One of the earliest user requests after Mozilla opened them up to the public!

They also track the other popular user requests, although it's a total crapshoot weather they will ever get implemented. Moneymakers (AI features, Ad telemetry, shopping Sidebar, profitable search engine partnerships) tend to get pushed to the front of the pack.

I think the bigger question is, how did shaving off 1% of Google's market share guarantee the absolute destruction of its single competitor? It's a devilishly sneaky position Google got itself into, creating mutually assured destruction between one of its many tendrils and one of its competitors.

Not like Mozilla did much better, systematically painting itself into a corner while it promised tens of millions of dollars towards AI projects over the past few years...

It's a bit unfortunate that there are options for tagging photos automatically and even on-device (Ente is a third, which will run on your local phone or any synced device, propagating data across other devices)... But nothing that runs exclusively on-device without syncing.

There's no apparent reason an app couldn't do the tagging on-device to device-exclusive photos.

Same thing here. If I don't see a source code repository, the result is an obvious no-go. Especially because I'm pretty sure there are others, similar projects that either exist in the wider closed source space.

Accountability is an important thing for these kinds of apps. Unfortunately, if you don't have a reputation online, that's about as bad as having a bad reputation. No offense intended, it's just inevitable.

The post got removed a year later, by Reddit filters?

wtf

True. I don't know much about their software, though. They've released so much stuff over a short amount of time, I'm having a hard time keeping track

Heh. OpenAI already accused them of training off their ChatGPT output. Hilarious if true (because fuck OpenAIq), but impressive if false.

It's actually easier than that - the model gets loaded onto open-source software that is usually made by American companies. It doesn't connect to stuff... because it can't. It's like an MP4 or jpeg file.

TDI (they deserved it) unless Feddit admins pop in with some extravagant response

From my own fractured understanding, this is indeed true, but the "DeepSeek" everybody is excited about, which performs as well as OpenAI's best products but faster, is a prebuilt flagship model called R1. (Benchmarks here.)

The training data will never see the light of day. It would be an archive of every ebook under the sun, every scraped website, just copyright infringement as far as the eye can see. That would be the source they would have to release to be open source, and I doubt they would.

But DeepSeek does have the code for "distilling" other companies' more complex models into something smaller and faster (and a bit worse) - but, of course, the input models are themselves not open source, because those models (like Facebook's restrictive Llama model) were also trained on stolen data. (I've downloaded a couple of these distillations just to mess around with them. It feels like having a dumber, slower ChatGPT in a terminal.)

Theoretically, you could train a model using DeepSeek's open source code and ethically sourced input data, but that would be quite the task. Most people just add an extra layer of training data and call it a day. Here's one such example (I hate it.) I can't even imagine how much data you would have to create yourself in order to train one of these things from scratch. George RR Martin himself probably couldn't train an AI to speak in a comprehensible manner by feeding it his life's work.

You (and Ed, who I very much respect) are correct: DeepSeek software is open source. But from the jump, their app and official server instance were plagued with security holes - most likely accidental ones, since they were harmful to DeepSeek itself! - and naturally their app sends data to China because China is where the app is from.

I do find it pretty funny that they were also sending data to servers in the US though. This isn't a China issue, it's a privacy/design issue, and even after they resolve the security holes they still receive your data. Same as OpenAI, same as every other AI company.

DeepSeek releases genuinely open source code for everything except for its models, which exceeds industry standards. The models can be downloaded and used without restriction, and this is considered "Open" according to the OSI, but most other people would say it's not. I don't think it's open either. But again, they have gone above and beyond industry standards, and that is why "Open"AI is angry at them.

Anonym Private Audiences is currently in closed beta, supporting early-use cases where privacy matters most.

Wow that really is private! So private we can't even see what it's up to.

Differential "privacy," based on what I've learned, seems to be a joke. The only thing it does effectively is hide the fact you've disabled it, if you choose to disable it. But if other people disable it, it becomes easier to identify you. The best move is to not participate, which should encourage other people to also not participate...

And if you're one of the unlucky few people still using it, its developers basically need to choose where on a sliding scale from "anonymous" to "useful" they want to start collecting your data. And there is every prerogative for them to push towards "useful" and away from "anonymous."

It operates separately, and is not integrated with, our flagship Firefox browser.

Doubt...

Well, they do promise it's secure! Which means... Nothing, absolutely nothing in terms of privacy.

How much useless space can a program take up before we are allowed to complain about it

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It won't hurt to try disabling both of them! Watch for non-functional notifications, make sure the most crucial apps in your arsenal work, see what happens.

You might want to avoid "total anything death" phrases

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tnd-kill-behead-roundhouse

You wouldn't even guess this would be on the Keet homepage, but the developers can't help themselves. They just see dollar signs.

As your app grows, Holepunch lets you evolve into a business without compromises. With Bitcoin Lightning and USDt micropayments built-in, it's easy to implement and use powerful paid features in apps. Peers control their own data, including how it’s bought and sold.

"Peers control their own data"

I really hate how "sovereignty" has become a dogwhistle for "sell your data to us." And they make it as easy as possible to sell yourself out, irreversibly, for mere pennies. Maybe that's the fantasy: since "code is law" in Cryptoland, get somebody to sign over their identity with code.

Either is pretty good. If you're looking for more diverse options I'd recommend 4get or a half decent Whoogle or SearxNG instance.

But you're right that you do have to trust the person or group running it, and I think Mullvad has the upper hand there. It's big enough to attract a crowd, and its caching means the results are extra generic too.

If you're looking just for Google results, Startpage is... Fine, I think.

Running a VPN makes any of these options much better.