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Comment Re:Still ahead (Score 2) 113

The US is now carbon negative. It reached a max of 6 billion metric tons of CO2 in the 2000s. In 2025, we are putting out about 5 billion metric ton

That's not carbon negative. It's not even carbon neutral.

What you should be saying is that the US has passed peak carbon, but even that assumes that Trump's anti-renewables drive doesn't increase carbon output, which seems unlikely.

Meanwhile China is reducing its unit energy cost by installing lots of renewable generation.

Comment Re:bad. (Score 1) 216

You say '... block any imported EVs ...' as if that  tariff action were a bad thing. I'd favor the  retro/contra-tilt: block ALL "industrial" manufactured  imports except medical equipment.  OTOH allow  importied "craft" products like German/Russian sausage , Irish whisky and Italian womens shoes.  Individuals and "guilds" and sweatshops may compete world-wide. A producer/designer  society values much higher than  consumer/investor cultures. Let globalist sociopaths and mercantile pederasts immigrant to China ha...hahaha and watch them howl when Maos' doppelganger rises again. .

Comment Re:"base" model (Score 1) 72

These have 16 GB memory and 512 GB storage. That's plenty for a large portion of the market.

16GB of RAM, I'll grant is fine for standard use...but Apple really needs to come up with some sort of solution for storage expansion beyond "bag of USB accessories" or "2TB of iCloud storage"; most Mac owners end up with both.

Sure, 512GB is fine for Apple Chromebooks, but video editors easily end up with either an external storage array or having to do "the project shuffle" of data management that is an absolute chore. There are more than a handful of PC laptops that offer multiple NVMe slots, so 8TB of internal storage is an option on less expensive laptops, that isn't possible on a Macbook, at all, for any price.

Sure, it's not everyone...but soldered-RAM and soldered-storage means that a nontrivial amount of the Mac market (which is disproportionately musicians, photographers, and videographers) is stuck buying the other half of their computer in pieces, including a port replicator to plug them all in simultaneously. This isn't an argument that Apple needs to design some Clevo monstrosity with interchangeable GPUs, only an acknowledgment that there is a sizeable market demographic that is artificially hamstrung.

Comment Wrong Starting Point (Score 4, Insightful) 66

I swear, the FSF has no concept of onramps, incremental victories, or provisional compromises.

Graphene, iode, and /e/OS exist, in addition to LineageOS. Are they "free enough" for the FSF? No, but to argue that the reason these things don't have mass acceptance is because users can't modify their modem firmware is patently absurd. I can appreciate the desire for purity, and a truly Free/Libre software stack from the low-level firmware to the apps, but this is absolutely the wrong starting point.

For starters, they could throw some funding toward F-Droid. Fund app development contests to improve availabilty of FOSS/FLOSS mobile apps. Users won't move off a proprietary OS if they *also* have to say goodbye to their massive app stack. If apps are available that will allow users to migrate their data to FOSS alternatives that are *also* available on a FOSS/FLOSS mobile OS, the migration path off Google Android becomes much easier to walk.

To double-down on this, the FSF could fund Creative Commons alternatives to Spotify and Netflix and maybe Tiktok or Instagram, and provide music and video streaming platforms for artists to post their music and movies (maybe with a self-hosted/federation option). Sure, it'll be a bit amateur at the beginning, but so was Youtube, and now entire careers exist because of it. If the FSF got behind these kinds of platforms, to the point of releasing iterations of streaming clients in the Google Play and Apple App Stores, it would chip away at the reasons *why* a FOSS/FLOSS operating system has such an uphill climb. Imperfectly, sure...but my wager is that more users would be willing to abandon iOS and Android if they already move over to independent streaming apps, than if the FSF's sales pitch is "you can modify your own firmware".

From there, again, onramps. Make a list of phones that pass certain criteria of freedom - 'copper' for phones with user-unlockable bootloaders and a commitment to release device trees within the first year, 'bronze' for phones that ship with unlockable bootloaders and release device trees on day-one for Lineage-and-friends to modify, 'silver' for phones that ship with unlocked bootloaders and officially supported mostly-Free Android builds with user instructions to load it, 'gold' for phones that ship with a mostly-free Android build out of the box, 'platinum' for phones that are FOSS everywhere except the modem (which has a documented API), and 'diamond' for 'no proprietary code anywhere, at all'. Hell, the FSF could probably make a few extra bucks reselling such phones at all the different levels, and let users decide the level of freedom they're looking for.

Ultimately, starting at the lowest level of the hardware stack might have its place, but it is of no virtue if the LibrePhone has no users (or worse, whose primary users are troublemakers who get IMEI runs blocklisted). Firmware is the least of the problems the FSF is facing, and while a staunch adherence to principles is laudable, it is of no virtue to have an OSS cellular modem that can't make phone calls or text messages because no telco will allow it. It is of no virtue to have a FLOSS laptop who spends its day storing data in Google Drive, acquired from Salesforce, and copied into Quickbooks Online, then going home and listening to Spotify and watching Disney+...and the phone landscape is exactly the same. Without a counterbalance of enabling users to meaningfully interact with their data without being beholden to proprietary systems, the FSF will be the poster child for winning the battle and losing the war.

Comment Re:AI-hallucinated citations :o (Score 1) 38

Chatbots are trained to never admit that they don't know, and to always be willing to be convinced that the person talking to them is correct.

No, that's exactly not what chatbots are doing. Chatbots have no concept of right and wrong. Chatbots know that given the frequency of words already in the conversation and their probalistic neighborhood to elements in their body of data, which words are most probable to come next. And if there is not enough data fitting their current state, they randomly add words, because no possible next word presents them with a high probability.

Comment Re:It sounds to me... (Score 1) 34

Indonesia is a Muslim country with approx the same population of USA, but sharia-law & a yearly theater  box-office less than 10% of ours. Indonesia really does-not-count as a media mover, so their use of movie.ai fades into noise. When a country ( like China ) with a proven record of world-class films begins slurping *.ai into their art  then movie-goers  can start to worry. BTW// I do not consider integrated CGI-crafted catastrophes as "ai".

Comment Re:Why not OpenDocument Format? (Score 0) 143

Yep. China is employing economic screws to promote state power ... as has every city/state/nation since Gobekli-Tepi.  It's all good ... and USA should return the favor by rejecting ALL/ANY Chinese manufactured products or raw materials.  Shut-down trading that has never been in USA interests, apart from a few sociopathic globalists. If required the USA can go to a temporary  war-time footing and generate everything it needs right here or from "affiliated" partners. USA workers would see huge employment gains and SA/Canada would finally get the USA attention they deserve.  Some unproductive USA economic sectors --- like software --- would suffer: no problemo. To repeat ... China screws us we screw them ...  all's fair.

Comment Re:Not surprising (Score 5, Insightful) 184

"Move Fast and Break Things" inspired a generation of incompetence.

I think there were three elements of this mindset that were assumed knowledge on the part of the person who said it:

1. "Move fast and break things...in a development environment where possible".
2. "Move fast and break things...in a way that is easily reversible." (see #1)
3. "Move fast and break things...and assume they will break, so assume you'll be fixing what broke" (see #2 and #1).

I can appreciate that Facebook can have this mindset, and in the case of a social network, there *is* an element of wisdom in not treating it like the IBM-of-old that overengineered EVERYTHING, making it super-reliable, but also making development very slow and very expensive. Facebook's focus on agility makes perfect sense for the nature of the work.

This doesn't work in every field, though. From finance to medicine to engineering, the costs are much, much greater than the loss of cat videos. Just because something makes sense in one field, doesn't mean it makes sense in EVERY field...and unfortunately, there are very, very few MBAs who understand the one thing that is more valuable than money: wisdom. Wisdom can earn money, but money can't buy wisdom.

Comment Re:How is this even "tech" anymore? (Score 1) 42

Not just scientists and engineers find AI technically useful. I am in a no-support / "troubled" WiFi environment with my Linux systems. I have used DDG.ai troubleshooting my  randomly(?)  on-again/off-again internet connection. Without DDG.ai I simply could not fumble-thru enough setting changes to maintain my connection. It's like having a tireless Linux-savvy  pal sitting at my side. 

Comment Re:The discipline of a recession. (Score 1) 60

It's a fair guess ( the Kennedys thought so ) that excluding medicine, basic science has played-out until the next  Archimedes/DaVinci/Newton/Einstein/  comes along.  You know, once every couple centuries. Surely "string theory" failure has taught us something. A  century or two of  plodding experimental/engineering development seems the most robust and productive course of scientific action.  Meanwhile, methods like *.ai and Quantum computing can find their own  value-producing niche venues ... and humans can return to  more face-2-face cultures.

Comment ignore (Score 1) 126

Likely 4Chan can simply ignore neo-Stalinist  British laws/regulation; surely ignore the fine.  Does 4Chan have a "hardware/brick" presence on English property? If not Brit leverage is zero. 'Course the  Brits may install their own "Great Firewall", but that will only provoke world-wide hackers to tunnel thru it as happens with the Chinese version.

Comment Re:Bee Ess ... (Score 1) 70

Fact:  Chi.com electronics ALL/repeat/ALL include  firmware snooping devices that report activity back  to the CCP "mothership".  Importing such devices to America represents a direct  political/military  security risk. Of-course personal privacy is also suborned by these  Chi.com devices -- and  after corruption fed-back as mis-information --  but American companies have yet to be forbidden such data "kidnapping".  Best let the chi.comz eat their own production while American labor and capitol looks after internal consumption:  tools, raw materials, medical equipment and womens shoes excluded naturally.

Comment How does it feel if the shoe is on the other foot? (Score 1) 126

The USA claims jurisdiction over the entire Internet based on "the bits touched our server!"

How do you like the same argument applied to US companies? Not so much? Then maybe change a few of your "might makes right" laws like the patriot (lol) act.

Otherwise this is just the beginning of the end of free Internet.

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