For me, there’s no point just controlling screen time for the sake of controlling it, I need to have something actually available and ready to replace it with. Recently I started reading (physical) comics, picking up a couple of the “trade paperbacks” for the Dark Horse Alien and Predator comics. Or re-reading some Gene Wolfe or Tamsyn Muir. Self-imposed technical controls are pointless, to me.

You’ve grouped together a couple different classes of software, with different purposes.

“Bossware”: this is the BS one, that is used for monitoring employees. Remote screenshots, activity times, application use clocks, etc. No one should ever put up with having this.

MDM (Mobile device management): This is IT software for managing device settings across a fleet (used to mostly mean smartphones, but now it actually means laptops), like enabling disk encryption, enabling the firewall, installing software and security updates, etc. It is also what you use for e.g. remotely wiping devices (e.g. when they’re stolen). It doesn’t usually monitor user activity.

EDR (endpoint detection and response): this is security software for detecting malicious activity, meaning malware or adversarial actors (I.e. hackers). It often also enforces security settings like USB disablement and software allow/blocklists. This is a 90% automated, and a device that’s not doing or having done to it anything malicious is just a green checkmark.

I run our security team, and I tell people up front that I’m not interested in what employees are doing as long as it’s not destructive or dangerous. I don’t and wouldn’t deploy bossware. I ain’t a cop, and I won’t roleplay one for my employer.

It’s literally antivaxxers, but for computer viruses.

You mean you dont need your machine to tell some ad brokers to contact you about needing to buy more coffee soon?

The person taking the video is literally prompting it by saying ‘la la la’ themselves. Why would they be surprised that it’s response is to sing it back?

You’re looking for the populace as a whole to have some kind of sit-down, coordinated evaluation of what has maximal climate impact, but that’s not how protest movements work.

Small groups can be tactical like that. Large protest movements have to seize on whatever momentum happens, when it happens.

If people were out there protesting golf courses, I’d be there too, and I’d be encouraging it, but I’m not going to waste my breath as someone with zero meaningful platform trying to foment a mass protest movement out of thin air.

And there’s something more important to this movement than just directly addressing the environmental impact of datacenters, which is the anti-large-corporation sentiment it’s feeding (both from, and into). That is very important for climate action. And I’m not sure if you’ve been going to any (climate) protests, but there are definitely signs at all of them protesting oil and gas companies.

It’s hilarious they are like, “but golf courses are worse!”

Yeah. Get rid of them too.

Is it going to be called the Ministry of Truth? Or did they at least have the self awareness to come up with something less on-the-nose?

“My wife taps my shoulder, and I pay!”

ba-dum-tsss

We’re way beyond usage statistics. That’s for startups trying to get a Series A. OpenAI and Anthropic are playing at the Fortune-100 level already, influencing elected officials and making deals for government contracts. They’re not rolling up to the DoD with their MAU counts.

Fetterman’s chance to cure his conservatism!

As someone with no 3d printing experience, but a lot of firearm experience, I’m surprised that PLA holds up as a comp.

It’s one thing to have a printed frame of course, but comps are right past the barrel and get the worst of gas and heat (by design). Hell, I have a very heavy comp on my HK P2000, and it gets absolutely scorched.

Sadly, they exist irregardless of our little projects. Financially supporting them is one thing, and if your own ethics prevent you from using a weapon of the enemy, as it were, that’s fine, but abstention is not actually doing anything to oppose them.

The water consumption of any LLM compute time I’ve used is almost assuredly less than a single bath, and I’ve certainly skipped more baths in my life than I probably should have. :P

And more importantly, an hour of Netflix uses SIGNIFICANTLY more water than an hour of text LLM generation, so most people are not actually having the impacts on water consumption they likely think they are.

There’s another type, which is like me, who develop as a means to have a tool I need.

I wanted a better way to manage my cross-device libraries (desktop, laptop, NAS), and the multi-pane file managers didn’t work great for me, so instead I used Claude to build one that has native per-pane ssh support, streamed video and music preview clips, etc etc.

Capitalism is always gonna Capitalism, doesn’t matter what type of tools are at play.

As someone who works in security, you should be extremely skeptical of their stated reasons, or even the validity of the data.

There were a LOT of divorces following that leak, citing the hack as proof of infidelity, but the reality is that the leakers could have added people to the data explicitly to facilitate uneven divorce settlements (e.g. adding a woman to the site in order to give the husband a means to demand no split of assets).

As much as it would be great to imagine hacktivist crusaders going after cheaters, there was a lot of money moved on the back of that leak, and in fact one of the problems with Ashley Madison was that prior to the hack it was used to essentially extort non-users, because anyone could create a profile with any email, but if someone created a profile of you, you had to both verify yourself with your ID (which they saved), and pay them money to delete it (which the leak revealed they didn’t actually do anyways).

Most people aren’t aware, but Axon already does AI-assisted surveillance software too.

The first thing I did when I moved into my new place is disable all the Ring surveillance crap the previous tenants installed. Luckily I have no “smart” appliances to worry about.

You were not going to give me the benefit of the doubt, don’t expect anyone who is genuine to believe otherwise.

You’re free to be as cynical as you like.

“is ai” is very obviously a simplification, but is also the reality of where they have chosen to go.

It’s not a “simplification”. A simplification is still roughly the same meaning. “Coded with AI” and “Is AI” are unrelated statements, not more or less nuanced versions of each other, any more than “Bill is driving a racecar” and “Bill is a racecar” are.

I was going to give you the benefit of the doubt until I saw your responses.

“Is AI” is meaningless drivel. Software does not become “AI”, and an OS is not and cannot “be” AI.

What you mean is, “Debian devs use LLMs to code”, which has no impact on or correlation to whether Debian will include age or ID verification. No one ordered the devs to use LLMs, so that is not evidence of their “compliance” with authorities, as you seem to imply.

These snarkily-delivered insinuations have no value; they’re not educating anyone about the topic, they’re not arguing anything of substance, they lack basic technical understanding of what they’re criticizing… they’re just a feel-good gotcha for you.

“Minor by default” is not a shift in how companies treat minors online, it’s a shift in how they treat everyone online.