Also, the development and evolution of these open technologies relies on human interest and attention, and that attention can be diminished, even starved, by free, closed offerings.

Evil plan step 1: make a free closed alternative and make it better than everything else. Discord for chat, Facebook for forums and chat/email, etc.

Step 2: wait a few years, or a decade or more. The world will largely forget how to use the open alternatives. Instant messengers, forums, chat services, just give them a decade to die out. Privately hosted communities, either move to Facebook, pay for commercial anti-spam support, spend massive volunteer hours, or drown in spam.

Step 3: monetize your now-captive audience. What else are they going to use? Tools and apps from the 2000s?

What? Did I turn it off and on again? I’m a very smart technology person, of course my big brain already thought of that. I develop software for a living. It couldn’t be that simple or I wouldn’t be calling you.

. . .

Turning it off and on again worked. My shame is immense and I have wasted everybody’s time.

(And that is how I learned to embrace my own idiocy and do the recommended, simple troubleshooting tasks without questioning them.)

So I’m curious . . . what reference am I missing that helps me understand what menu settings cause exactly which pieces of personal data to be shared with which Apple services? I want to RTFM, and while I appreciate people wanting to be helpful, comment replies are not themselves documentation.

(I switched from Android to ios in 2020 and haven’t really figured out details beyond turning icloud sync off for specific apps. I’d like to add more devices and learn to trust that sync method but I don’t understand where crypto is used and how the keys are handled.)

Plagiarism should be part of the conversation here. Credit and context both matter.

How much stock ownership remains with the nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation? And will that be enough to hold off shareholder complaints that they aren’t being evil enough?

They probably got the sound file from the Visual C++ 4.2 CD’s samples folder. That’s where ICQ got it from.

Agreed. Use your experience to shape the direction your teammates are moving in. Be an architect, and let them handle your light work.

Ugh, this makes me want to “slash slash slash.”

I use Due on iOS for repeating timers/reminders where I need it to be persistent and annoying because the task is important. Like paying rent, or physical therapy “homework” I kept forgetting. The persistence might be good if you’re worried you’ll just dismiss a normal alarm or forget to start the next timer.

Yeah a bit. IBM QRadar is alright. I’m confident there’s something real (and real expensive) underneath the buzzword salad in that article.

I think the most important thing we can do is shout about this from the rafters, so every potential IPO investor can hear. Most of the subject matter experts have fled. The best data is available for free elsewhere. (And none of us are too happy about having our collective knowledge shared without attribution or appreciation by an AI, but that’s not the point. Money is the point here.)

Even old HP printers aren’t safe. I have a two-generations-back HP Color LaserJet I got from a tech recycler for $300. (MFP M477fdw) It can be optionally configured to enforce or not enforce genuine toner. I can get a four-pack of CYMK high-capacity cartridges for $70-80 on Amazon. Prints wonderfully, toner is cheap, so I’m in the clear, right? Safe from this BS?

Turns out that wear items (intermediate transfer belt, for example) within the printer have chips with versioned firmware. And the printer will throw error codes if different firmware versions within the printer aren’t mutually compatible.

I’m sure the moment they believe they can get away with it, replacement ITB assemblies, fixers, document scanners, etc will include a shrink wrap license and firmware that requires you to update everything else to match - and the matching firmware will make official toner no longer optional.

Definitely Fuck HP. The moment any of that comes to pass and disables my own printer I’m re-recycling this printer and buying another brand immediately.

You might be presenting it backwards. We need LLMs to be right-sized for translation between pure logical primitives and human language. Let a theorem prover or logical inference system (probably written in Prolog :-) ) provide the smarts. A LLM can help make the front end usable by regular people.

Clearly my comment annoyed you. What should I have done differently? Apart from switching away from Windows, what plan or idea should I have attempted to rally support for?

Ok that tears it. What firewall rules do I need to set so I get security updates and absolutely nothing else?

Agreed. They are deliberately taking advantage of the fact that people don’t understand how autopilot is actually used in aircraft.

Sure, the most pedantic of us will point out that, with autopilot enabled, the pilot-flying is still in command of the aircraft and still responsible for the safe conduct of the flight. Pilots don’t** engage autopilot and then leave the cockpit unattended. They prepare for the next phase of flight, monitor their surroundings, prepare for top-of-descent, and to stay mentally ahead of the rapid-fire events and requirements for a safe approach and landing. Good pilots let the autopilot free them up for other tasks, while always preparing for the very real possibility that the autopilot will malfunction in the most lethal way possible at the worst possible moment.

Do non-pilots understand that? No. The parent poster is absolutely correct: Tesla is taking advantage of peoples’ misunderstanding, and then hiding behind pedantic truth about what a real autopilot is actually for.

** Occasionally pilots do, and many times something goes horribly wrong unexpectedly and they die. Smart, responsible pilots don’t. Further, sometimes pilots fail to manage their autopilot correctly, or use it without understanding how it can behave when something goes wrong. (RIP to aviation Youtuber TNFlygirl who had a fatal accident six days ago, suspected to be due to mismanagement of an unfamiliar autopilot system.)

Hmm I’ve got an old Compaq 575e with a PCNet32 nic, and an old 3com 3c509 ISA adapter in a closet with 10base2 and AUI ports.

Use a modem router or managed switch to get down to 100baseT, give this box a Linux distro, enable Ethernet bridging in the kernel, and slaps case this baby can drop almost 20k packets a second, no sweat!

Ok now I’m curious what I’m missing out on. Can anyone recommend a good PCIe token ring adapter and concentrator?

Really great ideas. I read up a bit on Fediblock and I think you’re absolutely right.

If I could riff off of your ideas a bit: instance-blocking recommendation lists bundle an entire stack of things together:

• statements of fact or intent: this is wrong, this is right, this is insulting and harmful, this is insulting but not harmful if you can laugh at it

• value judgements about those statements: I care about this issue but not that issue, this wrong statement is easily disproven, that wrong statement takes paragraphs to disprove, etc.

• actions to take based on those value judgements: block, tag with a statement, link to an article, etc.

With things bundled, the whole stack has to be a pretty close match for a user’s own values, or else there’s friction. The user can just tolerate the friction, maybe miss out on some content, or they can decide to switch to a whole new list.

Suppose we could unbundle those from each other. Subscribe to the work of a group of volunteers that recommends safe defaults but lets you customize things when you encounter friction points.

I feel like we need different ways to share and learn things about harmful posts and comments. Like, sure maybe your server aggregates the posts, and because you own the server you can remove or edit things if you really want to. But I should be able to say “this is objectively wrong in a dangerous way, and here’s proof” in a side channel that the server owner can’t block.

And for it to have any point at all, clients should be able to subscribe to feeds. Like, a science educator I respect can say “I trust this foundation that fights harmful disinformation” and I should be able to click a button and see their stuff. Without the server owner banning me for some weird reason.