This reminds me of the antics of streamer DougDoug, who often uses LLM APIs to live-summarize, analyze, or interact with his (often multi-thousand-strong) Twitch chat. Most recently I saw him do a GeoGuessr stream where he had ChatGPT assume the role of a detective who must comb through the thousands of chat messages for clues about where the chat thinks the location is, then synthesizes the clamor into a final guess. Aside from constantly being trolled by people spamming nothing but "Kyoto, Japan" in chat, it occasionaly demonstrated a pretty effective incarnation of "the wisdom of the crowd" and was strikingly accurate at times.
I'd love to hear more about the hardware behind this project. I've had concepts for tech requiring a mic on me at all times for various reasons. Always tricky to have enough power in a reasonable DIY form factor.
What approach/stack would you recommend for listening to an ongoing conversation, transcribing it and passing through llm? I had some use cases in mind but I'm not very familiar with AI frameworks and tools
I totally get this. When I'm watching videos for the purpose of learning a language, I want all the actual words in the subtitles. But if I'm watching just ot enjoy, say in a language I don't care to learn, I don't mind someone creatively changing the dialog to how it probably would have been written in English. This happens with translations of novels all the time. People even seek out specific translators who they feel are especially talented at this kind of thing.
This might work but biases against languages whose package managers are not used in the rank. As well as code that is used alot but not referenced via code directly e.g. drop in dlls.
It's funny, I often hear, for the first time, about interesting projects just as they are shutting down. I wish there was some kind of pre-emptive news service that would tell me about them BEFORE they shutdown! Like maybe some kind of quantum computer internet thing that lets you time travel but just via the web browser.
This seems like a good place to Ask HN: What is the state of Android distros/forks right now anyway? What's the popular works-pretty-well-for-most-people project? What are some obscure or niche gems that could be better known?
CalyxOS is the alternative to Graphene mentioned above. CalyxOS has a bit different goals - it cares about privacy more than security and complete removes Google services instead of sandboxing them (they get replaced with MicroG which is a shim of Google services so that majority of apps continue to work). I successfully used it for a few years on my Pixel 4a. Most apps just worked including banking, but some didn't. Notably dating apps didn't work well and Uber's map didn't look right.
Graphene completely removes Google services in the default install. There is an option to install a sandboxed version of the Google play store, with enhanced privacy and security, but you don't need to install this or any other Google services if you don't want to, and I have opted to keep my Graphene installation Google-free.
There is a disagreement between the Graphene and CalyxOS community about which is more secure/private: Graphene's sandboxed Google play store, or CalyxOS's MicroG. I've read posts advocating for both sides, but I don't have the expertise to have an opinion, and I decided that I don't want either software on my phone, since I don't want to run google code or play store apps.
Although I'm not expert enough to validate the following claims, here's what I've read.
Graphene people claim that MicroG needs elevated privileges to run, privileges that Graphene doesn't grant to any app. MicroG also loads and runs Google code (in a context where that Google code would presumably have access to those elevated privileges). Graphene's version of the play store emulates some APIs without using Google code (for privacy), and sandboxes the Google code that it does run, running it with reduced privileges. This is a security first posture, keeping in mind that if you don't have security then you can lose privacy via exploits of your security holes.
CalyxOS's MicroG emulates a larger fraction of the google play APIs, making it less reliant on google code to operate, and this is the source of the claim that MicroG offers more privacy.
It's really not feasible to run most apps without Google Play APIs/MicroG. The most problematic issue is the notification API.
MicroG runs with elevated permissions to avoid being killed, and so that it can continue listening to socket events. Once an event arrives, it decodes it into a notification, packages into an RPC request, and awakes/runs the target application activity. Then it, crucially, uses the elevated privileges to override the default policy to also allow the target application to run without interruptions for 20 seconds (to process the notification).
I get my apps from F-Droid, which guarantees that the apps are open source, free of most "unwanted features" (ie, not malware), and don't depend on google play APIs. Apps written to the F-Droid standard don't use Google Play APIs for notifications. I acknowledge that most people want to run closed source apps from the google play store, but I consider those apps untrustworthy, and what I do won't work for most people.
The specific privilege that MicroG wants and that GrapheneOS doesn't allow is the ability to spoof the signatures of other apps. GrapheneOS runs the Google Play APIs in a sandbox, and this sandbox allows push notifications to work, so that's not the problem with MicroG from a GrapheneOS perspective.
I just really wish they would just allow microG, sandboxed in the same way as Google services (like DivestOS does), behind as many security warnings as they see fit.
The DivestOS project put stronger emphasis on device longevity and on libre ("free as in speech"), so their microG implementation was just a better fit for their case.
I can explain. The first link actually contains multiple comments -- the complete discussion is linked.
For a specific example within it, it does explicitly state "17.1 and higher have an unprivileged microG feature now: https://divestos.org/pages/faq#appCompatibility" in 2023. The comment was by the DivestOS project author.
The second link, also from 2023, starts with "Latest release of my DivestOS can now run microG in an unprivileged manner:" -- also by the DivestOS author.
I think that covers it for your reading of the links, no?
Anyway, the DivestOS project did have an implementation of microG, and it was sandboxed. As for my comment about projects goals, I also selected those two links because both include such commentary about DivestOS' implementation in relation to project goals and to the GrapheneOS implementation.
Thanks for clearing that up. I should've read your post more closely. To be honest I never checked the second link because I follow the Android privacy/security scene pretty closely and I was already pretty confident that if DivestOS added support for that I'd have already heard about it. My bad!
GrapheneOS on a Pixel is probably the most polished and secure experience.
I have installed it (and enabled sandboxed Google services) on my mom's phone (she's pretty non-technical) and she had no bigger problems in the last years.
I got a Pixel 8 to run GrapheneOS just last week, I installed it right after I got the phone after all the recommendations I read online.
Before that I was using crDroid on a Poco F3 (I switched because the camera was quite awful and the battery got drained rather fast), and I was expecting some of crDroid's features that were just missing. A shortcut to the flashlight via power button long press, battery charge limit/smart charging, bandwidth display on the status bar, the option to add more columns to the quick settings, just to name a few.
I ended up running crDroid on the Pixel as well, overall it's a decent experience, but not nearly as polished, it turns out I had to manually grant Google Play Services the location permission via ADB so apps would know where I am (missed a train to that one).
I'd love it if there was some ROM that combined the security and sandboxing from GrapheneOS with all the neat little features in crDroid... or an actually good Linux phone.
Graphene's team takes a fairly hostile view towards feature creep, possibly for very good reasons. They basically only add features that improve security & privacy. Everything else is stock AOSP.
My personal hill to die on is that the launcher uses lil tiny icons and text, which I find hard to read, and alternative launchers are a bit of a privacy and security disaster. They refuse to add anything to the built in launcher to adjust this, and suggest either raising all of the sizes (with accessibility, which affects all apps) or use an alternative launcher.
I miss this from my old Motorola Android phones, along with the squeeze feature on IIRC the Nexus. It would definitely be nice to have for me.
However I've found that flashlight is still relatively accessible. It's three actions - press power, drag finger down from top of screen, tap Flashlight. Not too bad, but not possible from muscle memory or with gloves on. Good for looking under the seat for your keys at a movie, bad for quick reactions.
When I'm traveling or outside at night, I tend to carry a dedicated flashlight, but I'm odd like that.
Is there still the issue of third party Android launchers being treated as second-class, not allowed access to features like gesture navigation? I haven't used one in a while.
Nope! Third party launchers work just fine in GOS and other custom roms, with gesture navigation as well. The tough thing is that animations don't work well, at least in my experience. Most of the very slick "return to home" animations break on non-stock launchers, and it introduces stuttering on returning to home unless you're using 3-button navigation.
I probably wouldn't use an alternative launcher with those caveats attached. It seems the awkward animation thing may be a consequence of an Android security feature:
> Why is the recent screen buggy?
> Unfortunately, it is because the system launcher handles the Recents screen. Therefore, if you change the default launcher, weird things can happen [...] The only way to fix this is by having a Magisk module called QuickSwitch.
Would you mind talking a little bit about the threat model that would lead you to using Graphine on a new device? IIUC, you have to unlock the bootloader to use a custom ROM, which makes the device vulnerable to physical access in cases like theft, confiscation, etc. So you have to trade that for whatever the custom ROM gives you?
Graphene only supports the pixel line, and part of the reason is because that's one of the very few (if not the only?) phones that let you relock the bootloader after installing a replacement ROM
I don't think I have some crazy threat model, I just highly dislike giving Google more access to my own phone than I have. Although at the end I gave up on that due to the lack of features in GrapheneOS, and went back to crDroid with regular Google services installed as system apps.
I've been using it for the past year and it works well.
With one exception. The couple of times I've called emergency services, they were not able to detect my location since GrapheneOS does not support the protocol for this. So, I had to waste time giving directions. It's a tradeoff for privacy vs safety.
It might be something to think about before, say, putting this on someone's phone who has a medical condition or is elderly.
Custom ROMs still exist, but have become a lot weaker in destinction than they used to.
In their "golden years" OEM Android distributions were just bad and came with inexcusable bloatware and restrictions. The main charm of Custom ROMs back then used to be that they were relatively cleaner. But now, with most Android phones coming with hardware powerful enough to make any impact of bloatware negligible, not to mention Android (and OEM iterations) itself having been converged into leaner, more efficient designs, the relative utility offered by Custom ROMs is fading fast.
The main advantages these days are reducing reliance on Google [1], supporting open-source software, and extra security/privacy protections. Probably true that the average poweruser perceives less value from them than before. Some of those advantages are more ideological and less concrete/measurable.
Compared to the Pixel stock ROM, you aren't missing out on much, and you're gaining a few non-security bonus features, like unrestricted tethering, local/offline backups, call recording, and Network permission toggle [2].
[1] I don't really like the term "de-Googling" because it paints an all-or-nothing picture, despite alternative ROMs providing the option to use Google services in a safer and fairer way (fairer as in, non-Google apps are on a level playing field when it comes to OS integration).
[2] This is most certainly intended as a security/privacy feature, but I find it useful as an adblocker as well :)
Replicant is an older still relevant project that could use some support! As I understand they have been held back by lack of modern handsets with clearly separated modem chips. It still great on Galaxy S3... The Pinephone has been identified as an appropriate dev target.
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