Rip the band-aid. You don't own your email, which means all the things you're worried about could at any moment be lost anyway.
Buy a domain, own the MX records, send your emails where-ever you want. Then just try live your life, and anytime you log into something, try swap it over to your new domain.
Keep your gmail, keep it as the backup email. Just reduce your risk.
Anecdotal but over several years with an AMD GPU in my desktop I've tried multiple times to do real AI work and given up every time with the AMD stack.
This. When compilers came along, I believe a bunch of junior engineers just gave up utterly on understanding the shape of how the code was generated in assembly which was a mistake given early compilers weren't as effective as they are today. Today vibe-coders are using these early AI tooling and giving up on understanding the shape, and similarly struggling.
I think it's more: when I don't have access to a compiler I am useless. It's better to go for a walk than learn assembly. AI agents turn our high-level language into code, with various hints, much like the compiler.
Personally I consider the crop part of the problem. By cropping (rather than just picking another image) it "cleans" the image, but retains the context. I could crop many images to be valid as test-images, but people who know the context would still see them for what they are. Lenna represents a time when the highest quality magazine at hand in a laboratory was softcore pornography.
I want to point out some of the language you've used. You've brought up "current narrative", "crusade", "sin" and "inquisition", when really you seem to be saying "the image doesn't signal anything and the push to remove it is overblown". I disagree with you (for example IEEE has banned it) but I do respect you believe the actual movement that disagrees with is small but influential.
Instead however I would ask you look at the words you used, where they came from, who said them to you, and why you brought them up here. They are strangely charged words for a debate over a picture.
You're right my comment was off the cuff but I stand by it's logic. I didn't say Kovid was a terrible person, just not great. Having not done research into him specifically I just noted with the parent that certain qualities such as supposed abrasiveness often overlap with qualities I dislike, like using the Lenna image.
My point is that using the Lenna image is a signal, just as you rightly point out so is my comment. I know exactly what the image is and is used for. But I also think it's sad that it's politically charged to say using a Playboy image in a literally objectifying fashion as a test-subject by a women who's requested we don't use it is bad.
It's not a sudden ban, it's been an issue since ~2015. Fun fact I learnt in this, Goyal is totally open to changing it (https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/661), it's simply no-one changed it. I'll see if I can, thanks for the correct call-out.
Interesting you say the Dev isn't a great person, because I had a hunch when I saw the use of the Lena photo on the front page (https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/it-s-time-to-retire-...). It's interesting how small gestures present how someone sees the world.
It's a definitive statement that you don't want to talk to people. In London not wearing headphones ironically means you become a target for people who want your attention. And it blocks out the otherwise very loud cityscape.
Lets add some context. Amazon is the author's only job. 5yrs Software, 7yrs Senior, 4yrs Principal, now runs a YouTube self-help. Reading through there are multiple lines that collectively paint a picture of a difficult career.
"I had over 20 managers across my 18 years at Amazon", whilst this might be out of the author's hands, that's a wild manager history.
"..when I finally pushed for bigger scope at Amazon. My manager’s initial reaction wasn’t excitement. It was something closer to “But you’re doing so well where you are.”", most managers generally push their devs to always be doing larger pieces of work, if they aren't, that's weird.
"I was a passenger for the first 10 years of my Amazon career", which doesn't really line up, unless they're referring to their horizontal move to Prime in an effort to find promotive work.
"Not because I suddenly got better at my job, but because I started being intentional about which parts of my job were ... mapped to what the next level required.", which means the author worked out how to correctly market themselves internally.
"You know where you want to be in five years, and you’re actively seeking out the work that will get you there eventually.", again, they worked out how to find promotive work. This seems to be the key take-away they're dancing around.
Honestly great work, but this is very much something where the results matter more than the product. It ends without a single comment about whether it worked in Production.
Given MCP is supposed to just be a standardised format for self-describing APIs, why are all the features you listed MCP related things? It sounds more like it's forced the enterprise to build such features which cli tooling didn't have?
When I started my career I heard people say almost verbatim "Stack overflow is making junior devs useless", with the idea all we did was copypaste scripts over. The same people failed, and the same people who can use the tools will succeed now.
It feels wild to have to keep reminding people, but AI changes very little. Tools have always had a variety of output, and ways to control this, and bad tools output a lot by default, whilst good tools hide it behind version of "-v" or easy greps. Don't add a --LLM or whatever, do add cleaner and consistent verbosity controls.
This is the answer. If you provide internet access to someone, you're responsible for it. It's a generally established law from a Torrenting PoV, so isn't it equally applicable to downloading content unsuitable for children. Sure it'll destroy offering free wifi, but that always was tricky from a legal PoV around responsibilities.
I genuinely just don't use the Start Menu anymore. It cannot find anything, and every search will include two Internet results (Bing only of course) and a Microsoft Store reference.
Buy a domain, own the MX records, send your emails where-ever you want. Then just try live your life, and anytime you log into something, try swap it over to your new domain.
Keep your gmail, keep it as the backup email. Just reduce your risk.