An emotionally charged rant (what other kind is there?) is a projection. It can be good when you're overwhelmed and need to get through a crisis, but it's bad long term. That's how I see it, at least.
A quick search resulted in this: "Android malware saw a 67% increase in 2025, with over 40 million downloads of malicious apps targeting banking and stealing data, frequently hiding in "Tools" and utility apps on the Google Play Store."
So no, I don't think that's a small amount of risk, even if there's billions of Android users in the wild.
Especially considering how much money can be stolen from peoples bank accounts
Much of this could be solved if the base system simply came with basic utilities.
Windows XP had an audio recording app and most people didn't even have microphones. Now we have smartphones that don't have a way to record audio as a file or even write text notes built into the system, forcing you to use third-party tools that can be maliscious.
Default installed apps are often carrier dependent.
It is true that at certain points I have bought brand new Android phones that did not come with such basic utilities, including utilities that bargain priced feature phones were expected to have, like a sound recorder.
IIRC, the Droid Turbo 2 I got in 2016ish came with Android 2 and did not come with a sound recording app stock. It also did not have a file browser stock. This was a Flagship product. The flashlight was not included for long enough for the top ten app, a flashlight app, to be on a significant quantity of android phones and end up being a data harvesting operation.
If you're willing to go through all this trouble, why not just become politically active? Don't underestimate what a motivated individual can do. All these public figures (or institutions) swaying the country back and forth are only people too.
I was politically active in the USA, in the only way I believe can make any meaningful change: direct action, mutual aid.
The American political system is captured by two neoliberal (one now post liberal, fascist) parties, and you have to sell your soul to "accomplish" anything, only to watch it yet ratcheted away by your own party, or obliterated by the fascists.
The casualty-to-death ratio in Ukraine is surprising for modern times, especially on the Russian side. Counting civilians, Ukrainians, Russians, I can see the death count being close to 1M. Partisan sources already put Russian combat losses at around 1.2M personnel. Ukrainian losses might be more than half what Russian losses are. The 1M deaths estimate doesn't seem outlandish.
But russia-ukraine is also a much more contained war between 2 parties that will likely end in a stalemate.
The middle east is a much more tangled web of alliances and hatreds, i think the iranian regime falling would have much more harder to predict second order geopolitical effects.
Ukraine will never de jure give up those territories and majority of nations will never recognize those as part of Russia. And it’s 20%, not 30%. Pre full scale war it was 7%, now it is 19%, so during the five years they’ve captured 12% of Ukraine's territory.
Russian goals were:
- Quick decapitation - fail
- Change of government - fail
- Prove that majority of Ukrainians are phone Russians and the moment greater Russia comes everyone will see that Ukraine is not a real state - fail
- Make second Belarus out of Ukraine - fail
- Stop NATO enlargement, Finland and Sweden joined NATO essentially doubling border with NATO - fail
- Dissuade Ukraine from joining EU and make it pro Russian first - fail
- Prove that Russia is a great military power on par with US that can topple regimes at will - fail
- Make Russia strategically independent- fail, Russia is now completely dependent on China
- Destabilize EU - fail, Europe is united like never under US/Russia/China threat
This war will enter history as one of the worst blunders.
I hope you're joking. This is such "Ukrainians are just Russians by a different name" logic. China, Belarus, and North Korea are deep in this conflict, so are all the European countries. There's no stalemate end to this war, only a temporary cease fire or the collapse of Russia.
I'd love to see text-only spatial reasoning. As in, the LLM is presented some kind of textual projection of what's happening in 2d/3d space and makes decisions about what to do in that space based on that. It kind of works when a writer is describing something in a book, for example, but not sure how that could generalize.
believe it or not my 8th grade son was given a US History homework assignment to play Oregon Trail. I was very amused watching him "do his homework". I wonder how an LLM would fare in that game since it's mostly a text choose-your-adventure type interface.
> partial observability, long-term planning, resource management, and real-time adaptation
Note, this project doesn't have that best I can tell? Its two static AI scripts having a go. LLMs generate the scripts and they are aware of past "results", but I'm not sure what that means.
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