but the hardware is not capable. it’s running a miniscule custom 260k LLM and the “claim to fame” is that it wasn’t slow. great? we already know tiny models are fast, they’re just not as accurate and perform worse than larger models, all they did was make an even smaller than normal model. this is akin to getting Doom to run on anything with a CPU, while cool and impressive, it doesn’t do much for anyone other than being an exercise in doing something because you can.
you can follow hashtags. I follow #opensource and a few other interests and I’ve found some interesting stuff you don’t generally see in other places. but yes, the format is completely different and I find lemmy allows for better discussion than Mastodon.
Checkout Notesnook. I’ve tried most of the ones you’ve listed and have been really enjoying how well it works compared to the competition considering its end-to-end encrypted.
A few features:
One thing I really like about the project is how open they are about what they’re doing, why they’re doing it and what the future holds. It’s been great seeing their roadmap (https://notesnook.com/roadmap/) and seeing promised features land with new ones being added, and I’ve only been using it for less than a year now!
Appreciate the added context. Definitely a lot of history and quite a few red flags.
EDIT:
Oof. Just saw the Louis Rossmann video and yeah, Daniel Micay ruined the projects reputation for me.
Yep, I’ve seen this ~exact post a several times, same general structure and points, none of it acknowledging that the attacks on other people in the community started long before the alleged swat.
Just re-iterating what I’ve seen online - would love some sources or evidence to what you posted as those are 100% valid criticisms if true.
I don’t really follow the drama but have seen others comment on it before. It’s the reason I try to reply to posts with sources as I hate rumors being spread and the only way to combat misinformation is to provide evidence. What you claimed is pretty damning, if you’re able to provide a soruce I would love to read and educate myself in adding more context to the situation. Thanks!
the main graphene guy has unaddressed mental health issues and refuses to seek treatment (he appears to believe the problem is everyone else)
Daniel Micay stepped down last year []. Also, he was allegedly being swatted which would put anyone on edge, considering someone has already been killed over it [] and police aren’t exactly known for treating people humanely.
I genuinely don’t feel comfortable with that one man show controlling my phone
Looks like there’s 16 people involved in the project [] - excluding any external contributors, that’s definitely more than one. Granted, its probably the previous lead and the new one who have the most commits, I haven’t looked, but its still not just a single developer. That said, your concern is valid. Smaller projects are more likely to die as soon as their main contributors lose interest or stop working on it for any reason - see the end of DivestOS as a prime example [].
[] https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/14/us/swatting-sentence-casey-viner/index.html
did they comment (maybe I missed it) on why they’re ending development?
the rich always get a fast pass
they think because he inherited a recovering economy, that he himself had some major part in it.
I bought a 20TB external hard drive a year ago for 0.015 cents per GB. This was after taxes, so it was technically cheaper.
$301.69/20,000 = 0.0150
nor any evidence of them selling or allowing anyone access to their servers and recent headline news backs this up
The entire point is that you shouldn’t have to put your trust that a third party (Telegram or whoever takes over in the future) will not sell/allow access to your already accessible data.
There’s no evidence that MTProto has ever been cracked, nor any evidence of them selling or allowing anyone access to their servers and recent headline news backs this up
Just because it’s not happening now does not mean it cannot happen in the future. If/when they do get compromised/sold, they will already have your data; it’s completely out of your control.
Google, on the other hand, routinely allow “agencies” access to their servers, often without a warrant
Exactly my point. Google are using the exact same “security” as Telegram. Your data is already compromised. Side note - supposedly RCS chats between Android is E2EE although I wouldn’t trust it as, like Telegram, you’re mixing high/low security context, which is bad OPSEC.
WhatsApp - who you cite as a good example of E2E encryption - stores chat backups on GDrive unencrypted by default
… can you be sure the same is true for the people on the other end of your chats?
Valid concern, but this threat exists on almost every single platform. Who’s to stop anyone from taking screenshots of all your messages and not storing them securely?
[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/news/whatsapp-encrypted-backups
Signal is completely open source and auditable by anyone: https://github.com/signalapp
if you were to create your own clone, it would not interoperate with the real one.
The FBI can’t just force them to add malicious code. A bad actor could try to contribute bad code, but Signal’s devs would likely catch it.
Lacking end-to-end encryption does not mean it lacks any encryption at all, and that point seems to escape most people.
Not using end-to-end encryption is the equivalent of using best practice developed nearly 30 years ago [1] and saying “this is good enough”. E2EE as a default has been taking off for about 10 years now [2], that Telegram is going into 2025 and still doesn’t have this basic feature tells me they’re not serious about security.
To take it to its logical conclusion you can argue that Signal is also “unencrypted” because it needs to be eventually in order for you to read a message. Ridiculous? Absolutely, but so is the oft-made opine that Telegram is unencrypted.
Ridiculous? Yes, you’re missing the entire point of end-to-end encryption, which you immediately discredit any security Telegram wants to claim:
The difference is that Telegram stores a copy of your chats that they themselves can decrypt for operational reasons.
Telegram (and anyone who may have access to their infrastructure, via hack or purchase) has complete access to view your messages. This is what E2EE prevents. With Telegram, someone could have access to all your private messages and you would never know. With E2EE someone would need to compromise your personal device(s). One gives you zero options to protect yourself against the invasion of your privacy, the other lets you take steps to protect yourself.
the other hand, if you fill your Telegram hosted chats with a whole load of benign crap that nobody could possibly care about and actually use the “secret chat bullshit” for your spicier chats then you have plausible deniability baked right in.
The problem here is that you should not be mixing secure contexts with insecure ones, basic OPSEC. Signal completely mitigates this by making everything private by default. The end user does not need to “switch context” to be secure.
[1] Developed by Netscape, SSL was released in 1995 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#SSL_1.0,_2.0,_and_3.0
[2] Whatsapp gets E2EE in 2014, Signal (then known as TextSecure, was already using E2EE) - https://www.wired.com/2014/11/whatsapp-encrypted-messaging/
Telegram, for all their security claims, is basically not actually encrypted at all.
Apex Legends. Its a difficult game to master, but every once in a while I get “in the zone” and pull moves/plays that impress myself. It’s not often, but feels nice when it happens. I still enjoy it even though I “suck” most of the time. I basically play it as a survival game >90% of the time.
anything specific you can call out for those of us who have zero interest in moving to another centralized platform?
except i’m not wrong. the model they ran is 4 orders of magnitude smaller than even the smallest “mini” models that are generally available, see TinyLlama1.1B [1] or Phi-3 3.8B mini [2] to compare against. Most “mini” models range from 1 to about 10 Billion parameters, which makes running them incredibly inefficient on older devices.
but I can imagine it. in fact, I could have told you it would have needed a significantly smaller model in order to run at an adequate pace on older hardware. it’s not at all a mystery, its a known factor. i think it’s absolutely cool that they did it, but lets not pretend its more than what it is - a modern version of running Doom on non-standard hardware.
[1] https://huggingface.co/TinyLlama/TinyLlama-1.1B-step-50K-105b
[2] https://ollama.com/library/phi3:3.8b-mini-128k-instruct-q5_0
[3] https://www.thirtythreeforty.net/posts/2019/12/my-business-card-runs-linux/