Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • People who really want to communicate with each other will find a way.

    I think English<>French is a language pair you could get instant translations with the help of Google. So there’s a tech solution that will cause humorous misunderstands but will make do. You could hire somebody who is bilingual for the first meeting to let the parents talk behind their kids’ backs.

    If they are French, they may actually be able to have a simple conversation in English but the boyfriend wouldn’t know because they lose this ability the moment they cross the border back into France. That’s a silly stereotype but I like it.


  • So, as I said, we need to look at the legal situation at the same time. The assholery of the bank is possible due to the assholery of these OS restrictions and the duopoly of mobile OSs. Everybody wants to have a walled garden. Outlaw or at least restrict walled gardens.

    One thing politicians like to say is that they want to protect consumers. Forcing consumers into walled, privacy-invading gardens for essential services such as banking should be a change item on their agenda.

    So looking at the status quo you’re correct. I’m just hopeful we can change that. I’m also looking at these mobile compute devices in our pockets as universal ones. They can run any instruction set that doesn’t burn their hardware. All of these restrictions - chipped components, unaltered OSs, software only from one place - are man-made/big corp imposed. With a view to a walled garden. That’s where the law needs to intervene so you can bank safely from where you want.


  • We humans always underestimate the time it actually takes for a tech to change the world. We should travel in self-flying flying cars and on hoverboards already but we’re not.

    The disseminators of so-called AI have a vested interest in making it seem it’s the magical solution to all our problems. The tech press seems to have had a good swig from the koolaid as well overall. We have such a warped perception of new tech, we always see it as magical beans. The internet will democratize the world - hasn’t happened; I think we’ve regressed actually as a planet. Fully self-drving cars will happen by 2020 - looks at calendar. Blockchain will revolutionize everything - it really only provided a way for fraudsters, ransomware dicks, and drug dealers to get paid. Now it’s so-called AI.

    I think the history books will at some point summarize the introduction of so-called AI as OpenAI taking a gamble with half-baked tech, provoking its panicked competitors into a half-baked game of oneupmanship. We arrived at the plateau in the hockey stick graph in record time burning an incredible amount of resources, both fiscal and earthly. Despite massive influences on the labor market and creative industries, it turned out to be a fart in the wind because skynet happened a 100 years later. I’m guessing 100 so it’s probably much later.


  • Why isn’t this a popular thing? Because the majority of people on this planet does not care about time zones and either doesn’t have to deal with them at all or doesn’t see a problem when they do. It’s tradition, it’s convention, it’s well-established, and it just works for most people. We should abolish DST but otherwise this ship has sailed.

    We should use the aftermath of a civilization killing meteor hit or thermonuclear war to decimalize time keeping - it would need a catastrophic, cataclysmic event like that. A day is now 100 jiffies long. Each jiffy has 100 centijiffies. Now, if we could alter the time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun to something more even that’d be great.






  • The solution should not be one single provider. Use Ente for pictures, maybe Proton* for other cloud storage and Docs replacement, look into a Nextcloud server hosted by another provider for calendar and email. Don’t put all your digital eggs in one walled nest.

    *Proton is plagued by a CEO who can’t keep his mouth shut about politics. Look into that and how you feel about it before you sign up. Their VPN is good but I wouldn’t use them also for email to make switching less of a headache - and I don’t think you could use your own domain there anyway.


  • Why is this in privacy? Because it’s an obfuscation, which is good, or because there will be another database to be hacked, which is bad?

    I was disappointed they didn’t go for a system like these three words. Or just structuring their addresses around street names and house numbers, like normal people. If you don’t know: currently, addresses are not written as 123 Example Road but mostly as Subdistrict name and number, Block number, House number. The splits into numbered subdistricts is fairly random, the block split just fairly less random, and the house numbers can be in order of building completion so number 6 can be next to number 13. Most streets have no name. It’s so utterly absurd that even if you knew the address there is no guarantee you will actually find the right place without a map provider with correct addresses. It’s a miracle not more people die because first responders couldn’t find the right address. But they don’t change this system, no, they just exchange one incomprehensible system with rando numbers and letters! Well done, the Post Office.


  • If we needed everyone we want to name anything after was required to be a saint, we wouldn’t have anybody to name stuff after.

    Churchill - the man who rose to lead his country through WW2 - was a big colonial killer in India before. Both the reformator Luther and the philosopher Kant were raging antisemites. A non-insignificant number of US founding fathers held slaves. Bill Clinton balanced the budget while molesting an intern (and allegedly worse). It’s rare that we already know the president is a sexual predator before he gets elected. Yet, there will be a probably very small library named after 47 if there isn’t one already. It’s probably the best library in the world!

    History goes through many hands before it gets whittled to a generally agreed upon narrative. Churchill was lucky in real life. Daystromn was lucky in canon. And while sympathies may change over time, I’m not expecting a name change in trek Okinawa.


  • I think with PCs it will be harder to lock them down and not disgruntle consumers too much in the process. I’m also hopeful that over time right to repair will be the standard, so they have to allow for third party repair. So all these restrictions like chipped components and software only from our store will be phased out by incremental legislation. The EU is not perfect but it’s on this path. Even in the US people are thinking antitrust more often now. There is hope, however small.

    You can run whatever you like in your Android phones. Jailbreaking iPhones is also possible. All these devices are just computers that can run anything within their hardware specs. Hacking some of these things may be against the Ts and Cs or even illegal. But technically possible. The restrictions are mote political, not technical.

    Chromebooks are not the way to the future. They fill a niche in education for cheap hardware in connection with limited capabilities. They are not technical limitations, they are designed to limit users in what damage they can do. AFAIK you could technically wipe a chromebook and put Linux on it. It may violate the Ts and Cs and we’re right back at political. Google would like to develop future customers at an early age. They don’t care about the education so much as about their bottom line.




  • Like the river finds the sea, people will find a way around it. Satellite connections, just as an idea.

    Anything a chip does can be backwards engineered to fool it. People will break your proposed surveillance chip eventually.

    Most of these companies are maybe US-owned to varying degrees but they don’t produce everything in the US. Also, they would put a very high price on these government mandated chips for two reasons: 1) government has deep pockets and 2) it would keep them away from very profitable so-called AI biz opportunities.

    The pandy has shown us that with a few disruptions in the supply chain, any system that requires a cryptographic chip check to function can be sent to hell in a handbasket. I forgot if it was HP or Canon or some printer company had to teach its customers to bypass, i.e. hack their own cryptogtaphic chip checks because they couldn’t get more chips and otherwise the printers wouldn’t print. A few disruptions could also affect the censorship chip supply chain.

    The great firewall of China has also shown how creative people get to get their message across. If it’s not just human censors but also so-called AI censors it will just take creativity to a new level. Necessity is the mother of invention.

    So there are some reasons why you might be worrying too much. I think another one is much broader. The majority of Americans did not vote for the current president. If he started censoring the internet now there would be Civil War II - Now It’s Digital. The reason why Russia or North Korea can censor their people much easier is because they have never had or only on paper a brief period of liberty and rule of law. It will be much harder to control the US population. There isn’t just the one media outlet, the one ISP, the one judiciary to dominate. It’s splintered. And populated by feisty people, some of them armed. You couldn’t pull off what you suggested without much more support for 47. And he seems to be losing it more than gaining these days.



  • I think there is data on it. Back in school I remember looking at the population pyramid. It’s a visualization of the number of men and women (x-axis, going both left and right) per birthyear (y-axis). In ye olden days, that formed a triangle. Many babies at the bottom, fewer olds at the top. You could tell a lot from the shape this took. You’d get dents on the male side that will correspond with armed conflicts, like the world wars. And then in the 1960s the pyramid with war chips in it massively narrows. At least in countries where the pill became readily available. It turned the pyramid into a tree with a big head at the top and a wide but thinner stem growing under it. I suspect now 80 years later we’re at a much narrower elongated triangle shape again. So you can probably count the shift in numbers there and put a number on “prevented accidents.” But you would have to account for other factors as well, improvements in medicine, vaccinations, etc.

    Were all births accidental? That’s a question you could only ask in hindsight. Humans have always looked for ways you prevent conception because we like to party but without reliable success. It’s only in the second half of the last century that we have come up with measures that the Catholic church really doesn’t approve of. Before that, children weren’t really planned in today’s sense. They just happened. They were expected to happen. And with most women being relegated to raising them and running the household, there wasn’t much else they could do. The concept that a wife could be raped by her husband is sadly fairly new. The patriarchy was strong. Abortion was a gamble and many women died from bad jobs of them. Most of the time, if she got pregnant, the decision was made, end of story. If you weren’t married yet, shotgun wedding. That’s how it went until we developed contraception that actually works. I wouldn’t call any kids before that accidental.

    Sure, you could remain abstinent. But we like to party.