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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Well look, not to be dismissive of what you’re saying, but the technical aspects of it really don’t matter. There is not (yet) any law in the US that would protect people from such surveillance, regardless of its current technical infeasibility. The point of getting people at large worried or upset about this is to get law established before it becomes a widespread problem, not after some company publicly admits to doing something despicable.

    The fact that companies are thinking about this, trying to accomplish it, trying to buy this functionality from other companies… that should be enough to scare people and get them angry. It’s certainly enough that we should all be talking about it, and publicly shaming them for the voyeuristic creeps that they are.

    There should be riots in the streets over stuff like this, because you can’t build a surveillance state without surveillance technology.


  • For a “robot” or other automated appliance to be able to perform tasks in the world, it must be able to perceive the world around it in some way. For it to interact with humans, it must perceive the humans (observe their actions, interpret their instructions, and understand their intentions). The direction our technology is headed in has shown us that any such device would primarily be a surveillance platform which collects data on its users. Any helpful tasks it might perform for the user would be the bait that gets them to swallow the hook, and not the device’s primary purpose.

    I don’t want a smart car or a smart TV and definitely not a smart household appliance such as a refrigerator. Why would I want a self-propelled, self-aware surveillance platform under the control of a multi-billion dollar corporation in my home? or workplace? or anywhere?











  • The thing that bugs me the most about Settings is the amount of wasted white space on every page. You have to do so much scrolling and clicking through tabs just to find various options. By comparison the dialogue boxes of the Control Panel apps are compact and concise. Every time I have to scroll down for something in Settings, I wonder why there’s so much empty space padding around everything.

    You’d think a multi billion dollar corporation could afford a decent UI designer or two.


  • I am past the point of having “a” computer with “an” operating system… the concept of “moving” to another OS is basically irrelevant… I use different environments for different purposes and there’s no good reason to leave potential functional value unused for the sake of ideological convictions or fanboyism or whatever. My problems now revolve around having a useful cross-platform account that has access to my files on any/all of my platforms/VMs. I do lean heavily on open source software, I prefer it to proprietary.

    More basically, an OS is not a food that you might like or dislike, it is a tool that you use when it is suited to the task. Discriminating against tools doesn’t make sense, it only limits your capabilities.

    Please read this older comment of mine, it explains my point of view on this more… and if you want to do something really interesting then try to implement Qubes and actually use it for awhile.