2025

The (not so) futuristic technology of “Lazarus”

I’m currently watching an anime that the streaming service Max kind of threw in my face, Lazarus. The animation is stunning, and the soundtrack is awesome. It really reminds me of Cowboy Bebop, and not by coincidence: both series, separated by nearly 30 years, are directed by Shinichirō Watanabe.

The story of Lazarus takes place in 2052. There are several curious nitpicks, such as the nationality of the protagonist, our Brazilian Axel Gilberto. (A risky bet by the writers, suggesting that by ~2030 “Axel” will took over Enzo and Gael as popular foreigner boy names for newborns in Brazil.)

Right at the beginning of the fifth episode, “Pretty Vacant,” two technological details caught my attention.

The first was that Delta Medical, the company responsible for manufacturing the drug that drives the story, published the test results of the medication encoded in audio files on SoundCloud. Did you remember that SoundCloud still exists? I could bet that by 2052, SoundCloud will just be a footnote in some Wikipedia entry.

(By the way, someone noticed that in February 2024, SoundCloud changed its terms of use to give itself the right to use user content to train AIs. The future is now, and it’s dystopian.)

The other detail, which is kinda bad news, is that we will still be using phones, and the ones in the future will also have glass screens prone to breaking. Early in the fifth episode, the CEO of Delta Medical, Dr. Ahmed Rahman, throws his phone against the wall and *crack*, another shattered screen.

A murky future for Corning and a bright one for the case and screen protector industry — which products, apparently, Dr. Rahman wasn’t using. (My pet conspiracy theory involves manufacturers of phone cases and screen protectors, but that’s another story.)

What’s on your desk, Danilo?

Hello everyone! My name is Danilo, I’m 37 years old, and I live in Jaboticabal (SP). I work as a systems analyst for a consulting firm that partners with Totvs, focusing on the Protheus ERP. Currently, I work 100% from home, and as someone with Tourette syndrome, the home office setup has been incredibly beneficial for me.

(Ignore the model in the photo…)

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Maestral: An alternative app for syncing files with Dropbox

Maestral logo: white outline of a wing against a dark green background.

Remember when Dropbox was a small, snap app only used to sync and store files in the cloud? Good times… Today, it’s a heavy monster packed with corporate features. Perhaps it was necessary, for business reasons, to transform it into this… thing, but that doesn’t comfort those who just want to sync files and keep them in the cloud.

Maestral is an alternative client for Dropbox, open-source, written in Python, and that promises to be lightweight. According to the official website, “it provides powerful command line tools, supports gitignore patterns to exclude local files from syncing and allows syncing multiple Dropbox accounts.” Sounds promising!

For those in the know, in addition to the command line, Maestral offers apps with native GUI (Cocoa on macOS, Qt on Linux). This allowed its developers to create an app that is about 90% smaller than the official one and demands, on average, 80% less device memory. (However, this last figure can vary significantly depending on the size of your Dropbox folder.)

Two important warnings for anyone considering giving Maestral a try:

  • Advanced Dropbox features — namely: Paper, team management, and shared folder/directory settings — are not supported.
  • Maestral uses the public Dropbox API, which does not support partial file transfers (“binary diff”). This results in a more intensive data usage.

And, of course, keep in mind that it’s an unofficial app.

macOS users can download an app bundle that includes the Maestral graphical user interface (GUI). For Linux, there are two less user-friendly options: via PyPI (GUI optional) and Docker image (command line only). All the information can be found on this page.

In the lawsuit where the US Justice is deciding which “remedy” to give to Alphabet, following its conviction for monopolizing the search engine market, Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice-president of services, said that in April, the volume of searches made via Safari shrank for the first time in history — that is, in almost two decades.

Eddy attributes the decline to the rise of generative AI assistants that deliver pre-digested search results, such as Perplexity (with whom Apple is reportedly in talks), ChatGPT, and Claude.

Alphabet (Google) shares took a 7.5% dive following the Apple executive’s statement, as reported by Bloomberg. The company released a statement disputing the information, saying that “we continue to see overall query growth in Search. That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platform”

Who to believe? I don’t know, but if there were doubts that a seismic shift is underway, data like this helps dispel them.

Eddy Cue also said that Apple is considering changing Safari so that the browser can incorporate AI assistants, and that he has lost sleep over the possibility of losing the annual USD 20 billion that Google pays as a “sweetener” to be Safari’s default search engine. I almost feel sorry for him.

Where are the small phones?

Bruno from Florianópolis (SC) asked:

Ghedin, do you think small phones that can be used comfortably with one hand have become a niche thing? Have major companies dropped making small phones, and will phones only continue to grow in size or stabilize at current sizes?

Great question! It’s almost a meme that, week in and week out, someone asks in our (Portuguese-written) discussion board if there are any small phones being sold. On my end, a recent and unpleasant experience with a gigantic phone brought my attention back to this gap in the market.

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The creator of cURL, Daniel Stenberg, has raised barriers against the avalanche of security reports produced by or with the help of generative artificial intelligence. In addition to the volume, he points out that they are often useless: “We have yet to see a single valid security report made with the help of AI.”

Most of the inappropriate uses of AI were already possible before. What changes with AI is the scale.

As soon as you open the site allow.webcam, it requests permission from your…

As soon as you open the site allow.webcam, it requests permission from your browser to access your webcam. If you grant it, the site takes a picture of you and displays the pictures of all the other people who have also allowed themselves to be photographed. If you decline, you’ll be left with a black screen.

No Instagram, no privacy

As we become promoters of our own lives in the digital realm, new social dilemmas emerge. (At this point, they may not be so new, but they are still challenging to navigate.)

In this solitary post (the first and only one on the blog), the author reflects on the situation where someone posts photos of themselves on Instagram, and a third party, known to both, becomes aware of their gathering:

Over the past few months, it has struck me multiple times how people know more about my life than I tell them or likely hear from others. Like: where we travelled last weekend and with whom. How can they know? Instagram. A post from someone else on that trip about that trip. Of course. You don’t have to be on Instagram, to be on instagram.

How do you meet the expectations of such a diverse audience, even if it consists of people from your own circle? Travel photos or pictures from a party are interpreted differently by your family, friends, coworkers, and boss.

I believe there are two paths: ignore the consequences (sociopathy?) or “pasteurize” the content in an attempt to please everyone (impossible, but you can get close).

And even then, you can’t escape other dilemmas:

Imagine a friend you were on a weekend trip with. This friend talks with another common friend. This common friend could have equally well been on that weekend trip because you like him or her but, due to circumstances, as is life, you did not invite him. You probably would feel uncomfortable with that first friend talking about that trip as if it was the most awesome trip ever, that everyone had non-stop fun and now everyone who was on that trip are best friends for life.

Yet this is the kind of impression an Instagram post or story typically evokes. It’s probably the content most of the first friends’ followers love to see. Except for maybe the few people who wonder why you didn’t ask them to join the trip.

They proposes, as a solution, a new etiquette that disapproves of posting about social gatherings beyond those involved. Instead of sharing a story for all followers on Instagram, one could restrict it to “close friends” or even share it in a group on WhatsApp/Signal.

No Instagram, no privacy
blog.wouterjanleys.com

Dark Visitors got a new free plan

Dark Visitors, a service for monitoring and blocking bots from artificial intelligence companies, has revamped its plans and now offers a very generous free tier, with a cap of 1 million “events.”

You can use the free mode indefinitely or register your credit card to access paid features without charge, as long as your site does not exceed the 1 million events limit. After that, the cost is USD 0.00005 per event.

Last year I had canceled my use of Dark Visitors here when the trial period expired. Now, I’ve reactivated it. It’s almost therapeutic to see the traffic from non-humans around here.

The age of the double sell-out

Behavioral changes have been happening at such a rapid pace that patterns and assumptions that were common one or two decades ago completely elude me. W. David Marx’s article reminded me of one of them: the aversion to the mainstream, or the idea of not being a “sellout.”

In the last three decades, youth culture has moved from a deep suspicion of commerce to a passionate defense of anti-anti-commerce to an entire generation of “creatives” who leverage the commercial market… to do even more commerce

At what point did becoming a salesperson on Instagram (aka an influencer) become a life goal, a childhood dream? Or working proudly for large corporations? When did the all-consuming nature of mass-produced, canned culture (the “franchises”) take over the imagination of the masses?

The 20th century taboo against selling out was, at its heart, a communal norm to reward young artists who focused on craft and punish those who appropriated art and subculture for empty profiteering. Now the culture is most exemplified by people whose entire end goal appears to be empty profiteering.

Any hypothesis?

The age of the double sell-out (em inglês)
culture.ghost.io

End of 10: Replace Windows 10 with a Linux distro

Support for Windows 10 will end on October 14th, 2025, just a few months away. A group involved with Linux distros has launched the website End of 10 to assist those who want to switch from Windows to Linux, instead of following Microsoft’s guidance to discard a functional computer and buy a new one with Windows 11. End of 10 gathers instructions and information about locations and events where volunteers install a Linux distro on computers for those who are not familiar with the process.

End of 10
Switch from Windows 10 to Linux

Another way to be part of the fediverse/ActivityPub

I’ve been thinking of ActivityPub more as an extra layer for existing websites to become “social,” eliminating the middleman (like Twitter, for example), rather than a direct replacement for social networks like Twitter. Instead of posting on a blog and then writing a tweet (to follow the example) announcing the blog post, the blog post itself is published directly to the timelines of those who follow you on Twitter. This is impossible on Twitter/X, but perfectly feasible with ActivityPub.

The idea of larger instances than just a handful of people who know each other, where you adhere to the admins’ decisions (and emotions), tends to lead to drama. Just look at the Fosstodon case, or the various conflicts led by Mastodon.art (tell me about a troublemaking crowd!) or among Brazilian instances since… forever?

What would such an alternative approach look like, where ActivityPub is “sprinkled” over an existing site instead of being a destination in itself?

You don’t have to look far for an example, because you’re in one. With the awesome WordPress plugin, this Manual do Usuário has become its own instance, findable in the fediverse at @feed@manualdousuario.net. Posts and podcasts are propagated through the fediverse, and comments made there appear here. And perhaps most importantly: zero #fedidrama.

And it goes further. It’s possible to create user profiles within WordPress using the ActivityPub plugin. This feature is still experimental and relies on additional plugins, but it already works — and there are people using it. Support for migrating profiles from Mastodon started to be implemented in version 5.3.0. In the future, who knows, I might migrate my personal profile over here…?

Tiny Emulators brings together a handful of emulators for classic operating systems and games

Screenshot of several screens of emulators from old operating systems.

Tiny Emulators brings together a handful of emulators for classic operating systems and games, running directly in your browser. To play the games, use the arrow keys and the spacebar. Some OSs have special commands, which are listed here. I just spent a good few minutes playing the original Prince of Persia.

“Capitão Astúcia” takes an alternative path in filmmaking: straight to YouTube, free of charge

The first time I spoke with Filipe Gontijo was in 2015. He had just directed a virtual reality film, at a momento when big techs were promising that the future of entertainment lay in virtual reality packaged in a piece of cardboard with a phone stuffed inside.

Fast forward to 2025, and this time, still in the same email conversation, Filipe is innovating behind the scenes. His first feature film, Capitão Astúcia, was released directly on YouTube, for free, without ads. The business model? Anyone who enjoys the film can contribute with a Pix donation of any amount. And by “Pix” I mean the Brazilian instant money transfer systems.

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Firefox logo. Silhouette of a red panda wrapped in a blue circle.

Firefox 138, released this Tuesday (29th), introduces the long-awaited profile manager. The official documentation explains that “creating multiple profiles allows you to keep separate browsing data, themes or settings for different purposes, such as work and personal use.”

There are also new contrast options focused on accessibility, and in Windows 11, context menus now have that translucent (“acrylic”) look that is standard in the OS. Release notes and download.