There’s “playing with fire” and then there’s “using a lit match to check the bottom of a gas tank”

This would be funnier if we weren’t deploying massive AI data-centers to destroy the last surviving mega-fauna.

Classic Authoritarian Log Flume

Seems like you don’t really need to fork the system until someone applies DOB field in a meaningful way.

Even in such a situation, I would suspect the short-term solution is simply a patch or crack to neuter the functionality that the DOB field is supposed to implement. A full fork seems unnecessary, even counterproductive, since it would define your OS as meaningfully distinct (and noticeably out of compliance) with a standard installation.

What’s being described right now is just an optional date-of-birth field.

The timing is dogshit.

Like getting handed a grenade pin and told “It’s a fucking pin! It’s harmless, what are you worried about?”

I heard the big banks were trying something similar shortly before the '08 crash. And the Enron/Worldcomm crew right before 9/11.

Certainly possible they’ve got an exit strategy lined up. But the problem is that they’re always just a little too greedy and too high on their own supply. During the '14 mini-recession, reinflating the bubble economy was a bipartisan goal. After the '20 COVID crash, there was broad consensus in cranking open the money hose and flooding the economy with cheap cash. '08, '14, and '20 set a big historical precedent for the “We’ll never let you fail” policies of the federal government. And so we’ve diluted a lot of the short term pain of economic contraction into the longer term pains of currency inflation.

The enormous devastation to real physical capital all across these Mid-Eastern theocracies, combined with the socio-economic pressures of Climate Change induced heat waves, can and will push certain regions of the globe to a breaking point. At some point, you just don’t have anything to spend all those excess dollars on.

How’s this?

And learn to shave down below! God damn, nobody wants to see those hairy toes, you freak’n hobbit.

Who can afford that kind of comically oversized lollypop on a normal salary?

They’re not invisible. They’re wearing yoga pants. Just like the Allistic women.

I hear the guy on the left is gay.

I don’t begrudge rich people going to rich people prison, because the point of prison is to remove dangerous people from society not to torture them in a cage. I do begrudge poor people going to poor people prison, because it seems as though these prisons exist as a means of extracting cheap labor from poor and PoC populations. Or outright abusing them - mentally, physically, and sexually - because this kind of brutality generates political rewards.

fines don’t count anymore, only hard time

I mean, you’re assuming this survives one of the eight million appeals the Facebook legal team is going to throw at it.

But yes, by the time it works itself all the way up and down the appellate courts, I wouldn’t expect this $1.5T company to experience any legal penalties in excess of a few million dollars.

LLMs are excellent tools for mapping one set of words and phrases to another, which is more or less exactly what you need out of a language translator.

The former I’m still looking sideways at.

The latter, probably the only truly benevolent use of LLMs. And even then, you’ll get plenty of grumbling.

🫣

It is entirely true that all models from all manufacturers are compromised by spy agencies.

I think there’s a little bit of space between “spy agencies employ systems professionals that know the guts of a component’s security and tricks to bypass it” and “every device firmware has a double super secret protocol for sidestepping all of its security features”.

However the worst offender by far is Cisco even though they’re “American”.

Sure. I’m willing to believe that Cisco, specifically, has relationships with the Five Eyes network such that they make monitoring their traffic easier. Even then, there’s limits. One thing to say techniques exist to bypass security. Another entirely to know what those techniques are and whether they’re practical for application at universal scale.

One of the more chronic problems that big spy agencies have is sifting through all the spam and bullshit and empty chatter. Decryption takes time. And you can’t monitor everything, everywhere, all at once. The bigger sins of Cisco are in how they expedite access on behalf of their agency partners, not that they fail to produce perfectly hack-proof hardware.

because why the fuck the not?

In theory, you would have better things to do with your real estate.

But I guess I’m the idiot who threw my kit out six months ago to make the house a little less cluttered.

Smuggling? Setting up a factory in Florida that reboxes routers and slaps “Made In America” stickers on them? Resale/referb router prices going through the roof?

Take your pick.

If you don’t visit YouTube…