NGram

Yup, this is open weights just like DeepSeek. Open source should mean their source data is also openly available, but we all know companies won’t do that until they stop violating copyright to train these things.

Thanks for letting us know to delete Telegram!

Is Revolt federated? I thought it was only FOSS

That’s quite compelling but I still can’t find any official confirmation of that information. The BashSquare website doesn’t mention any employees but does mention the app (and their website is on the G Play store). IMO the information you’ve provided is enough to confirm it uses some of the public boycott list, but could still be omitting things (though very unlikely; that would be a wild Israeli misinformation campaign).

The boycott website doesn’t provide barcode prefixes for companies to boycott, which means there is still some information that isn’t verifiable, and it’s one of the more crucial parts of the app’s functionality (if you’re not scanning barcodes you could just use the website). I did manage to find a way to look up barcode prefixes but there was no mention of a public API so it makes me think that either they’re part of the app (see qualms about open/verifiable dataset) or the app is using some proprietary API/scraper to get that info.

Thanks for the info!

Unfortunately that has no bearing on whether the tracking is active

I’d be inclined to agree if it wasn’t broken down into more detail than what I actually shared. The app includes ads and one of the trackers is Google AdMob, so that’s definitely not anonymous tracking. It’s also impossible* to be sure whether the other two trackers, Google Crashlytics and Firebase Analytics, are anonymous.

*without reading the source code, at least

Edit to add the report that Aurora Store used

This is the sort of app that really needs to be open source or at least open dataset. Right now there’s no way to see if their data is reliable. Aurora Store tells me that app has tracking in it (minor, but still, ewww), which is also concerning, so I’m not going to install it to find out if that information is at least provided in-app.

Oh also it’s developed by this super generic-looking company BashSquare. Overall not very confidence-inspiring.

Being against your work supporting genocide seems pretty work-related to me. At best, it’ll just destroy their company culture (not that I’m convinced it’s good to start with). Optimistically, I hope everyone who’s hard to replace quits and finds a better job somewhere that cares about more than infinite financial growth.

I’ve mirrored it to my own git server too https://git.ngram.ca/mirrors/cdrm-project I will ignore DCMAs because I (and the server) don’t live in the USA.

This sounds like open weights but not actually open source (which requires an open training set), but we can only hope they are true to their promises when they actually release it. Bonus points if they also release how much energy they wasted to train it and how much energy it wastes to run it.

Regular smart watches are such a luxury good that I’m surprised they’ve been growing up until last year. Realistically most people don’t need a smart phone that’s more than like $300 and I can’t imagine spending more than that on a smart watch which just duplicates most of the features of a smart phone (and adds a few more sensors if you’re lucky).

The rise in kids smart watches is a bit alarming to me, though. If the reason for it is truly that parents want to track their kids more, that’s really bad for the kids for two big reasons. First being that kids need to learn how to behave without their parents always watching, and second is that if the parent can see where the kid is then probably so can the company who made the smart watch. Maybe they’ll make a smartwatch which sends location data over something like the Signal protocol to mitigate 3rd party tracking, but I doubt there’s a big enough demand for that for any of the major companies to do that on their own.