I haven’t heard of those in an AI context yet, thanks for the ping!

I’m not aware of any blogging platforms that respect my privacy and align with my values.

Why rely on someone else’s property?

So long as you have a decent symmetrical Internet connection and your ISP does not block port 443 (https, and ideally also port 80 - plain http - for emergency fallback), you can self-host any kind of website you want.

Stick with a static site generator, and your technical needs for hosting will drop down to practically nothing. You could run your website on almost any kind of a low-power device, including - if you have reflashed it with something like OpenWRT - the gateway router to your home network (although this isn’t something I recommend beyond a “holy shit, it worked!” scope).

There are even people running static websites on computers close to four decades old (512k Macintosh, FTW), although the limiting factor there isn’t the hosting but the computer’s responsiveness in responding to page requests… they aren’t the most spry circuits in operation and are easily overwhelmed.

Honestly, the sky is the limit for what you can do, and you can go as simple or as technologically complex as you desire.

It isn’t bulletproof, and has been briefly circumvented before, but unfortunately it is the ONLY anti-AI / intellectual-theft-prevention system currently out there.

Definitely use it. AI can and will ignore any generally-accepted copyright statements on the site.

It needs guardrails similar to capitalism in terms of checks and balances and protections against abuses of power. And it needs to be an economic framework, with direct-participation democracy doing the political work.

We are at the technological threshold where a Republic is no longer needed as the primary interface of democracy, but such a direct-participation democracy needs to be paired with an electorate which is highly educated, places said education on a higher pedestal than wealth or power, and focuses on experience and meritocracy above all else. Most importantly, said population must have virtually no economically vulnerable people, as poverty nerfs intelligence by up to 15 points and dramatically reduces a person’s ability to think critically beyond their immediate day-to-day needs. Having a population that can see near-100% attention to national questions makes for an effective direct-participation democracy.

Essentially, the people vote directly on everything, and about the only “political apparatus” that exists would be those structures meant to carry out the will of the people and diplomats that interact with other countries. There would be no leaders or politicians, only people being the gears of government.

If a person is particularly passionate about a cause, they can champion it in public forums, going up against other debaters, but are not allowed to monopolize the forum in a career-like manner.

Plus, such a democracy would be reflected down into the worker’s collectives which would operate on virtually identical principles, only with scopes restricted to that collective.

There are other parts of the societal structure that could enhance said communism.

The legal system will need to be 100% apolitical and utterly divorced from the political structures or economic incentives. Lawyers become judges by courts of their peers, who examine their body of work and determine if the expertise is sufficient for the judgeship. Ideally they wouldn’t even be told who they are evaluating, their only opportunity is to recognize the work done through any anonymization done to it. Judges that misbehave can be removed either internally or by an external vote by the population at large. Laws can be implemented in either direction - from the population or from judgements - but must be approved by the people.

The police system needs to be a national system that cannot allow bad apples to just jump from precinct to precinct to avoid discipline (as per America), but must also be unarmed as a base unit. Only SWAT has the ability to carry more than restraints. Police are assigned to neighbourhoods to learn and integrate with the residents, as per Japan’s system. Trust is built by literally walking the beat and being an integral part of the community.

Any wider security forces (NSA/CIA/FBI) or military would be focused only on external and internal threats, and are highly constrained to only act in the best interests of the society as a whole, but are also under a sort of “prime directive” to not meddle in other countries except to blunt/neuter what they are doing in the first place. Military, in particular, would be primarily self-defence and international peacekeeping.

Both the military and the police and any other security forces would have a shadow council of randomly-chosen civilians whose entire purpose would be to criticize and constrain overreach, along with dedicated lawyers whose entire purpose is to advise on laws. All police and military members would have the ability to access JAG-style lawyers and would be protected when refusing to carry out illegal orders.

There is a lot more I could add, but imma gonna stop here.

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.

If the chest freezer has the ability to turn off the “frost free” functionality, do it.

Every time you open a freezer, moist air from the outside gets pulled in, and that moisture freezes onto the walls and contents after you close the door. Over time, this leads to a significant build-up of ice that can impede the freezer’s ability to cool and your ability to remove items in there (it starts on the walls, works its way to the centre, engulfing packages it encounters).

That “frost free” feature is the freezer literally letting the interior defrost so that the ice that has built up on the inside walls can sublimate away. Problem is, both ice and food defrosts, which means moisture has the ability to migrate out of the food yet remain trapped in the packaging, “burning” the food and making it inedible by drying it out.

And because water has a high specific heat, this freezer burning process accelerates as the food dries out - food that is meant to be moist but has dried out can freezer burn faster than food that is still moist, because it takes a lot more energy to melt ice than warm up dry foodstuffs.

By turning that feature off, you have to choose one cold day every year (where it is at least -10℃ outside) to empty out the freezer and carefully chip all that ice out (which could be once every several years if you open the freezer only once or twice a month), but the benefit is that any food in there will be good so long as it never defrosts before you use it. You could chuck in a vacuum-sealed hunk of meat, and it could still be edible two decades down the line provided it never had the opportunity to get anywhere close to 0℃.

If there is no option to turn off the frost free functionality, then your best bet is to adopt a tracking system (spreadsheet, app, whatever works for you) that can effectively tell you what’s in the freezer and how long it’s been in there, allowing you to rotate stuff back out of that freezer in time for you to eat it before it becomes freezer burned.

At this point, I wouldn’t blame any company that immediately ceased expansions in America and started to consider moving existing production facilities to adjacent countries, like Canada.

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.

Everything in the link you provided says that Obama could have done a shitton more to ensure that the Senate Judiciary Committee actually did their jobs.

Instead, they played political bullshit, Obama blinked, and as a result, America is now two good shakes away from a Fascist dictatorship. The midterm elections - or America’s own “Night of the Long Knives”, which seems all the more likely due to the rhetoric surrounding Kirk’s assassination - Will cinch this future in the bag.

The fact that Obama didn’t fill the position that Scalia opened when he died is probably one of the biggest missed opportunities in America’s recent history. Had his position been filled with a left-leaning Justice, especially a young one with many decades of life left, much of America’s Fascist changes could have been opposed.

As it is, the SC has become a rubber stamp for whatever the current Fascist/Authoritarianist regime wants.

A rationality check for you, specifically, from a purely biological standpoint:

For a woman, peak fertility occurs between about 16 and 28. After 30, fertility starts dropping more and more rapidly every year, with pregnancies after 35 being classified by the medical system as “geriatric pregnancies” due to their age-related risk.

By the time most women hit 40, they need to put forth up to 30× the effort to become pregnant as they would have when 18, and by 45 most women are considered by the medical system as being functionally sterile.

That’s not to say that women cannot become pregnant after the age of 45, it just becomes highly unlikely without many tens of thousands of dollars of medical assistance.

Natural pregnancies after 45, and without any medical assistance, really only happen to women who have - ironically enough - been pregnant for most of their adult lives, because pregnancy pauses the natural cycle for up to 9 months. This pausing of the ovulation cycle prevents eggs from being expended, and pushes back the decline of fertility by up to as much as a decade if full pregnancies occur often enough. However, since this means carrying a full pregnancy to term each and every year from the teenage years onwards, I seriously doubt that any woman would willingly reach for brood mare status just for a longer fertile window.

So if you have any desire to have a child safely and easily, now would be the time to do so.

Your husband, on the other hand, is likely to continue being fertile until the day he dies. The only risk he faces is a significant rise of mutations in his sperm (starting in his late-40s) that can lead to rates of genetic diseases and birth defects in his children that directly correlates to his age. As in, he ought to be motivated to act soon, as well, but has far less pressure to do so than you do.

Sure, it takes a bit of effort. But if you replace your routers with ones that have open-source firmware or actual workstations acting as gateway routers and running business-class open-source software, you can create a personal VPN between everyone involved that shows only one exit point to world+dog.

The trick is with ensuring that all YouTube stuff gets properly and comprehensively funnelled through this exit node - VPNs can easily leak data if not configured properly, and sometimes do so despite good configs - and implementing this even on other devices that require individual VPN connectivity (roaming, like phones).

Plus, having a mobile device’s VPN auto-recognize when it’s connected to a known good network, and have it automatically disable itself in favour of the VPN on that network, is not something that’s easy to do.

Finally, doing so without a high-quality, high-speed ISP plan can easily lead to an unusably slow VPN. The “mothership” exit node, in particular, would have to be gigabit or better - and symmetrical as well, so fibre and not cable - because it has both the node and connections to other homes and devices. If everyone started suckling the YouTube teat at the same time, things would likely slow down pretty fast on anything significantly less than a symmetrical gigabit connection.

They needed someone with a CCNA certificate for hardware discount reasons, and mine was going to expire the day before the interview

Did they demand the proof of the cert, including the expiry date?

Because if you did clearly also mention - and also showed proof - of the renewal exam, that’s grade-A bullshit. They were searching for an excuse.