In a previous job I had a "kick the server" button configured from a Termux integration that would automatically SSH in, punt some logs my way and kill some commonly misbehaving services we didn't control, and then failing that reboot. As long as my phone was on the VPN it was generally a one-click triage.
For a couple of weeks I'd automated myself out of on-call by hooking that to an automation that fired every time I got paged. I wasn't brave enough to keep it going in the long term, but it was the best two weeks of sleep I had at that place.
To me it allows me to interface with my phone as if it was an actual computer and not just a locked down entertainment autoscroller.
I take notes, do programming, remote into computers, investigate networks, download and play back music/podcasts/web radio, surf the web with w3m, run background services, pretty much anything I'd use a terminal emulator for on a laptop computer.
Eventually I expect more people to move off Discord and the like so I can easily have them in terminal chat software instead.
I take monthly notes with the excellent app Markor, keep my daily diary with the nice app Diary and share lists, notes, todos with family members via Joplin (stores data on my own WebDAV server).
So almost everything is text (with markup/markdown) and can thus easily be synced and merged between devices via rsync, ssh and perl or shell scripts.
Example: when I want to look up notes in either markor's or diary's files, that's easily accomplished with a shell script, e.g.
cd ~/storage/shared/Documents/markor
if [[ $# == 0 ]] ; then
exec zsh
else
grep -i "$@" **/*(.) | less
fi
Instead of grep I could even use agrep to handle typos. I can start a simple web server on the phone or tablet, if needed:
python -m http.server $PORT --bind 0.0.0.0
and view media files from another device (mobile, desktop, laptop, … whatever.
And there's exiftool, ffmpeg, ImageMagick, scripting languages, all in reach, wherever I go.
Some basic uses: SSH, wake-on-lan, downloading youtube videos, watching anime through ani-cli, coding, pen-testing, setup your phone as a file server through copyparty, setup a full linux desktop on your phone, etc.
For anyone who already is familiar with a linux terminal, termux is a great way to use a lot of the open-source tools you're already familiar with instead of trying to find a dozen different apps instead (that all probably show ads, spy on you, or require a subscription). There are also several apps that use it as a necessary backbone for their functionality, and require it to be installed.
I'm an enthusiastic enjoyer of the Janet programming language.[0] Sometimes people ask questions about how to do something in the Janet Zulip instance, and I like to help if I know the answer. But I'm most likely to see those messages first on my phone.
Termux makes it super easy to pull up a Janet REPL on my phone and try some things out before I reply. You could do the same with node or Python or anything else with a CLI REPL.
I use it all the time to SSH into my workstation and check on long-running tasks, code, etc.
- Using vim/neovim is way better than I'd expect on a phone keyboard, because you can move around faster with less keypresses.
- My terminal sessions are wrapped in tmux, so switching between devices is seamless (tmux panes resize without any problems to match your device dimensions/aspect ratio as soon as you interact with the terminal - nothing ever breaks). You can do the pinch gesture to change the text size, depending on what you need to see at the moment.
- Both devices are using tailscale, so all I need is cellular data connection. For low quality network coverage I use mosh, which makes the session truly unkillable and makes sure it will recover when the connection comes back, albeit I ran into some annoying limitations with text scrollback.
With the recent development of agents, it becomes even more effective, since I can just open up claude session, type the prompt and have the agent do the heavy-lifting (mostly writing large chunks of code). This greatly compresses the amount of text you'd have to type and makes phone-only coding more viable than ever.
I was away from home without my laptop one night when I got an email from a friend I was collaborating on a project with. saying he needed some data crunching done that night if possible, because he needed to send the results out. I was able to download termux, git clone our project, run it, and write a ruby script to generate the figures he needed from the raw output, all within half an hour of somewhat painfully tapping my phone screen. would not even have been ten minutes had I had a bluetooth keyboard. I cannot think of how I would have done it at all without termux.
It's my primary environment for anything code related (I'm not a developer by profession). Cheap tablet in vertical model, cheap keyboard, termux, tmux, Claude Code with instructions to offload anything more resource intensive to a 5$ VPS. I'll not claim it's perfect - occasionally Claude does try to run something that crashes termux, and the keyboard mappings are not ideal - but it's good enough that I haven't needed a laptop in over a year.
>it's good enough that I haven't needed a laptop in over a year
Not to single you out but I worry about this trend. As things stand, free (FLOSS) privacy-respecting computing remains all but impossible on the mobile platform. If now Termux is encouraging even geeks to abandon the desktop, that seems like a net negative.
In that interview between Musk and Trump, Musk was telling him that CO2 levels in the atmosphere are increasing and that that's bad. That wasn't a part of the interview that got a lot of news media coverage.
It's frustrating that "CO2 levels in the atmosphere are increasing and that that's bad" is what passes for "leftist" or partisan at all. I find the "don't look up" attitude so aggravating. The unwillingness for humans to take any responsibility for our actions is so frustrating, especially while wielding the phrase "personal responsibility" like a cudgel.
The left-wing position is, climate change is a significant problem and we should impose taxes on fossil fuels and low-MPG cars, subsidize renewables, etc.
The right-wing position is, the claimed consequences can be mitigated with sea walls etc., the economic costs of the proposed taxes and subsidies are significant and will cause greater hardship than the original problem, in the cases where that isn't true the market will adopt the alternatives anyway because they're cheaper, the US would fail to solve the problem and only be put at a competitive disadvantage if the result is to export the emissions (along with the industry) to China et al, etc.
But politics is a tug of war, so both sides stake out a more extreme version of their position with the hope of negotiations ending somewhere that moves the midpoint in the direction of their preference. So then you have Republicans denying that it's even happening and Democrats proposing to ban all cars and discourage people from having children etc.
Which in turn makes admitting that it's even happening a left-wing position.
Why would you expect them to be the same corporations? The ones funding skepticism are the fossil fuel industries. The ones lobbying for mitigations would be the likes of coastal real estate owners.
Also, what does this have to do with the nature of partisan posturing? The corporations lobbying for mitigations may or may not even be supporting the same party as the ones funding skepticism.
> The ones funding skepticism are the fossil fuel industries. The ones lobbying for mitigations would be the likes of coastal real estate owners.
As if billionaire oligarchs don't own both. ... It's not the companies f'ing around with the world as much as it's the oligarchs that own them. They don't give a damn who you voted for. If they can manipulate you to their ends, they will. Oh, and in case it wasn't obvious, the oligarchs are the ones with the money, not the <insert scapegoat culture or heritage here>.
Ignoring the obvious goalpost move from "the same corporations doing both" to "there are some oligarchs with widely diversified investments", you would then have the problem that your claim isn't true. It is actually the corporations rather than the shareholders doing this. The executives of Exxon don't want a carbon tax and perform machinations to prevent it. Some oligarch who has 4% of their holdings in energy companies is just going to have their fund manager get the inside story on whether the bill is going to pass and then shift around their holdings accordingly.
Musk has a pretty large financial investment in battery tech and electric vehicles and other "replace CO2" businesses, so I would be careful taking his words at face value to reflect his actual beliefs
So there's a video of him addressing this - he doesn't hate the tech. He mentions that it's wildly expensive for cars. But, they use it heavily for SpaceX
I think they will though, I think the enormous corpus of video data and the supercluster that powers self driving development are the machine vision analog of internet scale text data that gave rise to LLMs. We'll see the same moment for vision models that text prediction models had once the data is there, where an enormous foundation model becomes much much better, especially at zero-shot tasks.
I would guess the plan is to have the foundational machine vision tech that becomes the core of robotics sensors. Not just Optimus but every robot arm in a factory, robot mule, etc. I don't think everything will have LIDAR if its proven to be unnecessary.
I feel “require” is a bit strong. But, I think there are some interesting possibilities.
Advertising your medical practice as an “LLM-consulting” (better name needed) one in the same way there’s “Montessori” schools could be interesting.
Another option I think that would be interesting would be making the LLM patient-facing and required as one of the check-in “docs”. And then attach the results to the patient’s file for the medical professional to view.
Could also be great for pre-screening and/or suggesting a virtual visit if appropriate.
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