everdrive

The prices I think a lot of us expected. I know Valve is being pressured by the market, but I can't imagine buying one for this price, even if I'm really excited for the Steam Machine. That said, the Steam Deck is now so expensive I don't think I can justify replacing mine when it breaks.

Mobile browsing should be considered high risk for most users except for the most mundane activities.

I'm pretty busy and behind the times a bit on this one. What is a practical method to avoid such a ban? I'm not in the UK, but there seems to be a general anti-privacy movement that is sweeping the globe.

What can we do when such a law comes to our country?

- Route all traffic via tor, then connect to a VPN from Tor?

- Finally learn I2P?

- Something else?

The P5+1, while quite imperfect so was preferable to the current situation that's almost unbelievable. This whole invasion has been a deeply stupid move on the part of the US.

According to the NVIDIA CEO, yes. He's quite ravenous at the possibility that before he only had humans as customers, but now he is potentially opening up a new customer base where agents are customers.

It's no surprise. The wild tech optimism of the 1990s and 2000s has completely fallen apart as time and time again tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives. Perhaps edged out only by things such as actual violent crime and partisan hatred. (which itself, of course, is stoked to the absolute maximum in part due to technology trends in the past 15 years or so)

The loneliness epidemic, a constant drip-feed of outrage -- all so that people can make a small amount of money, distracted driving. Nearly every single service becoming worse over time, etc. Since then, the tech CEOs has been sidling up to the halls of power and effectively begging to help destroy privacy as thoroughly as possible.

I certainly know that my life was transformed for the worse by social media. And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes -- rather common culture was hollowed out, friends were distracted, friends fell down their own extremist rabbit holes. There is no successful social media company that actually cares about the negative impacts it has had on society. They speak about things such as "providing value" where value = time spent on the platform. They do not care if they ruin lives.

So a few years ago, nearly everywhere you went people are talking about how thoroughly AI was going to transform society. You couldn't go anywhere without hearing it. Of course people are wary. Big tech has been a net negative in very loud, intrusive, and obvious ways in _most_ people's lives. And now they're saying they're going to radically reform society.

The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal. For sure, if they really how the power to radically change everything, they would change it for the worse and would never spend a moment worrying about the damage they had done.

>It's getting to the point where selling my soul to the highest bidder is going to be absolutely required for any big tech job going forward.

Can you expand on this? Aren't there plenty of "not-amazing-but-definitely-not-evil" organizations out there which need talented engineers?

What counts as a lot of memory? What could someone do with 16 GB of RAM?

This would only work for anyone foolish enough to attempt to access content and services with their phone. You don't own your phone. It might has well be a company-owned device.

"But everyone uses their phone all the time!" Yes, and everyone will be worse off for making the obviously worse choice.

I'm still confused about what makes uBlock Origin Lite less powerful than uBlock Origin. I don't use it or Chrome in any case, but I would prefer to understand the difference.

I agree with your points, but I would prefer a world where Putin would say "call this off, it's too risky given the enmity we've fostered."

Putin is uncowed, clearly. It's hard to know what the truth of things is. It's clear he's on his back heels in Ukraine and at home, but perhaps he still holds a strong position.

Services are really never safe. Or at best, they should be considered temporary. If you like what they provide, know that what they provide could become worse and/or more expensive. This is the likeliest scenario.

At best, you should use services on a temporary basis and never allow yourself to get entrenched. Once you're locked in, you are part of the product to be sold to advertisers. The "install base" that is used as leverage for these sorts of shenanigans.

There's a mad dash right now. Everyone is sprinting as fast as possible to invent and propagate the worst technology possible. Oh, you thought smart phones ruined society? Well good news, smart glasses are finally viable. You just won't believe what they'll come up with next, and everyone will buy it, and everyone will be worse off.

Perhaps it caused a mini baby-boom.

Hopefully it stays down.

It's a weird social psychology quirk. For whatever reason, the entire music industry has been captured by the delusion that mixing all the sounds louder is good. No one likes it, except for those guys. For reasons I'll never understand, the movie industry has been captured by the opposite delusion; they're going to pump dynamic range so high that you can only understand about half the dialogue in the movie. And of course, no one likes this.

Just think about your comment if we ever see for-real 1940s-style fascism at the same time we have all these stupid tracking devices on us all the time. If we made it through to better times people have no idea how so many people could have so easily and freely given up their privacy and freedom. With no fight whatsoever. Giving it up gladly. Hoping even more freedom could be taken from them so they could be just a little bit more comfortable.

>I was required to install an app in order to enter and leave the Philippines

That's good to know. Me and my family will definitely never be visting the philippines. My phone doesn't have mobile data enabled at the provider level. Would have been an award search for Wifi.

>My local system is completely cashless. You can pay by phone,

It's baffling to me that anyone would want to link payment to their phone. This is one of the least intelligent self-owns of the last decade.

>or I can install an app and have my issue resolved in a few minutes. Which option do you think most people choose?

I take your point but I'd say that most people don't put much value on their freedom if they'd trade it for a couple of hours of convenience.

Could you expand on this? What happens at the national border? What happens if your phone just won't do a QR code? I'm not arguing with you or disagreeing with, I'm just curious what the process is.

It's difficult in the sense that it's rare and much of it is out of your hands. That's a very different kind of difficulty than honing a technical skill. I'm happy to call it something other than difficult, but most of those engineers would not succeed in becoming CEOs -- whether or not they would actually do a good job at it.

Quite frankly speaking and acting as if you are from the upper crust is itself a criteria for success. It might be fine to say that this is not a skill, but people can definitely tell and they select for it.

I spent most of my time in government, and I was quite shocked in private industry how enthusiastically nearly everyone had taken to the class divide. It was a bit like A Brave New World. Even when resenting it, the lower class totally bought into the mythos of the upper class. It was very clear I would never be an executive at my company, but at the same time, my particular company was riddled with incompetent and corrupt executives.

I didn't feel or sound like one of them, and I refused to lie or bullshit. And every one of them could tell, and it forever marked me as an outsider.

More engineers understand this than you may think. Many just dislike it. It doesn't fit with their disposition (for better or for worse) -- but they are not confused about the facts.

I'm with you. On my list of things to do is seek out a a local credit union so I'm not reliant on a banking app.

This is not meant as an argument or a counterpoint, I'm just not familiar with some of your examples. Would you be able to elaborate?

>Scan this QR code to install the app to cross the border.

Would this be a national border? I haven't traveled internationally for a while, but this would be quite troubling.

>Install the app to board the bus.

Is there no option to pay without an app?

>Install the app to get your filing status with department xyz.

Surely the government also allows you to just call and get an update?

There are a lot of bad CEOs, though. It's a lot like a politician -- it's quite difficult to become a CEO, and the skills to make it to that position don't always intersect nicely with the skills necessary to actually do the job well.

And people will keep carrying their phones with them. And keep using them. And keep installing apps. Yes, ideally we'd have laws against government infringement, but the capability to not use your phone is in your hands.

I drink a lot of tea and I hadn't really thought about pesticides. I really don't know what's wrong with people. For so, so many products the thought process seems to be:

  - encounter minor problem

  - apply poison permanently and liberally

And then when you try to say that poison is bad someone comes in clutching their pearls and shrieking "but if we didn't use poison then the product would be more expensive!" I'd rather have less of it than be poisoned.

There's a problem here that people don't necessarily consider. Ignore motives for a bit. Lets say that large groups of people really, really wanted to spread positive, constructive messages on social media. Perhaps about how important it is to read and exercise and not to consume passive content. Or how kind it is to put group differences aside and focus on the things we have in common. Etc.

I'd argue that it just wouldn't work. Outrage is what's "engaging" and it is engagement which actually forces these things to go viral and spread. You are therefor limited in what sort of information you can spread on social media, at least in the virality sense. You could not, for instance, use social media to "trick" millions of people into practicing calculus every day. And you could not use social media to coerce people into spending hours meditating.

It's of course not that you could never house this content on social media, but instead that this content could never be viral, never make a strong, immediate emotional impression in the eyes of the viewer. Practicing calculus or meditation is much, much more than a strong, quick, (and I'd argue) innate emotional reaction to bare stimulus. It requires focus and participation.

So it's not just that there are these little evil troll farms sowing discord around the world. Rather, outrage, and particularly outage about social or tribal topics will always float to the top in any sort of system (algorithmic or not) that preferences engagement. There will always be at least outrage in the general population of posters (whether "natural" or else astroturfed) who are putting out outrage content, and this content will always be treated preferentially in any system that filters for outrage content. It's quite hard to avoid. You actually see this on the "boring" 4Chan boards. There is no algorithm in the modern sense of the word (although of course there is something like an algorithm in the literal sense of the word) and on these boring boards you just cannot get much much traction when starting a thread that is not a "troll" thread. A normal, informative thread gets fewer replies, and so it falls off the front page, and then no one sees, and so it gets even fewer replies.

In other words, these systems will always privilege outrage bait, even if they had real incentives to attempt to avoid it. There are only certain topics that get people fired up in a quick, immediate, emotional sort of way -- and the communication systems we've built and have become addicted to will only preference that sort of communication. Identifying these troll farms matters, but why would a crappy little troll farm from far away be able to to write content that captivates you. If they wrote a book, you wouldn't read it. If you directed a TV series, you wouldn't watch it. But one dumb little caption on an image about how a person from the wrong group has trespassed against you and it sticks in your mind forever. People need to think about why that is.

Exactly right. It's a good place to gather information, but it's not a good place for discussion or for community. It's very useful; but it's not a place to spend time.