It’s not just Reddit, so many companies try and shunt you off a mobile web page and on to their app, despite many apps being little more than a pre loaded mobile web pages.

Why? Because users can modify how they interact with a web page, they can install extensions that modify how the code from the website is run, or just deny web pages access to some other process. There is very little a company can do about that, they have no control on how the user chooses to run the page. But… with an app, users can’t modify how the program is run. No plug ins, no web extensions, no choosing not to run some part of it, just the software as distributed by the company. Meaning full fat ads and complete access to any information the OS will let them have, way easier to make money on users that way.

Technically, it’s possible to alter any program, but it’s very hard if don’t have the source code, and it’s illegal to do so in many cases thanks to section 1201 of the DMCA, especially if you try and distribute that modification or tell others how to do it. Which is dumb, it’s your computer/phone, they shouldn’t get to tell you what code you can and can not run on it, they shouldn’t be able to force you to run code on it you don’t want to.

Lmao, you could also just… not instinctively call people slurs during a confrontation? Like, so many other expletives you could use?

A lot of the “meat imitation” products that got lots of press and media attention were highly engineered products with a lot of unique processes involved, as well as a lot of unique technologies. The raw soy protein input wasn’t the expensive part, it was all the additives to make it more “meat like” that required expensive new production lines, in addition to all the marketing and R&D (paying off the VC investors who funded it really).

There is also the grocery store distribution side of things. These products were niche and didn’t sell particularly large volumes, so grocery stores marked them up a lot to justify the opportunity cost of using shelf space on them rather than something that would have sold at a higher volume.

The reality is, you can get plenty of cheap as hell meat substitutes, they’ve been around for decades (millennia really), you just have to go to speciality stores, or order them online, where enough volume is sold to allow for low margins. meat imitations sold as speciality products in mainstream stores are expensive. An example of a substituted as supposed to an imitation would be textured vegetable protein (often abbreviated to TVP)which can be used in the same way as ground meat. It won’t be the same, you will be able to tell the difference, but, it won’t be worse(assuming it’s seasoned properly) just different, like substituting ground pork for ground beef. And TVP can absolutely be found for much cheaper than ground meat, if purchased from the right place.

This is gonna sound gross and I hate thinking about stuff like this but…

The truth of it, or even plausibility of it, is irrelevant. Whether the people claiming it believe it, is irrelevant. What’s important is that it’s compelling and dominates the discourse. It prevents the discussions from being “Murder is bad VS had it coming”. Instead of getting to use the event to justify crackdowns on opposition or painting them selves as victims, they have to waste time denying allegations that they staged it.

Even if it’s not true, even if it’s absurd and conspiratorial, it’s still the right thing to say because it doesn’t let trump’s camp steer the conversation to benefit themselves. I hate it, it’s gross, but, the public conversation shifting in his favor is worse than me feeling a bit uncomfortable about a bad faith argument. I want conversations and discourse to be honest, reflective, and in good faith, but… both sides of a debate need to do that for such a discussion to exist.

Same exact computer, they just don’t charge you for the windows license. So it’s a bit cheaper.

It is very private, by nature of it recording so little and leaving so little trace. Which is what was being asked about, not strictly speaking security.

Most distros don’t collect any data by default.

Basically any distro not built and maintained by a company will be a thousand times more private than Mac or windows. Arch and Debian are both good in that regard, most distros are derived from those. There is also Fedora which is a community project, but it’s very heavily involved with Red Hat inc who is owned by IBM. I’ve never heard about any privacy issues there, but, it’s worth keeping in mind.

If you want something super secure and locked down in regards to privacy, there is Tails which has a lot of neat tricks and tor built in. Not sure I’d recommend it as a daily driver but it’s got it’s use cases.

*75% of code was written by people who were required to have an AI plug in installed.

Probably also having their usage tracked.

Also have had their work loads increased and their deadlines shortened.

And if they don’t hit the metrics and meet the shorter deadlines… they get fired.

I’m sure that’s a recipe for functional, well tested, efficient, and secure software. Definitely not creating a shit ton of technical debt.

Or the jaw

Artificial carbon removal was never invested in because it was a good solution, it was invested in because it was an easy excuse. “We’re developing the technology to remove carbon, so no need to stop emitting it”.

It was about putting out headlines and creating a narrative that diffused public outcry. Enough people are now aware it’s infeasible at scale that it’s no longer useful as an excuse. So the investment is disappearing.

So currently, the draft system is not legally provisioned for in the US. It would require a law to be passed to reinstate a draft.

Right now there is just a list system for if that were to happen. This change is just making it so people are automatically put in to that list system, as supposed to having to manually do it them selves, arguably a good thing since it was already mandatory. Not registering for the selective service is a federal crime, and a lot of people have failed to register because they don’t know or simply forgot to.

It would probably be better to remove the selective service system all together, make it harder to reinstate a draft in the future. But if it is going to stick around and continue to be mandatory, it’s better it be an automatic system.

In general, there are basically no federal level “lists of all citizens”. The closest would be social security (national pension fund and elderly health insurance system) but even that doesn’t really work for identifying people or tracking them. it’s something people in the US have been very paranoid about for a long time.

Can’t wait for Schleswig-Holstein and France to fight distro proxy wars.

“It’s here right now and definitely working and producing productivity and revenue, but also we need to cut costs so we can keep spending money on it. Hmmm? Why not use the revenue it’s generating to pay for it, well, you see, we’re just scailing so fast it’s not enough. Oh, why not fund it with credit? The banks won’t let us put up the nvidia chips as collateral to buy more nvidia chips anymore.”

It’s always funny to me when people are like “yah we’ll just grow food using hydroponics and grow lights powered by a diesel generator.”

Like, honey, you could store a decade of food in the volume of space needed to store enough fuel to run those grow lights through one harvest. Like, the conversion rate of fuel to electricity, to light, to biomass is … pathetically tiny.

Closed circuit cameras are less of a concern than cameras connected to a network. Every corner store having a security camera hooked up to a tape in the back is whatever. It’s when it’s an internet connected camera that things get super worrying.

So spraying Windows with the assistant, regardless of how users felt about it, was somehow an accident?

Probably more that internal politics at the company lead a bunch of project leads to try implementing it. If leadership keeps emphasizing how important AI is, and people who have “done stuff with AI” keep getting promoted, then of course people are going to shove it anywhere they can, and of course the higher ups will approve it. It’s classic group/cult think in a hierarchical system.

Don’t let this become a “protect the kids” thing. The intentionally addictive and manipulative design of these platforms has been just as harmful to people across a wide spectrum of ages. The solution is not to ban kids from using these platforms, the solution is to hold these platforms accountable for their behavior and put regulations in to ban intentionally manipulative design. Adults are just as much victims of having their brains cooked by this shit, and it’s had larger scale societal consequences that we need to take seriously.

Perhaps, but, they can’t make any money on it.

And it burned money like no tomorrow with no real revenue generation. Now that it’s past the initial hype and not getting them in the news cycle it’s just a waste of money.

Oh absolutely, the rabbit hole of deception can just go a lot deeper when people don’t even have to report numbers at all.

Like, they can fudge line items, but, if the line items are growing at the same rate after they merge them, then it’s pretty clear the new thing isn’t driving growth. And changes like that are visible and can be scrutinized as well.

We can watch the hands on this kind of reporting.