You have to go out of your way to either be extremely bigoted

looks at all the alt-right subs and the fascist users

Uhhhh…

AI is a solution in search of a problem.

The problem being CEOs asking themselves, “how do we acquire labour without having to pay for said labour, in order to maximize our own profit margins?”

AI was always meant to allow wealth to access labour without allowing labour to access wealth.

I, for one, am designing an entire production line of guillotines for when our capitalist system finally collapses. And for those in bunkers: a way of discovering air exchangers and all emergency exits so they can be filled with cement to turn bunkers into tombs. We need an effective method of culling sociopaths from our civilization, after all.

Insurers, he said, are already lobbying state-level insurance regulators to win a carve-out in business insurance liability policies so they are not obligated to cover AI-related workflows. “That kills the whole system,” Deeks said.

If insurers are going through extreme lengths to remove AI output from the list of things they will insure, this says everything about its future.

Because nothing says “effective risk management achieved” like an insurer signing off on, or forbidding the insurance of, an entire class of materials.

It’s a canary in a coal mine, like how insurers are now removing any ability for Floridians to insure against hurricanes or sea level rise, despite flat earthers screaming their heads off that climate change is a conspiracy and isn’t real.

(Note: I have seen the term “flat earther” starting to be used as a catch-all term for anyone who vehemently denies reality in spite of copious evidence that shows they are wholly and completely wrong)

Both classic Notepad and classic WordPad can be downloaded and installed from third-party sites.

However, to thoroughly neuter the enshittified versions and ensure the classic versions are used in all workflows can take a bit more than what the installers recommend. Primarily, I would recommend adding the *.bak extension to the enshittified versions then make (IIRC) junction links from the classic ones to where the enshittified ones are sitting. This ensures that if anything reaches for the enshittified ones, the junction links are there to redirect the action to the classic versions.

Both classic Notepad and classic WordPad can be downloaded and installed from third-party sites.

However, to thoroughly neuter the enshittified versions and ensure the classic versions are used in all workflows can take a bit more than what the installers recommend. Primarily, I would recommend adding the *.bak extension to the enshittified versions then make (IIRC) junction links from the classic ones to where the enshittified ones are sitting. This ensures that if anything reaches for the enshittified ones, the junction links are there to redirect the action to the classic versions.

There are ways for normal home users to bodily rip this shit out, but it takes some work and technical knowledge to effectively rip-and-tear in ways that work for you.

Some of the tools are also not the most user-friendly, expect the user to be a power user with deep familiarity with Windows, and have non-obvious workflows that may confuse a majority of average users.

While it takes about 8-16 hours of concerted effort, there are ways to castrate Windows into a mild approximation of what it was before.

The big question mark is Windows 12… and whether AI and spyware/malware features such as Recall will be baked into core functionality such that it will be impossible to remove or reliably deactivate.

I’m still with Windows for now, owing to requirements that have no non-Windows alternative (which include supporting and actually opening client data files for the desktop version of Quicken, for example), but I do foresee a time when I would reliably extract my last foot out of the Windows ecosystem.

Thankfully, their server products still appear to be enshittification-free. For now.

Still works perfectly fine under Old Reddit. Was refreshing the page and browsing it just this morning.

I like RustDesk. If you’re worried about connectivity, you can even run your own relay server.

For many places, it’s operational inertia. If you’ve had a hosting account at the same place since 1998, you’re bound to still have username/password access to services like FTP even though other (and better) options exist.

And then there is the issue of sole control. Many greybeards like myself still run traditional username/password auth on services because,

1. We have whitelisted our IP address, and if dynamic, keep that whitelist updated
2. That outside of said whitelisting, the service is a quasi-honeypot meant to protect the machine as a whole. Any connection made from outside the address space of my ISP, by anyone else, is by default considered malicious, and is banned instantly as a precaution. They don’t even get the opportunity to attempt a login; merely connecting to said service is sufficient evidence of hostile intent.

So while my setup is not ideal, it is ideal for myself. if I had anyone else as co-admin, or even clients, things would get stupidly complicated very quickly. But since it’s just me…

I’m wondering whether Europeans the other 96% of humanity

There, FTFY.

And yes, the other 96% of humanity would very much like to see Imperial measurements die.

Hell, as a Canadian born after 1970, I wouldn’t understand almost all Imperial measurements even if they smacked me clear in the forehead. About the most I have ever used are inches, feet, and pounds, and only because they’ve hung on in tightly-linked-to-America blue-collar industries and (until about a decade ago) grocery stores. I would have zero clue how much a cup or a Florida Ounce is.

OpenBSD does not have a docker engine. Can this be installed without docker?

Another reason why, while AI might be a fun toy, no one who is serious about getting work done will touch it with a dirty barge pole. The gratuitous hallucinations alone ought to be a sufficient deterrent.

As a security professional… yeah, nope. Nope, nope, nope.

Win11 has many usability issues, and Windows seems to accumulate more with every design decision, but reaming your arse open for someone else to bugger you via an exploit run under your own account is not one of them.

Yyyyyup.

What I find incredible is just how slow-moving and cruft-filled it has become.

For example, DotNet has had string interpolation since C# 6, back in 2015. That’s a decade, already.

Java recently yoinked their implementation because they just couldn’t make it work.

That’s damning.

Right now - ignoring the wider ecosystem and looking purely at the core language - I am seeing the very latest LTR version of Java as being on-par with C# pre-2010 in terms of continual material improvements and ease of use.

Yikes.

I still use Java, but… yikes.

And I self-host precisely because of the money I save using surplussed hardware. I have a symmetrical 1Gb SOHO fibre connection from my ISP, so I can host whatever the hell I want, I just need to stand it up. And a beefy older system with oodles of RAM is perfect for spinning up VMs of various platforms for various tasks. This saves me craploads of money over even a single VM on cloud platforms like Vultr. Plus, even if I were to support a “heavy” service sufficiently in demand to warrant its own iron, it still costs me less than a year’s worth of hosting to obtain a decent platform for that service to run on all by it’s lonesome.

My only cloud costs end up being those services which are distributed for redundancy and geographical distance, such as DNS and caching CDNs.

The paradox of tolerance disappears if you look at tolerance not as a moral or legal standard, but as a social contract:

If someone does not abide by the terms of the contract, then they are not covered by it.

In other words: the intolerant are not following the rules of the social contract of mutual tolerance.

Since they have broken the terms of the contract, they are no longer covered by the contract, and their intolerance should NOT be tolerated.

Will have to look into that, thanks.

One of my key implementation requirements, however, will be resiliency, which means simplicity will be a core feature. The more “moving parts”, the easier it will be to break.

flip phone

Almost all such phones are actually smart phones in a flip phone Edgar Suit. Especially if it has maps or YouTube or any kind of an App Store. I see a crapton of flip phones that run Android, which has all sorts of Google spyware piggybacking along.

I think there may be only two or three dumb flip phones or feature flip phones left on the market, and IIRC two are locked to specific networks.

If you want a bona-fide dumb phone, you might be limited to something like the rotary un-smartphone.