wonderingwanderer

Nah, give him shrooms and let the mushroom gods show him the weight of his own soul as it drags him beneath the rising tides of the abyss…

Go read about rare earths and what they’re mostly used for, then come back when you’re ready to join the discussion

Oh, what, you can’t handle three paragraphs? Maybe you should go over to mastodon or loops then.

I question your definition of “gratuitous hate,” as I haven’t seen any examples of actual hatred in this comment chain. You seem like you just can’t handle being disagreed with, so you make strawman arguments against the people disagreeing with you.

nor the reduction of Chinese people’s experience to work drones (what you’re doing).

Calling attention to an abysmal work culture which enforces long working hours and authoritarian hierarchies, and frequently drives people to suicide, isn’t reducing people to work drones. And if that’s how you interpret that critique, then you have no class solidarity.

And before you cry that I’m singling China out, I’m not. The US rivals them for overall shittiness, while paling by comparison in innovation and development.

But this conversation is about China, and if you can’t tolerate a structural critique that isn’t even laden with hatred and bias, then, well, I don’t know what to tell you…

The issue with that is that your range at least needs to make it between charging stations on the highway to be a realistic choice for many people. That might not be a problem in major corridors, but in sparser areas like the US midwest, it’s a legitimate concern.

Doesn’t mean Na+ is bad, it’s just a young technology. In the next few years I expect to see the energy density increasing rapidly.

Na+ batteries are really cool tech, and with a few more iterations of R&D they can potentially replace Li+ batteries, removing the need for rare earth elements that are toxic to people and the environment, dangerous to extract, and more often than not extracted by child slave labor (such as in Xinjiang and Congo).

It doesn’t matter how you feel about China, although framing Na+ as “China’s battery” is problematic for other reasons.

How is pointing out the flaw in your logic “gratuitous hatred”? It doesn’t make any sense that the rationale for calling it “China’s battery” is to make it sound bad, when the article is clearly extolling the virtues of the battery.

Or is it the part where the other commenter brought attention to the working conditions in China? Because that’s not motivated by hatred, but rather class solidarity. How badly do you have to hate Chinese people to believe Chinese workers don’t deserve better conditions? What about ethnic minorities in China who are having their cultural heritage stripped away from them?

Is it because the government officials aren’t white, so you believe they can do no wrong? So you’ll just call any legitimate criticism of them racist? That’s like Israel calling anti-zionism anti-semitic. There’s nothing sinophobic about legitimate criticisms of the PRC.

It’s an arms race like any other. Cybersecurity has always been an arms race. You can’t stop developing security patches, cause adversaries will continue developing new exploits.

If AI enables your adversaries to develop exploits faster than human developers can keep up with, then yeah AI will have to be a part of the solution. That doesn’t mean vibe-coding security patches, but it could mean AI-driven pen-testing.

Just like quantum computing. You can call it useless and impractical all you want, but some day someone is going to use it to break conventional encryption. So it would behoove you to develop quantum capabilities now, so that you have quantum safe encryption before quantum-based exploits eventually arise, as they inevitably will…

That’s so idiotic. Either that guy was a total amateur who couldn’t put together that “no shit, if you comment out the lines that do thing, it won’t do thing” or he was completely malevolent and disingenuous and just trying to justify his position by coming up with some crap that the big bosses are probably too stupid to recognize the idiocy of.

Either way, not someone I would want to be doing business with…

It’s not so much about being big shocked that it broke containment. The point of the test was to see whether it would be capable of breaking containment. The fact that it did is taken as evidence that it’s more advanced than previous models, which weren’t able to.

Part of Anthropic’s schtick is that they claim to be developing AI “responsibly,” and “ethically,” and if you read their documents where they describe what they mean by that, part of it is being able to contain their models so that they don’t get out of control.

With the focus lately on agentic environments, and lots of people idiotically giving too much autonomy to their bots, it should be easy to see the importance of containerization. You don’t want to give these things full control of your system. Anyone who uses them, should do so within a properly containerized environment.

So when their experiments show that their new model is capable of breaking containment, that presents some major issues. They made the right call by not releasing it.

Of course, the fact that the experimenters had no formal training in cybersecurity means that their containerization may have had some vulnerabilities that a professional could have mitigated. But not everyone who would use it is a cybersecurity professional anyway.

I mean, even a US-based VPN company could look foreign if they have servers outside the US, or even if they just allow multi-hop to third-party servers to/from outside the US.

Except then they’re even more vulnerable not only to subpoenas but also extrajudicial and unconstitutional raids, as some journalists have discovered, especially in deeply red states but not always…

Please let this be the beginning of the bubble burst 🤞

Also, what do you mean data centers aren’t all dark rooms lit exclusively by RGB lighting?!? I feel lied to…

Privacy companies based outside the US can still have VPN servers within the US. That traffic would still look domestic. The company being owned and headquartered outside the US just gives them a bit more protection against the rogue US government.

Some VPNs also allow multi-hop, so that you can connect to one VPN server via another. That could make it harder for the spooks to see that your traffic is leaving the US. Of course it also means that they might suspect any traffic coming out of a VPN server even based in the US, which is basically the point of this article.

And some VPNs allow you to enable a feature that protects against AI-driven data traffic analysis. So that someone who’s really committed can’t just monitor the size and frequency of your outgoing encrypted packets, then find matching patterns in packets leaving the server you’re connected to, tracing it to the destination. Instead, the VPN adds noise and sends uniform packets so that AI can’t trace it from source to destination.

I don’t know if Nord offers these features, cause I don’t use Nord. But I’ve heard some issues about them, which other user’s have already mentioned and offered alternatives for, so I’ll leave it at that

I use waterfox with all of the privacy and security settings enabled to the max, plus a few extensions like ublock origin, decentraleyes, consent-o-matic, and clearurls.

Not that many sites break. And the ones that do, I don’t visit. If you don’t need to offer an https option, or you don’t work without trackers, I don’t need to go to your site. Simple as that.

Meshtastic needs to hurry up and develop a way to connect to remote servers/send data over encrypted radio frequencies…

If you can spare the disk space, save a local copy of Wikipedia, save pdfs of your favorite books, textbooks, etc., project gutenberg, kiwix library, git mirrors, archive.org, jstor, etc.

The more people who have their own copies, the better this stuff has a chance of surviving the dark ages.

Also, if people can figure a way to send/receive data and remotely access servers over mesh networks, it will help populate the new web with useful information. Keep the light alive, even if it doesn’t reach everybody. Even through the dark ages in history, knowledge was preserved in monasteries.

Lastly, although you probably can’t grab every news article ever written, be sure to save the ones that are especially salient from a few reliable sources. Future historians and digital archaeologists will thank you.

Going back to my first comment on this chain:

And even though mods can ban from communities or instances, no automated admin bots can give you a site-wide ban over petty reasons.

So… what part of that has changed?

What a dishonest headline…

It wasn’t technically wrong, but it was deliberately misleading…

Also, I’m so glad I bought my hardware when I did…

You sound like you’ve had personal experience with this…

Also, that doesn’t change the fact that no instance admins can ban your IP across the whole fediverse, so it’s still not as bad as reddit…

I think it would be a mistake to paint those two courses of action as mutually exclusive categories.

Yes, governments need to regulate businesses and industry if we want to have a meaningful impact on climate change. Blaming the consumer and putting all the impetus for change on them is misguided at best and deliberate obfuscation in many cases. But that doesn’t mean consumers should feel no responsibility at all. If two companies offer different options, we should as consumers choose to support the company with the more ethical business practices.

Likewise, governments need to regulate big tech companies. But users switching to the fediverse are choosing to be part of the solution rather than the problem, and the more it grows the more it looks like a viable alternative for others who don’t care about the ethics of the platforms they’re supporting. And when FOSS platforms reach a critical mass, it will eat into the corporations’ bottom lines.

Governments need to hold corporations accountable and meaningfully regulate them, but effectively giving consumers license to do whatever they want even if that means supporting corporate tech, and pretending it ultimately doesn’t matter, is kind of defeatist. It’s like saying “Why should the workers go on strike? That’s the union’s job.”

I think we can manage to advance on both fronts at the same time if we really try, but if for a time we can only advance on one front, then we should hold the other on as best we can while we advance on the one we can. Cause the time may come when we have to hold that front, but are able to advance on the other.

I feel called out.