Repair, smuggle, Jerry rig

I mean… Everything is, really. I don’t think it’s a problem with cloud, I think corporations are slashing their workforce so hard they can’t keep up the quality

Cheap doesn’t mean fake, just like expensive doesn’t mean quality… Not anymore

Okay… But how much of that is realized?

Before, you told a doctor where to call to get your past records… Now, you tell your doctor where to request your past records. If your doctor works in the same healthcare system campus, they might get them automatically, past that it might happen behind the scenes if you get a referral

Backups are true… Except everyone has their own proprietary formats that require specific software to access the data, and if one of those companies go under, then what?

Access controls and tracking are true, but what’s digital can be hacked or leaked. Paper is far more secure - maybe they can phish one person’s records more easily without it, but the wrong IT person (who is multiple steps removed) can leak the whole database

I’m not saying paper is better - I’m saying electronic medical records are such a garbage fire in implementation that they bog down the healthcare part of healthcare. They eliminate jobs by automating processeses, but they end up getting rid of support staff in exchange for making the healthcare workers do more work

And I’m not saying it couldn’t be better - I’m saying that it’s just such a mess of proprietary software and regulation that it became one more layer of wealth extraction that bogs down actual healthcare

Yeah, but like… Are they really? No two systems communicate, every hospital configures even the same systems to be essentially incompatible, and the system is built as if it’s all seamless

It’s so bad. Paper records in a secure central database would be an improvement - 20 years of this and bending over harder for insurance companies is the only change

True, but the second you can’t buy enough food at the grocery store it all goes poof

If we stop, even for a couple weeks, the system collapses. If a third of people stop showing up for work, if a third of people steal their food rather than pay for it, if a third of people stop paying rent… It all just melts away like a snow flurry

Money means the value assigned to it - if it can’t feed you, it means nothing. If it stops moving, so does ‘the economy’. It’s so much more fragile than it seems

That’s wasteful and dangerous

Harvest the beast for batteries and GPUs

What do you mean? It’s a problem in your way, it takes how long it takes to get through it

I love the in between, where you have to actually adapt algorithms to useful situations

It’s like 2% of all the work I do, but those moments stick with me

I mean, yes and no. They just capture device info for a location, which can often be tied back to a person, but they just grab the info the phone sends to the tower. These days with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi you can even do something similar with just your phone

I don’t love that it exists for obvious reasons, but it’s a far cry from looking through your phone

I mean, the cell providers already sell your location info to anyone (including LEO, which is unconstitutional without a warrant as far as I’m concerned), as can Google, apple, and all sorts of apps - so this is a niche thing

FWIW, you can defeat that pretty simply… Just leave your phone behind and/or in a faraday pouch. No signal, no signature, no location data (from your phone at least). It won’t necessarily stop the NSA, but it’ll protect you in a protest where your just another face in the crowd

Rather than locked down, they’re basically a black box - I think they have their own firmware and hook into the OS and hardware in weird ways (part of the reason why Linux phones are so difficult to make work)

If the NSA wants to ping your phone location or even turn on the microphone, they can, supposedly even when the phone is “off”. If they want to side channel load in a rootkit, they probably can

But NSA surveillance comes in two main flavors - broad and focused. If they think you’re a terrorist or of strategic interest, there’s a lot they can do… But that means actual humans are interested in you, personally.

But for everyone else, they’re not going to sift through ten million phone storages - that’s way too much data to be useful, and they already have long collected way more than they could make use of. The broad stuff is about flagging people - the most effective is to look at networks of people. If you have connections to a terrorist, you’re a potential part of the network, and so you’ll be flagged as more interesting. I’ve heard rumors that certain keywords might be flagged on calls too, who knows. Too many flags and they might devote some man hours to looking into you personally

But generally, they’re very protective of their tech. They don’t use the good stuff widely, because it’s not useful, and it increases the chance for discovery and countermeasures. My understanding is they won’t share their surveillance systems either - they might put notes or flags on shared LEO systems or tip someone off, but they really, really, like to play it close to the vest. Even with other 3 letter agencies

So yes, this possibility exists - especially with llms to help filter through this information ocean - but there’s no shot they’re sharing capabilities with border control agents

The NSA doesn’t generally give access to agencies on the ground like that - at most they flag individuals in the interdepartmental system, they don’t hand over what they have easily

But, if you have physical access to a device, there’s always a way in. Border control or a police department can buy tools to do it or hire contractors

Anonymous released a video saying that musk has no idea what he’s doing and he’s crippling security, and that they will “strike when they’re weakest, so be ready”

That could mean a lot of things, but in my daydreams they get into the banking system and just really just fuck it all up. Just make a total mess of it

Because now you don’t have to run wires from the existing network to the new WiFi, you just plop them both in the new location!

But then if you want the access points to act like one WiFi network so walking around doesn’t reset all your connections, all you have to do is run cables to the new WiFi access points from the original signal, unplug them from Star Link, then wire starlink into the main uplink as a fail over or something! Easy!

I prefer the second picture, but angled back 30°

It was more they’re worried it would, because of the sheer scale of metallic satellites that would be burning up in the upper atmosphere

Easy. You put it in your backpack under the seat in front of you with a long cable. Now no one knows it exists, but your bag is within arms reach so the battery is too

Honestly, it’s scale. It dillutes the humanity to nothing, and all that remains is our worst selfish impulses

Communities become so large that bonds and reputation mean nothing. We create organizations to try to artificially recreate that, and they grow so large their primary purpose is to self purpetuate

It’s hard to muster up the will to hurt people right in front of you, it’s much easier if you can abstract it all to rules and numbers, and separate the actor from the decision maker

I think the only way something like communism works is like the fediverse - we need to find a way to weave ourselves into small communities that can act together. You can’t let power sit anywhere for long, or you’ll draw in power hungry sociopaths like flies - but inside a community they have to keep on good terms with others

We still have to collaborate, but if we shared methods and designs openly we could produce a lot of stuff locally. We don’t have to always be scaling up - if you have a thousand people, you don’t have to produce a 100k phones a year to make a phone. Working at that small scale even let’s you get creative and make better things - there’s all sorts of technologies that we don’t have access to only because they can’t be produced at scale

Plus it means people would be smarter and more skilled… Capitalism wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and that makes for craftsman that require a whole supply chain to be useful. Giving up scale means you have to make things last and be easily reparable. It means picking and choosing between your priorities

Know what? I endorse it. Aside from the cyber truck, if you want to pretend, ok take that as “I was bamboozled”. But the cyber truck… There’s no hiding that. There’s no hiding the timeframe on that. You can’t just call that POS a Toyota

Sorry, but that’s a bridge too far. Deal with the consequences… It’s just spray paint, if anything it’s protective compared to the lack of any kind of paint. Take it on the chin

I mean, they’re ruining their search anyways. It’s almost unusable at this point, it’s like asking for relevant ads and two year old Reddit posts

Is it censorship? Did they decide to just straight up sell SEO? Are websites locking down and blocking their crawlers to stop AI training crawlers?

I legitimately find Bing to be better at this point, but whatever they’re doing it’s maddening. Even better AI assisted web searches kinda suck because the data fed into them is more of the same

But solid chance they’re trying to boost Gemini, which has been a shockingly bad llm for a company that basically wrote the book on AI not too long ago