌘ Read more

Google Workspace Promo Codes: 14% Off for May
Boost your productivity and save with exclusive Google Workspace coupons from WIRED. Get up to 14% off plans for three months, including Starter, Standard, and Plus tiers. ⌘ Read more

The Top New Features in Google’s Android 17—and Gemini Intelligence—Coming This Summer
You’ll soon be able to generate your own widgets or ask Gemini to finish a booking in Chrome on Android. ⌘ Read more

Googlebook Is Google’s New AI-Powered Laptop Platform Built on Android
They won’t replace Chromebooks, but Googlebooks have an Android-centered operating system, AI-first features like the Magic Pointer, and a promise of desktop-grade apps. ⌘ Read more

How to Disable Google’s Gemini in Chrome
Chrome users were caught off guard by a 4-GB Google AI model baked into Chrome, sparking privacy concerns. The good news: You can easily uninstall it. The bad? You might not want to. ⌘ Read more

Google Is Rebranding the Fitbit App to ‘Google Health’
Google is sunsetting Google Fit by year’s end. While Fitbit remains very much alive, the rebranded Google Health app is your one-stop shop for all things health and fitness. ⌘ Read more

Google Ditches the Screen With the New Fitbit Air (2026)
Powered by Gemini and designed around simplicity, the new Fitbit Air could finally give the screenless fitness tracker market a compelling alternative to Whoop. ⌘ Read more

Google DeepMind Workers Vote to Unionize Over Military AI Deals
UK staff of Google’s AI research lab hope to block the use of the company’s artificial intelligence models in military settings. ⌘ Read more

Murena /e/OS Tablet Review: Privacy for a Price
Murena’s /e/OS tablet offers an iPadOS- and Google-free, privacy-friendly tablet experience, but you’ll have to pay for it. ⌘ Read more

DHS Demanded Google Surrender Data on Canadian’s Activity, Location Over Anti-ICE Posts
Using a 1930s trade law, Homeland Security targeted the man—who hasn’t entered the US in more than a decade—following posts on X condemning the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. ⌘ Read more

Top Google Workspace Promo Codes for May
Boost your productivity and save with exclusive Google Workspace coupons from WIRED. Get up to 14% off plans for three months, including Starter, Standard, and Plus tiers. ⌘ Read more

The Race Is on to Keep AI Agents From Running Wild With Your Credit Cards
AI agents may soon be buying your stuff for you. The FIDO Alliance has teamed up with Google and Mastercard to try to ensure that shopping in the near future isn’t a complete disaster. ⌘ Read more

WIRED’s Smart Home Ecosystem Guide (2026)
If you’re waffling between Alexa, Siri, and Google, the answer may already be in your home. ⌘ Read more

When the new client tells me they use a Google Sheet as a database ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net both, but neither directly. I know every workaround there is, including those used by developers, to test apps, while working on them. However if “sideloading” becomes so tedious, even the more technical users, cannot be bothered to do it, competing appstores and independent developers, not wanting to send their money and ID to Google, loose users at such rate, they likely won’t be able to justify continuing to maintain their projects, people like me rely on.

In the interest of fairness and hopefully for the last time, I ever have to address this, Google has flip-flopped again and promised “sideloading” will not be removed from their version of Android, but instead have to be enabled in the developer settings, using the following “advanced flow”:

To be perfectly clear, this still falls short of what I wanted, but at this point, it is a compromise I’m willing to take, over further pursuing this, through the various available European courts, myself.

Here is their full statement:
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/android-developer-verification.html

@bender@twtxt.net Yes, really should have chosen my words more wisely. As @movq@www.uninformativ.de mentions, we got a vague promise of an “advanced flow” being implemented, and in my case also a vague promise of a video call, with someone at Google, regarding it. Now when the backlash died down, it does not look like Google plans to follow through, with any of this and they’re completely unwilling to elaborate and get back to us, about if and how any of this will be implemented.

Last year, I made a huge mistake. I repeated on here, what multiple sourcea at Google told me, and what is to this day, written on their blog about Android.
I failed to take into consideration, that people who work at Google, often just lie, or present things intentionally vaguely, so they do not have to follow through with their promises.
I would like to apologize to everyone, who took my previous posts here, as assurance software not explicitly approved by Google, will continue working on Android, past this year (or even just a couple months from now) and that everything has been resolved, as things are now in fact even worse, than they were before. To follow the current state of “Open Android”, please check: https://keepandroidopen.org/

When I manage to fix a bug without using Google or an AI ⌘ Read more

Nevada ‘triangle’ on Google Earth sparks rumors and conspiracies
Eagle-eyed anomaly hunters have discovered a strange triangular feature situated in the middle of nowhere. Google Earth can be a great way to plan out… ⌘ Read more

Hora de anunciar algo novo: a @aiscarvalho e eu montámos uma consultadoria para ajudar organizações a adotar soluções e plataformas alternativas à big tech.

https://devicediversa.org/pt/

Ajudamos a informar e tomar decisões: tratamos de mapear necessidades, apresentar alternativas, elencar prós e contras da migração, e dar suporte e aconselhamento no processo de transição.

Aproveitamos a nossa experiência de 15+ anos a gerir e alojar a nossa infraestrutura digital para podermos ajudar outras orgs a fazê-lo, com expertise técnica e sabendo comunicá-la de forma clara e humana.

Por isso, se conheces quem esteja farto de depender de Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Dropbox, Salesforce, Zoom, Notion, AirTable, Adobe ou Figma, estamos aqui para ajudar a dar o salto!

Stop Google from limiting APK usage:sign the Change.org petition https://c.org/TQ9t4962bR

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I don’t know a number (wait, why can’t I google a Wetterbericht but only a Wettervorhersage?!), but it was enough for public transportation to shut down. 😅 I think I saw around five trucks on the side of the road who couldn’t continue, too icy. Some cars stranded.

My car has an automatic gearbox and I’m not sure if that’s good or bad in such conditions. 😂 Pretty hard to accelerate without spinning wheels …

@bender@twtxt.net gemini-cli, something something https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/16723

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/02/google-ai-overviews-risk-harm-misleading-health-information

#EvilGoogle #AIHellscape #AI

@movq@www.uninformativ.de How about “Quongsi”? I generated the first five letters with pwgen --no-capitalize --no-numerals 5 and since that already showed up in DDG search results, I simply appended the last two, which yielded nothing on DDG and Google).

What kind of project is it? Maybe we can help you find a name or nudge you in the right direction.

There is a #Processing survey going on at:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSduTT2cWlXzr7QG_g4LJ-Op6LwVTI7dtXHCGVH_FdI0BK00qg/viewform

I’m happy it mentions #py5 at some point.

At the end there is this invitation for the Processing Discord server. I find it unfortunate that the Processing Foundation is moving the community towards a closed, opaque platform controlled by a corporation, when they have the open and searchable forum powered by Discourse. I wish I understood the reasoning. I know Discord can be “convenient” but IMHO the downsides are much bigger.

#CreativeCoding #Discourse

Como ficaria as sua #VidaDigital se você perdesse acesso à sua conta do #Google (gmail, drive, photos e etc.)? Isso pode acontecer e acontece.

Tento pensar nisso pelo menos uma vez por ano. De tempos em tempos uso google.com/takeout e fica cada vez mais difícil.

Impulsionei agora pouco um post sobre uma pessoa trancada pra fora da conta da #Apple, um desastre também.

Webp, though it has been around for a long while, wasn’t fully supported on all browsers until recently. The other formats has been in use for such a long time, proving to work just fine, that the advantages Webp provides haven’t been seemingly enough to merit a switch.

Google is also the one behind Webp, and, well, people don’t trust, nor like, them much.

Webp, though it has been around for a long while, wasn’t fully supported on all browsers until recently. The other formats have been in use for such a long time, proving to work just fine, that the advantages Webp provides haven’t been seemingly enough to merit a switch.

Google is also the one behind Webp, and, well, people don’t trust, nor like, them much.

To everyone previously asking, what my (and other developers) endless complaining about Google, to both every EU body, with a form on their website and every relevant team at Google accomplished…
WE FUCKING WON!!!
“While security is crucial, we’ve also heard from developers and power users who have a higher risk tolerance and want the ability to download unverified apps.”
-source

I was also able to work with my new webhost, to bring back “🐕.fr.to” - everyones favorite vanity redirect domain, for my site, Googles changes to SSL warnings in Chrome, killed at the beginning of this year.

The lesson: I NEED TO COMPLAIN MORE

How to Find P1 Bugs using Google in your Target — (Part-2)

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Earn rewards with this simple method.

[Continue reading on InfoSec Write-ups »](https://infosecwriteups.com/how-to-find-p1-bugs-using-google-in-your-target-part-2-d37a9bb0b2e7?sour … ⌘ Read more

I used Gemini (the Google AI) twice at work today, asking about Google Workspace configuration and Google Cloud CLI usage (because we use those a lot). You’d think that it’d be well-suited for those topics. It answered very confidently, yet completely wrong. Just wrong. Made-up CLI arguments, whatever. It took me a while to notice, though, because it’s so convincing and, well, you implicitly and subconsciously trust the results of the Google AI when asking about Google topics, don’t you?

Will it get better over time? Maybe. But what I really want is this:

• Good, well-structured, easy-to-read, proper documentation. Google isn’t doing too bad in this regard, actually, it’s just that they have so much stuff that it’s hard to find what you’re looking for. Hence …
  
• … I want a good search function. Just give me a good fuzzy search for your docs. That’s it.
  

I just don’t have the time or energy to constantly second-guess this stuff. Give me something reliable. Something that is designed to do the right thing, not toy around with probabilities. “AI for everything” is just the wrong approach.

@prologic@twtxt.net Let’s go through it one by one. Here’s a wall of text that took me over 1.5 hours to write.

This section says AI should not be treated as an authority. This is actually just what I said, except the AI phrased/framed it like it was a counter-argument.

The AI also said that users must develop “AI literacy”, again phrasing/framing it like a counter-argument. Well, that is also just what I said. I said you should treat AI output like a random blog and you should verify the sources, yadda yadda. That is “AI literacy”, isn’t it?

My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of “AI literacy” into account, you basically end up with a fancy search engine, with extra overhead that costs time. The AI missed/ignored this in its reply.

Okay, so, the AI also said that you should use AI tools just for drafting and brainstorming. Granted, a very rough draft of something will probably be doable. But then you have to diligently verify every little detail of this draft – okay, fine, a draft is a draft, it’s fine if it contains errors. The thing is, though, that you really must do this verification. And I claim that many people will not do it, because AI outputs look sooooo convincing, they don’t feel like a draft that needs editing.

Can you, as an expert, still use an AI draft as a basis/foundation? Yeah, probably. But here’s the kicker: You did not create that draft. You were not involved in the “thought process” behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: “Okay, I want to draw a picture of a landscape and there’s going to be a little house, but for now, I’ll just put in a rough sketch of the house and add the details later.” You are aware of what you left out. When the AI did the draft, you are not aware of what’s missing – even more so when every AI output already looks like a final product. For me, personally, this makes it much harder and slower to verify such a draft, and I mentioned this in my text.

You, @prologic@twtxt.net, also mentioned this in your car tyre example.

In my text, I gave two analogies: The gym analogy and the Google Translate analogy. Your car tyre example falls in the same category, but Gemini’s calculator example is different (and, again, gaslight-y, see below).

What I meant in my text: A person wants to be a programmer. To me, a programmer is a person who writes code, understands code, maintains code, writes documentation, and so on. In your example, a person who changes a car tyre would be a mechanic. Now, if you use AI to write the code and documentation for you, are you still a programmer? If you have no understanding of said code, are you a programmer? A person who does not know how to change a car tyre, is that still a mechanic?

No, you’re something else. You should not be hired as a programmer or a mechanic.

Yes, that is “skill evolution” – which is pretty much my point! But the AI framed it like a counter-argument. It didn’t understand my text.

(But what if that’s our future? What if all programming will look like that in some years? I claim: It’s not possible. If you don’t know how to program, then you don’t know how to read/understand code written by an AI. You are something else, but you’re not a programmer. It might be valid to be something else – but that wasn’t my point, my point was that you’re not a bloody programmer.)

Gemini’s calculator example is garbage, I think. Crunching numbers and doing mathematics (i.e., “complex problem-solving”) are two different things. Just because you now have a calculator, doesn’t mean it’ll free you up to do mathematical proofs or whatever.

What would have worked is this: Let’s say you’re an accountant and you sum up spendings. Without a calculator, this takes a lot of time and is error prone. But when you have one, you can work faster. But once again, there’s a little gaslight-y detail: A calculator is correct. Yes, it could have “bugs” (hello Intel FDIV), but its design actually properly calculates numbers. AI, on the other hand, does not understand a thing (our current AI, that is), it’s just a statistical model. So, this modified example (“accountant with a calculator”) would actually have to be phrased like this: Suppose there’s an accountant and you give her a magic box that spits out the correct result in, what, I don’t know, 70-90% of the time. The accountant couldn’t rely on this box now, could she? She’d either have to double-check everything or accept possibly wrong results. And that is how I feel like when I work with AI tools.

Gemini has no idea that its calculator example doesn’t make sense. It just spits out some generic “argument” that it picked up on some website.

The AI makes two points here. The first one, I might actually agree with (“bad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itself”).

The second point is, once again, gaslighting, because it is phrased/framed like a counter-argument. It implies that I said something which I didn’t. Like the AI, I said that you would have to adjust the copyright law! At the same time, the AI answer didn’t even question whether it’s okay to break the current law or not. It just said “lol yeah, change the laws”. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AI’s “opinion”, because some of these changes could kill some business opportunities – or the laws would have to have special AI clauses that only benefit the AI techbros. But I digress, that wasn’t part of Gemini’s answer.)

Except for one point, I don’t accept any of Gemini’s “criticism”. It didn’t pick up on lots of details, ignored arguments, and I can just instinctively tell that this thing does not understand anything it wrote (which is correct, it’s just a statistical model).

And it framed everything like a counter-argument, while actually repeating what I said. That’s gaslighting: When Alice says “the sky is blue” and Bob replies with “why do you say the sky is purple?!”

But it sure looks convincing, doesn’t it?

This took so much of my time. I won’t do this again. 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net hehehe, yeah, it isn’t mine neither. Most obscure TLDs are in small registrars. I like to stick to one register (even though when Google Domains ceased to exist I was forced to have two, as Cloudflare doesn’t support the .ONE TLD).

How I Reported a Pre-Account Hijack Affecting Any Gmail User (Even Google Employees)- My Bug… ⌘ Read more

Gente amiga, podem ajudar-me a recordar casos de membros do governo que vieram das grandes tecnológicas para cargos relacionados com digitalização e tecnologia?

Os que me lembro:

• Bernardo Correia, SecEstado da Digitalização do Gov Montenegro, ex-diretor da Google em Portugal
  
• Manuel Dias, “CTO” do Estado no Gov Montenegro, ex-Microsoft e OutSystems
  
• André Aragão Azevedo, SecEstado da Transição Digital do 2º Gov Costa, ex-administrador da Microsoft Portugal
  

Eu sei que a lista é maior, e por isso adorava beneficiar da sabedoria coletiva pra poder completar a caderneta!

The XMPP Standards Foundation: XMPP related Workshop at the Linux Day Torino 2025
Nicolas Vial will host the Quale sistema alternativo per il vostro cellulare? talk with a workshop that will demonstrate how to install and use XMPP for free from F-DROID, but will also give away free QR codes for Monocles Chat from [Google Play](https://play. … ⌘ Read more

Der ganze Vorgang ist archetypisch für die seit Jahrzehnten völlig ohne Not stattfindende politische Selbstverzwergung Europas.

A comment on heise about the recent AWS outage.

https://www.heise.de/meinung/Kommentar-zum-Totalausfall-bei-AWS-Nichts-gelernt-in-den-letzten-30-Jahren-10794622.html?wt_mc=sm.red.ho.mastodon.mastodon.md_beitraege.md_beitraege&utm_source=mastodon

(Too bad there’s no good translation for the great word “Selbstverzwergung”.)

I’m paraphrasing: Europe (and other regions) depend on US IT services, a lot, without an actual need. We saw AWS, Google, and Microsoft build large datacenters and then we thought “welp, shit, nothing we can do about that, guess we’ll just be an AWS customer from now on.” Nobody really went ahead and built German/European alternatives. And now we completely depend on the US for lots of our stuff.

The article even claims that there’s now a shortage of sysadmins in the EU? I’m not so sure. But I’d welcome it, makes my job more secure. 🤣

Hosting services, datacenters, software, everything, it’s all US stuff. Why do we accept this, why not build alternatives …

I noticed Google put out this article: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/09/lets-talk-security-answering-your-top.html it’s very current day Google, but the comments under the YouTube video are pretty on point and I saw a few familiar faces there. There is also, unexpectedly, ways to contact Google.

First a form for “teachers, students, and hobbyists”, that I filled politely, as someone who falls under their hobbyist category. It can be filled both anonymously, or with an e-mail attached, to be contacted by them (I chose the second option).

Also a general feedback and questions form, that I was not as polite in and used to send them the following message:

I have already provided some feedback, in the teacher, student and hobbyists form/questionaire, as well as an open letter I’ve recently sent to the European Commission digital markets act team, as I do believe your proposal might not even be legal, given the fact it puts privacy-focused alternative app stores at risk (https://f-droid.org/cs/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html) and it was proposed this early, after Google lost in court to Epic Games, over similar monopoly concerns. Why should we trust Google to be the only authority for all developer signatures, right after the European courts labeled it a gatekeeper?

Assuming this gets passed, despite justified developer backlash and at best questionable legality, can you give us any guarantees, this will not be used to target legal malware-free mods, or user privacy enhancing patchers, like the ones used for applying the ReVanced patches? I have made a few mods myself, but I am in no way associated with the ReVanced team. I just share many peoples concerns, Google Chrome has been conveniently stripped of its manifest v2 support, that made many privacy protecting extensions possible and now you’re conveniently asking for the government IDs, of all the developers, who maintain these kinds of privacy protections (be it patches, or alternative open-source apps) on Android.

@bender@twtxt.net To add some context, I’m not one to write open letters often, nor do I expect to become some kind of martyr, the European Union will unite over, to fight Google.

However Google did loose to Epic Games in European courts, that determined Google maintains a monopoly over its Play Store, restricting competition and developers choices. And pretty much right after courts determined this, Google gives them the middle finger and proposes changes, that would destroy F-droid - the biggest and really the only competing app store, that’s actually competing and not just taking the apps from Googles Play Store and passing them on.

There are many more qualified and likable parties, who already reached out to them, with these concerns, I just think it’s important everyone impacted by this, politely contacts them too, to convey this is not just some niche non-issue, a few IT nerds made up.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I submitted it via the form on their website (https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/contact-dma-team_en) and got the following response:

Dear citizen,

Thank you for contacting us and sharing your concerns regarding the impact of Google’s plans to introduce a developer verification process on Android. We appreciate that you have chosen to contact us, as we welcome feedback from interested parties.

As you may be aware, the Digital Markets Act (‘DMA’) obliges gatekeepers like Google to effectively allow the distribution of apps on their operating system through third party app stores or the web. At the same time, the DMA also permits Google to introduce strictly necessary and proportionate measures to ensure that third-party software apps or app stores do not endanger the integrity of the hardware or operating system or to enable end users to effectively protect security.

We have taken note of your concerns and, while we cannot comment on ongoing dialogue with gatekeepers, these considerations will form part of our assessment of the justifications for the verification process provided by Google.

Kind regards,
The DMA Team

New TAG Heuer Smartwatches Now ‘Made for iPhone’
TAG Heuer today announced the Connected Calibre E5 smartwatch, now featuring “Made for iPhone” certification as the watchmaker abandons Google’s Wear OS.

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Three years after launching the Calibre E4, the Connected Calibre … ⌘ Read more

AI advance helps astronomers spot cosmic events with just a handful of examples
A new study co-led by the University of Oxford and Google Cloud has shown how general-purpose AI can accurately classify real changes in the night sky—such as an exploding star, a black hole tearing apart a passing star, a fast-moving asteroid, or a brief stellar flare from a compact star system—and explain its reasoning, without the need for complex training. ⌘ Read more

KI-Modus in Google-Suche kommt nach Europa ⌘ Read more

Stealing Part of a Production Language Model (2024)
We introduce the first model-stealing attack that extracts precise, nontrivial information from black-box production language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s PaLM-2. Specifically, our attack recovers the embedding projection layer (up to symmetries) of a transformer model, given typical API access. For under $20 USD, our attack extracts the entire projection matrix of OpenAI’s ada and babbage language models. We thereby confirm, for the first time, that these black-box … ⌘ Read more

Notes from the 2025 Git Contributor’s Summit
Taylor Blau has posted an\
extensive set of notes from the recently concluded Git Contributor’s
Summit. Covered topics include the SHA-256 transition, Rust, Change-ID
headers, Git 3.0, and many more. The note are also available on\
Google Docs for those who prefer that format. ⌘ Read more

My open letter, to the European Commission digital markets act team:

Hello,

I am joining other developers, concerned about Googles new plan, to approve every app and effectively destroy most of the competing 3rd party stores this way. The biggest one of these alternative stores, most known for their focus on user and developer privacy, already states, this would make it impossible for them to operate: https://f-droid.org/cs/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html
Even communities like the XDA forum, where new developers are often introduced to the world of Android development, would likely be strongly impacted, as making, publishing and installing Android apps is made less accessible.

I am not just writing on their behalf, I run a small website myself (https://thecanine.ueuo.com/), that both provides legal modifications, for some android apps - for example adding an amoled dark theme, to the most popular XMPP chat client for Android, or increasing one of Androids keyboard apps height. This all comes after Googles previous changes to the Android operating system, that prevent users from installing old apps (old to Google, can mean only a couple of months, without an update - https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/target-sdk and the target version gets increased every year). I rely on apps developed by a single developer, even for things like making the pixel art presented on my website and sideloading as a way to make these apps work, before developers can catch up to Google’s new requirements - if Google is allowed to slowly kill these options, us digital artists will soon lose the tools we need to create digital art.

Nach Kritik von F-Droid: Google verteidigt Maßnahmen gegen bisheriges Sideloading
Künftig lässt sich keine Android-App mehr per Sideloading installieren, ohne dass Google davon weiß. Das bringt dem Unternehmen mehr Macht. ( Google, Android)

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