When our parents say they want to be our friends, that’s nice. But we better also respect them as teachers. Totally equalizing them is demeaning them and arrogant of us. When Jews say they want to be everyone’s friends and allies, that’s nice. But Gentiles better also give them respect as their teachers.

The first time I read this kind of nonsense I thought it was a joke, then that it was an exception. Now I know, that I was being naive. Even now, I had to check it because i couldn’t believe that it was real.

I love Debian, I use it as a desktop and it’s installed on all my machines, but it has some problems/quirks that make it hard to recommend it for desktop usage.

First one is that it doesn’t have sensible defaults, the OS expects a user who is an admin, one who will configure things to their liking. I would consider this to be a feature, if it weren’t for the second problem, the documentation. The documentation is wayy too dated, lots of pages in the wiki haven’t been updated since Debian Buster days!

A better recommendation would be probably a Debian derivative like MX Linux. They are more opinionated, but as far as I know, they come with better defaults and offer newer guides, documentation, etc.

The Crypto AG story shows that the location of a company doesn’t matter that much. The US simply made legal what they were already doing behind the scenes. Intelligence services have always been and still are above the law.

Unpopular takes incoming.

Signal.

Way too many red flags.

• Why ask for mandatory phone numbers? You could at least make it opt in.
• Why we can’t inspect the latest server code?
• Why not make it easy for people to run their own servers?

Do you truly believe that a company that wants to preserve your privacy would take this direction?

And i don’t care how secure the protocol is, how well the code is audited. They can still map your social graph.

Anyways, because of my threat model, i still use Signal. But if i were an activist i wouldnt touch it.

More unpopular takes:

Tor and Mullvad probably compromised too. If a service gets too mainstream, I dont believe for a second that they would let it run without care. They would take it down, or control it.

Now, these services are still usefull. For example mt threat model is to deny my shit to the big tech. So they are useful if you want to escape data collection for adversiment purposes.

I don’t think they would burn the reputation of these services for low hanging fruit like selling data for ads.

There are plenty, as others have said, it has been able to help a lot in science. It has been used for finding new drugs, search for composite materials.

Sadly i don’t think the pros will outweigh the cons, the society as is right now won’t let it happen. I truly think this tool, even without any fancy AGI, if used in a responsible manner could help us solve some of the most pressing problems the world has.

But it won’t happen, look at the irresponsible manner the capitalist society has rolled out this tech, which is still in its infancy. It has wasted tons and tons of energy on models that are not yet fully mature. Brute force training of shit models just to get the best monthly benchmark over competitors. It’s so sad to see all the promised goals in terms of saving energy and water that went to garbage the moment the AI hype exploded.

And what we got for that? A bunch of models causing problems because they are not ready. Executives cutting workforce, in part to justify the use the new shiny tooling, only to get shittier services. And worse of all, shortage of water and energy to pump more compute.

Even if we get to a future where AI is cheap, powerful and capable, it will only be used to widen the gap between the wealthy and the common people.

Link Article

Sorry for the doomer rant, its a conflicted topic for me, feel free to skip.

@zarkanian When posting videos try to put a descriptive title or a summary with your thoughts in the body. Not only it opens up discussions about the topic, it always make me more likely to check the content. It’s not in the rules but i think is nice etiquette.

(From South America)

About phones, same advice as monovergent, i use a separate phone for things that require google and another one for work. It’s not ideal since they probably can correlate them, but it’s the best compromise i found.

About ID, you are required to show it for most of the things you ask, which I think is reasonable. We don’t have face id thankfully yet