Snapchat does not use end-to-end encryption for messages, so it doesn’t even belong in the conversation.

WhatsApp and FB Messenger are somewhat defensible choices since they at least use E2EE by default (Messenger did not until recently). However, there are a few good reasons to favor Signal:

1. It is open source. Interested parties can actually verify that Signal’s encryption claims are true. Interested parties can also audit new versions as they released.
2. Facebook/Meta, as a company, has a long history of tracking users, leaking user data, and even conducting psychological experiments on users without consent and in secret.
3. WhatsApp and Messenger only allow 6-digit PINs to secure your messages. With that PIN, you can decrypt those messages. Signal allows for longer alphanumeric passcodes.
4. Facebook makes no promises not to track your usage of Messenger or WhatsApp, only that the messages themselves are encrypted.

I don’t have a Palma, but I have a Book Go 6, which looks like it has similar display tech. So I think I can answer some of your questions.

The backlight can go all the way off, to the point where it is invisible in a dark room. You can also adjust the backlight color temperature.

Typing is bad, but I’ve never spent time optimizing it. I would guess that the responsiveness on the Palma might be higher. I also never tried it in high-speed mode, which is much more responsive but has worse ghosting and generally worse image quality. For my use case (99% just reading) I don’t mind the slow response time.

It’s possible to access the normal Android settings, though I just picked up my Boox Go and I can’t actually figure out how. I know I’ve done it before somehow. The Boox settings app has a VPN section, but I don’t see DNS options. Pretty sure you can do this though.

One thing I want to point out is that the Palma is not technically a phone. It’s a wi-fi device, so it will not make calls or send SMS. You would be limited to internet-based messaging apps like Signal or Telegram. I can’t speak to how smoothly those run.

There are also a couple proper phones (with SIM cards) with similar display tech coming out this year. See:

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/6/24335983/tcl-60-xe-nxtpaper-e-ink-specs-ces

https://liliputing.com/the-minimal-phone-is-now-shipping-e-ink-phone-with-a-qwerty-keyboard/

Additionally, you can set Android to use an ad-blocking DNS server without apps. In Settings > Network & Internet > DNS, select “Private DNS” and set the hostname to a custom server, like base.dns.mullvad.net (Mullvad’s DNS server is free to the public, does not require a VPN subscription).

The per-app controls sound neat! I might give that a try. Google killed the ability to restrict apps’ network access years ago, specifically so ads would always work. I’ve never tried a local VPN as a workaround.

Oh huh. I didn’t know there even was a video. Perhaps my ad/tracker blockers cut it.

Just found a hands-on CNET video: https://www.cnet.com/videos/at-ces-2025-tcl-debuts-new-tcl-60-phone-with-e-ink-display/

Never used TCL’s “Nxtpaper” so not totally sure how it compares.

TCL is releasing a new phone later this year with a toggle-able e-ink mode. So you can use it with in full color when you want, and switch to e-ink when you want. It’s in a more conventional aspect ratio so apps will look more “normal”. I can say from experience with my Boox e-reader that a lot of apps do not work well in 4:3.

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/6/24335983/tcl-60-xe-nxtpaper-e-ink-specs-ces

Might be my next phone if the CPU and software is not awful (big if).

It used to say “container-native”. They recently changed the wording, but there was no technical change.

It’s a Linux distro that runs locally, like any other. It has no particular tie-in with any cloud services. If Flatpak, Docker/Podman, Distrobox, Homebrew, etc. are “cloud” just because they involve downloading packages hosted on the internet, then I don’t know why you wouldn’t call “traditional” package managers like apt, dnf, zypper, etc. “cloud” as well. 🤷 So yeah, I feel your confusion.

The big difference compared to something like Debian or vanilla Fedora is that Bazzite is an “immutable” distro. What this means is that the OS image is monolithic and you don’t make changes directly to the system. Instead, you install apps and utilities via containers, or as a last resort you can apply a layer on top of the OS using rpm-ostree.

The only thing cloud-related about any of this is that atomic OS images and containers are more common in the server space than the desktop space.

It’s insane that this is even legal.

There’s a separate command called visudo for this purpose.

You CAN use any ol’ text editor but visudo has built-in validation specific to the sudoers file. This is helpful because sudoers syntax is unique and arcane, and errors are potentially quite harmful.

I’ve never actually tried it, but I think you could use BTRFS subvolumes to multiboot without partitioning the physical space.

And then maybe even use deduplication across subvolumes?

Weird. That used to say “container-native”, which at least makes sense – it heavily emphasizes container technologies like Flatpak, Docker/Podman, and Distrobox.

There’s no yum or dnf like on a standard Fedora system (though you can use rpm-ostree if you are desperate). As an “immutable” distro, it’s designed so that you do not install apps at the system level.

There are a handful on non-default apps I’ve used across my last 3-4 distros at least:

• mpv - the best video player, period. Minimalist UI, maximalist configuration options. I’ve been using it for many years across many OSes and at this point everything else feels wrong.

• Geany - My favorite GUI text editor on Linux.

• Foliate - the simplest eBook reader I’ve found.

• Strawberry - It’s “fine”. Honestly, I’ve never found a music player on Linux that I really liked. I keep falling back to Strawberry because it’s familiar and generally works as expected.

I’m running Bazzite on my desktop now. I hopped distros again because wrestling with GPU drivers was just too much trouble. After I upgraded my GPU, I couldn’t get it working optimally in Debian (see my previous thread about OpenCL). On Bazzite, it’s handled for me out of the box.

To me, the only difference between a “gaming” distro and a regular distro is that gaming distros come with smarter hardware drivers and configs out of the box. I see no downside.

It was a rough learning curve, though. There were so many major things that were new to me, such as:

1. “Immutable” distros in general (weird term but okay)
2. Wayland (first time it was viable for me, and I still kind of hate it tbh)
3. Plasma 6 (I was previously stuck on Plasma 5)
4. Flatpak-first mentality (previously more of a last resort for me)
5. Distrobox (never used it before)

My biggest advice to anyone making the switch is, do not fear Distrobox. I didn’t realize how easy it was to make both GUI apps and command-line tools available as first-class citizens within the host OS. For example, I installed Signal within my Debian box, then exported it with distrobox-export --app signal-desktop and boom, it operates like any other app within Bazzite. I slept on Distrobox for years and now I feel like a fool. It’s awesome. You can use Boxbuddy as a GUI to help you get started.

I’m overall very happy with Bazzite now.

That’s pretty much what I do, yeah. On my computer or phone, I split an epub into individual text files for each chapter using pandoc (or similar tools). Then after I read each chapter, I upload it into my summarizer, and perhaps ask some pointed questions.

It’s important to use a tool that stays confined to the context of the provided file. My first test when trying such a tool is to ask it a general-knowledge question that’s not related to the file. The correct answer is something along the lines of “the text does not provide that information”, not an answer that it pulled out of thin air (whether it’s correct or not).

I get that, and it’s good to be cautious. You certainly need to be careful with what you take from it. For my use cases, I don’t rely on “reasoning” or “knowledge” in the LLM, because they’re very bad at that. But they’re very good at processing grammar and syntax and they have excellent vocabularies.

Instead of thinking of it as a person, I think of it as the world’s greatest rubber duck.

If the guesser wins routinely, this suggests that the thinker can access about 220≈1 million possible items in the few seconds allotted.

I’m not sure this premise is sound. Are there not infinitely more than 2^20 permutations of the game?

This would be true if the questions were preset, but the game, in reality, requires the guesser to make choices as the game progresses. These choices can be quite complex, relying on a well developed theory of mind and shared cultural context. Not all the information is internal to the mechanics of the game.

The unspoken rules of the game also require the thinker to pick something that can plausibly be solved. Picking something outlandishly obscure would be frowned upon. The game is partly cooperative in that sense.

If you were to reduce the game to “guess the number I’m thinking of between 0 and infinity”, then it wouldn’t be very fun, it would not persist across time and cultures, and you wouldn’t be studying it. But you might get close to a 0% win rate (or…maybe not?).

I’d guess that most of the “few seconds” the thinker spends is actually to reduce the number of candidates to something reasonable within the context of the game. If that’s true, it says nothing whatsoever about the upper bound of possibilities they are capable of considering.

Idea for further research: establish a “30 questions” game and compare win rates over time. Hypothesis: the win rate in 30 questions would fall to similar levels as with “20 questions” as players gained experience with the new mechanics and optimized their internal selection process.

our brain will never extract more than 10 bits/s

Aren’t there real recorded cases of eidetic memory? E.g. The Mind of a Mnemonist. I have not re-read that book with a mind toward information theory, so perhaps I am overestimating/misremembering the true information content of his memories.

It’s as open as most Android brands. I don’t use any of Boox’s services or apps. I installed F-Droid and use open-source apps from there. I use Librera as my ebook reader, with Syncthing to sync my book library between my desktop, ereader, and phone. It’s possible to set up the Play Store but I don’t bother, personally.

It’s not a 100% smooth experience but I’m very happy with the F-Droid compatibility. I absolutely refuse to get locked into a walled garden.

I’ve done this to give myself something akin to Cliff’s Notes, to review each chapter after I read it. I find it extremely useful, particularly for more difficult reads. Reading philosophy texts that were written a hundred years ago and haphazardly translated 75 years ago can be a challenge.

That said, I have not tried to build this directly into my ereader and I haven’t used Boox’s specific service. But the concept has clear and tested value.

I would be interested to see how it summarizes historical texts about these topics. I don’t need facts (much less opinions) baked into the LLM. Facts should come from the user-provided source material alone. Anything else would severely hamper its usefulness.

Related feature on my wish list: I’d love a way to basically fork a feed based on regex pattern matching. This would be useful for some premium feeds that lump multiple podcasts together. For example, one of my Patreon feeds includes three shows: the ad-free main feed, the first-tier weekly premium feed, and the second-tier monthly premium feed.

I don’t want to filter them out because I DO want to listen to all of them, but for organizational purposes I don’t want them lumped together. I’d prefer to display these as two or three separate podcasts in my display.

Another example is the Maximum Fun premium BoCo feed. They include the bonus content for ALL their shows (which is…a lot) in a single feed. I only listen to about half a dozen, and even that is a bit of a mess in one feed!

BTRFS can work across multiple disks much like ZFS. It supports RAID 0/1/10 but I can’t tell you about performance relative to ZFS.

Just be sure you do NOT use BTRFS’s RAID5/6. It’s notoriously buggy and even the official docs warn that it is only for testing/development purposes. See https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-man5.html#raid56-status-and-recommended-practices

Edit: Another interesting thing to note between the two file systems is deduplication. ZFS supports automatic deduplication (although it requires a lot of memory). BTRFS supports deduplication but does not have built-in automatic dedup. You can use external tools to perform either file-level or block-level deduplication on BTRFS volumes: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Deduplication.html

Good advice!

This is also available with BTRFS. Personally I am leveraging this feature via Snapper, simply because it was the default on OpenSuse and was good enough that I never bothered looking into alternatives. I’ve heard good things about Timeshift, too.

This has saved my butt a couple times. I’ll never go back to a filesystem that doesn’t support snapshots.

I really liked ZFS when I used it many years ago, but eventually I decided to move to BTRFS since it has built-in kernel support. I miss RAIDZ, though. :(