Andy

all I keep wondering is why I didn’t try this sooner.

I think your experience is the most common way people first try Linux: most people first try Linux when they have a computer that is no longer valuable to them.

That was what happened to me. I had a Windows laptop that was running too slow for use, and a friend suggested setting up a Linux partition before I bought a new one. I did, and got another two years out of the laptop.

Now I see a lot of libraries and hackerspaces offering folks help doing this.

Deal removes constraint on OpenAI’s ability to raise capital

I think they mean “raze”…

Agreed. His comments are so bizarrely stupid on so many levels.

They’re not just “wrong”: they’re half-right-half-wrong. And the half that is wrong is idiotic in the extreme, while the half that is right casually acknowledges a civilizational crisis like someone watching their neighbors screaming in a house fire while sipping a cup of coffee.

Like this farmer analogy: the farmers were right! Their way of life and all that mattered to them was largely exterminated by these changes, and we’re living in their worst nightmare! And he even goes so far as acknowledging this, and acknowledging that we’ll likely experience the same thing. We’re all basically cart horses at the dawn of the automobile, and we might actually hate where this is going. But… It’ll probably be great.

He just has a hunch that even though all evidence suggests that this will lead to the opposite of the greatest good for the greatest number of people, for some reason his brain can’t shake the sense that it’s going to be good anyway. I mean, it has to be, otherwise that would make him a monster! And that simply can’t be the case. So there you have it.

It’ll be terrible great.

100%.

Peter Frase deconstructed this in an article a decade ago (and subsequent book) “Four Futures”.

It’s really not complicated. Saying 'the rich want to make us all obsolete and then kill us off ’ sounds paranoid and reactionary, but if you actually study these dynamics critically that’s a pretty good distillation of what they’d like to do, and they’re not really concealing it.

I appreciate this answer, because it at least tries to reason from first principles. You can’t, imo, have this conversation without actually defining what we consider to be the problem.

I think the key concern is that age – particularly during teenage years – typically correlates with a power imbalance. And the concern is that the younger person could be exploited and/or suffer harm. However we need to remember:

1. It’s possible for relationships to have a power imbalance and no one is harmed or looks back with regret.
2. It’s possible for relationships between people of the same age to be very harmful/regretable.

So the questions I have are: how correlated is a specific age gap with severe harm? And what would we advise in this situation?

I think that a 16 year-old probably has around a 50% of getting badly hurt in a relationship with another 16 year-old, and probably a ~65% chance with a 19 year-old. Because a 19 year-old can probably manipulate a 16 year-old better than their peer, but they’re also presumably a bit more experienced and mature, which can be a good thing.

I’m making these predictions presuming that they’re sexually active, btw. Which I think is probable. But if they’re not, I think that the risks go down to around 10% chance in both cases. This is just my gut impression. So I’d just advise any 16 year-old in a relationship with a 19 year-old to move VERY slowly physically, and talk frequently to an older friend or sibling. And if your partner wants to do anything you’re uncomfortable talking about with your older friend or sibling, that’s a sign you shouldn’t do it.

If you follow that rule, I think 16 and 19 is no big deal. Because I really want to emphasize: a lot of the risk already exists when a 16 year-old dates someone their own age.

I love buses too, but a van pool is materially different. Buses travel fixed routes. A van pool can act as a shared taxi that shuttles people directly between points of immediate departure, transit stations, and final destinations.

This article is a little light on thesis, but legit.

Personally, I’d like to tie a vision of autonomous vehicles to a broad rethinking of transit and public ownership. What if training data was shared, so instead of allowing Google to create another monopoly we deliberately cultivated a diverse market? What if we designed roads to accommodate autonomous van pools and also bikes and more light vehicles?

We can dream better than this.

Researchers following the adoption of AI predict around 92 million jobs are projected to disappear by 2030, even as roughly 170 million new roles are expected to emerge, McKinsey & Company has found.

What in the fuck does this mean?

Return? /s

Also, not only do they rely on “just vision”, crucially they rely on real-time processing without any memory or persistent mapping.

This, more than anything else is what bewilders me most.

They could map an area, and when observing a construction hazard save that data and share it with other vehicles so they know when route setting or anticipate the object. Not they don’t. If it drives past a hazard and goes around the block it has to figure out how to navigate the hazard again with no familiarity. That’s so foolish.

This is a genuine concern that we should recognize.

I’m about 99% confident it isn’t, but considering it is the kind of caution we should all be exercising these days.

Respectfully, this title gets under my skin.

Why so doomer? He might veto it. It wouldn’t be surprising. But why are you declaring a loss prematurely?

Don’t hope for things there’s no chance of. Fight to change the chances of things, and if you fail try and fight again and again until you win.

This headline reads like 2025 news Mad-Libs:

“[Proper noun] is using [Latest fad] to [Verb] [Ideological alignment adjective] [Conceptual noun]”

Try it:

“OpenAI is using Hydroflasks to destroy Catholic exceptionalism”

“Mark Cuban is using cryptocurrency to monetize white supremacist hope”

Good times./s

Oy. I really don’t want to see what happens when we’re faced with an actual challenge. This is… yikes.

Also: this article omits serious context about what the IDF does with the information Microsoft is describing!

Over a year ago, 972 wrote an explosive expose on IDF ai targeting. It’s all pretty blunt. A general name Yossi Sariel wrote a book describing how AI could automate industrialized killing, and these plans were put into practice to deliberately target civilian infrastructure when entire families were sitting down to meals. The tools included Lavender, which composed target lists that pretty much included any male over 14 and Daddy’s Home, which tracked targets generated by Lavender and generated strike plans when it determined that the target was at their home.

There’s no good reason why the Independent left this out. A general literally wrote a book about this, and it’s been a year since this information came out.

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

Yo I self host a Nextcloud server and I don’t know what an apk is. Please stop being a gatekeeper. Grandma Ruth deserves alternatives to big tech just like the rest of us.

All freedom to all the people. These tools aren’t supposed to be some special privilege for 1337 hackers. They should be ubiquitous.

Try a different instance.

I’m on slrpnk.net and it’s all radical environmentalists.

Come for [email protected], stay for [email protected].

The same ones listed in the article. Property ownership, speech, privacy, etc.

I feel like the rise of corporate personhood is the elephant in the room this article seems to avoid acknowledging.

I specifically said I wasn’t.