You're so brave!

The EFF is probably the most important advocacy organization that educates and acts on behalf of normal people's digital rights, freedoms, and privacy. The legal actions they take in support of these are meaningful. Now that the CFPB has been dismantled and the FCC and FTC had their teeth and spines removed, groups like EFF are the only thing we have in the US pushing back against millions of dollars of corporate lobbying money.

I'm not sure what you're talking about regarding RMS. Aside from the open letter they published after he was re-elected to the FSF board, which is fine to disagree with (I do), I don't think EFF did anything to him. Plenty of people pointed angry fingers at him in 2019 but AFAIK his resignation from the FSF was his own decision.

Your Example Dell PC doesn't "need your leftover keyboard, mouse, and monitor", because Dell is happy to sell you new ones if you'd rather not supply your own.

Mac Mini is the same.

Absolutely not the case. The Neo is essentially Apple's first attempt at a budget laptop, and the market segment they're targeting is entirely different.

Case in point: My dad has been a Windows user for 20+ years and has always decried Apple as "decent hardware that's overpriced and running a lobotomized operating system." However he hates Windows 11 more and decided to replace his aging Windows laptop with a Neo last week. So far he's been impressed, though is still dealing with a learning curve. I guarantee you he isn't alone.

I think the Neo is Apple's attempt at getting into a new segment of lower-priced computers AND taking advantage of Microslop dropping the ball hard when it comes to Windows 11 shit quality and bullshit hardware requirements.

Perhaps somewhat ironically, I suspect the market really being cannibalized is potential new Linux users who go with a New instead of installing Linux on a cheap Windows laptop.

Current base price for a Mac Mini is $599. So, there's that.

If that's a barrier to entry, it's one that is shared by 90% of the (non-laptop) PC market, and it never seemed to bother PC users. It's not like Apple won't happily sell you a keyboard, mouse, and monitor along with your Mac Mini, if that's what you want to do.

Comparable to, say, a 787 airliner, whose environmental damage we tolerate without thought or comment simply because we're already used to it.

Consider the alternative, then. Anthropic does nothing, and sooner or later OpenAI or some other less responsible company delivers an AI with similar capabilities, but just throws it out to the public without much thought about the consequences. Both the black hats and the white hats start using it, of course, but the black hats have a field day compromising anything and everything before the white hats have a chance to find, fix, and distribute all the necessary patches to defend against all the newfound exploits. Not a great situation to be in, but probably unavoidable at this point unless the white hats are given a head start.

Haha, no. Humans' collars are already here, we just keep them in our pockets and pay for them ourselves.

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a company that doesn't hide things. The difference between Anthropic and (insert company here) is only that Anthropic leaked their source code, so now we can see what they kept hidden.

If you can't figure out for yourself what's wrong with ordering large numbers of men to their deaths, then I won't be able to explain it to you.

They could take that one step further: once your computer has compiled the appropriate shader for its particular combination of hardware/driver/etc, the game could upload that particular shader to a repository, so that the next install with the exact same combination of conditions could just download it instead of having to duplicate the work. I imagine there are a lot of people out there running functionally identical systems that would benefit.

I suppose they don't do that because they don't trust people not to repurpose the mechanism as a malware vector, or something.

He's probably not scared enough. Anyone old enough to remember Vietnam knows how the song goes from here. "We must throw another batch of American men into the meat grinder, otherwise the lives of the previous batch will have been sacrificed in vain", and repeat ad infinitum.

Turning to AIs for a ruling on who is human and who is not is an interesting inversion of the Turing test.

It could be that. What it definitely was, though, is that Sony thought they could make more money selling to data centers than to the public.

Antiprotons, the forbidden PopRocks