And Microsoft is stuffing AI straight into Windows.

Betchya dollars to fines that this will happen a lot more frequently as normal users begin to try to use Copilot.

Doesn’t exactly help when most Android phones more than a year old won’t get these patches for many months or even years – if at all.

That’s what I am saving up for, actually. The numbers of surplussed high-end compute just in my sparsely populated region could probably let me open my own datacentre.

Guardrails are only enforceable by the state. Without the state to smash capitalism and enforce guardrails against corruption and the power of greed, capitalism and authoritarianism will always step in to fill the power vacuum.

This is why communism has always failed within a few months to a few years of initiation: lack of guardrails and laws that are effectively enforced against capitalism or authoritarianism. It’s why every “communist” state in history devolved into an authoritarian, anti-communist political structure very, very quickly. Hell, even in Russia communism was effectively dead by 1918.

We are so close to having the technology to implement direct participatory democracy (A.K.A., political communism), where things like presidents and premiers and politicians in general just don’t exist, and only minor functionaries and coordinatinative councils remain to carry out the people’s directives.

What is still needed, however, is a highly educated and literate population that values education, facts, and meritocracy - thereby suffocating conservatism and strangling it to death - and for that population to have an exceedingly tiny level of economic inequality, such that the wealth is returned properly into the hands of the Working Class that created it, and most people can then acquire the mental headspace to focus on more than just daily survival needs (as in, focus on community-level or even nation-level subjects).

A strong state is not necessarily a dangerous one. What makes ours dangerous is that power is concentrated at the top, with those who have money (capitalists) calling the shots. A distributed, citizen-directed state that is utterly immune from money and power hierarchies can be built that will only ever feel oppressive to those who are inherently abusive, greedy, and malicious.

Another reason why, while AI might be a fun toy, no one who is serious about getting work done will touch it with a dirty barge pole. The gratuitous hallucinations alone ought to be a sufficient deterrent.

Das sieht wunderschön aus. Das ist eines der vielen Dinge, die ich an Deutschland vermisse. Nebel haben wir im Westen Kanadas nicht so oft.

IDK, I like growing and eating zucchini. Especially Ronde de Nice and Cocozelle. But you have to check pretty much every day during peak season, those suckers can go from hand-sized to arm sized in just a day or two.

Just don’t take away passwords + TOTP 2FA for those of us who are actually using it correctly.

The FBI is probably going nuts here because someone inadvertently archived the Epstein files and everyone at HQ is panicking. They need to purge it for the Internet before someone discovers that archived content, and so they’re using CP as an excuse.

everyone can see the AI BS right out in the open

To me it is four things in particular:

1. How AI use erodes skills in the subject AI is being used to assist in. This is a 100% occurrence, and has been demonstrated across all industries from software developers to radiologists. Most experience a 10-20% erosion in their skill set within the first 12 months of AI use, but others in the study groups have seen up to a 40% erosion in their skill sets.
2. How AI use shuts down critical thinking, and makes users more stupid. This is a 100% occurrence, and has been clearly demonstrated by MRI scans of the prefrontal cortex while users are actively using AI.
3. How AI use makes the user slower. This is the only user point that is not 100%, as only less than 2% of the most senior and skilled users show a slight increase in work completed… after more than 12 months of using AI. Projections have been made on the other 98%, and over 90% of them will never work faster with AI than without it, regardless of training or experience.
4. The gratuitous hallucinations, which are only increasing in scope and severity with every AI generation. It arises entirely from the constraints the AI are rewarded with - providing no answer is weighted just as negatively as a wrong answer - and anywhere from 60-80% of all responses are hallucinatory or incorrect in some fashion, depending on the current model.

In prior generations, any industry with such performance would be laughed clear out of the boardroom.

But because capitalism is desperately seeking a solution to what they perceive as a problem - how to obtain labour without having to pay said labour - AI is being adopted hand-over-fist.

After all, the underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.

Both platforms have problems, and some of those problems are big ones, but Google’s actions with the Play Store makes Apple’s shenanigans look like that of a choir boy or Boy Scout:

https://www.howtogeek.com/how-google-tracks-and-scans-everything-on-your-android-device/

I have no clue how this doesn’t creep everyone right TF out.

And saying “I have nothing to hide” is the answer of cultivated ignorance:

https://amnesty.ca/features/wrong-response-mass-surveillance/

This looks small enough to be installed within the wheel hub itself. Imagine a car with four motors, one inside each wheel. The entire floor pan could just be one thin battery, and everything above it could be passenger and storage space.

Treat the cause,

Right. Like obtaining a controlling interest in Apple is just so easy to achieve. Now, where did I leave my random trillions?…

On iOS you can install a system-wide DNS configuration profile for AdGuard without having to install any app.

It doesn’t deal with ads served up from the exact same API/domain as the content, but any source of ads that is drawn from a different domain can be blocked and usually is blocked.

About the only apps I still see ads in are YouTube, Pinterest, and Facebook. All apps that use third-party advertising feeds have those ads blocked.

Damn, that’s promotional material that SanDisk would probably not want to have.

Considering how I have seen some servers configured, this is a very real problem.

RustDesk all the way, baby.

All of the mainstream router manufacturers have critically insecure firmware. Nearly all routers ship with hundreds of vulnerabilities, and sometimes even zero-days, even when initially released.

It’s why it is so important to find and acquire routers that are capable of being re-flashed with third-party firmware such as DD-WRT or OpenWRT.

Check with the router database of each project to see if what you currently own is eligible. DD-WRT enjoys wider support but is more limited in functionality. OpenWRT is more powerful but needs more capable hardware to run on.

“If you think you can intimidate us, tough luck. We will never let our beautiful country be taken away by extremist troublemakers,” the party’s leader, Rob Jette, wrote on X.

Oh, the irony.

Aside from the Rotary Un-Phone, there are pretty much no dumb phones anymore. Those that market themselves as dumb are just reskinned full-fat platforms.

Even almost all flip phones are smart phones with a dumb skin, as they run either Android or KaiOS.

The main reason why I would switch is for device security - a true dumb phone OS that operates purely out of the ROM and has no ability to install anything that could survive a reboot.

And for something that primitive, it would be a flip phone on par with the Motorola StarTac. Simple black-on-green screen, low-res display, with a calendar and address book as the only non-phone, non-SMS functionality.

Looks like the future country of Cascadia is finally starting to make some moves.