The article is about a highly accurate (orders of magnitude) INS system.

We can make energy from renewable sources.

Fresh drinking water is finite, especially in the desert.

Politicians are cheap

Doesn’t matter, their audience isn’t intetested in accuracy they only want more things to feel outraged about

It would only take one regulation to fix that:

Datacenters that use liquid cooling must use closed loop systems.

The reason they dont, and why they setup in the desert, is because water is incredibly cheap and energy to cool a closed loop system is expensive. So they use evaporative open loop systems.

I can only save myself.

I have successfully converted a friend to Linux though. I walked him through an Arch install becacause it’s easier to teach about the boot process when you’re required to manually install everything.

He quickly discovered EndeavourOS, apparently manual Arch installs are not to his taste…

… and don’t get me started on the “birds”

I setup a Windows 11 laptop for a friend yesterday, I cannot believe the amount of ads built into the new user experience which are disguised as installation options.

I had to find the tiny, low contrast skip button to avoid signing up for more cloud storage, a Copilot subscription, and an Office365 subscription before I was even able to see the desktop.

The entire left side of the start bar seens to be a news feed which shows ads, opening an Office app requires closing a Copilot ad unless you disable it (individually for every application), it’s impossible to create a local user account, it looks like the user folder defaults to their cloud storage so just saving things into your document folder will eventually result in scary “You’re almost out of space, buy more here!” ads disguised as system promots, and your bitlocker recovery key is saved in your Microsoft account.

That’s just what I noticed in the first 20 minutes.

I’m so glad I ejected from that dumpster fire of an OS.

No, but it can function as an OS, a spyware library and a targeted advertising vector.

I can blame the user for believing the marketing over their direct experiences.

If you use these tools for any amount of time it’s easy to see that there are some tasks they’re bad at and some that they are good at. You can learn how big of a project they can handle and when you need to break it up into smaller pieces.

I can’t imagine any sane person who lives their life guided by marketing hype instead of direct knowledge and experience.

It’s a lot of people not understanding the kinds of things it can do vs the things it can’t do.

It was like when people tried to search early Google by typing plain language queries (“What is the best restaurant in town?”) and getting bad results. The search engine had limited capabilities and understanding language wasn’t one of them.

If you ask a LLM to write a function to print the sum of two numbers, it can do that with a high success rate. If you ask it to create a new operating system, it will produce hilariously bad results.

This isn’t a good argument.

If law enforcement had access to all of your social media, e-mails and live video feeds from inside your house then they would be able to catch criminals more effectively.

We have laws specifically limiting police powers because we recognize that there are more things to consider than simply maximizing arrests.

Protection against unreasonable search is written into the constitution, after all

Why?! Why is immigration enforcement being stifled so much? Imagine if there was a police database that could help find murderers

It could be because immigrants are not as bad as murderers.

To gen z, a boomer is anybody older than them

I don’t know about that but they do have a program where advertisers can pay them in exchange for their ads being allowed past the block.

The problem of social manipulation via bots isn’t limited to intelligence operations, though I would argue that this is the most immediate danger.

We’re also seeing a huge spike in advertising bots pretending to be normal users just to push goods and services.

Because of these motives social media has become less about bringing people together and more about extracting information from people in order to more efficiently manipulate them.

It’s causing social media to become actively dangerous to society in general. Ensuring that everyone is a human is an essential first step for having ethical online social interactions.

Just look at the difference in conversations on Lemmy vs Reddit. Sure, there are some assholes here and there but it’s largely a calm place where you can have an actual conversation.

This is how online discourse used to be from the early BBS days right up until Facebook and algorithmically curated feeds discovered that fear, outrage and anger are the best drivers of engagement.

Now, in addition to the platform’s manipulation (which is largely commercially motivated) we have LLMs which let anybody with funding create massive armies of fake people who can dynamically insert themselves into conversations in order to push any messaging you can imagine.

It’s a bad situation that needs an immediate solution.

I just don’t like that the solution has been decided on, in secret, by western democracies and is being forcefully implemented in a manner that also allows intelligence/law enforcement a backdoor into everything. (A digital ID also makes it very easy to view every users complete Internet history because that data is tagged with the users actual identity).

In firefox you can easily toggle off the studies telemetry bullshit in the settings.

They’re abusing the default and making privacy settings require user intervention rather than defaulting to the most private settings and allowing the option of opting in.

It’s abusing consent, so people move to browsers where privacy is the default option.

Any minute now guys, quantum computers are just around the corner…

It’s really simple.

The western democracies want to create a universal digital ID wallet and have that be required to access any site.

There are a lot of reasons they could want this. For example, there are probably tens of millions of fake accounts controlled by adversarial nations which are used to sow extremism and disinformation online. It is impossible for counterintelligence to detect these at scale. We can see the corrosive effects that social media is having on society, there are countries actively working to make the problem worse but we have no tools to stop them.

This is also why there is a big push to limit children from accessing social media. They’re often the targets for these campaigns because they’re easily manipulated and have a lot of free time to spread the misinformation once they’re indoctrinated.

I don’t think a digital ID is the way to solve this problem. But, we’re not being asked or informed about why it is happening. They’re, instead, trying to ram these measures through using moral panic about children so anybody opposing them is easily dismissed as “not caring about The Children” or “supporting sex trafficking/pedophiles/predators”.

I understand the situation, but they’re trying to go around the democratic process by not talking about the problems.

Yeah, well Google Execs also assured me that email would be replaced by Google Wave which has very good integration with the future of social media: Google Plus.