The duress deletion function was always obviously and transparently going to get treated as obstruction of justice issue the minute it got used in a high profile case. Here we are.

If you don't want to have trouble at the border, wipe your devices before you get anywhere near, and restore them once you are across. The precursors to this event have been in the news for years - the border is a legal gray zone, act accordingly.

I have mixed feeling here - sad for this kid, whomever he may be. Once again annoyed at the activist/NGO world for not training up to the point they can dodge this *easily* avoided problem. And I'm leaning forward in anticipation of being able to point and laugh at any crypto enthusiasts who make comically implausible arguments about these simple facts.

WIPE YOUR DEVICES BEFORE CROSSING THE BORDER.

Is that clear enough?

"Who's more foolish? The Fool? Or the fool who follows?" -- or maybe Vizzini from The Princess Bride, "...Plato, Socrates, Sam Altman? Morons, all of them." Well, something like that. How about, "Burn, baby, burn, Token Inferno..." No? Well, maybe you were just born too late.

Starting with the Intel 386 it became possible to run a proper operating system on consumer hardware. I can still recall the excitement with that first Redhat 3.03 book and CD I received, sitting in front of a 16MHz i386sx, craving change. I had owned a Vax 11/730, an LMI Lambda, an SGI 210GTXB, but they were just stupid expensive to run and it took a couple friends to move them.

Anthropic and OpenAI are in the same position the workstation vendors were thirty years ago. What they do is amazing, extremely desirable to those of us who create and use software, but SOOO painful price wise. While I'm writing this on my 16GB M1 Mac the Bonsai 1 bit models are downloading. I mostly use Claude Max and an Ollama cloud subscription, but if I can shift some of the work to the machine on my desk ...

I let an RTX 5060Ti go cheap a few months ago, 16GB was just not enough. I don't regret this, but I wish my income position would change. The world would be a different place if the HP Z4 in my kitchen had an RTX 6000 Pro in place of its current GTX 1060. The advent of TurboQuant makes me want to try some things on one of the Intel GPUs - maybe that entry level sedan price on the RTX 6000 Pro is no longer the real barrier to entry.

These are strange days we are living, strange days indeed ... and no reactionary pack of ninnies is going to be able to do anything. It's a fine thing, having China defending our freedom to create, eh?

I changed careers thirty years ago to get Microsoft out of my life and I've never regretted that decision.

Using Microsoft operating systems is like dating a morbidly obese person who is continually in and out of the psych ward, and they've got a cluster B character disorder, one of the really manipulative ones.

I do not understand how that company's products are not limited to historic niches that are too difficult/unprofitable to clear.

Perhaps the advent of AI is going to lower the barrier to entry for decent operating systems. The Unix based ones have always seemed easier to me, but I'm an aspie weirdo so my opinion only counts just a little.

So Google's mouthpiece responds with Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) as a matter of course because that's what they always do. Google is just one great example of why The European Union needs to worry about it's own digital sovereignty. Too bad a billion-dollar fine won't make much difference in their "Be Evil" product strategy. Late-stage capitalism at its finest, where "growth at any cost" is not just the ethos or logos of a cancer cell. Go Euro Commission. American companies pretty much suck at this point and they're not afraid to act up, even internationally. You do what you gotta do.

Microsoft has been bilking, milking, and threatening for about 40 years now by my count. This company is not interested in the commomwealth, the general welfare of man, or preserving any data or status quo unless it has a price tag attached to it. They're in it for the cash, nothing more to see there. I've lost count of the software competitors (like soft PCs and emulators, for example) that they've bought and put on a shelf and forgot about, litigated to death, or just plain unfairly priced out of existence. Everyone just needs to assume that Microsoft won't be preserving jack-squat for posterity. That said, Apple, Adobe, Meta, bullsh-X, Google, Samsung and pretty much all of the other "big tech companies" are all cut from the same cloth. Don't hold your breath that they're going to come to the aid of the human race anywhere, ever. Not even Bill Gates' philanthropic outreach or "pick your favorite ex-googler" are really going to help that much. You're just gonna have to create a future without them. (Because that's really the only way the human race is going to survive.)

Let us all take a moment to reflect that this was a thinly-veiled proxy war on Linux started by Microsoft back in the day, and it went on for entirely too long. Let us also remember that FreeBSD was vetted against AT&T waaaaaaay back in 1994 and that, as they say, was that. No insanely long-tailed legal maneuvering. I can only hope that they keep Hell hot for the new round of greedy morons pushing this effort. Or, at the very least, they also get to endure two decades of value destruction in their own lives, dying broke and penniless in some locked senior ward somewhere.

I dropped Facebook several years ago (2022) when their "community standards" moderators went all douchy/Trumpy on me and I've never looked back. Best move I've ever made in my life for my own mental health. And any projects I take on in the future will explicitly avoid/deny/lock-out Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other big social media just because I don't see any value there anymore, for anyone. The collective "we" burned that village down to the ground. Oh well. Moving on.

Negligent. Big Tech has been negligent in their characterizing AI, influencing business leaders, destroying jobs anyway because of the negative zeitgeist, and now they're saying that they may have been wrong. In the mean time we all know that AI isn't going to wash our cars or plant a garden or mow the lawn for the common man, nor is it necessarily the best solution for lots of jobs out there, but they're going to push it anyway. In the mean time the institutional investors are going to continue to push the AI hype so that they can foist off all of the so-far-accumulated debt to the smaller investors because the big boys already know that they want out. They're also starting to realize that spending millions of dollars on "AI tokens" may not have been the smartest move for their companies and clients, but they still want out, and they'll still lie through their teeth to make sure that someone else buys their AI "junk bonds" so that they can be made whole again. Garbage in, Sam Altman out. But my key point here is negligence. They have been negligent and they are still untrustworthy.

I was going to complain about the lack of a Claude Desktop for Linux, but I double checked before roasting them, and by gosh they've got a version in beta for Ubuntu and it'll work on any Debian offspring. When Anthropic says beta that means it's pretty darned good, they're cautious about putting stuff out.

I got a couple M1 Macs two years ago and the weight advantage pushed Linux off my desktop. Anthropic releases Mac first and I'm a Max subscriber so I've been at the head of the line. All my Linux these days is a Proxmox box in the living room and a Qubes 4.3 on my kitchen table that has been at install completion for two or three weeks, and I just don't have time to mess with it.

I'm looking at the stuff in my dock and all of these apps are on Linux. I guess my wish is ... maybe better integration on Mac file systems, so I can get a thumb drive from a pure Mac user and not have to do a bunch of gymnastics to get the data where I need it.

The Trump administration is cooking the books but they can't do it fast enough to head this off.

Even with the shell game the numbers are falling.

This is a post pandemic, starting to be AI era job market. Kinda looks like the pre-genocide Gaza strip, where one young person would support seven family members. This is my Signal chat today - two people overdrawn, one about to default on mortgage, a fourth who needs to move for safety's sake but can not afford.

This is a global phenomenon and the Hormuz "peace" where both sides keep shooting is NOT helping.

Years ago Republican pollster Frank Luntz, when asked how bad things might get, deadpanned "France. 1793."

We're not there yet, but you can faintly hear the thunk of falling guillotine blades, if you listen closely ...

BMW wants to charge you a monthly subscription for seat warmers for a car you already bought once. Maybe Meta can charge you for wearing pants as sort of a "protection racket". Zipper access will cost you an extra $7 per deployment when you need it though. "Nice pants you got there. It would be a SHAME if they were to get wet." -- Utterly ridiculous, decidedly unneeded and definitely unwanted.

The ENTIRE AI ECOSYSTEM is FOUNDED on MASSIVE COPYRIGHT THEFT AND FRAUD! How dare they?!? (That was satire for the humor-impared.)

And this is yet another example of why data sovereignty is so important for Europe, Australia, Japan, and pretty much the rest of the world. Even CloudFlare knows the AI leader-wannabees are less than reputable, less than honorable, and not worth trusting.

So..., pay three times as much for less capable brains that are assisted by AI for about the same tangible output than your regular software engineer? Sounds like The American Way. ...Or a crutch. But hey!, with AI around to assist all of those young minds in cheating on their exams, they won't know much about the network, the transactional layer, data structures, databases, or software engineering in general, so they won't mind cleaning the bathrooms part time either because, "hey, it's a job, man". (But their AI assistant won't be helping them clean the bathrooms. 'Pretty sure of that.)

I remember Volkswagen doing pretty much the same thing back in 1973-74 with the VW Thing. "Customize it. Make it your own." I hope it finds its niche.