Oh you ran into EDP too, huh?

"""The mods all became power-trippers obsessed with closing questions and keeping people in line, rather than the original purpose of helping people"""

This..

I've been on the hunt for some obscure pickle I was in and found exactly the question I needed answered showing up in my search results - I go clicking on it to see what the responses were only to see that there are no responses and a mod said "this does not meet the requirement for bla bla"

Most recently annoying one - someone was asking on StackOverflow which related to an API - they weren't quite directly asking like "how to I code this" but the mods shut it down for not being about programming - I was kind of floored...

Another one was they added some new comment feature and I replied to someone using it only to be chided by mods saying effectively "yes this is a new feature and it looks like it should be used for this but we the community hate it and have petitioned to remove it so kindly delete your comment and put it this way instead"

It makes me not want to answer or help... I do stil go there and give +1s to folks with good questions or answers but nowadays I find that domain specific subreddits (/r/MacOS, /r/homelab, /r/MatterProtocol etc...) are much better at providing curent answers without nearly the gatekeeping - sure some subreddits are run by d-bags but those seem to quickly be abandoned and a new subreddit on teh topic pops up - very ... fork you!

I have rarely read a post by someone that so exactly touches every single point I would have wanted to make.

Sincerely,
~an old curmudgeonly lady who also yells at clouds (quite literally these days) to get off my browser and by computer and my everything.

Cop pulls me over, the phone has been shut down. Handing them your phone with digital license is just invitation for them to go plug your phone into a moblie forensics tool and go fishing..

Seriously, hand over your license and registration and proof of insurance paper and refuse to agree to any searches, refuse to answer any questions (politely) and ask if you are free to go.

These digital wallets are just pretense to get you to unknowingly give consent for a search

I imagine the Steam situation will get sorted out pretty quickly then.

I'm not a fan of AI.

Don't get me wrong, I think machine learning and neural networks and machine vision etc.. a lot of specific subsections lumped under "AI" have merit and value - and even LLMs in the right places could be useful.. but the whole AI hype train where every company just forces LLMs and chatbots into everything .. and the insane power (both political and electrical) grabs etc.. it's just such a total shit bubble waiting to pop.

In some ways, Apple's failure with Apple Intelligence shows us something: they pulled back because they realized that the local AI has so much information to everything about you and if it starts hallucinating/misbehaving (which it apparently did outside of the narrow confined window they used in their demo) it could have dire consequences in terms of their reputation as being champions of privacy (Note I am sure they care more about the appearance / vibe than actual, and if they decided it would be profitable to flip in the future they might)

Point being that apple screwing up on shoveling AI into their stuff made them fall back to less hyped implementation that might actually bear real fruit (pun intended) in the future

So, my thought is that maybe if the CCP sees AI as a threat, they'll similarly pull back from some of the hype and find ways to make less grandiose AI stuff - specific purpose narrow AI stuff that does useful stuff... and since they have such a prominent position in terms of making electronic stuff - end up making actually better AI

Or .. they could just go with their current Streisand Effect mode...

At one point I saw a lot of the US blocking /banning Chinese stuff as purely racism motivated "yellow scare" from the admin, but its complicated - Chinese state sponsored actors have absolutely been actively probing our power grids, there was a huge issue with finding undocumented cellular radios and sim chips in various grid infrastructure (grid level inverters for solar and wind for instance) as well as in things like public transportation (city busses in some countries)

So there's this weird thing where it's easy to see many reactions from the US admin as kneejerk racist insanity but then there's actual crappy stuff the Chinese government is actually doing or supporting... so I'm left not being sure what to believe

Except I'm pretty sure the current view of AI and the hype is utterly an unsustainable bubble that is going to leave a lot of folks holding the bag but probably allow folks like Altman to walk away with wheelbarrows full of money.

Damnit, I'm a Gen-Xer I watched the world go from analog to digital, I was a huge technophile all my childhood. I really used to love Dystopian Cyberpunk speculative fiction .. but now that I am living in a Dystopian Cyberpunk future I've realized that somewhere in there Orwell was an optimist, Idiocracy was conservative in their estimates of how bad things get, and now am firmly in the position that we are in fact the Pakleds from StarTrek... and Max Headroom was right about everything except instead of TV networks, it's the Interwebz.

The cynical view of course is that Perplexity will get to where it accepts ad revenue (bribes) to steer folks to certain brands, effectively cutting Amazon out of the lucritive ad market

I read somewhere that Amazon makes far more money from charging money for ad placement in their results than from actual direct sales.

They also make far more money from allowing the third party slop sellers and forcing them to use Amazon Fulfillment than they do from sales

Its basically that they used selling stuff and a great service initially to get their market cap and a captive audience then leveraged that into all this far more lucrative enshittified garbage.

I guess I'm cynical and jaded, but I just worry all this AI arms race is just putting the Pakleds in charge

It might well be the 'partners' themselves that wanted to give up. If they saw no market, then yep - cut the investment. It's been a long long time since the CEO magazines hyped the 'metaverse' every flaming day.

Yep - absolutely agree with you. Just because a devices is locally controllable and has opened up localhost:8080, that doesn't prevent it from also opening a connection to https://badthing.example:9999/ and uploading everything it can find to it. Concepts are orthogonal.

I must admit I haven't got round to doing it yet, but a common thing to do these days is set up a specific IoT network in your house and have it all connect to that, then limit access to the internet for that network. A lot of routers support doing this out of the box now.

HomeAssistant's main strength is in tying otherwise incompatible devices together. Local first is not unique though - HomeKit is local, Matter is local, I don't know much about the Alexa/Google setups but I believe they can be controlled locally too.

Don't get me wrong, Home Assistant is an excellent bit of kit with lots of standardisation and automation. But this article is pushing the wrong part of its strengths - local-first isn't unique. Pick the right ecosystem and it's all local-first anyway.

I have many different smart vendors in my home - Google (originally Nest), Philips, Meross, Aqara, Eve, Ikea, LightwaveRF, Shelly, Eufy, Switchbot...none of them require the internet. All of them can work locally. All of them work in the same ecosystem. Then I have oddities which I use HomeBridge for to bridge the gap - Roomba (older, non-Matter, Worx Landroid (robot lawnmower), Dyson Hot'n'Cool thingy, Logitech Harmony...even plugins for Synology which show the NAS's temperature and allow shutdown. Through the use of HomeBridge, I can draw them into the same ecosystem too. None of this requires the internet.

The meme is completely overblown and quite often you can tell by people that don't actually use this kind of tech. Obviously if I want to control this kit from outside the home then I need an internet connection, and if I want to update any of the kit then I need to download the updates from the internet for that too, but operation from within the house? Just a HomeKit/Matter hub, that's all.

I am truly dismayed at how long I had to scroll through this thread till I saw a comment that asked this

Seriously we live in The stupidest possible timeline

I honestly don't know what's worse:

The privacy implications / issue reported
or the fact that this even exists..

how is this a thing?

Should you choose to believe the gossip, this is apparently being seen as a good thing amongst Apple's staff.

Seems to be a case of the Gene Wilder's Wonka scene "oh no, stop!" while doing nothing to actually stop it.

Sorry - as a full-blown human-caused climate change believer, I am also old enough to remember being told that we were in an inter-ice age era and that it would end in my lifetime. I'm in the UK, and I clearly remember a school textbook with drawn pictures of Trafalgar Square fully iced up. This would be early 80s.

Let's not deny that bad information has been given in the past. Bad information is also likely being given today, and will be tomorrow as well. Mistakes happen. I like that this paper has been caught and do not in any way see it as a problem.

I'm seeing a lot of scepticism in the posts, whereas in fact this approach works really well. I'm going to use the example of the Mac - Rosetta 2. I play games running x86 code all the time on my M2 ARM chip, and it's not really noticeable at all. Taking exactly the same approach and applying it to Linux - yep, why on earth not? Already proven to work well.