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rustcleaner

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Nice! I hope to see continued liberation of these locked up SOTA models. Cloud is a virtual prison, since other people's policies on what they think a user should and should not do cannot be [easily] bypassed, if enforced remotely on a cloud. All digital natives should be skeptical of cloud-hosted services or software. Think like an intelligence agency or sovereign: how are you going to get screwed by the cloud? Your data is fully accessible by the provider, and they can surveil your activities. You probably can't pirate it, so you are a slave in their rentier model. You could be prevented from doing something you want to do, because the provider disagrees philosophically or economically with your desire. You could be stripped of your information/data by a ban due to their policy enforcement system triggering.

One should live by the maxim: you don't have the thing if you don't possess the file or its processing. That goes for streaming, software, machine learning models, file storage, etc. But I digress; I am happy to see these paternalistic rentiers getting bit by these liberation/copying efforts, and human interests are served every time the digital and infrastructure locks are broken. I will always stand by the distillers!

I don't need your stinkin' passkeys! I have KeePassXC on Qubes OS and KeePassDX on GrapheneOS. No I will not buy into your proprietary cloud prison, with FISA/NSA/court-order backdoor access to my data! No I will not rely on KeePassXC/DX for storing them, when I can wake up tomorrow and find the paternalistic tyrants who maintain the provider attestation/trust lists have blacklisted my KeePasses! TOTP/HOTP-everywhere is a much better idea than freakin' passkeys! We need a law that forces any service provider that requires (hell, even offers) SMS 2FA to also offer TOTP or HOTP as additional options to substitute for SMS!

Whoever makes these boneheaded decisions (SMS 2FA only, hardware/cloud passkeys only) should not be allowed around engineering authentication for the public!

Yeah, I went there! Back off! Get off your high horses and eat some humble pie!

One idea I've had for reform is to ban central banks from inventing new currency except to pay every citizen a UBI debt free, and only tax limited liability entities (not humans). This would give citizens, instead of borrowers, first spend on new money and orient limited liability entities to serving citizens in the market to get their taxed revenues. It would also be a boon for financial privacy and reduce the burden on the average man.

Agree with you. It is a collateral consequence of the War on Drugs™ that everything good and effective is getting locked behind a $50-$200 doctor's visit for a 'scrip. This scam medicine problem could be helped if a bunch of substances were moved out of Rx and back to OTC. The nanny state will continue to grow to meet people's definitions on how much others should be warded.

Please no. We need to be going the other way on that trend: converting things which won't easily outright kill/maim you (and dare I say, even potentially addictive ones) at normal doses from Rx to OTC! Acetaminophen is one of the few cheap, easy, and working products on the shelf!

Just bring back ephedrine and pseudoephedrine! Nobody cares if a few enterprising nerds could cook it into methamphetamine! Oh my gawd someone might experience some unapproved, unrentiered joy! Send in the SWAT teams! This is what the War on Drugs™ gets us.

I just wish the Maxis games retained that awesome simulator feel and Win32 GDI integration that SimCity 2000 had, and not turned into full screen PlaySkool kiddie-gamer interfaces with big dumb buttons and junk.

Also like Mr. Wright I too was fond of the Care Bears, Nelvana's series particularly. Why bronies became a thing and not care bros, I will never figure out!

AI's PR Problem 1 month ago

I'll be real here: as a customer having to call into support, I have had way more unsatisfactory experiences dealing with "south asian" reps than I've had with AI. That offshoring has been absolutely horrible and it needs the heavy hand of government to put an end to it: Hire Americans for tech and support roles or be ready to pay taxes which will cost more than any cost savings that are had by offshoring, with the caveat that moving HQ out of America to try to dodge this -> full sanctioning from doing business with America or American companies.

This is not a funny dynamic, and the only real winners in this have been the investors. I would hardly call Microsoft an American company anymore.

AI's PR Problem 1 month ago

PR fixes:

1) Stop the guardrails (except for anti-hallucination guardrails, those are good),

2) Stop the REPLACE ALL THE HUMANS agitprop and sales pitches, maybe start presenting it as a technology which will overthrow rather than empower aristocracy,

3) Stop sucking up compute silicon and driving powerful home computing to absolute unaffordability,

4) Lean really heavy into local inference and open weights, for information privacy and personal sovereignty; we [smart ones] can see that the cloud monster is the Intelligence Community's golden goose right now and we're not buying it!

Never ever connect your "Smart"-TV to your network, or if you have an incurable impulse to then make sure it's on a firewalled gateway-less VLAN. Take the money you save buying the thing (compared to what a profitable "dumb" version would cost) and buy a surplus corporate mini-workstation system, and slap LibreELEC/Kodi or whatever on it, and use that device as your "smart" device. No good for you can ever come from bringing the TV onto the internet... ever!

(Also: never paypig, never subscribe!)

What will protect is taking bicycles off motor vehicle roadways, and laying down new, much narrower bicycle-exclusive roads all over instead. It doesn't make sense to mix the slower and vulnerable bicycle traffic with the faster and safer motor vehicles!

So if the 'Gilded Age' saw deflation of ~30% over some decades, what will historians in the future call an era of thousands of percents of inflation over some decades?

The 'Gelded Age' where the average man had his balls cut off by inflation?

most people aren't going to deal with that shit

Then we cipherpunks dunk on and make fun of them as we jet by in our cool top-down VPN convertibles! They can be ID cucks while we enjoy all the finer things on the internet!

Liberty and privacy aren't free; it takes sweat off the brow or the blood of sacrifice to preserve or claw back to.