Recent graduates tend to be stuck with hourly food service and retail jobs. These tend to treat availability outside 9 to 5 as a condition for hiring, not to be doable from home, and not to pay enough for a taxi. Even a cyclist needs a backup during bad weather.

If someone happens not to have this privilege, then how would they go about traveling to or from work at night or on Sundays, when all the bus drivers are at home with their families? (Source: Citilink in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA)

I imagine that most gamers are unwilling to pay for business-class service if business-class service is the only "real" service offered at their home address.

How are you going to host a game server on a home computer if you share your IPv4 address with other subscribers to the same ISP in the same neighborhood,[1] and the combined modem and router that your home ISP requires all subscribers to use lacks an option for port forwarding? Both of these are true, for example, of T-Mobile US Home Internet.

[1] Many home ISPs apply carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) to conserve IPv4 addresses since the worldwide exhaustion.

Everything needs to be branded or monetised.

It's why I want large commercial organisations as far away from my data, computers and workflow as possible.

I do not care about you, I don't want to be reminded you even exist, and I certainly don't want to give you money. Go away.

I want to turn on my computer, load up the browser of my choice, and that's it. I don't need to see a single brand, no "notifications", no messages of your choosing, nothing. My boot screen is a spinner. My desktop is a flat, blank, plain colour. I have my browser pinned as a single recognisable icon (doesn't even have the name).

That is what an OS should be. That is what most services should be. We shouldn't be spending our life subject to the whims of a corporation trying to wheedle money out of us or "foster brand engagement" or whatever nonsense they class it as.

The one good thing about hitting limits on CPU clock speed, memory shortages, etc. is that they might finally have to start actually making programmes vaguely efficient again.

There's also yet-another reason that I don't use Windows, and that's that everything seems to want an app running on startup to cache what it needs to to present these shitty web UIs with any semblance of performance, to do the most worthless things.

There are far too many programmes that just don't function correctly if you have a software firewall other than Windows Defender and you deny them web access, for instance. Windows Defender just lets it all through, but if you have a "ZoneAlarm-type" firewall, you see that EVERYTHING wants to talk-home or connect to a local web service and, when denied, it hangs up and falls over itself rather than deals with it gracefully.

Not what you want to see in critical services, for example.

Tell me how you're ever going to implement this on any open-source operating system ever?

Because people will just patch it out.

It's not like it's even a boot-time requirement (thus necessitating it being in the kernel/initrd, etc.). It's an account requirement. Which means that it can be patched out in no time at all.

As far as I know, not one single open-source OS has actually implemented this requirement (they put a field that would be useful for it into systemd, but nobody's actually using it).

Apple push an silent automatic update just for your computer that the next time you type in that key, it sends it to the FBI.

Next?

We're not dealing with a bit of software piracy or finding out who stole someone's Bitcoin, you're talking about agencies dealing with anti-terrorism and wars.

Only in America could you legally argue that an unnecessary profit-making middle-man was legally required and that it would somehow "reduce costs".

There's no such thing as technologically unable to comply.

If a nation state law enforcement insists, they will make you comply, and you and I will never hear about it.

A simple OS update with "If phone MAC == XXXXXXXXXX then send copy to FBI", targeted specifically at one phone, deployed only to that one phone, would go entirely unnoticed by the world.

And Official Secrets Act / equivalent, combined with a government-NDA and jail time for talking about it's very existence is literally routine. Has been since the days of black boxes in ISPs and them tapping Google's inter-datacentre links.

If someone like the FBI, NSA, MI5, GCHQ, etc. wants you to do something... you have literally zero choice in the matter. And talking about it will get you immediately jailed. And it really doesn't matter how big you are.

You think that Whatsapp end-to-end encryption is just going to make GCHQ etc. go "Oh well, nothing we can do?" No. If they need it, there'll be a guy knocking on your head office with a bunch of people, he'll only tell you why he's there in a closed meeting, you will comply, even if that means throwing everyone out of the datacentre and doing it yourself, and if anyone hears what he asked you to do, you will go to jail.

Been the same for decades. They just don't use it for ordinary crimes and petty stuff, mostly because of the resources they have to deploy to ensure that it stays quiet.

So we're giving up on CAPTCHA then, are we?

And the only alternative we can come up with is literal ID verification?

Something tells me that we skipped a step - i.e. a better CAPTCHA.

Four of the top five and five of the top ten games on Are We Anti-Cheat Yet's list are marked "Denied", which it defines as "Games where the developers have explicitly stated that they will not enable the anti-cheat solution to work on Linux or have denied the possibility of Linux support".

It's basically plugging the output of ChatGPT into a sudo terminal on your machine with write-access to all your data.

It's quite literally the dumbest thing I've ever heard of.

But then, even Slashdot are running obnoxious "generate apps with AI" ads in massive bars on my screen, and I paid to disable advertising and have ad-blockers.

What could go wrong?

LLMs have no business model.

That's why OpenAI is trillions in the hole, with no profitable tier of product in sight.

It's a cute toy that costs far too much to generate and maintain, and relies on basically stealing the data of the entire Internet to keep itself up-to-date and vaguely relevant, and the lawsuits on that have barely started yet.

And if an LLM was actually "AI"... it wouldn't need customers, as such. It could be left to wander off onto the Internet, given a credit card number and it would: set up its own company supplying goods that it obtains from others, answer customer queries, set up a fivr account and respond to every job on there, sell its own unique products, design its own 3D models for sale or production, trade on the stock market, bet on sports, or whatever... it would literally... just earn money for its owners. Directly. No need for a user to ask it to do so and then to give the result back to the user. Just... do the things that would directly earn it money.

Give it $100,000, a credit card, an Internet connection and... leave it to its own devices. It's "intelligent", right? And it has capabilities and capacities far in excess of any human, so we're told? So it could literally just start up a fake company, fill in the paperwork, register for tax, import goods, have a courier handle them, put them into a warehouse, set up a website, sell the product to the public, have a courier collect them from the warehouse, sell the product direct. Nobody would ever have to know that it wasn't human, and it could join the dots and just do what humans the world over do to make money directly.

If AI was any good... then IT would be the next billionaire.