late_pessimistic

At least one security researcher says Edge is the most secure option for Windows users.

…github.io/security-privacy-advice.html#browser

Surely this will make them finally realize it is unsustainable to demand consumer to upgrade their hardware every few years?.. Right? Right??

That’s weird. If they want an OS to tinker with, Windows is the worst option really. Why not Arch or Gentoo or NixOS?

This article’s title is ridiculous. What do you mean ‘why don’t normal people use agentic AI?’ Were they supposed to?

That’s fair. Your work environment created every incentive for you to use AI. If no one is reading or fact checking those reports, and only evaluates how many plausible reports, pages, megabytes or files there are. Then what’s even the point to put in effort there anyway, right?

I would blame the broken incentive structure rather than individual actors making rational choices.

I think there were already some research findings, how software developers tend to drastically overestimate how much AI helped them, while AI was actually hindering their productivity. It could be the same case here.

What AI is really good at is spitting out plausible sounding garbage, pretending it did some comprehensive research on the topic, and making people feel like it’s helpful without neccessarily being so.

Shill harder, we need to deliver more shareholder value

Signal is better, but if the concern is Telegram scanning messages and automatically sending them to the police, that doesn’t seem to happen either. Durov doesn’t care, for better or worse, like Telegram being used for drugs and terrorism. Although Telegram employees themselves could be snooping through your messages, that’s true

She may have overestimated the degree of privacy her DMs had. That’s also on her.

Her fault for being too busy teaching kids and surviving on $40k salary instead of researching perfect OPSEC and going down the digital privacy rabbit hole

Mass surveillance has been around for like, what, 20 years now? How well has it worked out with preventing school shootings?

Passive indiscriminate mass surveillance doesn’t do shit to prevent or stop crime.

Becoming a billionaire really does seem to get to people’s heads, the younger the billionaire the worse.

Zuck is being completely reckless, burning through hundreds of billions of dollars hopping on every futuristic idea, and doesn’t listen to anyone’s fair criticism anymore.

He probably even thinks he is some great visionary and everyone else is holding him back, and that’s why they work for him, not the opposite.

In a sane socioeconomic system we wouldn’t people get this rich and powerful for their own good, especially young people.

Had a friend in the most expensive private school in my area. They had phones banned over a decade ago already.

Probably because richer parents have more mental bandwidth to worry about children’s digital footprint and neural development rather than survival.

Thus I believe extending this ban to public schools is only fair. Distraction-free and surveillance-free environment for children shouldn’t be a luxury reserved for few.

Have you considered trying out redlib? It’s clutter-free, minimal, privacy-respecting proxy for Reddit. You can also subscribe to subreddits without signing up.

I personally use redlib.catsarch.com, but there are a couple more instances of Redlib from different people

People usually have different tolerance level for pop-ups and distractions based on their neurobiology.

I have heard autistic people say pop-ups hurt and overstimulate them, ADHD people say they can’t ignore pop-ups, while neurotypocal people say they don’t even notice the pop-ups.

So both experiences can be true at once. You have no issues with pop-ups, while for someone else physically can’t tolerate a single distraction without stressing them out.

There might be, but very few. Most (like gpt-oss, or Deepseek R1) are open weight, because no one wants to make their model training data public.

Open sourcing a model would likely give away they are using pirated content or scrap internet websites without permission. That’s something Anthropic was fined for last year, they were caught using pirated books for model training.

Moreover, training data is one of most lucrative resources in AI race next to GPUs, and AI companies are going all in on finding it, desperately fighting for any possible data. Heck recently they even started buying antique books, digitizing, and burning them.

They invest a whole lot of resources to get quality data, and they don’t want to share it with competitors for free.

My personal opinion though is FOSS philosophy doesn’t apply that cleanly to LLMs anyway. If compiling Chromium or Linux kernel from source is tedious enough, “compiling” an LLM from source on consumer hardware is straight impossible. It’s something only your competitors could do.

Thus you can’t verify the LLM is the same as it’s source code anyway, so open source label becomes meaningless.

And open weight model is still an improvement over using a cloud model, as it’s local and doesn’t call home with your chats data.

According to the article, this guy’s legal team claims he did, in fact, tell them they should show a search warrant, and he won’t talk without a lawyer.

But they were ignoring those requests, and pressuring him further till he realized it’s a lost cause, and handed them over the Duress pin

Or both! Don’t consume where possible, seek out the most ethical option when you must

Jurisdiction doesn’t matter, it’s an myth spread by Protonmail marketers so everyone thinks their privacy is ensured by some strict Swiss privacy laws.

Although privacy laws are pretty mild everywhere. Even GDPR is quite outdated and is barely enforced.

Proton, Tuta and others do it because “Swiss privacy” or “EU-based” brand is much more recognizable and easier to sell people on, compared to “we do metadata obfuscation” or “here is our 50 page long security audit”.

However, what actually matters more is security architecture. Signal is US based, but they thought through how to retain as little data on users as possible, so when FBI asked them for info, Signal could only give them date of account registration, user ID, and last login.

TLDR ignore country of registration and HQ location, evaluate on the merits