Yeah, afaik airvpn basically can’t offer VPN to Italian citizens any more because they’d be forced to keep logs. But they can still get customers from outside Italy. And presumably Italians can still use VPN outside Italy. I think, let me know if I’m wrong.

Many have done that for decades, but the tend remains that the internet is getting less and less free.

Italy made VPNs practically illegal. The UK might soon follow. And surfing the web with a VPN is a painful torrent of capchas. And email addresses you can get without revealing your phone number to identify yourself are becoming sparse too.

If you’d want to actually address the issue (insofar unsupervised teenagers watching porn is an issue) you’d need something like a U2F security key that can be used as anonymous age verification and be bought anonymously in a physical shop for cash, just by showing your ID to a clerk (without your details being stored). Keys being stolen or misused could then also be flagged in a public database.

Don’t worry about the AI companies, they can afford it and then make a profit (eventually).

Worry about the open source AI models that you can run locally using solar panels. They will become defacto illegal piracy. Affordable hardware to run large models without too much power is finally appearing (Ryzen AI max), but the software will become proprietary intellectual property of those who own the world. Which is the worst case scenario.

Yeah public broadcasting is under attack because of advertising. Advertising fuels private broadcasting and it’s in their owner’s interest to push anti public broadcasting propaganda.

Any system humans design to serve us as a society will over time become “min maxed” by people or institutions seeking to maximize their profit or gain more power or maintain power in the face of changes. Advertising is a primary vector how those with the most economic power can influence society without people even realizing it. And everything is political.

For example take the ratings and something like yellow pages and announcements for new businesses like a plumber - needing to invest additional capital in advertising has an effect too. It makes it so new businesses are more indentures, more like wage slavery, than if no advertising existed at all. Obviously no advertising at all would favor seniority. But we have advanced in technology since we designed our government systems - there should be an independent “forth estate” or fifth or something for economics and regulation. They could be independently voted on to the executive or legislative. And their job would be to deal with regulation in the public’s interest, and sponsor things like an independent ratings portal that is moderated, and force shops like amazon to use the independent ratings for the products and the vendors. It will stay a struggle to stay ahead of people trying to abuse the system for gain, but right now we pretend the tools we have right now are somehow god given. We Europeans are far more conservative than we like to think.

If we want to have any resiliency against what is coming (because we destroyed our planet and let wealth inequality spiral and social media is nearly completely controlled by plutocrats) we need to push for better tools to govern democratically. And advertising is a major obstacle because it allows unmitigated influence of those who own the world.

TLDR: We don’t *have to * screw over new plumbers, but we should do it if we had to because stopping the brainwashing is more important.

Ok, it’s obviously a complicated task, and banning advertising will make things more complex. But that is what progress often is.

But before the internet we used to even have TV shows reviewing things, under the mandate they don’t get paid to do so. People do have an interest in learning about new cool things or improvements to old, and comparative reviews. There is no reason this wouldn’t serve the legitimate need for information better. Now we have ratings and that could be improved as well, through better technology to gather independent reviews.

And yeah, there are not free lunches from corporations, but there are from people or from the government. We pay collectively for things and distribute them for free all the time. Public broadcasting could be extended to youtube or even news papers, to make them more independent from profit driven behavior or owners. You can’t have democracy without free press, and currently we don’t have that. We have corporate press and every single youtube channel has to serve corporate news. And as you point out, in capitalism there is no free lunch. But we can make it free so we can stop the insanity of neoliberal and fascist propaganda currently destroying our civilization globally.

Another thing I forgot to mention, advertising is the main vector to increase consumerism. Which is killing our planet.

There are also market effects on what type of content is produced / profitable to advertise on.

And mostly unknown psychological effects of advertising on the human mind. Maybe advertising has altered your mind so much that you “don’t even mind” it any more. It is a brainwashing technique after all haha. Maybe all those youtube ads made about 5% of the people’s brain soft enough to vote for MAGA. Maybe the effect of advertising is as bad as lead in gasoline.

1 Self checkout rarely allow you to pay with cash. 2) Self checkout can be made easier faster by scanning with a phone app

That leads to different complications and outcomes. See OP complaining about slow self checkout. The more self checkout, the less cash transactions and the less privacy.

A fully cashless society would make people more vulnerable. Not just privacy, but maybe some bureaucratic snafu that doesn’t allow you a residence, maybe your ID card expired, and no banking account. If you’re not in the system, you can’t even buy food. Or if your account is in the red and blocked.

Ideally we should have have fully anonymous cash cards. But regulation is being pushed in some countries to limit them, or make you give ID. Or they take 5% “tax” on the revenue. And a phone app is easier to use.

In what reality do you live in lol? This isn’t a conspiracy theory, this is literally the business model of “data collection companies”. European privacy laws and the cookie disclaimer BS just showed us what is already happening.

If you don’t think all this data isn’t being collated and used then you don’t understand the nature of neoliberal capitalism and politics. Mock me all you want, but it seems they’ve already won when basic privacy is now a fringe idea.

Yeah you’d want to legally verify that and organize en masse for this to have any impact.

I suspect it might even be easier (forward vs inverse kinematics).

If you could combine both (pressure sensors and pistons) you could do force feedback input devices that can be 3D printed. Which could be useful for serious applications, like controlling a vehicle and “feeling” the road, or feeling the air pressure on the wings of a plane. Or controlling an excavator and “feeling” the earth by measuring feedback in the pneumatic pressure. Currently things like that is really expensive.

HOW THE FUCK IS BEING CONCERNED ABOUT YOUR EVERY MOVEMENT BEING TRACKED CONTROVERSIAL NOW??!?

What the fuck? Do people not understand the concept of privacy? Have you ever read one of those cookie agreements? This is exactly the same!

If you pay via card or app or account they have your name and identity. We KNOW they use or sell that information from countless examples. That information is bought and aggregated by other companies, and the NSA owns or backdoors those companies, or the cops or ICE can buy that information without a warrant.

They really went all out haha. They also have a linked website with a video and a tutorial. The tutorial has an easier to understand explanation of what they are doing.

It seems they use simple motion flow of the video to train the neural net, but they also use some kind of volume rendering to train the AI to predict and reconstruct the 3D scene with your robot. And they use cheap depth cameras but apparently it also works without depth. And this works for basically any robot you can imagine which is really brilliant.

Looking at all those pneumatic soft robots, now I wonder if you could invert this to use for an 3D input device. Like a kind of 3D printed pneumatic joystick that simply measures the resulting air pressure at the end of internal channels when you tilt or twist or move the joystick. No wiring or assembly, just 3D print a joystick and glue it to a board.

Well then they know your name at the very least and can use and sell your shopping data.

You mean you can pay with cash? The one I’ve seen is with making an account with email and online payment, or worse, an app that can extract all sorts of info.

Woah this is awesome. I imagine this could be used to make “shitty robots” with imperfect joints, backlash or other things more precise. Which could help with 3D printers as well as 3D printed robots. Or using internal strings and pulleys to control a robot arms. Especially for larger robot arms stiffness becomes a problem.

Is there an open source, easy to use software framework so people can start to play and experiment with it?

Vote blue no matter yahu

For me it’s mostly privacy concerns. Now the fucking shop and all their 111 marketing partners know my email and where I live.

There should be an “protest buy” action to any the products that do this bullshit. A large group of people buy the products and then return them to the store for a refund. Especially for perishable goods, this would make them worthless. Which would make stocking such products a loss and force the vendors and manufacturers to cut the shit out.