Honestly I don't care if you choose to view Elizabeth Holmes as a naive idiot or as a brutally efficient sociopath. Either way, she's dangerous. And my biggest fear is that she'll do it again. Unless one of her former investors goes full Joe Pesci on her for "losing" a couple hundred million bucks. Somehow I just don't feel like her "crime time" antics are over yet.

...and the Hubitat C-7 really isn't that bad. No cloud, no subs, unless you want them. The C-8 looks like it might be leaning a little heavier on the internet access so your mileage may vary. My C-7 is still doing just fine without having to buy the latest thing out there or being forced into an upgrade I don't want.

See also; "Sony Dash" and "Chumby". The Dash didn't even make a credible door stop, before or after Sony chose to shut the Dash servers down, thereby relegating all Dash's to the status of e-waste. Don't bother. Same junk, different vendor.

One of the first uses "AI for the masses" was put to was generating non-consensual sexual imagery (oh, FFS, lets just call it porn already), ripping off artists, authors, musicians, and coders in a massive way, and then then, of course, there's the attempted "addiction loop" where they're trying to get everyone to rely on the technology even more than alcohol, tobacco, and hard drugs like heroin. It is "Effective Altruism" at it's worst, saying, "it's okay if we kill millions of people in the process because just look at all of the shareholder value we can create." You want some credibility, Sam Bankma...er-Altman? Disavow all of the supposed wealth that comes with your company being successful. Then take personal responsibility for any deaths that happen on your watch. If your fancy auto-correct happens to start a war is it okay to start a war against you? These are questions no one wants to answer. They just want us to stay dumb and quiet and in-the-dark enough so that they can blaze past Mark Zuckerberg on "The World's Most Important Douche Bag" list THEN they'll worry about the implications of what they've done. ...Maybe.

For a technology, and now an entire industry, founded on massive IP theft, fraud, and C-Suite thuggery, this story should not be surprise to anyone, especially the part about Sam Altman stealing credit for someone else's work.

We, The People, have ample reason to NOT TRUST Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook/Meta, and dozens of other companies that put their quarterly profits over people every second of every minute of every hour of every day in this world. I can't imagine why the "Magnificent Seven" AI companies should expect that we would trust them any more that the other huge tech companies. Would you trust Elon Musk at this point? Or Sam Bankma...., er, I mean Sam Altman? Shitty psychotic billionaires hiding behind huge corporate mazes inducing mind-boggling circular cash flows to prop up an entire industry founded by outright Intellectual Property theft is an unspeakably complex problem. Then add in use-cases like Flock cameras and job displacement and you're talking about a lot of anxiety from a LOT of people. You want people to trust huge companies more? Give them the power to put your entire C-Suite in prison for crimes they commit (either randomly or intentionally, because we know that some of this shit is intentional) and make them accountable again, rather than untouchable because corporate attorneys can generally be scum too. For that matter, the corporate attorneys should be held accountable for the work they do for their companies. And crazy, stoopid billionaires making fiscal or political policy has also proven to be a problem. Now couple that with the AI cheer-leading about how you should spend $30K for an AI-powered robot to dig a hole in your back yard rather than just go pick up a shovel and get it done for the cost of a little effort and sweat on your brow and you have a recipe for hating an entire industry. This whole "AI Everything" nonsense has got to stop. Here's were I'm at, Mr. Dipshit-Moji; "I trust an egg salad sandwich out of a vending machine in a men's room in a truck stop on the edge of Phoenix in the middle of August more than I trust you and your friends." And we know "who" you're so fervently developing AI for, and it's not, apparently, the commonwealth, or the general welfare, or, anyone or anything other than YOU. (Also, I think the potential is growing for you morons to actually destroy the planet at this point.)

I guess I'll have to find a different venue to stream from/to then. Goodbye, Twitch. That simple sentence has a rather resounding sense of finality to it for me.

If you IPO for any dollar amount described with the word "trillion" does that instantly make the company "too big to fail"? Does this mean that they should instantly qualify for government bail-outs if/when things go sideways for them? Do they screw hundreds of millions of tax payers to keep a couple thousand douchy-investor-types whole? Or does this particular event signal the dawn of a new day where "too big to fail" should no longer be a thing? Because if your IPO is in the Trillions of Dollars, your investors had better be ready to take it on the chin when your share price drops. Just sayin'.... cuz I'm sick of it happening the other way.

Go for the C-Suite. Surveil them. Document their movements. Make them the center of attention for some unknown not-necessarily-an-assailant(s). Let them know how it feels to be tagged and mapped and their whereabouts reconstructed. (Now I'm using a metaphor:) "Lop of the head and the body will whither and die." That's how you treat the mass surveillance beast of a thousand eyes.

"Who's more foolish? The Fool? Or the fool who follows?" -- or maybe Vizzini from The Princess Bride, "...Plato, Socrates, Sam Altman? Morons, all of them." Well, something like that. How about, "Burn, baby, burn, Token Inferno..." No? Well, maybe you were just born too late.

So Google's mouthpiece responds with Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) as a matter of course because that's what they always do. Google is just one great example of why The European Union needs to worry about it's own digital sovereignty. Too bad a billion-dollar fine won't make much difference in their "Be Evil" product strategy. Late-stage capitalism at its finest, where "growth at any cost" is not just the ethos or logos of a cancer cell. Go Euro Commission. American companies pretty much suck at this point and they're not afraid to act up, even internationally. You do what you gotta do.

Microsoft has been bilking, milking, and threatening for about 40 years now by my count. This company is not interested in the commomwealth, the general welfare of man, or preserving any data or status quo unless it has a price tag attached to it. They're in it for the cash, nothing more to see there. I've lost count of the software competitors (like soft PCs and emulators, for example) that they've bought and put on a shelf and forgot about, litigated to death, or just plain unfairly priced out of existence. Everyone just needs to assume that Microsoft won't be preserving jack-squat for posterity. That said, Apple, Adobe, Meta, bullsh-X, Google, Samsung and pretty much all of the other "big tech companies" are all cut from the same cloth. Don't hold your breath that they're going to come to the aid of the human race anywhere, ever. Not even Bill Gates' philanthropic outreach or "pick your favorite ex-googler" are really going to help that much. You're just gonna have to create a future without them. (Because that's really the only way the human race is going to survive.)

Let us all take a moment to reflect that this was a thinly-veiled proxy war on Linux started by Microsoft back in the day, and it went on for entirely too long. Let us also remember that FreeBSD was vetted against AT&T waaaaaaay back in 1994 and that, as they say, was that. No insanely long-tailed legal maneuvering. I can only hope that they keep Hell hot for the new round of greedy morons pushing this effort. Or, at the very least, they also get to endure two decades of value destruction in their own lives, dying broke and penniless in some locked senior ward somewhere.

I dropped Facebook several years ago (2022) when their "community standards" moderators went all douchy/Trumpy on me and I've never looked back. Best move I've ever made in my life for my own mental health. And any projects I take on in the future will explicitly avoid/deny/lock-out Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other big social media just because I don't see any value there anymore, for anyone. The collective "we" burned that village down to the ground. Oh well. Moving on.

Negligent. Big Tech has been negligent in their characterizing AI, influencing business leaders, destroying jobs anyway because of the negative zeitgeist, and now they're saying that they may have been wrong. In the mean time we all know that AI isn't going to wash our cars or plant a garden or mow the lawn for the common man, nor is it necessarily the best solution for lots of jobs out there, but they're going to push it anyway. In the mean time the institutional investors are going to continue to push the AI hype so that they can foist off all of the so-far-accumulated debt to the smaller investors because the big boys already know that they want out. They're also starting to realize that spending millions of dollars on "AI tokens" may not have been the smartest move for their companies and clients, but they still want out, and they'll still lie through their teeth to make sure that someone else buys their AI "junk bonds" so that they can be made whole again. Garbage in, Sam Altman out. But my key point here is negligence. They have been negligent and they are still untrustworthy.