I don’t think anything Onno said is “extremist”, I just think it’s so vague that what they think might be happening is indecipherable. Makes it more likely to be rage/engagement bait, imo.

But it’s not extreme to think that perhaps, given the current anti-anonymity push among governments worldwide, and the fact this uses DHTs and P2P routing, governments might love to tarnish those things in peoples’ minds in order to more readily accept banning of bittorrent, onion routing, TOR, etc, which can help bypass a lot of the dangerous government net restrictions and surveillance being put in place.

Do you think that government intrusion into media, or the existence of online influence campaigns, are “extremist” conspiracies rather than proven realities?

That would be a crazy turnabout given their public banning by Trump from being used by the USFG (mil included).

You can’t be sure, but you can use providers and exit nodes that are based in places hostile to whoever you are trying to protect against.

Also, functional anonymity can exist by different entities having different pieces of data that together would de-anonymize you, but who are unlikely to ever intersect. A good example of this is DMCA requests: if a copyright holder sees a US IP address on a residential Comcast IP range, they’re going to file a court case and get a subpoena for the subscriber info.

If they see a Hong Kong IP from a co-lo datacenter who would need to cooperate to tell them who owned that IP at that time, they’re not going to even bother because they don’t know how to even start filing a court case in China, and if your VPN has too much data it won’t even matter because no one will even have contacted them.

It all depends on your threat model.

There are people who get VPNs because they hear that they prevent your ISP from snooping on you when configured correctly, and just hear “no one can see what I do”, because that’s what snooping is, right?

When I worked at a university IT dept, we’d often get content block hits for adult websites from inside the internal protected network, via the university VPN, because a professor or staff member thought a VPN would route their traffic ‘past’ us.

This absolutely did not kill them. I’ve been dealing with federal procurement, including ATOs for DoD, for years, and 99% of companies never even remotely interact with it. Yes, there’s a large number that do, especially among Fortune 500s and up, but the actual percentage of companies who have military contracts is tiny. This was meant to intimidate them into compliance, but this doesn’t make them any less viable than AIaaS already is or isn’t.

no company wants to become a supply chain risk to potential customers who might have a DoD supplier somewhere down the supply chain

The order is actually much narrow than that; it only applies to companies who directly have contracts with the military.

Anthropic software just can’t be used to process federal data, but if e.g. Lockheed uses ADP to process internal payroll, and ADP uses a third-party developer to build some software, and that developer uses Claude, that doesn’t snake it’s way back up the chain and invalidate Lockheed’s contracts.

Would not be surprised if it happened to be trained on the thousands of policy debate “nuclear war terminal impact” arguments on openev.

I’m not arguing against the automation used in this particular case; that sounds perfectly reasonable.

I’m arguing that the only reason it’s newsworthy is because companies want to put a positive spin on automation right now, right as the majority of companies expanding automation aren’t doing it to benefit workers.

But what’s newsworthy about this in 2026?

It’s about framing the debate of “robots doing work” in terms of being a positive thing (“see? they’re helping us do important SCIENCE!”) so that people will be just a little less combative when they get a BigMac handed to them by a robot arm.

I think the point is, what happens once all the current senior devs are gone?

They’ll likely only target fully assembled 3d printers, which is why just like their firearms laws it will only stop people who aren’t actively attempting to circumvent the law.

I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but given that this is an anti-firearms bill, they will probably do the same thing they do when you purchase a firearm magazine cross-state; they’ll open the box and check that it is ‘compliant’ with the 10-round limit (or in this case, has compliant firmware). If it is, they’ll ship it on to you. If it’s not, they’ll ship you the empty box with a notice of seizure. You may also be contacted by CADOJ later, depending how much free time they have.

I’m sure they’re quaking at the thought of floating out on their golden parachutes…

just say ‘doggo’ and ‘w00t’ and ‘roflmao’ a couple times and the AI will peg you as an elder millennial and leave you alone

I’d settle for any home, smart or dumb.

I’m so mad they’ve switched from their “protect the children” line for Boomers, to “protect the pets” for us Millennials.

IRC is still alive and well, team speak for voice chats. Hell, Nextcloud even has these, as well as video calls.

Everyone forgets that “Information Technology” was just a rebrand from the more accurate “Information Systems”, which was itself the less accurate rebranding of “Data Processing”, which is what computers actually do. There was also the failed push by IBM for Information Communication Technology (ICT).

It’s been hype cycles since the beginning.

we’d better be careful to make sure that we aren’t simply giving the federal government (and the shitheads who run it) even more power and control over everything

You do realize that copyright is solely a function of the federal government, right? There is no state or municipal copyright, it’s already the federal government who decides whether your copyright as a creator is valid or enforceable, or whether to just hand it over to another company/ billionaire.

The real means to prevent this is unionizing, which is really the answer to most other techbro-hellscape problems too. Just like Hollywood is putting anti-ai clauses in their contracts, so too will tech workers need to. Unfortunately, given that the end goal is to remove the IT workers entirely, this is still only a delay if companies push ahead, since just like scabs, there will always be people willing to sell their fellow workers down the river for their own enrichment.

But we’re not even close to that point; most tech workers think unionizing is a 4-letter word. There’s always a private chat room where folks are lamenting the absolute class-ignorance of their coworkers who are all convinced they’re going to stumble into unicorn stock options soon, despite multiple rounds of layoffs each year now being standard in tech.

The real question is what has to happen to end this horrible capitalist nightmare in general.

This is great to see, and as long as it’s up to companies whether to do this we need to encourage that behavior… but it also shouldn’t be up to companies’ whims whether to do this or not. It should be legally required for end-of-support devices and software to release whatever source code or changes are necessary to either operate the device/software independent of a server, or run the server ourselves.