It all comes out of the pockets of the taxpayers. Playing magic shell games doesn't change that. At the end of the day, it's all the same pool. You're deluding yourself.

Closed source binaries have companies who own the copyright and would sue the pants off of anyone who used this tool to try and "clean room" engineer a replacement. With open source there's not always a monolithic entity that can exercise copyright claims against an infringing party and perhaps generally less of a desire to do so even if the money and desire to pursue legal action were there.

The hope is that by targeting open source there's people infringing on the copyright of the authors will be able to get away with it more easily. For a lot of smaller projects that's probably true. The costs of litigating this aren't something a small project can afford.

Why would anyone want to work for a company that does stuff like this??

The problem with this mindset is that too often companies introduce something that consumers don't really want and instead of moving on and trying something else, the new gadget gets shoved down everyone's throat. The same is true and far more noticeable on the software side. I find myself constantly wishing that companies would release new versions that are faster, more efficient, and have fewer bugs instead of cramming new features in and then trying to make me use them even when I don't want to. Apple has enough gadgets to refine for the next decade before they need to introduce something else.

This looks like the latest escalation in the tug-o-war between employers and remote workers. The relatively few people going to extraordinary efforts just to avoid doing the job they're being paid to do is going to ruin it for everyone else. Do you want to make return-to-office mandatory? Because creating AI fakes to pretend to be on work meetings sounds like a good way to make that happen.

Software development is too broad to really be called a trade. Almost everything is connected to a computer these days and there's no way to teach all of it in four years. The best a CS program can do is to teach students how to solve problems and translate those into languages that computers can operate on, provide them with a fundamental understanding of the computational model and its limitations, and expose them to different tools and best practices that will make them better at solving those problems.

Almost anything that they learn outside of that (and maybe even some of the things related to the aforementioned concepts) will be out of date within a few decades of their graduation if it already isn't by the time they're out of school. Most of the people still posting here would have gone to school before or around the time that the Internet was taking off and becoming ubiquitous, before mobile app development existed, and for some even before desktop PCs were in most households. The landscape completely changed for us, but the skills we learned allowed us to solve these new problems or invent new languages to make those tasks easier.

What we have is too much of a moving platform to be considered a trade.

Most people aren't disciplined enough to stop themselves if they're even aware of the problem in the first place. The screens are incredibly effective mechanism for delivering little dopamine hits that the human brain craves. Human attention to these mechanisms selects for the most suitable and developers constantly try to build a better dark pattern to keep the eyeballs on their app instead of someone else's.

Alcohol has been a part of human society for thousands of years and it's still a problem for us. Some people can use it responsibly and others can't. I would imagine that's due to evolution slowly filtering out the genes that couldn't handle it in moderation. This is an entirely new drug that humans have far less experience with though. Television may share some similarities, but what smartphones have on offer is an entirely different beast.

The scary part is that it will probably get worse before it gets better.

Cut and paste probably are t a stretch for most people. Most preschools or other forms of education involve art and crafts activities. Cutting shapes out of construction paper and gluing them onto another sheet of paper is something that most kids have done before they deal with the kinds of software programs that use the metaphor.

Most people know what files are, but the idea of a file system isn't one that they grasp. Phones have made this a lot worse as they tend to hide the notion of directories from the user.

Also did you mean to type CR as in carriage return? I'm assuming so based on context. You're probably right on this one. I'm old enough to have used a typewriter, but I wouldn't expect most people born in the last 40 years that know much about they operated.

There's really nothing that can be done about the technology in public, but these will run into the same problem that guns do even in states that allow carry with or without permit. At some point a person will want to enter a private establishment and they will be subject to the policy of the owners. Many businesses already explicitly forbid anyone from recording on the premises so anyone wearing these glasses would need to check them at the door.

Meta should really just invert the concerns of these groups as a form of marketing. Buy these glasses and they can identify if your stalker is following you. Concerned parents can have faces scanned against the sex offender registry so that they can spot a pedophile from a block away. Obviously nothing will ever go wrong with any of that, but when has marketing ever cared about unintended consequences?

Arson is usually taken pretty seriously, but that's because there's a tendency for offenders to be serial offenders as often as it's a directed one-off attack. You'd have a better argument if it were something like burglary or vandalism which the cops will do fuck all about unless you've got video evidence at which point they'll take that from you and then do fuck all 90% of the time unless they already know the suspect.

Was anyone planning on building a data center in Maine in the next two years? Probably not, so all this amounts to is a meaningless law that politicians can say they worked hard on to ensure that the citizens of Maine were blah blah blah. Even though it did nothing expect it to be talked about excessively when the candidate is up for reelection. This is just a hot button issue that a lot of people are worried about or feel strongly about so it's easy to score points with voters with something that cost no political capital. It's the equivalent of passing a resolution to recognize cancer is bad, only it's less obvious what is being done to the average voter.

There have been several instances now of counties that have made local ordinances effectively banning data centers. I'm not sure if all of them were in counties where anyone was considering opening a data center, but it's not that much different than counties banning the sale of liquor. Sure, you or I might think it's stupid, but I also suspect that you might like at least some of the laws or regulations in place at various levels of government that should also be similarly done away with while letting the market sort it out.

The actual number of data centers that will be built is still small and even if some places want to ban them, somewhere else won't. To the extent that I think people should be able to outlaw things they don't like on property that isn't theirs, I am more receptive to it if it's a popular initiative than one pushed from higher up, but I think that even the people who agree in this specific case would find reasons to be upset if the state/county/whatever were banning something that they personally liked.

We've had that for thousands of years, at least since the dawn of agriculture. The hangover or other side effects can be a bit rough though.

They charge enough for their hardware for me to believe that they don't need to try to squeeze an extra nickel out of me with ads or otherwise selling my user data that they might collect. Not that it really matters if someone is using an AppleTV to run Netflix or other third party apps. Of course they at least have an incentive not to sell my data because keeping it to themselves may provide some competitive advantage.

Of course, the best solution for the privacy minded is a self-built Linux box and Pirate Bay. Otherwise someone knows what you purchased and you're ultimately at the mercy of them not abusing your trust.

Is it more or less degrading to train your replacement when it's not even human compared to when it's some third-worlder that barely understands you?

I'm personally not inclined to trust anything (human or otherwise) trained by a person with an axe to grind or resentful of their replacement. Someone will have trained the replacement poorly out of spite. I suspect most people have heard stories of this happening when IT started getting offshored or otherwise outsourced in decades past.

For the average human being in modern society, nature is a hellish nightmare. Wild animals have no qualms with gorging on your entrails while you scream and flail helplessly as you die. The plants that will poison you will not label themselves as such and food will not deliver itself to you. Humans can absolutely live there. Our ancestors all did at some point and some groups still do to this day, but for the average person being thrown into that nature is a death sentence and one that likely involves a lot of suffering.

If your idea of nature is a quant hiking trail or a forested park where you can watch the birds those only exist because humans made them that way and keep all of the dangerous flora and fauna out. Nature is incredibly beautiful, but many deadly things are.