Humorist2290

vor 5 Tagendiscuss

To take a different perspective than ownership as "right to re-sell" or ownership as "the right to use in perpetuity," I think there is also value in considering ownership as responsibility to maintain those rights.

When one owns property, they get benefits from it, but they also have the responsibility to maintain the property or else it wastes away. Sometimes this incurs costs you wouldn't get with leasing, and sometimes it makes ownership more expensive than renting. But still I think that responsibility is a virtue in itself. Not everything should be consumable.

Humorist2290

vor 12 Tagendiscuss

Interesting analysis. In it they say

  Worse, the burden [generating energy] increasingly falls on the buyer [data center developers]

I don't believe this is worse, but appropriate. The grid is a shared resource, used by enterprise and individuals. If some class of consumers demand an outsized share of that resource, they should pay an outsized share of its maintenance and development. I don't see that happening.

It's as if trucking companies flooded the highways with so many trucks that people couldn't commute to work anymore.

Humorist2290

vor 12 Tagendiscuss

This is very "war on drugs" coded, but to extend the metaphor a bit:

Meta here is the heroin cartel. They're a publicly traded company, have offices all over the country, and have mountains of evidence sitting in moderately well secured cabinets. Why should the government go after users when it could more easily go after the producers?

Humorist2290

vor 12 Tagendiscuss

In many states, children under some age are prohibited from using firearms. There is substantial evidence to show that firearms pose a real and present harm to individual children and large groups.

An excellent rider to the KIDS act would be to mandate the installation of age (that is, identity) verification to all firearms in order to disable the safety.

Humorist2290

vor 13 Tagendiscuss

From the Claremore City Council minutes [0] it does show the person mentioned in the article was a speaker, among a group of some 20 other members of the community. They also include the incredible claim

  Claremore Data Center will house the backbone of the internet and supports all the functions that occur on the internet.

The minutes mention that many of the council members were accused of not caring, but they do not mention the arrest. I'm not suggesting the story is false as much as highlighting that the city's minutes omit it.

0: https://claremore.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/02-17-2026-...

Humorist2290

vor 17 Tagendiscuss

I'm increasingly convinced that these kind of leaks are the only effective resistance to this surveillance society we're entering. Meta will keep doing this, and other employers will probably follow, and then of course governments will use "appropriate legal processes" to add the data to their dossiers, etc. We are watching in real time the expansion of surveillance cameras, chat control, deanonymization, etc.

Leaks of this data make it obvious to everyone how much a liability it is. Meta Execs have their data in this pile as well; soldiers and congresspeople are in Flock's database. How many senators do you think PornHub has an accurate taste profile for?

Of course there's harm that comes with leaking this data. But is the harm really greater than everyone being surveilled by everyone, everywhere?

Humorist2290

vor 19 Tagendiscuss

It must be a wild time in the corporate espionage world these days. The annual operating budget of the CIA is like 20B. That's a rounding error compared to the burn rates of these labs.

Maybe it's conspiratorial, but it seems like the direction this is going is for the US to nationalize these companies. Somewhere between "too big to fail" and "national security."

Humorist2290

vor 19 Tagendiscuss

So I had a feature phone -- the Nokia 8110 4g. What sold me was that I could use it as a 4g hotspot and connect a smartphone to it, or not and be offline. The idea of "going online" is something I miss, in that it's not normal to be always attached to the internet. The connections I want to foster don't need to be mediated by an ISP, or a Telco, or a social media crime syndicate, or whatever else.

The "flip" part of this phone is cute, but the point Commodore makes about using it to punctuate the experience of using the device is significant to me. The Nokia also has a little sliding cover (which I always preferred over the flips as a matter of taste) and indeed the tactile interaction adds something. If it's still always connected to the internet though, it's just a gimmick.

Sadly my cell provider at the time gave me a SIM which just wouldn't work with it, and nowadays it seems like they aren't even available to buy anymore. I'd be interested in this, but not at a 600$ price level. I want a phone which (a) is a phone and (b) is a 5g wifi hotspot on demand and (c) nothing else. After years of casual searching, I have concluded that such a product is either too niche or too countercultural to be allowed.

Humorist2290

letzten Monatdiscuss

It's more comical than sinister, but I have an example in this vein.

I was using Claude to work on a pet project which itself has a "generate with AI" feature. The default model the project uses was Gemini (because it was cheaper and more reliably produces the correct output format). Claude kept changing the default model to Opus when working on entirely unrelated parts, and I kept noticing it because Opus would mangle the output and break the rendered page. It also did this to the .env file in addition to the default.

Humorist2290

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

I'm taking a "wait and see" approach with Bitwarden. I've been a paying customer for a while, happy with it, and hoping the leadership changes won't be too user hostile. Still, a major reason I chose Bitwarden to begin with is they have a decent "Export" button, and all of this news reminded me that my offline backup of the vault was a few months old. Regardless of their product roadmap, they could have an incident tomorrow that keeps users away from their passwords -- offline backups are a good idea.

And Vaultwarden is nice. I've used it at work, hosted it myself, and as a user of the password manager I can say it's basically indistinguishable. But I don't really pay Bitwarden for a password manager -- I pay them for a secure sync of a password manager I can share with family members who can't figure out a VPN.

Humorist2290

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

An exception that proves the rule, but KRAZAM's channel on Youtube has legitimately helpful ad reads. Rare Data Hunters [0] for example ends with a 1 minute Cloudflare ad that's basically a crash course in their services. Having worked with GCP and AWS but not so much with Cloudflare, that ad gave me a surprisingly clear idea of what the important pieces would be.

Truly an exception though. I think generally the only people for whom ads are helpful are advertisers.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU4ByUbDKNc

Humorist2290

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Company offers a service that is considered essential to function in society, and the overwhelming majority of people _must_ pay for as if it were a tax: "this seems like something generally useful to the public! They need to be a regulated utility!"

Humorist2290

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

It's incredible that on the same device we can write pithy little comments, we can also play games, listen to music, read countless books, basically access the whole of the internet, and also empty out bank accounts. I'd wager most of those can be done on many people's devices in under a minute, with little more safeguard than a fingerprint.

To me this isn't some security flaw in android that allows users to do something. It's a fundamental flaw in having most of the world's population forced into using a device whose software, firmware, and hardware are gate kept by a handful of monopolistic companies. They want all your eggs in one basket, and they'll hold the basket for you.

For many people these things mediate a person's interaction with the world. That's not some super fantastic responsibility on Google's shoulders, but a humanist catastrophe caused in part by (and of course handsomely profitable for) Google.

Humorist2290

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

America's culture of individual liberty moved into the national mythos in the last century, replaced by a culture of consumption and commerce over all. People don't have the freedom to build whatever they want because pockets need to be greased, permits need to be reviewed, HOAs need to have their fees, etc.

Humorist2290

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

At some point in the not so distant future, it seems entirely likely for the US to bail out OpenAI / Nvidia / etc using national security as justification. Democrats and Republicans really can get along as long as their donors get what they want. No matter how the regime changes in the coming years, the DoD will keep getting funding, and that funding will increasingly go to vendors who don't mind killing people.

Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, and 60 years later it's eating everyone's lunch.

Humorist2290

vor 6 Monatendiscuss

> Why must he have some shady ulterior motive rather than just honestly believing the thing they are are stated?

I wouldn't say it's shady or even untoward. Simon writes prolifically and he seems quite genuinely interested in this. That he has attached his public persona, and what seems like basically all of his time from the last few years, to LLMs and their derivatives is still a vested interest. I wouldn't even say that's bad. Passion about technology is what drives many of us. But it still needs saying.

> This is reductive to the point of absurdity. What other statistical text prediction model can make tool calls to CLI apps and web searches?

It's just a fact that these things are statistical text prediction models. Sure, they're marvels, but they're not deterministic, nor are they reliable. They are like a slot machine with surprisingly good odds: pull the lever and you're almost guaranteed to get something, maybe a jackpot, maybe you'll lose those tokens. For many people it's cheap enough to just keep pulling the lever until they get what they want, or go bankrupt.

Humorist2290

vor 6 Monatendiscuss

I can believe this, and it's a good point. I believe Bitwarden does the same. I'm not against Vaultwarden in particular but against colocation of highly sensitive (especially orthogonally sensitive) data in general. It's part of a self-hoster's journey I think: backups, isolation, security, redundancy, energy optimization, etc. are all topics which can easily occupy your free time. When your partner asks whether your photos are more secure in Immich than Google, it can lead to an interesting discussion of nuances.

That said, I'm not sure if Bitwarden is the answer either. There is certainly some value in obscurity, but I think they have a better infosec budget than I do.

Humorist2290

vor 6 Monatendiscuss

It needs to be said that your opinion on this is well understood by the community, respected, but also far from impartial. You have a clear vested interest in the success of _these_ tools.

There's a learning curve to any toolset, and it may be that using coding agents effectively is more than a few weeks of upskilling. It may be, and likely will be, that people make their whole careers about being experts on this topic.

But it's still a statistical text prediction model, wrapped in fancy gimmicks, sold at a loss by mostly bad faith actors, and very far from its final form. People waiting to get on the bandwagon could well be waiting to pick up the pieces once it collapses.

Humorist2290

vor 6 Monatendiscuss

Fun. I don't agree that Claude Code is the real unlock, but mostly because I'm comfortable with doing this myself. That said, the spirit of the article is spot on. The accessibility to run _good_ web services has never been better. If you have a modest budget and an interest, that's enough -- the skill gap is closing. That's good news I think.

But Tailscale is the real unlock in my opinion. Having a slot machine cosplaying as sysadmin is cool, but being able to access services securely from anywhere makes them legitimately usable for daily life. It means your services can be used by friends/family if they can get past an app install and login.

I also take minor issue with running Vaultwarden in this setup. Password managers are maximally sensitive and hosting that data is not as banal as hosting Plex. Personally, I would want Vaultwarden on something properly isolated and locked down.

Humorist2290

vor 7 Monatendiscuss

So the AI Village folks put together a bunch of LLMs and a basically unrestricted computer environment, told it "raise money" and "do random acts of kindness" and let it cook. It's a technological marvel, it's a moral dilemma, and it's an example of the "altruistic" applications for this technology. Many of us can imagine the far less noble applications.

But Rob Pike's reaction is personal, and many readers here get why. The AI Village folks burned who knows how much cash to essentially generate well wishing spam. For much less, and with higher efficacy, they could've just written the emails themselves.

Humorist2290

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