There's always the option of going Linux for your main OS and using VirtualBox for the 1 or 2 small things that still require Windows.

(Spoken from personal experience a decade ago or so. By now my universities' office 365 can run in Firefox (container) tabs, ProtonDB on my SteamDeck is stellar, I don't own any electronic gizmo that requires a Windows app to sync/updateetc.(*), and I don't care enough about anything else to dust off that VM)

(*): By now electronic gizmos either have Wifi to update themselves (though this comes with its own bag of problems) or have other routes (SD cards, USB sticks, dfu-utils on Linux, etc.) like my Linux retro handheld.

lolwut?

One is suddenly making available to the regular person at home a tool to do computations (despite a lot less complex and powerful) that was previously available only to universities, government and corporations,
while the other is money extraction scheme designed to keep hopes of growth and confidence in stocks of a few big corporations who are in a race of "who is going to build the largest possible datacenter / boil lakes the fastest / and completely break the internet with AI slop?"

To keep with your computing metaphor, it's as if we where in a timeline where "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" wasn't merely a mis-attributed quote to Thomas Watson but was the official company goal of anyone making computers, with the large corporations trying to out compete each other buy luring investors with the false promise of becoming the one corporation that will get a monopoly and build those 5 behemoths. And the general public could only get to do computation be renting extremely expensive glass terminals and accoustic modems (but currently temporarily offered for free while each corporation tries to gather more users than the competition).

(Regarding current usefulness of AI: mini AI models running locally would be the actual game changers, but it's not going to get any much emphasis while the corporations are currently busy in their arm race, and there are tons of ethical questions around training of models and the slop they produce).

You haven't been paying attention to the 143 pages of legalese in the EULA, have you?

(In a time-line where Disney would try to lawyer out of a allergy death on the grounds of the arbitration clause of a trial subscription to a steaming service couple of years before, I am only half joking)

No love for cheese fondue?

(sad kitty eyes, while holding a caquelon in the hand)

How did the stock market get into this discussion?

And the list concept concerns me. Are these lists appealable? If not, then they're abusable.

Also, the line between "AI generated" and "non-AI generated" is ever more fuzzy. AI is used for upscaling. AI is used in cameras to enhance images taken. AI is used to make the sort of minor edits that are done the world over in Photoshop. Etc. There's also the fact that this is done with image fingerprinting, which is fuzzy, so then any images that have minor modifications done with AI which get added to the list will get the raw images flagged as well. The thing people want to stop is "fake images", and in particular, "fake images that mislead about the topic at hand". But then that's not "AI" that's the problem in specific, that's image fakery in general (AI just makes it faster / easier).

And re: fingerprinting, take for example, the famous case of the content-spam creator who took a photo of a woodcarving of a German Shepard, flipped it horizontally, ran it through an AI engine to make trivial tweaks to the image, and then listed it as his own. I'd think any decent fingerprinting software would catch both versions. And if it's not flexible enough to catch that, then I have to wonder how useful it is at all, since images constantly change as they move around the internet, even accidentally, let alone deliberately.

WHAT is right there on video? That is NOT one of Zelensky's bodyguards. That's a random soldier from the 25th Separate Secheslav Airborne Brigade, which recaptured Izyum, during Zelensky's visit to celebrate the victory. Do you think bodyguards spend all their time taking selfies with the person they're protecting? Grow some common sense circuits in your brain. And it's not like Zelensky was handing the man an award with the patch prominently featured in front of the camera while he received it or anything. The Russian volunteer ranks are absolutely littered with Nazis.

What, you mean like the Russian governor of occupied Donetsk outright giving an award to a guy with a Totenkopf patch? Or all of the numerous Russian officials who have praised or given awards to the puppy-eating, unabashed Nazi, Milchakov?

Also, contrary to the misinfo sites you read, that was not a photo of "one of Zelensky's bodyguards". That was from his visit to Izyum where he was posing with random soldiers from the 25th Separate Secheslav Airborne Brigade to celebrate the retaking of the city from the Russians. That's why everyone has their phone out to take selfies.

Stalin was perfectly happy to ally with Hitler for the conquest of eastern Europe. The USSR only turned "anti-Nazi", not for ideological reasons, but because the Nazis betrayed them. Today in Russia, "Nazi" is used as a general insult for any external perceived enemy of the state, with any actual connection to Nazism not being at all required. Yet actual support for the actual principles of fascism within Russia is well tolerated. For example, Putin's good friend Dmitri Rogozin, now governor of occupied Zaporozhye Oblast, is absolutely a fascist, including speaking at a far-rally surrounded by people doing Nazi salutes under a only slightly modified Nazi flag, among so, SO many other things.

In most countries, the saying with respect to WWII is "Never Again". In Russia, it's "We Can Repeat It!" (Mozhem povtorit!).

I guess it depends on who you were. If you were Jewish, the Nazi occupation was definitely worse. Stalin was more of an equal-opportunity atrocity-committer.

It is kind of darkly funny how similarly Hitler and Stalin thought, though. For example, Hitler cited positively the Holodomor and the collectivization of Ukraine, and planned to use the Holodomor as a role model for resource extraction during scarcity, and to maintain the collectivization of Ukrainians set in place by the Soviets. He likewise viewed Ukrainians as a "colonial peoples", in the sort of Africanizing terms common among imperial powers of the time, and just planned to switch which foreign colonial master ruled them, arguing that ultimately Ukrainians would prefer the German yoke to the "Jewish"** (Soviet) one.

** How the whole Nazi view of the USSR as a "Jewish Empire" played out was I guess predictable. Because if the Wehrmacht rolls into your town, and you're some low-level communist functionary, and there's a bunch of soldiers knocking on your door who want to kill communists, but who also believe communists = jews = communists, what's your response? For most, it was along the lines of, "Yes, yes, you're right, communists ARE Jews, absolutely! And look, I'm not a Jew, I can prove it! But THAT GUY over there, HE is Jewish, that's the guy you're looking for!".

The USSR fought the Nazis to the last Ukrainian.

The highest price in that war was paid by Ukrainians and Belarusians.

Really, computer chips are the *hardest* thing we could compromise. It's way easier to e.g. compromise mechanical or electrical parts so that they fail under stress.

They use so many western chips, if we knew what the programming was, and actually cared to, we could contaminate the smuggling routes with compromised chips to do exactly that.

Heck, we could probably do it with rough guess work if we actually cared. For GPS receivers it's obvious how to manipulate them, but even in CPUs, if you see e.g.: two floating point registers with values that look reasonable for latitude/longitude coordinates in a non-occupied part of Ukraine, and another two registers that look reasonable for latitude/longitude coordinates in an occupied part of Ukraine or in Russia... swap them. And of course, delay your functionality by some number of weeks or when a pair of registers is within range of a known production facility, so that the batch passes QA.

The fact that there's been no apparent signs of any effort at all to contaminate Russia's smuggling routes with compromised parts just screams about how lax the west has been taking this all. Heck, forget about compromising smuggled part streams, just cracking down on the smugglers at all. Like, EU trade with Tajikistan increased by an order of magnitude after the war started - gee, I wonder what's going on there!. Yet zero effort was made for years to crack down at all.

Ukraine's far-right unified in the last election under the Svoboda party. They won 2,16% of the vote, putting Ukraine the weakest electoral performance by the far right in all of Europe.

From the Wikipedia article on Utkin:

Views
According to several news outlets, Utkin was an admirer of Nazi Germany and had multiple Nazi tattoos, including Schutzstaffel (SS) insignia.[13][14][15][16][17] Utkin also reportedly used call sign Wagner after German composer Richard Wagner, because his work was greatly admired by Adolf Hitler and was appropriated by the Nazis.[3][18][19] Allegedly he greeted subordinates by saying "Heil!", wore a Wehrmacht field cap around Wagner training grounds, and sometimes signed his name with the lightning bolt insignia of the SS.[20]

Members of the Wagner Group have said that Utkin was a Rodnover, a believer in the Slavic native faith.[21]

And why stop at Wagner? Let's take another example: Rusych. They have been heavily used since 2014, and their leader - the infamous puppy-eater Alexey Milchakov - is a proud and unabashed Nazi, who openly marches with a Nazi flag and openly declares himself to be a Nazi in interviews, and nonetheless, has received awards from multiple high-ranking Russian government officials for his brigade's successes in Ukraine.