Do you have long-term statistics on this, or is it based on social media influencers' gut instincts and feelings?

I simply make a habit of reading what the intelligent people on both sides (and also on other, less known sides) say.

If one goes by the short, oversimplified slogans the angry masses from all sides loudly shout during protests, without looking at what the high-level sources that got oversimplified said, one's definitely going to misunderstand a lot of what's being actually argued for or against.

a) "Defunding the police" is something right-wing media and social channels love to misrepresent. It doesn't mean removing law enforcement, but changing how it's enforced.

Here's an analogy. Imagine a scenario in which there's a single unified public force that's responsible for dealing with violent criminals with military-grade force, and for helping small children walk safely to school, and for putting out fires on houses and buildings. Its official are responsible for all that, but 95% of their training is in dealing with violent criminals with military-grade force. Would you want to have them arrive, in full SWAT gear, to put out a fire on your house, and to talk to your daughter so she enters the schoolyard without incidents?

The concept of "defunding the police" is to remove from police responsibilities they don't deal with well, and to transfer those responsibilities to agencies that deal better with them. Continuing with the analogy, to split a firefighting force from the unified police force, so firefighter are strongly trained in putting out fires, rather than on putting out violent criminals, which involves, evidently, removing from the unified force the money necessary to fund the new firefighting force.

In the "defund the police" world police continues existing, but it focuses only on dealing with violent criminals. Their funding is reduced proportionately, and the difference is transferred to the other forces focused on solving all the stuff policed is called upon nowadays despite having little to no training in dealing with those things.

b) "the pronoun police"

You do know this is just annoying people on Twitter and on comments sections of sites, not an actual enforcement of anything under threat of State sanctioned violence, right?

c) "mandatory (...)"

Nothing in that has ever been mandatory.

Now, one caveat: if someone benefits from and builds atop public services paid for by citizens' taxes, it's simply fair those same beneficies cannot in turn deny said citizens who paid for it all with their taxes from enjoying access to such buildings on the equal footing with all other citizens. If you disagree, are you willing to refund them the taxes they paid, covering the costs in their place?

He's opposed to human engineers reviewing AI-generated code. He seems to believe, truly believe, it suffices for engineers to prompt the AI to review and fix the code itself. And then for the AI itself to evaluate the fixes made and simply report to the engineers whether the fixes it made to the problems it detected were successful. And so on, and so forth.

I don't accept that premise. If there were, methods would have been open to discussion by the community and one of the actually privacy-preserving alternatives would have been chosen, such as having every website declare the age bracket in the HTTP header, legal determination it cannot be informed incorrectly, parenting tools within devices coming enabled by default and, if not opted-out, which only the adult buyer would be able to do after showing proof of purchase (no identity required), and browsers and the like only allowing connections to online services that matched the enabled configuration.

The way it's being implemented is the reverse of that and gives the government access to deanonimizable tracking. We know it's almost certainly deanonimizable because Snowden's files have shown how intelligence agencies deliberately include very subtle weaknesses in government-mandated cryptographic standards, protocols and methods, so any such must be assumed to contain one or more backdoors irrespective of them being seemingly impossible, as there's no feasible way to prove they don't other than blind trust.

The rule of thumb is that every single time politicians claim "think of the children!" without including in the proposed law objective measurable metrics the law is presumed to improve, plus requirements that if the improvement doesn't happen within a specific period of time the proposal must be cancelled, isn't about children, but it's rather levying popular emotional reactions to induce layers of false consciousness.

You're supposing the EU doesn't like the control this gives them. Consider how they're pushing privacy invasive age verification all around, and tying the process to people using verified iOS and Android devices. With ADC they'll be able to know exactly who made this or that app they dislike, and it will give them another means by which they can request specific apps providing features the EU doesn't approve of can be disabled.

Besides, if they prevent Google from limiting their system in a way similar to how Apple is limited, that argument might down the line be used to demand the same openness from apple, otherwise both platforms aren't competing on an equal footing.

The trick to understand how these things work is to think like a lawyer, not like an engineer.

The EU wouldn't care. Google's model as described is still way less restrictive than Apple's, and they've approved Apple's. If Apple's model was found to be acceptable, so will Google's.

Their answer to F-Droid will be quite simple: change how it works so it's compatible with how the ADC works by either registering for a single ADC key and being liable for all apps on the store, or by allowing every developer providing apps through F-Droid to have its own ADC and liability. And if F-Droid doesn't want to do either, there's always the alternative of becoming an ADB-based store that installs apps via USB cable or whatever after the user unlocks sideloading through the new process.

The EU will look at all this and answer "yeah, that's reasonable", and that'll be it.

That's the limited distribution version of the ADC. It has these limits:

So, not viable for the scale of F-Droid, or for any application that has more than 20 users, assuming each user would install it on a single device. And yes, they've figured quite well what they're going to do.

I found these ToS by searching. I'm not quite sure this is the most up-to-date version, as I don't have a Google developer account and don't want to create a new one to check, but it says these things:

Plenty of apps on F-Droid violate these. Several are illegal in different countries, while others directly violate the ToS of individual Google products. Since F-Droid would be the one signing on all of them, its own ADC use could be cut, and then trying to install apps signed with that terminated ADC key would fail.

The problem with that is that Google says it will ban developers whose apps signed this way violate its ToS, which can have anything they want on it, so F-Droid will have to policy apps uploaded to make sure they comply with their own and Google's ToS, and if some gets through that review and does violate Google's, since it'd be signed by F-Droid, that might mean that one account responsible for all F-Droid apps being banned out of a sudden, and with it all F-Droid-installed apps on a single go.

I imagine an alternative is for F-Droid to stop using its own signature and having developers sign their apps themselves. Reproducible builds would still exist to check whether the user-provided signed version matches the rebuilt version, or however that works, but the signatures would be individualized.

I only purchase phones I know I can install alternative OSes on. When one of my current ones is getting too old and in need of replacement, I research what the current alternative Android OSes are, chose a bunch I find are nice enough, then find the list of devices supported, the chose one from among those that's within my budget range. Those tend to be Motorola, whether officially or via some hack.

I don't buy a phone to play games, which means most any phone is performant enough for my needs, so I go with the cheapest option that does what I actually need. This also means that warranty is irrelevant: if the phone breaks for some weird reason, which is rate, getting it serviced by paying for the service, or buying a new one outright, aren't a big deal. Hence, the moment the new phone arrives I follow the procedure to get it unlocked, then the new ROM into. Sometimes with Google apps, sometimes without, depending on what I'm using it for.

As for bank apps and the like, I keep an old, tiny, cheap phone with stock, years-old Android that banks, due to mysteries of the universe, consider "secure" despite having hundreds of unpatched holes all the way down to the kernel. When I need to do banking I pick it from the docs drawer, turn it on, do what I need, turn it off, and back into the drawer it goes. For everyday use I have a debit/credit card, no app necessary with them.

Streaming is a loss, but eh, YouTube works well enough either with the official app, an alternative one, or a mobile browser, so good enough for watching something on the go. For me that suffices.

But yes, for those for whose use case is way more mainstream that's certainly not a good fit.

But he did deal with people like you, hence his essay.

No, you aren't. A centrist is someone located between Social-Democracy, meaning what's done in most of Europe, and Social-Liberalism, "worst known" to Americans as "Liberalism". AmiMojo positions are centrist. Yours, from the little I've seen, are quite explicitly right-wing.

You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.

For the record, I'm neither American nor British, so I'm talking badly about a foreign country. Is that allowed? But I can talk badly about my own country, which is currently run by the left (as in, actual left, not what Americans think that word means), and full of corruption. Can I criticize that, or should I praise them because it's my country and thus that'd count as "truth"?

AmiMojo: Defends one the hugest pro-free-market aliance of Capitalist countries in History.

Anonymous Coward: calls that Capitalist free-market alliance "far left".

AmiMojo: practices what G. K. Chesterton, one of the most well-regarded Conservative intellectuals of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, defended in his famous 1901 essay A Defence of Patriotism.

Anonymous Coward: likely believes Chesterton to be a Communist or whatever.

20 years, zero learning. Sad, so sad.

A major reason for that is the fact mainstream media is entirely owned by a tiny number of billionaires who actively use it to advance whatever narrative suits each one, to the point journalists wanting to keep their integrity must leave.

And a major way this might be solved would be by breaking these personal fiefdoms, forcing mainstream media to break into competing operations, as used to be the case before deregulation made consolidation possible, and then a certainty.

Quite the opposite. He hates Anthropic and keeps trying to find a way, any way, to damage them. Those attempts keep backfiring, though. It's the internal image of his international misadventures.