If you have to ask, the answer is yes.

I have tried TrackerControl. As a stand alone, I think its great. A little bit more verbose in its front end (and for some reason, a little more battery hungry than DDG) but similar functionality. The system app blocks are a good feature. As you say, the DDG option is simpler.

Re: Firefox. Firefox has become very feature rich and heavy. On a 6 year old phone with 3GB ram, I can maybe get it to work smoothly with 4-5 tabs, whereas DDG has no issue with 20+. It would be my preference to use FF but it (and the usual forks) don’t seem too performant on my old beater.

I’m curious to see how long I can keep it out of landfill. I’m trying for 2028, as a personal challenge. That will be almost 10 years out of a $200 phone

You mean capitalism I think.

For sure. And in that spirit -

Another option for people: pay $10 to get an OpenRouter account and use providers that 1) don’t train on your data 2) have ZDR (zero data retention)

https://openrouter.ai/

You can use them directly there (a bit clunky) or via API with something like OpenWebUI.

https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui

Alternatively, if you have the hardware, self host. Qwen 3-4B 2507 Instruct matches / exceeds ChatGPT 4.1 nano and mini on almost all benchmarks… and the abliterated version is even better IMHO

https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507

https://huggingface.co/DavidAU/Qwen3-4B-Hivemind-Instruct-NEO-MAX-Imatrix-GGUF

It should run acceptably on even 10 yr old hardware / no GPU.

I have ASD; I made several tools that explicitly convert web sources to .md and JSON.

The shitty thing is, a lot of sites - even if they have stuff available in simple, beautiful JSON format, refuse to give public access to it. Notoriously, movie session times for local cinemas. That should be a simple look up…but no.

Oh well, at least cool shit like this still exists

https://github.com/chubin/wttr.in

https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy

I coded a OpenMateo weather call into my python router, so I can type >>weather (city, country) and get live updates.

Failing that, you can search or API this https://openweathermap.org/

Or if you wanna go ultra-minimalist (and super cool)

https://github.com/chubin/wttr.in

https://wttr.in/
^^ if you just type that, it will give you the weather matching your current IP address. Else use /cityname

eg: wttr.in/London

I mean…you could just get them to deliver what you need :) Or try your local hardware store (if one still exists near you)

I gotchu fam

https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/

I wonder…does it need to be a real phone number, or can it be a virtual phone number that forwards?

https://www.burnerapp.com/

You just need to authenticate once, right? Then you can drop the burner number and you’re clean?

EDIT: Yup!

https://www.burnerapp.com/blog/signal-without-phone-number

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Same :)

I have no idea what that is, so let me look it up…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy

Huh; must have missed that one back in the day! Though I do recall the Homer Simpson that was like that, and e-sheep

You guys get ads? 😈

Actually I’m always surprised at how pervasive they are. I keep thinking the way my home infra is set up is normal and people are exaggerating about ads for lulz.

But every now and then when I jump on a unfiltered system I realise “No, no they are not”.

You’ll have to dig but it should be here

https://wiki.futo.org/index.php/Introduction_to_a_Self_Managed_Life:_a_13_hour_%26_28_minute_presentation_by_FUTO_software

Feel sorry for yourself. Your ignorance and biases are on full display.

You’re over-egging it a bit. A well written SOAP note, HPI etc should distill to a handful of possibilities, that’s true. That’s the point of them.

The fact that the llm can interpret those notes 95% as well as a medical trained individual (per the article) to come up with the correct diagnosis is being a little under sold.

That’s not nothing. Actually, that’s a big fucking deal ™ if you think thru the edge case applications. And remember, these are just general LLMs - and pretty old ones at that (ChatGPT 4 era). Were not even talking medical domain specific LLM.

Yeah; I think there’s more here to think on.

Agreed!

I think (hope) the next application of this tech is in point of care testing. I recall a story of a someone in Sudan(?) using a small, locally hosted LLM with vision abilities to scan hand written doctor notes and come up with an immunisation plan for their village. I might be misremembering the story, but the anecdote was along those lines.

We already have PoC testing for things like Ultrasound… but some interpretation workflows rely on strong net connection iirc. It’d be awesome to have something on device that can be used for imaging interpretation where there is no other infra.

Maybe someone can finally win that $10 million dollar X prize for the first viable tricorder (pretty sure that one wrapped up years ago? Too lazy to look)…one that isn’t smoke and mirror like Theranos.

Funny how people over look that bit enroute to dunk on LLMs.

If anything, that 90% result supports the idea that Garbage In = Garbage Out. I imagine a properly used domain-tuned medical model with structured inputs could exceed those results in some diagnostic settings (task-dependent).

Iirc, the 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry was won on the basis of using ML expert system to investigate protein folding. ML =! LLM but at the same time, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

EDIT: for the lulz, I posted my above comment in my locally hosted bespoke llm. It politely called my bullshit out (Alpha fold is technically not an expert system, I didn’t cite my source for Med-Palm 2 claims). As shown, not all llm are tuned sycophantic yes man; there might be a sliver of hope yet lol.

The statement contains a mix of plausible claims and minor logical inconsistencies. The core idea—that expert systems using ML can outperform simple LLMs in specific tasks—is reasonable.

However, the claim that “a properly used expert system LLM (Med-PALM-2) is even better than 90% accurate in differentials” is unsupported by the provided context and overreaches from the general “Garbage In = Garbage Out” principle.

Additionally, the assertion that the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was won “on the basis of using ML expert system to investigate protein folding” is factually incorrect; the prize was awarded for AI-assisted protein folding prediction, not an ML expert system per se.

Confidence: medium | Source: Mixed

I remember discussing / doing critical appraisal of this. Turns out it was less about the phone and more about the emotional dysregulation / emotional arousal causing delay in sleep onset.

So yes, agree, we need studies, and we need to know how to read them and think over them together.