There are a lot of problems with both, but neither deserves the title of worst criminal state. Most hypocritical state, maybe.

It does. I got a notification in early 2025 (running a pre-release Android 16 build) while traveling in NY. I got someone who was working on the feature to pull the detailed logs from my phone and they were able to get quite a bit of detail about what kind of fake tower it was. Pretty cool.

Not if you want to have mobile phone/data service.

If your mobile provider supports VOIP and you have Wifi available (e.g. at home) you can just disable cellular service. Then everything will go through your Internet connection -- and everything is encrypted these days. But that only works when you have Wifi.

(I'm not claiming any equivalence between coffee and heroin, but the "I enjoy it so I don't care about health effects" claim really only works if the health effects are fairly minor.)

You can use Qt from Rust.

My point is that if that low-level stuff is what makes C fun to you, then Rust and C++ will be fun, too... but without all of the drudgery and error-prone crap C makes you do.

If that's not what makes C fun to you, then what is? It's certainly not being able to accomplish a lot quickly; higher-level languages are much better for that.

Let's be real, even if wordpress code quality isn't the highest of its CMS peers at least the core product is probably not worse than the vast majority of server software out there.

The real issue here is AI. The time it takes and the range of capable people who can now reverse engineer a patch, and generate exploit code from has been greatly reduced and greatly expanded respectively.

Patch management that once got exposed systems patched the same day is no longer adequate, if you can't be patched within hours even if you're tiny potatoes, shodan.io knows about you - so you're in for a bad time. Every hour is a roll of the dice.

Which brings us back the zero trust model, and why it really isn't a very good idea, or not a very good idea implemented independently from the tradition moat/perimeter model. Between true 0-days and now near zero time to patch, nothing not even the immediate peer if it is directly on the Internet can enjoy much of any trust no matter how often you re-authenticate.

I have to push back against your assumption that Rust is a language that limits developers. It absolutely does not. As for the AI bit... I use AI to write code all day. It's great, but it makes the same sort of mistakes humans do. I find Rust is a great language for AI to write (under appropriate supervision).

I have fun programming in Rust. I don't like programming in C. I do like programming in C++. I like building type systems that prevent errors and automate drudgery. Both C++ and Rust let me do that, C does not.

I think the point of your "you will have fun programming in C" is that in both languages (and C++) you spend a fair amount of time thinking about low-level details of what the compiler is generating. That's true, and I like thinking about memory layouts, cache lines, what the optimizer is going to do, etc. But I don't like all of the tedium C forces on me.

On balance, I prefer Rust over every other language I've used.

More relevant, Commerce is run by Howard Lutnik, who BBC just implicated heavily about getting Epstein services and lying to Congress. And who unilaterally decided Anthropic (run by Dario who is Democrat and therefore an Enemy of the State) could not release Fable for weeks until they bent the knee. And who approved OpenAI ChatGPT5.6 saying they did not even need government approval. Because Sam Altman already bend the knee.

This is obviously true, and the realization that AI was going to be the battleground for "truth" happened almost immediately. Even relatively smart people, if they go to Google and type in a query, will read off the AI-generated "summary" at the top as if it's the de-facto truth. I mean, they did this prior to AI as well, not taking the time to click into the articles. I find that AI summaries are even worse, as when I click on the supporting links, I rarely find the information that supposedly supports what it said. But if you argue with Google you just look like you're crazy.

The only way they're going to be able to monetize this technology to the masses, who won't pay a monthly subscription, is to use it for advertising. If you ask AI about the best vacuum cleaner, it's going to give you an answer that's manipulated by whatever vacuum company paid the most for promotions. Similarly, if you ask it a political question, the answer will be influenced by paid political pandering, and also by the whims of the organization that created the model. Grok's going to sing the praises of Elon Musk, and Gemini will sing the praises of Sundar Pichai.

This gets pretty scary when you consider the "ministry of truth" implications here. Sure, we'll have lots of different models available, and they'll be beholden mostly to various corporate interests, but you can already see where it's heading in authoritarian regimes like North Korea, China, Russia, etc. That's why all countries are racing for AI. It's a race to control the magical oracle machine that everyone thinks is the single source of truth.

Here's a little more detail.

Researchers a few years back ran tests. ADHDers and neurotypicals were asked to harvest berries and edible plants.

Neurotypicals tended to over-harvest and damage bushes to the point where recovery would be slow if possible at all, and tended to pick areas clean, wiping out local populations of edible plants.

ADHDers tended to move relatively quickly from area to area, harvesting a decent amount from each area but not excessively. The quantities tended to be at the sort of level that have long been established as a good balance, such that plants and populations would tend to actually do better the following year. Not only that, but they tended to gather more.

https://www.psychologytoday.co...

Crofts and small farms rapidly went to three-stage and four-stage crop rotation, but different fields would be with different crops. This meant that the failure of a single crop would be much less of a survival thing.

You'd see fields with a mutitude of diverse crops, because diversity was critical. Failure was highly likely, so you localised it. Failure in one area had no meaningful impact overall. Things like the Irish potato famine and the parsnip failures across France in the 1700s were relatively rare in history. Likewise, when industrialisation wiped out cottage industries, farms that had been very successful suddenly went bankrupt and mass starvation was common. The ability to task-switch and have a large number of small projects going was essential to life at the edges.

You're absolutely right, more ADHD would have indeed curbed the excesses. The industrial revolution caused huge problems by trying to do too much with too little diversity. Which eventually destroyed the economies built around the early mills, because the markets were too easy to undermine. There was no capacity to switch. But during the IR, the obsession with coal meant nobody really looked at alternative fuels or alternative activities. Economies became tightly constricted, which was devastating when it came to global warming, but equally devastating when it came to distributing metal-devouring bacteria (which did enormous damage to infrastructure) and radioactive particles (old mill areas are still unusually radioactive).

More ADHD wouldn't have eliminated the problem, but it would have diversified the solutions and would have diversified the markets, resulting in a much more robust, much healthier marketplace and a much more robust, much healthier population.

Uh, no. As in, 100% of gatherers would be ADHD. IF they weren't, you'd be extinct within the year. 20% of the hunters would also be ADHD, because over-harvesting was also going to wipe out your food source. 100% of your explorers would be ADHD, 100% of your experimenters would be AuDHD.

ADHD was essential to survival. If you didn't want to die out, you stuck the neurotypical outside so that the wolves and other nasties actually hunting (tigers wouldn't be present) would get them. Neurotypicals were the main threat to survival.

Free speech includes lying.

My overall strategy is very different. I don't think Claude's code is remotely good enough yet, so I don't trust it to go off and do "development" semi-unsupervised. I direct and review everything it writes, and I control the scope and content of every commit. To be a little more precise, Claude's code is generally fine (if a bit over-commented), but Claude rarely produces code structure that is clear, clean and correctly-mapped to the problem domain, to my (very picky) eyes. So I never just turn it loose on a large, multi-commit development task.