seems like Old reddit is account-walled as of today maybe

Idiot’s in Ties are still Idiots.

Surveillance is not security. When fully formed Surveillance is slavery.

In other news "Shark says fish fears unfounded. "

Ahem… https://www.flyingpenguin.com/cloudflare-ceo-is-lying-to-you-about-the-bot-traffic-jump/

The category Prince points to as the cause contradicts him. Agentic is tiny. What actually fills the AI bucket is training scrapers, like GPTBot and ClaudeBot, pulling text to build models, which have been climbing steadily and predate his announcement. He blamed a friendly, fast-growing sliver of agents fetching pages for people and swapped in unfriendly bulk (mass scraping for training). Why? We can guess, but that is exactly the traffic his pay-to-crawl product exists to bill.

It’s a sales pitch.

And it’s based on a lie.

can’t do good business with bad people.

“People still using X”.

by writing articles like this they spark the wrong discussion. extreme analogy, sorry to folks who don’t do analogies: If there is a robber in a persons kitchen. Any discussion is a net negative for that homeowner. why? because the robbers presence alone is a violation of the sanctity of the home. Any and all solutions, start with the robber not being in the kitchen. Any and all discussion, adds _more time to the robber being in the kitchen All of which is a net loss for the homeowner, and potential gain for the robber.

These type’s of horserace articles encourage a type of busywork discussions that waste time because they lead many of those readers away from thinking about the real / pertinent discussions to have.

Exactly.

It’s possible to make things worse when attempting to solve a problem made by uncaring people. Making things better, temporarily, often gives them more time to continue to make things worse. Making things better this way also leads people at-large to believe they no longer need to take steps back away from disaster.

If you’re new to Pine - the watch and phone are Open Hardware devices for people who are want to help build that future of open hardware. As a coder, I think this is a good thing. I have several but I wouldn’t give one to a family member, just yet. Pine itself is about open hardware - but that process happens over a large time when smart people do good work. By comparison, Linux has been around 35 years.

I have a pinephone, and it has hardware on/off switches for mic, wireless, camera. my bet would be so will the pine time pro.

“Scientists synthesize nutrients Bees no longer get because humans destroyed all the flowers, and we think this is a net good.”

don’t believe it. ms is in for the long game.

decorum: a solemn request that questions use question marks.

why: differentiation - between “hey. look at what I made” posts and “anybody know how I can?” questions.

… and liars lie.

devils.

In any problem, every solution that works is a solution, but not every solution is of equal value. In math we use the word "Elegant : Characterised by minimalism and intuitiveness while preserving exactness and precision. " To describe solutions that work well, are concise, and don’t add pain.

Jigsaw puzzle analogy: If you have a puzzle with one piece missing, there are at least a hundred things you can use that will fill that space … sawdust, sand, play-doh, cement, but the most elegant solution, is the puzzle piece made to go there.

With tech, its just more complex- we don’t create solutions in a vacuum ( a world by themselves ), they have to exist and mesh with a preexisting world. We call those limits constraints. And the problem with tech is that often the people who create the technology ignore (don’t care much about) the constraints.

Inventor: Can we do xyz with cameras? Society: And not let them be used for evil? Inventor: Not my problem.

Its easy to solve problems: the cat is sick. kill the cat. people: No that’s awful. inventor: but it did solve the cat problem.

Solving problems in a way that meshes well with the world is not easy. And our inventors are at the moment, shortsighted and greedy.

Just adding. This and all the bad things that will happen if they get the green light, is not how this is done or should be done.

‘But all the waste and ineficciency!’ Hog wash.

From the system that is working? and serves thousands of people what they needed every day of every year.

They have to say it’s horribly broken. Its a lie, but they have to justify why.

There are standards, procurement contracts, entire agency’s to make sure — Make sure what?

March 28, 2025 - Make sure that what will happen, doesn’t.

coda: The trick this cabal is using is simple - take a thing most folk don’t understand. Say it’s broken. Open it. Rob it. Say its fixed. Collect profits and praise, leave town.

Just clearing up the argument.

1. The files will be scanned
2. They’ve been doing for decades

There’s a difference here in principle. Exemplified by the answer to this question: “Do you expect that things you store somewhere are kept private?” Where, Private means: “No one looks at your things.” Where, No One means: not a single person or machine.

This is the core argument. In the world, things stored somewhere are often still considered private. (Safe Deposit box). People take this expectation into the cloud. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Box, Dropbox etc - only made their scanning known publicly _after they were called out. They allowed their customers to _assume their files were private.

Second issue: Does just a simple machine looking at your files count as unprivate? And what if we Pinky Promise to make the machine not really really look at your files, and only like squinty eyed. For many, yes this also counts as unprivate. Its the process that is problematic. There is a difference between living in a free society, and one in which citizens have to produce papers when asked. A substantial difference. Having files unexamined and having them examined by an ‘innocuous’ machine, are substantial differences. The difference _is privacy. On one, you have a right to privacy. In the other you don’t.

an aside…

In our small village, a team sweeps every house during the day while people are out at work. In the afternoon you are informed that team found illegal paraphernalia in your house. You know you had none. What defense do you have?