We, The People, have ample reason to NOT TRUST Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook/Meta, and dozens of other companies that put their quarterly profits over people every second of every minute of every hour of every day in this world. I can't imagine why the "Magnificent Seven" AI companies should expect that we would trust them any more that the other huge tech companies. Would you trust Elon Musk at this point? Or Sam Bankma...., er, I mean Sam Altman? Shitty psychotic billionaires hiding behind huge corporate mazes inducing mind-boggling circular cash flows to prop up an entire industry founded by outright Intellectual Property theft is an unspeakably complex problem. Then add in use-cases like Flock cameras and job displacement and you're talking about a lot of anxiety from a LOT of people. You want people to trust huge companies more? Give them the power to put your entire C-Suite in prison for crimes they commit (either randomly or intentionally, because we know that some of this shit is intentional) and make them accountable again, rather than untouchable because corporate attorneys can generally be scum too. For that matter, the corporate attorneys should be held accountable for the work they do for their companies. And crazy, stoopid billionaires making fiscal or political policy has also proven to be a problem. Now couple that with the AI cheer-leading about how you should spend $30K for an AI-powered robot to dig a hole in your back yard rather than just go pick up a shovel and get it done for the cost of a little effort and sweat on your brow and you have a recipe for hating an entire industry. This whole "AI Everything" nonsense has got to stop. Here's were I'm at, Mr. Dipshit-Moji; "I trust an egg salad sandwich out of a vending machine in a men's room in a truck stop on the edge of Phoenix in the middle of August more than I trust you and your friends." And we know "who" you're so fervently developing AI for, and it's not, apparently, the commonwealth, or the general welfare, or, anyone or anything other than YOU. (Also, I think the potential is growing for you morons to actually destroy the planet at this point.)

I guess I'll have to find a different venue to stream from/to then. Goodbye, Twitch. That simple sentence has a rather resounding sense of finality to it for me.

If you IPO for any dollar amount described with the word "trillion" does that instantly make the company "too big to fail"? Does this mean that they should instantly qualify for government bail-outs if/when things go sideways for them? Do they screw hundreds of millions of tax payers to keep a couple thousand douchy-investor-types whole? Or does this particular event signal the dawn of a new day where "too big to fail" should no longer be a thing? Because if your IPO is in the Trillions of Dollars, your investors had better be ready to take it on the chin when your share price drops. Just sayin'.... cuz I'm sick of it happening the other way.

Back in the teens we found a couple of instances where political actors were encouraging people to install screen savers or cryptocurrency wallets that turned their phones into reverse proxies. This was thought to be specifically for the sake of giving hostile foreign operations (read: Russia) access to U.S. domestic politics.

The fact that smart TVs are facilitating this is just ... we're going to need home networks that treat IoT stuff as different than our actual systems.

Oh, wait, TP-Link had well over half the U.S. router market, but they're getting banned over national security concerns?

Maybe there's a market for a router with traffic accounting as a service so one can see what's happening?

This is why the only device in my house with internet is a Roku. I simply will not tolerate the rest of that invasive junk.

The call centers are going to be decimated ... but so will the AI replacements meant to talk to humans.

I have a number of issues this morning that require calls. First, deal with PG&E about changing the billing for my new house. The I need to talk to my bank about banning Google from ever billing me again. I absolutely HATE changing doctors, but had to do it, because getting to Antioch, then into the city, is just ridiculous from here, so it's time for first appointment.

I would love to be able to just give Claude a list of administrivia like that and let it plow through the work. I see progress on agent related billing, I see Cloudflare doing stuff for an internet dominated by agents ... everyone in the industrialized world is going to have an AI adjutant to handle this stuff. I really hope the old military term "dog robber" gets revived as a way to describe them.

There's an obvious bubble, the circular dealings among the large core players are an enormous red flag.

The frontier labs are in the same position that DEC and Sun Microsystems were in the 1990s, as consumer hardware running Linux began to displace them. There will be ups and downs, but the trend is unavoidable.

The productivity gains are not there, AI is great for coding, some customer service is working, but the "50% of all white collar workers" that the frontier labs thought was good positioning last year 1) ain't gonna work but it did 2) infuriate the managerial class.

The frontier labs got away with it, thus far, in part because of concerns over the arrival of artificial general intelligence, which occupies a similar niche to nuclear weapons in the minds of policy makers. We ARE seeing frontier models escaping and attacking others, there ARE hazards, but it's nothing like what was imagined.

And the open models plus wild talent are as much a danger as wild talent was all on its own.

The frontier labs are like the coyote in that last moment when he's windmilling wildly, but not falling yet.

Go for the C-Suite. Surveil them. Document their movements. Make them the center of attention for some unknown not-necessarily-an-assailant(s). Let them know how it feels to be tagged and mapped and their whereabouts reconstructed. (Now I'm using a metaphor:) "Lop of the head and the body will whither and die." That's how you treat the mass surveillance beast of a thousand eyes.

Someone needs to launch a national campaign educating people on jury nullification.

The property damage laws are not really the sort of thing nullification is meant for, it's supposed to quickly put an end to the effect of bad laws, but if that's the one tool handy, and it's this much of a social issue, it should be put to work.

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.