FriendOfDeSoto

None whatsoever.

I am afraid you are “fucked” if you think AJ is an example of independent media and that YT numbers are enough proof for media suppression. Most people on this planet do not watch YT. And the ones who do tend to be influenced by their algorithms that continuously change. That makes YT numbers as slippery as an eel in a lubricant factory. By which I mean unreliable to start a conspiracy theory about a poor, cash strapped, impeccably impartial artisan media outlet from Qatar. Slash s.

Most people who say that do so for dogmatic reasons, not because they arrived at this conclusion after careful analysis. It’s the political point of small government.

These are the same people who will probably be first in line shouting for government intervention when their drinking water is full of chemical waste.

You can try to reason with folks like that but you probably won’t change their mind. Just try not to shout at them.

But FSBhub is!

I would think the sandwiches would be delivered before any declaration of independence.

Language isn’t logical in a mathematical sense. Every language develops its own logic over time as an unspoken consensus that only after the fact gets codified as orthography and grammar.

The big mother language to most languages in Europe, Protoindoeuropean, has its origins millennia ago somewhere in Ukraine. Linguists have pieced together what this language most likely sounded like. It’s a game of probabilities and good educated guesses but it’s fascinating. If you’re a nerd. One theory is that at the earliest time when this language was formed, most if not all verbs were what we would call today irregular, think know-knew-known or sing-sang-sung etc. Small language communities have no problem with insane and arbitrary grammar like that. You learn it with your mother’s milk so to speak. Very few outsiders have to deal with it. And life just goes on.

English is a true mix of stuff. The Germanic invadors after the Romans left had to deal with the native celts. They were themselves invaded by Vikings from Scandinavia and some 300 years later by Vikings that had become French. Both brought their own languages with them and influenced English. Both invasions caused situations where adults were put in a situation of having to learn another language. What kids soak up like sponges, grownups have a harder time with. So they take shortcuts in their speech. They didn’t struggle too much with sing-sang-sung because that’s a typical protoindoeuropean vowel change that exists just like that in many European languages to this day in versions of this particular verb. But some of the other verbs were just too hard to remember! Let’s just whack a -t or -d sound at the end and Bob’s you uncle. And that’s how English lost a lot of its irregular verbs. Over time this became -ed in most cases. But, as I said, we don’t follow a mathematical Boolean logic here. It allowed for hangers-on, regional varieties, and new formations of irregular forms. Burnt/burned hung on, fucked/fuckt did not. The reason is the flow of history.

I would think the same so-called AI that told us to eat rocks regularly, or that thinks it’s still 2024, or that “hallucinates” other stuff will make conquering our planet harder. Particularly, if these aliens are unaware of the concept of deception.

I would say this system is safe until one password - through no fault of their own - gets leaked. Worse even, two of them. If a bored hacker sees them in a stolen list, they could go to town on all other accounts. So you should advise your acquaintance to change their system. Long passwords are great but if they repeat a lot of characters they are immediately less useful. If the repeating string is known it makes brute-forcing other accounts that much easier.

The best advice is to keep unique passwords for all accounts. And by unique I mean not following a system like that. Long, random, non-sensical crap is best (but also most annoying) - for now. Once quantum computers become a thing, all this probably won’t matter any more.

Edit: And always with non-SMS, non-emailed 2FA. But if those are the only options available it’s better than nothing.

Because we don’t want an American system where 16 blorbs equal 1 waboom. We want as much centi and milli as possible! Resistance is futile.

People who really want to communicate with each other will find a way.

I think English<>French is a language pair you could get instant translations with the help of Google. So there’s a tech solution that will cause humorous misunderstands but will make do. You could hire somebody who is bilingual for the first meeting to let the parents talk behind their kids’ backs.

If they are French, they may actually be able to have a simple conversation in English but the boyfriend wouldn’t know because they lose this ability the moment they cross the border back into France. That’s a silly stereotype but I like it.

So, as I said, we need to look at the legal situation at the same time. The assholery of the bank is possible due to the assholery of these OS restrictions and the duopoly of mobile OSs. Everybody wants to have a walled garden. Outlaw or at least restrict walled gardens.

One thing politicians like to say is that they want to protect consumers. Forcing consumers into walled, privacy-invading gardens for essential services such as banking should be a change item on their agenda.

So looking at the status quo you’re correct. I’m just hopeful we can change that. I’m also looking at these mobile compute devices in our pockets as universal ones. They can run any instruction set that doesn’t burn their hardware. All of these restrictions - chipped components, unaltered OSs, software only from one place - are man-made/big corp imposed. With a view to a walled garden. That’s where the law needs to intervene so you can bank safely from where you want.

We humans always underestimate the time it actually takes for a tech to change the world. We should travel in self-flying flying cars and on hoverboards already but we’re not.

The disseminators of so-called AI have a vested interest in making it seem it’s the magical solution to all our problems. The tech press seems to have had a good swig from the koolaid as well overall. We have such a warped perception of new tech, we always see it as magical beans. The internet will democratize the world - hasn’t happened; I think we’ve regressed actually as a planet. Fully self-drving cars will happen by 2020 - looks at calendar. Blockchain will revolutionize everything - it really only provided a way for fraudsters, ransomware dicks, and drug dealers to get paid. Now it’s so-called AI.

I think the history books will at some point summarize the introduction of so-called AI as OpenAI taking a gamble with half-baked tech, provoking its panicked competitors into a half-baked game of oneupmanship. We arrived at the plateau in the hockey stick graph in record time burning an incredible amount of resources, both fiscal and earthly. Despite massive influences on the labor market and creative industries, it turned out to be a fart in the wind because skynet happened a 100 years later. I’m guessing 100 so it’s probably much later.

Why isn’t this a popular thing? Because the majority of people on this planet does not care about time zones and either doesn’t have to deal with them at all or doesn’t see a problem when they do. It’s tradition, it’s convention, it’s well-established, and it just works for most people. We should abolish DST but otherwise this ship has sailed.

We should use the aftermath of a civilization killing meteor hit or thermonuclear war to decimalize time keeping - it would need a catastrophic, cataclysmic event like that. A day is now 100 jiffies long. Each jiffy has 100 centijiffies. Now, if we could alter the time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun to something more even that’d be great.

Google has a vested interest in keeping Android open source. Because the moment they turn away from that more antitrust action is going to hit them like a ton of bricks.

What’s an “important app” to you here?

It’s not just Americans. There are many countries in Asia where the default is year month day. If you ever had to organize files by name and date this is the supreme sorting order. Both Europe and North America are getting it wrong.

If this gets you mad don’t ever look into how the French count from 80 to 99. Or how languages disagree on what’s blue or green. These things happen.

But that’s not all phones, is it. If you buy your phone directly from Google, you made a mistake. Like buying one from Apple. If Google want to continue to claim Android is open source, they have to allow for devices that forego any of this crap and boot vanilla non-Google-Services Android. And if you’re privacy oriented enough, you will give up on apps that are not.

And given enough time somebody is going to work out how you fool a modified system into booting. The problem is legal. Depending on where you are circumventing any digital locks can mean jail time at worst. We have to address the legal situation at the same time.

I think with PCs it will be harder to lock them down and not disgruntle consumers too much in the process. I’m also hopeful that over time right to repair will be the standard, so they have to allow for third party repair. So all these restrictions like chipped components and software only from our store will be phased out by incremental legislation. The EU is not perfect but it’s on this path. Even in the US people are thinking antitrust more often now. There is hope, however small.

You can run whatever you like in your Android phones. Jailbreaking iPhones is also possible. All these devices are just computers that can run anything within their hardware specs. Hacking some of these things may be against the Ts and Cs or even illegal. But technically possible. The restrictions are mote political, not technical.

Chromebooks are not the way to the future. They fill a niche in education for cheap hardware in connection with limited capabilities. They are not technical limitations, they are designed to limit users in what damage they can do. AFAIK you could technically wipe a chromebook and put Linux on it. It may violate the Ts and Cs and we’re right back at political. Google would like to develop future customers at an early age. They don’t care about the education so much as about their bottom line.

Sci-fi is delightfully circumspect on how an intergalactic empire would work. Maybe Herbert’s Dune universe is clearest and he just took us back to the middle ages with sandworms and drugs, fiefdoms and nobility.

I think whatever area shares the same government is a country. It doesn’t have to be contiguous or on the same body floating through space. It could be the size of the Vatican or half the universe.

I suspect the definition of the word will change once (if) we make it to the stars. We have gone from nomadic life to loosely defined borders to kingdoms to empires to multinational and intranational federations of sort. These terms may no longer be fit for purpose when we colonize Mars etc. And maybe that’s why you struggle to comprehend how it would all work behind the scenes. We don’t know for sure, sci-fi authors don’t know (or don’t want to be too specific and limit themselves in what stories they could tell in the future).

Like the river finds the sea, people will find a way around it. Satellite connections, just as an idea.

Anything a chip does can be backwards engineered to fool it. People will break your proposed surveillance chip eventually.

Most of these companies are maybe US-owned to varying degrees but they don’t produce everything in the US. Also, they would put a very high price on these government mandated chips for two reasons: 1) government has deep pockets and 2) it would keep them away from very profitable so-called AI biz opportunities.

The pandy has shown us that with a few disruptions in the supply chain, any system that requires a cryptographic chip check to function can be sent to hell in a handbasket. I forgot if it was HP or Canon or some printer company had to teach its customers to bypass, i.e. hack their own cryptogtaphic chip checks because they couldn’t get more chips and otherwise the printers wouldn’t print. A few disruptions could also affect the censorship chip supply chain.

The great firewall of China has also shown how creative people get to get their message across. If it’s not just human censors but also so-called AI censors it will just take creativity to a new level. Necessity is the mother of invention.

So there are some reasons why you might be worrying too much. I think another one is much broader. The majority of Americans did not vote for the current president. If he started censoring the internet now there would be Civil War II - Now It’s Digital. The reason why Russia or North Korea can censor their people much easier is because they have never had or only on paper a brief period of liberty and rule of law. It will be much harder to control the US population. There isn’t just the one media outlet, the one ISP, the one judiciary to dominate. It’s splintered. And populated by feisty people, some of them armed. You couldn’t pull off what you suggested without much more support for 47. And he seems to be losing it more than gaining these days.

Of course, I didn’t think far enough. Thanks for setting that straight.