My mantra is “plan to be hacked”. Whether this is a good backup strategy, a read-only VM, good monitoring or serious firewall rules.

Do you remember the smell of a fresh box of crayons?

It doesn’t make sense to me that I don’t like drinking water. When I lived in the desert, I would drink it all the time, but it’s a habit that I’ve fallen out of. Strangely, I went back to the desert on a trip and immediately resumed drinking water again.

For me, I don’t like the taste. I can taste the chlorine and fluroride and other stuff in the water. I have an RO system with carbon filter and then I need to have it near freezing. Even then, I need to put stuff in it like berries, cucumber or mint. I don’t drink pop, sports drinks or other stuff like that. I do drink tea and coffee.

Yeah, my doctor told me that I’m dehydrated, so I’m trying.

It sounds like somebody needs to spend more time watching documentaries on the mating habits of freshwater fish!

Are you referring to the AI search results? If so, I’ve fallen into a similar strategy. I’ll search for something, usuaply how to do something then read the AI result. If it’s what I’m looking for, then I’ll click through to the referenced articles. The AI result is usually too vague. Part of my problem is probably bad searching skills on my part. I’ll often find what I’m looking for way down the first page or sometimes the second page of results. The AI cuts through that searching page after page or tells me that I need to change my search terms.

As some of the other posters argued, this is a slippery slope to censorship by those in power, which does not allow for dissenting opinions to propogate.

Given that free speech doesn’t mean that anybody needs to listen, I feel that the problem (and solution) lies in the conduit for the free speech. I don’t understand the complexities of the laws but have wondered if adjusting the laws to hold entities accountable for their actions would have a positive effect. For example, an idiot shouting from the town square has a limited audience, but if a newspaper picks up the message and promotes it, aren’t they partially responsible for that message?

It gets tricky with opinion pieces, but we already have an established mechansm with newspapers’ opinion pages. One potential problem is that the current media companies enjoy no accountability, no content creation costs and profits from advertisers.

On that topic, I’d even go so far as to argue that advertisers share in the accountability of providing funds to organizations that support harmful messages.

There’s a lot more to this but would be interesting to see a country who has done it and if it had a net positive effect.

Probably not useful to you, but I’ve been using the pics that I deem political as a way to vet the accounts that want to politicize everything and I block them.

Keep the (good, nonpolitical) pics coming!

I suppose that makes perfect sense. A corporation is an accountability sink for owners, board members and executives, so why not also make AI accountable?

I was thinking more along the lines of the “human in the loop” model for AI where one human is responsible for all the stuff that AI gets wrong despite it physically not being possible to review every line of code an AI produces.

I was thinking about this the other day and don’t think it would happen any time soon. The people who put the CEO in charge (usually the board members) want someone who will make decisions (that the board has a say in) but also someone to hold accountable for when those decisions don’t realize profits.

AI is unaccountable in any real sense of the word.

I’m right there with you. I’ll try running again the day that I see a runner smiling while running.

Completely off topic… I saw a comedian in Arizona (USA) who said that his family was so poor that the family car didn’t have air conditioning installed. They didn’t want anybody to know that they were poor, so they would drive around with the windows rolled up.

Generally, no. On some cases where I’m extending the code or compiling it for some special case that I have, I will read the code. For example, I modified a web project to use LDAP instead of a local user file. In that case, I had to read the code to understand it. In cases where I’m recompiling the code, my pipeline will run some basic vulnerability scans automatically.

I would not consider either of these a comprehensive audit, but it’s something.

Additionally, on any of my server deployments, I have firewall rules which would catch “calls to home”. I’ve seen a few apps calling home, getting blocked but no adverse effects. The only one I can remember is Traefik, which I flipped a config value to not do that.

This smells a little funny, as others have suggested. I read an article a while ago that suggested that we’re not running out of raw materials; we’re thinking about the problem wrong:

Chachra proposes that we could – we must – treat material as scarce, and that one way to do this is to recognize that energy is not. We can trade energy for material, opting for more energy intensive manufacturing processes that make materials easier to recover when the good reaches its end of life. We can also opt for energy intensive material recovery processes. If we put our focus on designing objects that decompose gracefully back into the material stream, we can build the energy infrastructure to make energy truly abundant and truly clean.

This is all outlined in the book How Infrastructure Works from Deb Chachra.

I read recently that the lidar on many self driving cars can wreck the CCD on most phones. I don’t know how it works, but maybe parking one of the cars by your front door will solve your problem.

The typical reason that I’ve heard is kids and/or spouse like it and don’t care about privacy. A coworker set up a HTPC for a replacement and was frequently performing phone support when someone at home coudn’t figure out something.

The issue does not exist with the version installed from F-Droid. I think the Play Store version is a different build with the feature disabled as a condition of hosting it on the Play Sore.

The Android app itself still works with the permission, and we released new versions on the external F-Droid store. So the limit is a “purely” Google Play Store-related problem.

What you’re saying reminds me of things that vegans say: “If everybody knew the full story, they’d change their behaviour”. I think this is only partially true since change is hard.

I lurk in some vegan forums for the recipes but the majority of posts seem intended to invoke outrage, probably to help promote behaviour change.

Now, what if there were books and movies and forums about the horrors of automated factories? Would people change?

Mostly true, but a few months ago there was some reports of an automatic firmware update that blocked 3rd party ink or toner. It was probably my fault since I just bought a Brother and this sort of thing always seems to happen to me.

This reminds me, I need to learn how to partition my network to keep thebprinter from reaching the internet.

Cory doctrow frequently writes about how voting with your dollars is somewhat ineffective because then the richest people have the most votes.

I still boycott places, though.

I don’t know the building code for your area or if it would even work with the other stuff in the area, but the idea is to lay at least 2x2’s every 16", put Styrofoam between the 2x2’s, lay plastic or tyvek or some vapor barrier over it all then lay down plywood and carpet on top of that. It’s a lot of work to retrofit this into an existing space, but if you’re starting over, it may be worthwhile.

I had a townhouse on a concrete slab and in the winter, the cold would transfer through the concrete to the point that when it was below 0F, the water lines running through the concrete would freeze up.