Oh huh. I didn’t know there even was a video. Perhaps my ad/tracker blockers cut it.
Just found a hands-on CNET video: https://www.cnet.com/videos/at-ces-2025-tcl-debuts-new-tcl-60-phone-with-e-ink-display/
Never used TCL’s “Nxtpaper” so not totally sure how it compares.
TCL is releasing a new phone later this year with a toggle-able e-ink mode. So you can use it with in full color when you want, and switch to e-ink when you want. It’s in a more conventional aspect ratio so apps will look more “normal”. I can say from experience with my Boox e-reader that a lot of apps do not work well in 4:3.
https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/6/24335983/tcl-60-xe-nxtpaper-e-ink-specs-ces
Might be my next phone if the CPU and software is not awful (big if).
It used to say “container-native”. They recently changed the wording, but there was no technical change.
It’s a Linux distro that runs locally, like any other. It has no particular tie-in with any cloud services. If Flatpak, Docker/Podman, Distrobox, Homebrew, etc. are “cloud” just because they involve downloading packages hosted on the internet, then I don’t know why you wouldn’t call “traditional” package managers like apt, dnf, zypper, etc. “cloud” as well. 🤷 So yeah, I feel your confusion.
The big difference compared to something like Debian or vanilla Fedora is that Bazzite is an “immutable” distro. What this means is that the OS image is monolithic and you don’t make changes directly to the system. Instead, you install apps and utilities via containers, or as a last resort you can apply a layer on top of the OS using rpm-ostree.
The only thing cloud-related about any of this is that atomic OS images and containers are more common in the server space than the desktop space.
It’s insane that this is even legal.
There’s a separate command called visudo for this purpose.
You CAN use any ol’ text editor but visudo has built-in validation specific to the sudoers file. This is helpful because sudoers syntax is unique and arcane, and errors are potentially quite harmful.
There are a handful on non-default apps I’ve used across my last 3-4 distros at least:
mpv - the best video player, period. Minimalist UI, maximalist configuration options. I’ve been using it for many years across many OSes and at this point everything else feels wrong.
Geany - My favorite GUI text editor on Linux.
Foliate - the simplest eBook reader I’ve found.
Strawberry - It’s “fine”. Honestly, I’ve never found a music player on Linux that I really liked. I keep falling back to Strawberry because it’s familiar and generally works as expected.
That’s pretty much what I do, yeah. On my computer or phone, I split an epub into individual text files for each chapter using pandoc (or similar tools). Then after I read each chapter, I upload it into my summarizer, and perhaps ask some pointed questions.
It’s important to use a tool that stays confined to the context of the provided file. My first test when trying such a tool is to ask it a general-knowledge question that’s not related to the file. The correct answer is something along the lines of “the text does not provide that information”, not an answer that it pulled out of thin air (whether it’s correct or not).
I get that, and it’s good to be cautious. You certainly need to be careful with what you take from it. For my use cases, I don’t rely on “reasoning” or “knowledge” in the LLM, because they’re very bad at that. But they’re very good at processing grammar and syntax and they have excellent vocabularies.
Instead of thinking of it as a person, I think of it as the world’s greatest rubber duck.
It’s as open as most Android brands. I don’t use any of Boox’s services or apps. I installed F-Droid and use open-source apps from there. I use Librera as my ebook reader, with Syncthing to sync my book library between my desktop, ereader, and phone. It’s possible to set up the Play Store but I don’t bother, personally.
It’s not a 100% smooth experience but I’m very happy with the F-Droid compatibility. I absolutely refuse to get locked into a walled garden.
I’ve done this to give myself something akin to Cliff’s Notes, to review each chapter after I read it. I find it extremely useful, particularly for more difficult reads. Reading philosophy texts that were written a hundred years ago and haphazardly translated 75 years ago can be a challenge.
That said, I have not tried to build this directly into my ereader and I haven’t used Boox’s specific service. But the concept has clear and tested value.
I would be interested to see how it summarizes historical texts about these topics. I don’t need facts (much less opinions) baked into the LLM. Facts should come from the user-provided source material alone. Anything else would severely hamper its usefulness.
Related feature on my wish list: I’d love a way to basically fork a feed based on regex pattern matching. This would be useful for some premium feeds that lump multiple podcasts together. For example, one of my Patreon feeds includes three shows: the ad-free main feed, the first-tier weekly premium feed, and the second-tier monthly premium feed.
I don’t want to filter them out because I DO want to listen to all of them, but for organizational purposes I don’t want them lumped together. I’d prefer to display these as two or three separate podcasts in my display.
Another example is the Maximum Fun premium BoCo feed. They include the bonus content for ALL their shows (which is…a lot) in a single feed. I only listen to about half a dozen, and even that is a bit of a mess in one feed!
Great points, thanks.
Can you clarify what you mean by “local decryption”? I thought Proton and Tuta work pretty much the same way, but perhaps there’s a distinction I’m missing.
One thing I like about Tuta is that it has the option to cache your messages in localstorage in your browser so you can do full-text search. FWIW, I think Proton added a similar feature recently, though I have not tried it. I imagine neither would work very well with large mailboxes; probably better to configure a real email client.
Do they offer cloud storage now? From what I can see on their web site, it’s 500GB…just for email. I mean sure, that’s cool, but it would take me several lifetimes to accumulate 500GB of email so it’s not much of a selling point to me.
It’s a good email service, anyway. I’ve been using the free tier for a few years. Similar to Proton, and in theory Tuta is more private because they encrypt the headers as well as the message body.
Also worth mentioning: you might still need to add the “most recent visit” column under the View menu. And if you dare to actually load any of those pages, they’ll move all the way to the top, and will not remain in their original location. It’s really annoying.
Whisper is open source. GPT-2 was, too.
Absolutely this. Phones are the primary device for Gen Z. Phone use doesn’t develop tech skills because there’s barely anything you can do with the phones. This is particularly true with iOS, but still applies to Android.
Even as an IT administrator, there’s hardly anything I can do when troubleshooting phone problems. Oh, push notifications aren’t going through? Well, there are no useful logs or anything for me to look at, so…cool. It makes me crazy how little visibility I have into anything on iPhones or iPads. And nobody manages “Android” in general; at best they manage like two specific models of one specific brand (usually Samsung or Google). It’s impossible to manage arbitrary Android phones because there’s so little standardization and so little control over the software in the general case.
I posted some of my experience with Kagi’s LLM features a few months ago here: https://literature.cafe/comment/6674957 . TL;DR: the summarizer and document discussion is fantastic, because it does not hallucinate. The search integration is as good as anyone else’s, but still nothing to write home about.
The Kagi assistant isn’t new, by the way; I’ve been using it for almost a year now. It’s now out of beta and has an improved UI, but the core functionality seems mostly the same.
As far as actual search goes, I don’t find it especially useful. It’s better than Bing Chat or whatever they call it now because it hallucinates less, but the core concept still needs work. It basically takes a few search results and feeds them into the LLM for a summary. That’s not useless, but it’s certainly not a game-changer. I typically want to check its references anyway, so it doesn’t really save me time in practice.
Kagi’s search is primarily not LLM-based and I still find the results and features to be worth the price, after being increasingly frustrated with Google’s decay in recent years. I subscribed to the “Ultimate” Kagi plan specifically because I wanted access to all the premium language models, since subscribing to either ChatGPT or Claude would cost about the same as Kagi, while Kagi gives me access to both (plus Mistral and Gemini). So if you’re interested in playing around with the latest premium models, I still think Kagi’s Ultimate plan is a good deal.
That said, I’ve been disappointed with the development of LLMs this year across the board, and I’m not convinced any of them are worth the money at this point. This isn’t so much a problem with Kagi as it is with all the LLM vendors. The models have gotten significantly worse for my use cases compared to last year, and I don’t quite understand why; I guess they are optimizing for benchmarks that simply don’t align with my needs. I had great success getting zsh or Python one-liners last year, for example, whereas now it always seems to give me wrong or incomplete answers.
My biggest piece of advice when dealing with any LLM-based tools, including Kagi’s, is: don’t use it for anything you’re not able to validate and correct on your own. It’s just a time-saver, not a substitute for your own skills and knowledge.
Is this legit? This is the first time I’ve heard of human neurons used for such a purpose. Kind of surprised that’s legal. Instinctively, I feel like a “human brain organoid” is close enough to a human that you cannot wave away the potential for consciousness so easily. At what point does something like this deserve human rights?
I notice that the paper is published in Frontiers, the same journal that let the notorious AI-generated giant-rat-testicles image get published. They are not highly regarded in general.
DuckDuckGo is an easy first step. It’s free, publicly available, and familiar to anyone who is used to Google. Results are sourced largely from Bing, so there is second-hand rot, but IMHO there was a tipping point in 2023 where DDG’s results became generally more useful than Google’s or Bing’s. (That’s my personal experience; YMMV.) And they’re not putting half-assed AI implementations front and center (though they have some experimental features you can play with if you want).
If you want something AI-driven, Perplexity.ai is pretty good. Bing Chat is worth looking at, but last I checked it was still too hallucinatory to use for general search, and the UI is awful.
I’ve been using Kagi for a while now and I find its quick summaries (which are not displayed by default for web searches) much, much better than this. For example, here’s what Kagi’s “quick answer” feature gives me with this search term:
Room for improvement, sure, but it’s not hallucinating anything, and it cites its sources. That’s the bare minimum anyone should tolerate, and yet most of the stuff out there falls wayyyyy short.
I refer you to #7 on Bruce Tognazzini’s evergreen top ten list of design bugs.
https://www.asktog.com/Bughouse/10MostWantedDesignBugs.html