I always take my advice about remote work from a company who's business is providing office space and who's former CEO was basically a cult leader.

Artificial Intelligence, in particular Deep Learning, is exploding in popularity, with major companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia openly shifting their entire strategy towards it. The technology is solving real problems, today, like cancer detection and image recognition. Many of the most important projects in AI, like TensorFlow and Theano, are open sourced. Yet it seems like Ubuntu is the lead platform for these new workloads. Many of these projects don't run on even Fedora. Is Red Hat planning to get into the AI game and if so how?

I wrote a sci-fi story about the rise of labor robotics a decade ago, starting with the automation of fast food restaurants. When I wrote it nobody was talking about this at all, so it is crazy to see it start to come into reality. Blatant plug, you can read it here for free: http://meuploads.com/in-the-cr... I got the idea for this piece, one of my most popular, because I felt SF authors got robots all wrong, at least the early phases of robotics. The first robots wouldn’t look and act like intelligent humans at all. They’d be designed to replace repetitive labor. As I considered this more and more, I thought the first place we’d see this would be the food service industry. Then I realized that’s a lot of jobs lost. What would happen to all those folks trying to feed their families? Every day this story becomes more and more prescient. A Tech Dirt story pointed out recently that we’ve already developed robots that can ask “do you want fries with that?” something that did not exist when I conceived of this story. It might take only a few more years before we see wholesale adoption of fast-food bots which will displace a lot of people, especially if we try to solve this with ham fisted and arbitrary minimum wage hikes. That’s not the only sector facing competition from machines. Robotic cars could destroy 10 million jobs. In fact, the more I consider it, very few jobs are safe from automation. What will that mean for society? In all fairness, I am not as pessimistic as the short story might suggest or as some of the other doomsayers out there. If we could space roughly seven thousand cars around NYC, we could have a car to anyone in 30 seconds or less. That frees up a lot of capital to buy other things if we don’t need to buy a big old vehicle that sits around in our driveway for 97% of the time. It could also cut down on a lot of pollution. If we did the same for ambulances and firetrucks that could revolutionize how we help people and fight fires. Technology always ends up somewhere in between, doing both good and evil. Nevertheless, I stand by this story as one vision of how this can go for society, one where jobs are destroyed too quickly, with no alternatives created. Eventually societies will adjust, but sometimes that takes awhile and that won’t give much comfort to the people living through it before we adjust. When society breaks down, it brings out the worst in people, from ethnic tension to racism and classism, something we are seeing right now on the rise everywhere in the world.

I am so sick of these ridiculously cry-baby posts about the rise of the "techno-elite." What's wrong with those houses? They're big? They don't look like the other ones? Who gives a shit? Who's aesthetics are we talking about anyway? And why do they matter? It's old, therefor it's good? It has to all look the same? Oh God, people spent money and knocked down old shit to build that stuff they wanted to. How horrible! How dare those programmers and technologist make money. How dare they act like men! They're keeping everyone down! They're stealing from everyone! I mean nobody is buying technology and putting money in their pockets. Nobody should be rewarded for making stuff people want. That's just not right. Is this America or Mao's China? Is this a tech site or part of the Marxist society? Don't like 90% of the people who read this fucking rag work in tech?

Tor and other centralized VPN proxies are coming under attack from authoritarian/totalitarian governments all over the world. China started assaulting VPNs recently as well. The Arab dictatorships won't be far behind. As long as there are central servers to ban/block/attack then there is no way to stop them. Eventually they will seize control of their local internet and cut themselves off from the world. There is only one answer.

We need a distributed VPN/Proxy.

We need a ubiquitous p2p proxy that is both a client and server. It needs to be ridiculously easy to set up, as in download it, click a few buttons and you are browsing the web through random onion routing and allowing others to do the same. 100s of millions of server/clients cannot be shut down if they run over https.

Lantern may fit the bill. https://www.getlantern.org/ If there are others they need to get funding and widespread publicity as quickly as possible.

If you are going to make a statement, at least try to fake being a little more informed.

The U.S. repeatedly proposes such overreaching police state security measures and fails due to citizens taking a stand. Yes we have Gulags, but they are dealt repeated blows in the courts. Americans make mistakes, but we do not sit idly by while it happens.

When someone tries to take more control there are always others who step in to fight back. That is our history. We are rebels. We started a country as rebels. And we continue to rebel. That's why you can sit on this site and bitch all day. Try posting an article saying how much you hate your leaders in India or China or Russia and watch yourself disappear into rotting, rat infested jails, never to be seen again. Try saying that China is a totalitarian state, in China, on the internet, and see what happens, douchebag. Or try to look at some porn on the internet in China and spend 3-10 years in jail.

America is not perfect. But I am fucking sick of people saying that the alternatives are better. We make a lot of mistakes. We are people. People make mistakes. But at least we try to correct them. The abuses of the Bush administration are being swept out with vigor right now. There is a cycle here. The cycle elsewhere is a never ending one of oppression.

Um, Russia is becoming more free? Are you insane? Seriously learn a little something about the world before you say something stupid. Have you bothered to listen to former chess champion Gary Kasperov? The "elections" they just had where Putin's hand picked successor got 98% of the vote in Muslim parts of the country, where the Russian government is hated. Or how about forcing entire companies to vote while your boss watches you? Or about about placing your vote in the open with AK-47 armed guards standing over you. Guess who you vote for?

And didn't we just have a story about China the other day where they are looking to build an all seeing eye of linked facial recognition systems and hidden cameras?

A friend of mine went to China an few years back and the police burst into his room looking for unmarried couples sleeping together. They were going room to room in the hotel. Or how about taking a look at these pictures of dead Tiben monks, a group of peaceful non violent people by nature who were "rioting". http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikileaks_releases_over_150_censored_videos_and_photos_of_the_Tibet_uprising

Look at them if you have the stomach.

You are an idiot who deserves to spend a few years in Russia or China. Start by visiting the jails there, if they'll let you.