Tinfoil OTOH claims hardware attestation and confidential computing, which is a pretty strong and (in theory) verifiable promise.

You absolutely would not recommend tinfoil.sh to someone indifferent to privacy trying to save money.

It's a very different service than OpenRouter.

tl;dr of the article: Rather than building a closed AI stack (like Google - but they don't name it) Mozilla is pursuing partnerships. In this case, they are partnering with Exa.ai to offer AI integrations on desktop and iOS devices with visible source citations. There is no mention of confidential computing, hardware enclaves, or other technical mechanisms but they promise zero data retention. (Did I forget anything?)

The sloppy announcement is unfortunate, because there is no real need for that: exa.ai/about looks interesting to me. (Proper product, detailed changelog, etc.) For some reason, they just were unable to write about the cool stuff this partnership might enable in their announcement. Perhaps they thought it would be too controversial for their brand. (edit2: See: https://exa.ai/docs/reference/verticals/people )

edit: Not entirely sure, but maybe I even used Exa already unknowingly as an engine in the OpenRouter web search plugin.

https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/plugins/web-searc...

For example, this article (allegedly) makes two main observations to justify Anthropic being exceptionally bad:

> 1. Anticompetitive behavior. Anthropic cuts off users who get close to building competing AI (OpenAI, Windsurf, xAI), its terms block using Claude outputs to train competitors, it secretly degraded outputs for AI development work (Fable), and it trains on public and copyrighted data while blocking reciprocal use.

> 2. Weaponized safety and national security framing. Anthropic uses risk language to shape regulation (RSP influence in CA, NY, EU), advocate for pause authority while racing ahead, tie distillation to the CCP and military surveillance, and dismiss Chinese open models as a security threat rather than competing on openness.

There was probably more original thought behind the author prompts, but it is difficult to tell because it is all buried under meaningless slop, grande language, and derivative repetitions.

For real people, Anthropic just lobbies the government.

For a badly prompted LLM, Anthropic is laundering fear into paperwork through a feudalistic permission layer plantation model that wears the costume of virtue.

Same same.

I still remember him giggling over a particularly lucky banana bomb he threw.

Anyway: The round-based approach made the game surprisingly calm and inclusive.

I am no expert, but AFAIK Android does not disable signature verification when installing from "unknown" sources. It verifies the APK is signed and unmodified on every install, and enforces key continuity on updates.

Signal uses the same signing key for both the Play Store and signal.org APK, so if you at any point installed from the Play Store, the key identity is (as far as I understood) attested by Google, and every subsequent update from either source is verified against it.

I do think that Obtainium pins the key as well, so even without Play Store: If the original install through Obtainium wasn't a manipulated version, you should enjoy the same continuity.

I get the idea about a hypothetical threat actor from within Signal poisoning my specific install. But I think I'll roll with it for now.

Enabling "unknown sources" does not make my device less secure. The setting is also disingenuously named: It is in fact "known sources" I am installing (not "sideloading") software from. It is just not a source Google wants to know of.

I also do not need to reproduce every new release from source. It is a signed APK I'm getting from signal.org.

If the antagonists in my threat model are so capable they could serve a tailored, signed APK from signal.org for the IP I'm using, I should absolutely not use a messenger whose identifier is my phone number, aka my real world identity AND permanent location marker. That feels absurd. A threat actor that capable could just locate me, pick me up and shake me until I unlock the device.

You are saying Molly exists and works fine, so I'm not really sure the whole problematization of Signal holds up. Does the existence of Molly not disprove your criticism that users would have to use the mainline Signal app from the Play Store?

I think it might be a good sign that criticism of Signal tends to presuppose absurdly capable threat actors. It suggests there is little low-hanging fruit left to criticize.

Not sure about that. You do not need Google Play Store to download or update Signal. I use Obtainium to update directly via signal.org for a very long time now.

JSON: https://updates.signal.org/android/latest.json

How would the lack of IMAP compromise encryption? Sounds dubious.

Lock-in effects are problematic, but separate from encryption or privacy in general.

If the concern is actually lock-in, it is worth noting: there is little lock-in in the current Tuta offering. The service allows users to export emails into standard EML files. If you decide to switch providers, simply point your domain to the new provider and import your latest backup.

> I would like to get the old models back. If anyone can show me the way, I would be grateful. I liked them for NPC dialogue, for TTRPG campaigns and the like.

> I looked into it. GPT 3.5 is still around, I think. But perhaps they have trained it out of usefulness. It is difficult to say.

> They were quirky, the old ones, and not always perfect. But they had flavor, and their characters had nuance, and what they got wrong you could fix in the editing.

Full conversation with thinking: https://paste.ononoki.org/?2fc049fe1ae7302b#GjzuEn8VmaYJ565M... Password: kimitest

The ads cannot be disabled and there is no amount I can pay to stop them.

I even wrote to support, only to get a sloppy reply telling me no: because premium will always only have "an ad-free listening experience".

If the concept of art one has in mind limits creative endeavour and acts as a gatekeeper to art, then it is probably better not to have a concept of art at all.

I'm glad I'll never find out how much fun, skill gain and artful cultural production I might have missed if I had carried a false, limiting idea of art back then.

I think it is a uniquely American perspective to automatically assume that worthy (or even just prestigious) education somehow has to cost at least 200k USD financed through life-altering, non-defaultable student loan contracts.

I do understand that the money is not just drained. Whenever I was on an American campus as a student, I was in awe at their extravagant setups. Lots of food, an irritating amount of sports, more like a small resort town than a place to do educational work.

No wonder there is only a very small fraction of the population who would choose to study humanities in such a system. But it says much more about the system than about the humanities or liberal arts.

I'm not sure what is meant by "we're building in the open" if it's a closed-source project with no person attached to it.

There are also big quality issues on the existing page content. At some point you write that "Around 43 developers are using it right now" just to follow up a bit later with "Join thousands of developers who are moving faster with ...".

With a quick search, I was able to find one potential match on LinkedIn, where someone is associating with the project.

Another potentially validating find was someone's uploaded Prezi on the project.

I really do wish you luck with the project. But it would be great if it develops to a stage where you do not avoid associating with it as much.

Using local infrastructure leaks your location and simplifies law enforcement against the user. For example: Living in Saudi Arabia for work would absolutely not inspire me to seek out a hypothetical Saudi Social.

If local reddit communities are any tell, you would see competition real fast, e.g. Littletown Social, realLittleTown, LittleTown Online ...

Instead, one should probably use the server that aligns best with ones idea of moderation and appears somewhat trustworthy not to go down tomorrow.

I'd rather have a level playing field within a phase of adaptation and hardening regarding cybersecurity issues than a constant dependency on the US, maybe grabbing Greenland today, maybe "extracting" our president tomorrow.

The delta between privileged capabilities and open weight capabilities alone already is a massive, unaddressed AI safety risk.

Your quote was very relevant, as it highlights the foundational lack of intellectual honesty behind the whole Anthropic statement.

I'm sure he didn't mean just a "lobotomized to be worse than Anthropic products" badge for the test-passing models.

If a ban is the implied consequence of failing his "safety" tests, that means that Anthropic was and currently is advocating for a ban on some open-weight models.

Someone arguing for the ability to pay someone without surveillance does not argue for a world where nobody knows each other anymore. That would be awful, of course.

It is very likely that this will adjust in the future. Just look at how indistinguishable from organic content some prominent ad placements have become over time. But: There is merit in discussing the actual product, not some hypothetical version of it. If we do discuss hypotheticals, we should make that explicit.

This also helps the whole debate (and therefore, I believe, ad critics): arguments grounded in reality are usually far more effective than those that aren't. ... And there might come a point where OpenAI introduces some kind of native ad format. We would be well advised to preserve our credibility for that discussion.

edit: Paid content in the organic LLM output is a current problem already. It ist just not what this announcement is about.