So never buy OnePlus products. Got it. Thanks OnePlus for making the advice so clear!

It’s astonishing how many organizations are still using it for their official communications when there are ready alternatives.

You can also set up local AI alerts (AI here is mostly used for facial recognition) e.g. to alert you if your MIL comes around uninvited, or if your kids sneak out at 2am, and so on.

That sounds awful. I’d rather just not, and avoid that mindset altogether.

Don’t buy anything from Amazon.

Yeah. I just wouldn’t feel comfortable putting my name to a slice of that dreary blandness.

As a long-time user of the em-dash I’m pissed off that my usual writing style now makes people think I used AI. I have to second-guess my own punctuation and paraphrase.

I’ve been programming professionally for 25 years. Lately we’re all getting these messages from management that don’t give requirements but instead give us a heap of AI-generated code and say “just put this in.” We can see where this is going: management are convincing themselves that our jobs can be reduced to copy-pasting code generated by a machine, and the next step will be to eliminate programmers and just have these clueless managers. I think AI is robbing management of skills as well as developers. They can no longer express what they want (not that they were ever great at it): we now have to reverse-engineer the requirements from their crappy AI code.

Yeah you need hardware for that. They’re making it so we can’t get hardware and we can’t self-host.

It’s really important not to discard functional hardware now, even by throwing it into recycling. It’s more useful intact and may not be replaceable forever.

I was thinking more that they’d like the idea of better surveillance of their own population. If that happened there might be an incentive for them not to make it affordable to own capable hardware.

But if you’re right about what you just said and China of all places ends up democratizing tech around the world, that will be something of a silver lining.

That’s why they have to make the hardware unobtainable. This is well underway.

Most of us already are, when you consider how much Amazon hosts.

I hope China keeps manufacturing affordable computers and doesn’t go all in on the cloud too. There might be profit in selling computers, but I bet there are politicians in the CCP who would love to have everyone rent cloud computing that’s more easily watched and controlled.

There are plenty of smart tech workers without the first clue about morality or human rights. Outside of tech these people are ignorant and naive. That’s why so many techbros become libertarians and stumble into fascism. It’s cluelessness and a basic lack of curiosity to discover the world outside of tech.

He’s probably just trying to get noticed by Trump. “Hey, look at me! I’m on the side of you and the other pedoNazis! You’re the best!”

It’ll be cloud-based rental computing with compulsory AI spyware and tiered pricing that determines what they allow you to do. The base tier will have just a whopping 2GB of RAM and 30GB for all your file storage needs for just $25 per month. If, one month, you can’t afford it, no computing for you, and goodbye software and data. The small print will specify that anything you create on Microsoft 365 Cloud Copilot Windows Home Edition for Teams of Peasants and Serfs is Microsoft’s property for all eternity to use, share or sell as they see fit, and you waive any right to ever challenge them legally and will accept a $5 Copilot 365 for Teams gift card in compensation should Microsoft’s AI incorrectly recommend you for death by ICE. Private messaging will be impossible and Linux or (heaven forbid) non-vibe programming will be punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a fine of millions of dollars.

Innovation is so exciting. It will have cute little animated AI chums tailored to our individual personalities and consumption profiles, reporting our every move to the authorities for our own safety and the safety of the children! I can’t wait!

They’re recommending not that you link to their URL but that you create a back end that caches content from it and serves that content under your own URLs.

India proposes requiring smartphone makers to share source code with the government

Before anyone gets their hopes up that India is pushing for open source software.

It’s infuriating. They silently move all your files to their cloud and you don’t notice. Then one day they tell you that you have filled your cloud quota and they want more money. Switching to local only is, by design, a huge pain that tends to go wrong.

I’m sure it can, like any component. But we’re all running computers full of chips from American companies, and the USA isn’t any more trustworthy. It’s not a huge change.