There is an irony here

It's not irony, it's hypocrisy!

Also, what the reporter is doing is nowhere near as bad as what Flock does. The reporter didn't surreptitiously gather tons of data about this person, feed it to law enforcement agencies, or make reports (sometimes falsely) to those agencies that the person may have violated some laws. That's the real problem I have with Flock. I don't mind recording in public spaces. But I get really pissed off at what they're doing with those recordings behind the scenes.

Several decades ago, politicians would have recognized the dangers of this technology, not to mention how unpopular they are, and would have created restrictions on what companies could do with the footage. Republicans and Democrats would have argued vehemently about where to draw that line, but they would have both recognized that something needed to be done. That created a relatively high-trust society because the people felt that the government would do a reasonable job protecting them from overreach. The reason why nobody trusts the government anymore is because they let this shit run rampant, despite how unpopular it is. And it's gotten to the point that even if the government did create laws that prohibit analyzing the footage and alerting law enforcement agencies about the whereabouts of people of potential interest, no one would believe that those prohibitions would actually be enforced. So instead of having a potentially useful technology used in a reasonable manner, the only way we can be sure that it's not being abused is to ban it outright. This is what happens when governments decay to the point of dysfunction. Given that history shows it always ends the same way, and that so many top politicians supposedly studied history as political science majors, you would think that they'd act with far more caution, or at least pretend to give a fuck about the will of the people. Because if they're not respecting the will of the people, then we effectively no longer have a representative government.

How people at OpenAI and Anthropic aren't going to jail, or aren't even being prosecuted is rather beyond me.

You're talking about the U.$. - we know exactly why this isn't being prosecuted.

We'll see if you still feel that way when there's no one to feed you your applesauce and change your diapers when you've outlived your self-sufficience.

such as China's fertility rate falling to 1.06 births per woman in 2023

It's crazy to realize that China had a higher birth rate when they had the one-child policy.

I'm here before everyone starts blaming the economy for low birth rates. Either they're late to the conversation or no one cares about the cause of population decline anymore.

You didn't include a link to the blog post for "Wolves, sheep, and gypsies." Here it is. [hey.com]

Thank you for including the link. My analysis of the second article was a last-minute addition to my post and I forgot to include the link.

Hansson may not have explicitly "called for" ethnic cleansing, but the insinuation was clear enough: he considers vagrants and homeless people to be vermin

I base my opinions on what is actually stated, not my projections of what a person may have intended. This is what's causing so much division within our society: people get offended at an opinion that differs from theirs, so they proceed to assume the worst about the dissenter and publicly vilify that person. Ironically, it's surprisingly similar to the vilification that some people are performing of migrants.

I know we're in agreement about him not explicitly calling for ethnic cleansing, but I think it's worth analyzing just how much of an exaggeration it is for the blog author.

When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them

This is the probably the closest he comes to supporting ethnic cleansing. I have to admit I'm not thrilled with the pejorative term he's using here. However, when we look at his call to action, he never stated that Romanis should be removed from all of Europe, as the blog author had claimed. He didn't even say that all Romanis should be removed from Denmark. He stated that the Romanis who illegally camp on public land and violate the local laws meant to protect public health and safety should be deported. This is about holding visitors of your country to the same standard you hold the natives. When you're a guest, you have the choice of obeying local laws or risk being deported. What's the point of having laws if you're not going to enforce them? How do you think the natives will feel if their government enforces the laws on them but chooses not to enforce those same laws on migrants?

I have to say that I'm not thrilled with his comparison of people to unwanted animals and I can understand why that makes people uncomfortable. However, the specific solution he suggests for the migrants seems like a reasonable application of the laws that already exist. Deportation of serial lawbreakers is exceedingly warranted. In fact, not doing so is what breeds contempt among the natives.

Downmodding me instead of providing counterarguments demonstrates that you're incapable of refuting my points but you're not open-minded enough to agree with them. I guess ideology doesn't wander off easily.

Every one of these countries with its own quirks, rules, laws, tariffs...

I thought Uber's whole thing is that they find loopholes to avoid following the rules.

I'm not very familiar with DHH, so he may have said and done some truly horrific things, but the author of this "viral blog post" lost me from the start:

In “As I remember London,” he voiced support for ethnically cleansing London of minorities.

I believe I read that article a while ago and wanted to read it again because I don't remember it calling for ethnic cleansing. After reading it very carefully looking for any direct or indirect calls for ethnic cleansing, I came up short. Never at any point in the article did DHH state that ethnic cleansing was a valid solution. As a matter of fact, he directly recognizes that it's not clear how they can undo the erosion of British culture in Britain:

I really feel for the Brits because it's not obvious how they get themselves out of this pickle.

The whole article seems to maintain the tone of a cautionary tale with the message "this is why you don't let erosion of your culture happen in the first place - because it's virtually impossible to recover".

Similarly, the author of the blog post claims:

In “Wolves, sheep, and gypsies,” he called for the ethnic cleansing of Romani people across Europe, comparing them to wolves.

However, after reading that article, he never called for any ethnic cleansing, especially not "across Europe", as he never mentioned any place in Europe outside of Denmark. As a matter of fact, his horrible solution to the problem was for the Romanis to make use of the shelters Denmark provides:

Copenhagen is the Danish capital. It's repeatedly been named the safest city in the world in recent years. Partly because it didn't tolerate vagrants and homeless people taking over public spaces (as has happened in so many American cities). Previously, police would tell someone they couldn't sleep or camp in the city, and they could go to one of the city-run shelters. But now that this is considered too cruel(?!), the native inhabitants of the city instead have to deal with literal shit on their way to the metro.

With all of that said, he may have stated or done some other things that are indefensible of which I'm currently not aware. But the way that "viral blog post" grossly mischaracterized the tone of the articles is emblematic of why people on the far-left are often seen almost as equally divorced from reality as people on the far-right.

I find it interesting how many companies are attempting to use the flexibility of open source technologies to make up for the many shortcomings of Windows. Open source technologies are becoming more attractive for alternative solutions not just because they're generally more secure out of the box, but the ability to combine the many different features that are available provide a level of flexibility in which Windows could only dream. For instance, the use of immutable Linux distros, such as UniconOS, makes it much harder for a valid user or an attacker to damage or compromise the system. In addition to that, in Linux it's possible to combine file systems that can take snapshots (ZFS, Btrfs, etc) with boot loaders that can boot from specific snapshots to easily revert back to a usable system after a botched update (I bet the sysadmins who had to clean up after the Crowdstrike debacle would have appreciated that option!).

Meanwhile, Windows stagnates with no viable options to compete with these technologies. It makes we wonder if Microsoft will ever even attempt to catch up or just continue to slowly cede functionality to Linux and other open source alternatives. I'm not suggesting that Linux will take over any markets, but if I was running a company I would do everything in my power to make my users forget that competition even exists, not let my products stagnate to the point where the market becomes desperate to explore every possible alternative.

I don't expect this product to be particularly popular, but I do find it interesting that Citrix recognizes the problem and is attempting to use open source to resolve it.

I get what they think they are doing. But you can't really achieve security by layering ill-thought-out systems on top of each other.

I'm not disputing that these systems are at least slightly less secure because having two operating systems on a device inherently increases the attack surface. However, I do dispute the term "layered" because my understanding is that the two operating systems are designed to be as independent as possible.

I'm sure that the two systems together don't create any security holes one of them alone wouldn't have had. I'm sure.

I only see two feasible attack vectors:

1. Someone writes a virus that includes a Windows driver for the Linux file system used by UniconOS, writes malware to that partition, and then sabotages Windows to require the user to reboot into Unicon. It's certainly possible, but I believe it would require Administrator in Windows to install the Linux file system driver, and if the attacker has that then they have dozens of more straightforward ways to accomplish their malfeasance.

2. Someone finds a vulnerability in UniconOS that allows breaking immutability of the file system. At that point, they could compromise UniconOS or install a Windows file system driver and attempt to mount the Windows partition and install malware. However, UniconOS is probably going to be used exclusively by enterprise customers, most of whom will have Bitlocker enabled in Windows which would prevent mounting the Windows partition in UniconOS without serious manual efforts. In addition to that, since UniconOS is only meant to be used for emergencies, there likely wouldn't be many opportunities to exploit this.

Again, I do believe that these systems are slightly more vulnerable than your tradition system which has only one OS, but I don't think the level of effort to leverage it will be very attractive to attackers. With that said, this is a fairly unique service but I don't believe it will be compelling enough to sell a lot of units. Most companies would rather focus their efforts and budget on preventing the emergencies from happening in the first place.

What is "right" in this case is subjective. No one in the U.S. government, not even the wannabe dicktater, can compel a private company to rename a body of water within their product because executive orders only apply to the federal departments of the executive branch. And most people in the U.S. don't want it to be renamed. Therefore, if the people don't want it and the president can't enforce it, then there's an argument to be made that the "right" thing to do is completely ignore Trump. However, as someone else already pointed out, Trump can single-handedly remove Google from consideration of all "no-bid quid pro quo" federal contracts for the rest of his administration and Google wouldn't be able to do much about it. So Google has made their decision, but it's far from unanimous about whether or not it was "right".

Why should "Lake Ontario / Lake America" (or the previous "Gulf of Mexico / Gulf of America", where the latter is objectively a descriptive name) be any different?

Because in those cases, it's largely the will of the local peoples rather than retribution from a petulant manchild who lost a trade war that he unilaterally insisted on starting.

I can't stand Donald Trump (just look at all of my other posts on this story), but I don't think we can blame him for the first economic freefall - the effects of a pandemic are going to crush any economy. And he signed the CARES Act which was sponsored by a majority Democratic House. He certainly screwed up handling the health and safety aspects of the pandemic, but I'm not sure the Dems would have been able to ease the economic sting much more than what was already done.

However, the current economic freefall is completely unnecessary and completely Trump's fault. At this point, he seems absolutely determined to obliterate our economy. It's his second biggest initiative, with the first being the construction of vanity projects which serve as monuments to himself.

He doesn't care at all about the midterms because he and Mike Johnson have absolutely no plans to swear in the newly elected Democrats if they lose the majority in the election (which they most certainly will). If we thought things were interesting now, they're about to get far more interesting in a few months.

Also, my personal feeling is that if you don't vote, you don't get to complain.

If we used the popular vote, then I'd be more amenable to this mindset. Personally, I skipped the top of the ticket because I don't live in one of the 43 states that mattered.