I wish someone would figure out how to combine Hyphanet (original Freenet) and I2P. Basically the network based storage rather than having to have each services server online all the time to work.

Well, they sort of have - they turned into a finanicalized services company basically back in the aughts.

I know this is probably unpopular, but there is a youtube channel by a supposed nuclear power plant engineer that pointed out that our current radiation standards are not like any other standards. IIRC he said the current standards don’t set a given exposure level and simply say as low as reasonably possible. Which sounds great till you realize that what’s reasonably possible is a constantly lowering standard - what I mean is as tech gets better the standard is always stricter. Which sounds great, but in reality isn’t how we regulate (as far as I know) anything else - we set a safety level and politically revisit it as makes sense.

As I understand it - this would be like saying lightbulbs must use as little energy as reasonably possible for a given lumen output. This sounds good too - except that it means we never get to attain cost savings, or ever reach a “good enough” level. And this isn’t new installs, this is under legal and inspection threat that if you haven’t replaced your incandecents as soon as florescent came out, then replaced those with LED, then replaced those with more efficient LED basically as soon as it was available, constantly planning and replacing your otherwise working lightbulbs - you get huge fines.

And our radiation protections only apply to nuclear plants etc, yet I’ve widely seen reported that coal plants actually give off more radiation now, it’s just diffuse. So we’re not actually worried about radiation exposure in general. We’re also not comparing to background radiation …

Yea, it’s just that every one has something problematic IMO. So for say torrents cheap and available is worth more than an app I don’t have to use. I of course don’t know a about if say PIA is better or whatever.

Where was that reported?

IDK, I think we should be looking beyond Signal for these sorts of things. Signal is great for when the metadata doesn’t risk you, and when you control your device, but there are likely better options out there if the government is actually out to get you.

Personally, if I was worried enough about various tracking, I’d want to use the configs with known vetted third party FLOSS apps vs their own built app. For instance, one of the concerns with SurfShark in those sites is the app isn’t vetted and has some custom analytics. Using openVPN plus configs kills app level analytics.

IDK how much I ought to or should not trust any VPN provider, but for what I need, SurfShark has been great and pretty cheap, though for other reasons I’m a bit disappointed no port forwarding. I would use other tech than commercial VPNs for “deep” privacy.

I’m not even sure I’d call the mass deportation in the US Ethnic Clensing. Part of the problem is it targets minorities, but not one specific minority, and the extent it targets minorities under cover of law is targeting non-citizens. Now, I think the whole thing is horrible, and bad policy. But it seems different to me from openly taking a specific group that are citizens and deporting them en masse.

Now - it’s made worse by the wink and nod the US sort of used for decades and never actually made good / modern immigration policy.

I think it’s possible to be someone who’s for mass deportation of people not legally in a country and not be someone who supports genocide OR ethnic clensing. It can actually be a simple “rule of law” sort of position. I don’t think MAGA is that sort of person, or at least many seem to be perfectly happy with ethnic clensing as an idea, but I also don’t think they’re actually happy to stop at non-citizens. It’s just they haven’t gotten through the “illegals” yet.

Maybe a good thread the needle would be if you’re in the country for 10 years (or some amount of time) without getting deported, a “statute of limitations” has then expired and you’re now a citizen. I’m sure that wouldn’t pass many people’s politics, but it would to my mind hold that if the government didn’t care for that long, you can’t be that much of an actual problem, and shouldn’t be kicked out anymore because you’ve also likely integrated into communities etc.

This is likely because PDF became the “file that everyone can open”, just in their web browser. It’s the next best thing to a web page for non-techie consumption. Yes, there’s no reason people can’t open pptx in most cases, but I bet various endpoint protection and just not understanding how to even pick the right program to open the file steps in.

Well, if your KPI is how much you use an LLM like in some reports - this is an easy way to get those good indicators. Also, LLMs are super easy to use to parse things, whereas many special programs like IDK grep isn’t exactly user friendly. Not to mention not finding patterns really. Though here I’m thinking things like looking at various logs on computers.

Well, from Microsoft sure. I have been pretty impressed with Hermes agent, though not the cost. Claude Code was also pretty good, I think a bit easier to control the API costs in my limited testing, and had more repeatable security gates than Hermes seemed to. Then again, I think Hermes could do more.

I question the security and the cost of agents.

Though I’d say there’s also a difference between banning phones in school and saying you can’t use them during class. We couldn’t just read our favorite fiction paperback or comic book in class back in the day either. No one ever (that I recall) suggested banning them from the school. I don’t see much compelling evidence that social media is a cause, much more obvious to me is schools having become mostly worthless in the US.

I don’t think that argument from Bambu is wrong though? Or I don’t know all the details. Are they suing the fork or just blocking it’s access? I would think they could just implement a token or credentials you have to supply to access their service like… any other web service?

I don’t know if Star Trek ever had a really strong coherent overarching morality, but it certainly doesn’t now. The Disco and newer shows are such a mishmash of different people and a different time that they seem often the opposite of what people thought TOS and TNG might have been. DS9-Enterprise were kind of the “in-between” IMO. So there’s at LEAST 3 different sets of sort of framework for what the canon/story/morals even are that it’s kind of hard to discuss as a whole coherently.

Then there’s always the people who take stuff as “cool” that the show didn’t want to portray as “good”. There are plenty of media examples of “cool” bad guys. Look at all the Ducat lovers in DS9, he was pretty explicitly intended and they thought portrayed as a villain, but a complex one. The whole last season turning him into a moustache twirling caricature was to try and “fix” this “misunderstanding” by a troubling portion of the fans.

The whole Prime Directive waffling is well known to fans, and generally there to specifically create conversation about the colonial vs anti-colonial ideals starting in TNG and morphed over time to now. I don’t think the show in a meta sense promotes the prime directive as a good thing - the amount of character struggles and flat out breaking it makes me pretty sure it’s a “no obvious right rule” exemplar.

Disco and on is generally so poorly written that it’s hard to say if they have a message to push inside the show. Most of what we know is from Twitter posts and interviews cause it’s so hard to tell what’s supposed to be the point of the actual show in many cases. With Georgiou I think they’re trying to tell an anti-hero redemption story of some sort. Some idea that anyone can change and deserves a new chance (I think it’s beyond second here). Take out the extremes for the drama and being a show and this is about as obvious as the prime directive as an ideal. It’s not the worst, but I can’t say it’s always valid either IMO.

I think you get from Star Trek what you decide to take from it - it’s entertainment first, not moral education.