It's a interesting and legitimate sci-fi scenario but the real problem isn't going to be waste heat it's going to be diverting huge amounts of limited resources, ie construction and money and time, to building out nuclear power plants for the sole purpose of AI to replace white collar workers.

So instead of machines serving all of us they are going to survey very very very very tiny group of people. Techno feudalism.

Dude that heat energy has to go somewhere. So even if you have miraculous electricity you're still going to be belching heat into the atmosphere.

But fusion is getting the headlines while these big tech companies are building out nuclear power plants.

The resources that are going to go into building those plants are going to be diverted from other projects. They don't have to be but they will be because there is very very very little money for anything besides corporate profits.

The economy doesn't have to be a zero-sum game but it is. That's the mistake a lot of people make.

Honestly the more I see the more I think we are eventually going to give nukes to religious lunatics and it's going to be game over.

Down to the last cinder so that we can put a shitload of white collar workers out of work and drive up shareholder value just a little bit more.

I'm kidding I'm kidding. It's a lot more shareholder value.

Remember kids, it's a big club and you ain't in it.

Um did you forget Microsoft Office exists? Offices a little more than twice as profitable as Windows...

Microsoft forces computer upgrades as a giveaway to the oems. It's not for there well-being it's so the dell and HP and all of them have a chance to sell a new computer. This helps keep those oems locked into windows.

To be honest with Windows 10 I don't think they cared nearly as much because they were pretty damn sure the oems couldn't do jack shit and they were right.

The reason Windows 11 requires a computer upgrade is so they can do some of the nastier DRM and eventually lock down the platform like Apple iOS is. That's been their dream since Windows 8 but software vendors saw it coming a mile away and wouldn't have anything to do with Microsoft.

This isn't caused by enshitification. This is just Microsoft never being able to put together a decent tablet at a good price.

Microsoft has never been good at much of anything. Take away the antitrust violations and they wouldn't even be around anymore.

But thanks to those antitrust violations and our complete unwillingness to vote for politicians that enforce law they can do things like lose 6 billion dollars on the OG Xbox and then just throw out another one and then throw out another one and lose money on that one and on and on and on.

But people aren't leaving Windows because Windows got worse. For r the average user even Windows 11 is fine. You have to be a gamer or someone doing advanced content creation to notice the difference. And I mean advanced, if all you do is throw together a YouTube channel with a bit of 4K video you won't notice the problems Windows 11 brings to the table.

But the fact of the matter is most people just use computers to access email and shop and maybe a bit of porn and a cheap Android tablet is good enough.

If Microsoft was a more nimble company they could have put out a cheap Windows CE tablet to compete with Android but they're not so they ended up chasing Apple money on overly expensive devices and anyone who's dropping $1,000 on a tablet is just going to buy an Apple device.

Microsoft would have monetized the user anyway.

Corporations don't want to make money. They want to make all the money. They are in all consuming all devouring Force.

You wouldn't have people being charged with human trafficking just based on random travel patterns because you wouldn't have a fascist government looking for reasons to charge people with crimes they didn't commit.

You're putting the cart before the horse. The problem is once you have a fascist government all the individual security and privacy in the world won't save you. If all else fails they will just come down on you like a ton of bricks with simple violence.

And by yourself you can't stop fascism because billionaires always want fascism. Before that it was billionaires but that's just inflation. If you're going to withstand the assault of people with that much money the only way you can do it is by grouping together with large numbers of people.

So protecting your individual privacy won't stop the actual thing you're afraid of, which is being arrested for crimes you didn't commit.

It will just be long enough for them to catch up. Same thing as when they used Intel and then switch to in-house silicon first chance they got.

If you even read the summary you would realize this isn't about their market dominance. This is about them having a walled garden for an app store.

Apple absolutely has a monopoly on app stores for iOS. Europe has already started breaking that down but United States has not.

The accusation is that Apple has used their Monopoly of app stores and app loading illegally.

One of the reasons we can't get any decent antitrust law enforcement in this damn country is that unless you have something that is so fucking obviously a complete total Monopoly of a critical resource people just don't believe it is a antitrust issue.

Antitrust law is highly nuanced and if it's one thing America hates its nuance. We desperately want things to be simple, clear and above all black and white. And that's just not how it is. Which is what gets us into messes like this...

Because Trump is your god king but the difference is when the journalists got called out there they rapidly corrected themselves whereas I never once saw a correction about the Joe Biden story and I never once saw anyone seriously criticizing Trump for losing his marbles 20 minutes into a town hall...

Well not exactly I think one of the editors over at the New York times tried to and got fired for it. Or maybe he just decided to resign all on his own after decades of working there...

Dude you won. You own everything. Your side can do anything it wants now.

Fascists are never happy because fascism is about being angry all the time so no matter how much winning you get you're going to be more and more and more miserable. Almost as if you probably shouldn't be a fascist...

Shut this down as not budget related? Then again there are literally hundreds of things to Republican party stuffed in that bill that aren't related to the budget so some things are bound to slip through.

Somehow I don't think 1 trillion dollars of Medicaid cuts should be included in a budget bill. That should be considered way too significant a policy change since it basically shuts down medicaid...

In other news 1 trillion dollars of government spending is on track to exit the economy. That's going to result in a hell of a lot of job losses. Not just in healthcare you can't take that much money out of the economy and not have it Go boom.

So what you describing is called a browser fingerprint and there are plenty of ways to prevent it.

On the other hand like I mentioned on another comment that only applies if you are fairly technical and while that might protect you it's not going to protect the vast majority of people who simply do not have the skills.

And if it's one thing the last 6 months has taught me it's that the rest of the world will drag you down with it. Freedom isn't something that can be protected with individual action. It requires a concerted effort from a large number of people.

Presumably the idea is that website y knows that VPN provider x is using it.

From there it's an opsec problem. Most of the time though hackers don't get found out by incredibly complex shit they get found out because they accidentally post their email address onto a forum and it traces back to them.

Stuff like this is mildly useful for peace of mind if you're doing something dodgy online and possibly very useful to foreign intelligence agencies that have really good opsec.

But society-wide it's not really going to allow us to avoid the techno feudal dystopian hellscape that's coming. Even if you're opsec is so good you never get caught when all your neighbors are getting caught they're going to drag you down with them as society collapses.

Freedom isn't something that individuals acting alone can protect. But nerds really really like to be individuals because it's a huge drag to deal with people. We wouldn't be nerds if that wasn't the case..

I'm tired of hearing that we don't have to worry about techno feudalism because magic space technology we can't imagine is going to save us. It's a childish appeal to Middle School level sci-fi.

We have tens of thousands of years of human beings being absolutely fucking terrible to each other and outside of a few developed countries human beings are still absolutely terrible to each other.

The real problem is you're stuck in a bubble where you've had a comfortable life so you can't imagine that being taken away from you because why would it? This is the way the world is and the world can't change. Certainly not for the worst because that wouldn't jive with the Sci-Fi books you read when you were 13.

It's the classic 4 to 14 problem where you have an idea that was planted in your head around that age group. In this case you're a nerd and I can see the same sort of Hope the future without the fear of dystopia that comes from being a slightly older nerd that grew up reading Asimov and Bradbury outside of Fahrenheit 451...

You might also have glomped onto the cyberpunk dystopia's where brilliant hackers can still live great lives. Nerds love that because we're the kings in that world.

None of us ever considered techno feudalism though. Or if we do, again we think of ourselves as the Kings and not the peasants...