You can also set up local AI alerts (AI here is mostly used for facial recognition) e.g. to alert you if your MIL comes around uninvited, or if your kids sneak out at 2am, and so on.

That sounds awful. I’d rather just not, and avoid that mindset altogether.

Theoretically a little spray paint could work wonders. Or something like a strong glue, or a well aimed laser. I think there’s also something called a WiFi deauthentication attack for a bit of temporary disruption.

We have the numbers to resist effectively, but we need to get used to going out and organizing and working with each other. A coordinated campaign of disabling cameras should be a relatively easy thing to get going.

Don’t buy anything from Amazon.

Yeah. I just wouldn’t feel comfortable putting my name to a slice of that dreary blandness.

As a long-time user of the em-dash I’m pissed off that my usual writing style now makes people think I used AI. I have to second-guess my own punctuation and paraphrase.

I’ve been programming professionally for 25 years. Lately we’re all getting these messages from management that don’t give requirements but instead give us a heap of AI-generated code and say “just put this in.” We can see where this is going: management are convincing themselves that our jobs can be reduced to copy-pasting code generated by a machine, and the next step will be to eliminate programmers and just have these clueless managers. I think AI is robbing management of skills as well as developers. They can no longer express what they want (not that they were ever great at it): we now have to reverse-engineer the requirements from their crappy AI code.

There’s this talk, where researchers found major US cellular networks decrypting people’s conversations at the tower then broadcasting them unencrypted to the entire continent via satellite:

https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-don-t-look-up-there-are-sensitive-internal-links-in-the-clear-on-geo-satellites

Yeah you need hardware for that. They’re making it so we can’t get hardware and we can’t self-host.

Now that’s sending a strong message: “We don’t really care and we’ll give up at the first opportunity.” Do European countries realize the USA can see what they’re doing?

The JNF is notorious for funding settlers in the West Bank. And Tony Blair is notorious for messianic imperialism and ruthless self-enrichment.

Last Wilson heard, he was employed by a large US-based aircraft company.

Uh oh. Does it begin with B?

It’s really important not to discard functional hardware now, even by throwing it into recycling. It’s more useful intact and may not be replaceable forever.

I was thinking more that they’d like the idea of better surveillance of their own population. If that happened there might be an incentive for them not to make it affordable to own capable hardware.

But if you’re right about what you just said and China of all places ends up democratizing tech around the world, that will be something of a silver lining.

That’s why they have to make the hardware unobtainable. This is well underway.

Most of us already are, when you consider how much Amazon hosts.

I hope China keeps manufacturing affordable computers and doesn’t go all in on the cloud too. There might be profit in selling computers, but I bet there are politicians in the CCP who would love to have everyone rent cloud computing that’s more easily watched and controlled.

There are plenty of smart tech workers without the first clue about morality or human rights. Outside of tech these people are ignorant and naive. That’s why so many techbros become libertarians and stumble into fascism. It’s cluelessness and a basic lack of curiosity to discover the world outside of tech.

He’s probably just trying to get noticed by Trump. “Hey, look at me! I’m on the side of you and the other pedoNazis!”