And he is a known idiot so there is good reason to doubt anything and everything he says and by extension the FBI.

If you look at the credentials of the people in charge of the country right now it's a who's who of has been bloggers and TV show hosts. This was on purpose. The voters gave us Trump and Trump wanted yes men.

Privately every single person in Trump's administration is terrified he's not going to get a third term because if he doesn't then they don't have any of that sweet sweet supreme Court granted presidential immunity and they're all wrong prison.

It's one of the things that makes the right wing so effective. The centrists are really just looking to put a feather in their cap and run some committee meetings. Keep things going smoothly. The right wing is so full crooks and lairs every single one of them is fighting for their freedom because if we ever start enforcing laws again they're all going to prison. Steve Bannon for example has been bailed out twice now by Trump and the Republican party.

Honestly Windows 7 and 10 are fine. Windows 11 is an absolute shit show. I don't care how fast your hardware is it is so painfully slow

I'm guessing it's mostly just him complaining about getting shot down for dates and forcing his way into locker rooms to drink beer.

Last time Trump was President famously they kept him from having access to classified information as much as possible because he kept leaking it and so did everyone around him. Trump didn't like that so this time all the adults in the room are gone and it's all toddlers. It must really suck to be an American intelligence officer or asset right now. I mean we had people restraining the stupidity back in 2016 and they are all gone now and the last time the number of dead intelligence officers and assets shot through the roof. These days I suspect they have a life expectancy comparable to a drain fly.

I suppose to be fair the UK isn't so much better. The police can make these requests themselves. They have an oversight group, but they rubber stamp everything it seems. Hundreds of thousands of requests per year.

So companies opened literally thousands of data centers that use huge amounts of electricity and water both of which are increasingly in short supply.

Now they have basically unlimited money because they are dangling the possibility of freeing the Epstein class from their long-standing dependency on us filthy filthy peasants.

But the problem is they don't quite have unlimited power and people have noticed how terrible the data centers are for their communities so they can't just keep building them.

So because of that they are starting to have to prioritize what their data centers are going to support and to do. At least in the short term. They are still building data centers here and there and they are gradually getting state laws changed by buying off State legislatures.

The Epstein class is always been really big on buying up the state legislatures. They are big and powerful enough that they can use them to ram through anything they want no matter what voters actually want but they aren't so small and numerous that they're too expensive or troublesome to buy up. And it can be hard to buy a national government completely.

First off about 60% of people never move from where they were born. Of that most of them move for work.

Second of all it is perfectly fucking reasonable that you should be able to move to any major city or town and not have to worry about whether or not you have water. Having water is one of the most basic elements of functioning civilization.

I am so sick of the absurd length and excuses people come up with to blame individuals for systemic problems just so they can preserve some kind of weird libertarian worldview where we don't actually have to take care of each other.

Meanwhile the reason is reservoirs are low is largely because we fucked up the water cycle with climate change. We didn't need to but it helped corporate profits and it got a few men closer to being trillionaires

Most Chinese phones use Android. Google could be huge there, but choose not to be.

They gave the Chinese government access to Chinese user's data years ago. They don't seem to have an issue with governments gaining warrantless access to their systems.

If you care about privacy, go Android. Google does require warrants, and doesn't operate in China due to the warrantless access requirement.

It will, you can side load them.

And we are on track for another 1,500 this year

I think you're having a hard time with the scale of what's going on because it's numbers that aren't normal for human beings

But I seem to remember them all being pretty crazy expensive for what you got. I guess it would be probably quieter than the equivalent Windows PC or hackintosh but most of the models I see out in the wild are the really expensive ones that would have sold for $5,000 and up

A quick search shows 5 million gallons daily. The Southwest states are currently fighting over the Colorado River or what's left of it and everyone wants to build data centers there because they get very few natural disasters. I think some parts of Arizona get big dust storms but those are easy enough to deal with. And the rest of the Southern United States doesn't even have those.

Remember it's not just about how much water an individual data center uses it's about how much water is available to that specific community.

Never mind the fact that we are seeing dozens of these data centers built. A large city might use 100 million gallons a day so the 10 data centers you might easily see near a large city could guzzle 50% of the water.

All of this because the rich don't want to have to pay people and they don't like to have to pretend to be civil to consumers or employees

Mine is a Pro as well. They just keep failing on me. One stopped seeing the remote after boot for a few minutes, and the other stopped getting any network connectivity (wired or wireless) for several minutes after boot.

A tangent on another historian of science and technology I enjoyed taking a course from and who wrote about information technology and who died relatively way too young:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "James Ralph Beniger (December 16, 1946 -- April 12, 2010) was an American historian and sociologist and Professor of Communications and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, particularly known for his early work on the history of quantitative graphics in statistics, and his later work on the technological and economic origins of the information society."

RIP Jim. Thanks for being an excellent -- and kind -- professor. And mentioning me and other students with thanks in your Control Revolution book.

And thanks also introducing me to the 1978 book "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought" by Langdon Winner --- which just gets more relevant every day.
https://www.amazon.com/Autonom...
        "This study of the idea of technology out of control makes an important contribution to our understanding of the problems of civilization. The basic argument is not that some persons or groups promote technology against the public interest (true though that is), or even that our technology develops in its own way in spite of all our efforts to control it (also true in some respects). Rather, Winner is concerned with a more subtle effect: the artifacts that we have invented to satisfy our material wants have now developed, in size and complexity, to the point of delimiting or even determining our conception of the wants themselves. In that way, we as a civilization are losing mastery over our own tools.... 'As a source for readings and reflections on this problem, the book is rich and rewarding.... If it has a practical lesson, it is that of awareness: only by recognizing the boundaries of our socially constructed scientific-technological reality can we transcend them in imagination and then achieve effective human action.'"

Winner's book is perhaps a sort of antithesis of "The Soul of A New Machine"? In that sometimes technologists (I'm looking at your OpenAI and cohorts) can get so excited about problem solving and miss the big picture. Related humor:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes...
        "This reminds me of the engineer who is condemned to death, but as his turn approaches they find that the mechanism on the electric chair is no longer functioning. About to send everyone home, the engineer calls out "Wait! I think i can see the problem!""

I heard that Winner did not get tenure at MIT essentially because he suggested that the method of education used there was essentially blinding the MIT students to the social implications of what they were doing. A related book:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
        "Who are you going to be? That is the question.
        In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
        The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
        Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."

Anyway, I am so thankful for people like Jim Beniger, Langdon Winner, Michael Mahoney, and others who provided a larger perspective to technologists on what they were doing.

If I can find fault with "The Soul of a New Machine" from hazy recollections from 40+ years ago I don't think it did that. It's still informative though on how technology -- like now AI development -- can become addictive for techies with both good and bad aspects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
      "The book follows many of the designers as they give almost every waking moment of their lives to design and debug the new machine."

It's maybe kind of like the difference between books that glorify warmaking and "winning" versus those that glorify peacemaking and "win/win/win"?

An example of the latter is "To Become a Human Being: The Message of Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Or an essay by Terry Dobson on Aikido:
https://livingthepresentmoment...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
      "My teacher taught us each morning that the art was devoted to peace. "Aikido," he said again and again, "is the art of reconciliation. Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection with the universe. If you try to dominate other people, you are already defeated. We study how to resolve conflict, not how to start it." ..."

Or in a way Theodore Sturgeon's "The Skills of Xanadu" 1956 short story about wearable networked mobile computing for sharing knowledge that inspired Ted Nelson to invent hypertext which contributed to the creation of the web.

Or Alfie Kohn's "No Contest: The Case Against Competition":
https://www.alfiekohn.org/cont...

One of the most interesting things I overheard at lunch at IBM Research was something along the lines of "We hire the top people from the most competitive schools -- and then wonder why they can't get along and cooperate."

And I'd add, wonder why many technologists rarely take much time to think about the broader social implications of what they are doing.

And "Soul of a New Machine" -- from what I can remember of it -- exemplifies and celebrates that focused mindset.

I can thank someone (maybe Bruce Maier?) who posted this essay to the Lyrics TOPS-10 timesharing system I used in high school circa 1980 -- for helping me have some reservations about such narrow focus:
"The Hacker Papers [about some Stanford CS students]"
https://cdn.preterhuman.net/te...
      "As much as an essay, this is a story. It is a true story of people paying $9,000 a year to lose elements of their humanity. It is a story of the breaking of wills and of people. It is a story of addictions, and of misplaced values. In a large part, it is my own story. ..."

Also assigned reading in Michael Mahoney's course on the history of science and technology at Princeton circa 1984. Although I had read it already -- and found it inspiring.

RIP Tracy Kidder.

And also RIP Professor Mahoney who died in 2008 at the relatively young age of 69 -- just when a historian is typically getting very productive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://www.dailyprincetonian....

"Histories of Computing"
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/bo...
"Computer technology is pervasive in the modern world, its role ever more important as it becomes embedded in a myriad of physical systems and disciplinary ways of thinking. The late Michael Sean Mahoney was a pioneer scholar of the history of computing, one of the first established historians of science to take seriously the challenges and opportunities posed by information technology to our understanding of the twentieth century."

It's going to be a rough next decade with ongoing loss of pioneers of personal computing and those who wrote about them or who inspired them. People like Steve Jobs and Doug Engelbart and Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon who have passed on years ago. Glad that Steve Wozniak and Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and so on are still hanging in there! A heartfelt thanks to all of them for giving us possibilities -- even if we may not be doing great things with them right now.

"Original architects [Wozniak] of the personal computer hate what it's become..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"Steve Wozniak says he's "disappointed a lot" by AI and rarely uses it"
https://www.techspot.com/news/...