As a European person I don’t want to drive an exploding car built by a nazi, so this company has nothing to offer me.

That’s a shame but also I get it. As they say themselves, “Similar privacy can be achieved through the combination of a VPN and a privacy-focused browser” so there’s not really a strong need for it I guess, and I’d rather they just cut something that’s not working than try to dig in and risk wasting resources that could go towards something more useful.

I think, AI quality aside, it’s mostly a matter of timing - IMO the AI bubble is obviously going to pop, NVIDIA’s market cap is now 16% of the entire US GDP and OpenAI is trying to IPO at a trillion dollars, which seem like ludicrous numbers to me. But I learned from the last few years that you can also never really underestimate society’s ability to just say fuck it and kick the can even further down the road.

And of course, SOMETHING is going to have to be the final straw that brings it all down, and it could very well be this. But I also didn’t think we’d get this far - the 2008 crisis didn’t do it, COVID somehow didn’t do it, but these things are are also all compounding as we don’t deal with them properly. And if AI is going to be the last straw, how long can we put it off for? Could it pop next year or can we still hold it off for another decade with even more ludicrous number-fuckery? I think that’s where the trick is going to be.

TBH this is just how petitions in the UK work: enough people sign it, it goes to parliament, they say a bunch of stuff about it that often sounds reasonable enough, then they do nothing about it. It’s just a way to give the public the illusion that they’re being listened to without having to actually do anything. It was the same with the digital ID petition, which I still signed but with 100% expectation that it wouldn’t actually achieve anything.

I just checked and I apparently have 137 apps on my phone. I think most of that though is just reading about some FOSS app, installing it to try it out and then just forgetting. I seem to have 4 different maps apps for example lol

Any of the Minds from Iain M. Banks Culture series, because that would mean the Culture was real and I want to live there.

I guess for a specific one, maybe the Arbitrary? That one seems pretty chill and knows where Earth is:

Also while I’d been away, the ship had sent a request on a postcard to the BBC’s World Service, asking for ‘Mr David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.’ (This from a machine that could have swamped Earth’s entire electro-magnetic spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn’t get the request played. The ship thought this was hilarious.

I exercise ultimate security by just having no money. If anybody manages to open the Pandora’s Box that is my bank account, best of luck to them.

Yep. As fun as it is to see this headline, the fact is that he was complicit in war crimes and in the torture and murder of countless thousands of people, and got to live to 84 years old in fabulous wealth and comfort not giving two fucks what we all thought of him. Unless there’s some sort of cosmic retribution waiting for him in the afterlife, he fully won.

Out of morbid curiosity, I’d like to see the reality where Obama ran for president, but doing and saying exactly everything Trump did to see how far he would get. I think “Grab 'em by the pussy” would have been the end of it, but I’d also like to see the reality where he made it this far, had shut down the government and bulldozed the East wing of the White House just to see what Fox News would be saying.

I like Betterbird, I find it slightly more less worst.

I just go around looking for other people who post their problems, then aggressively tell them to read the wiki and report the thread so it gets closed.

I’ve also heard it referred to as PICNIC: Problem In Chair, Not In Computer.

DNA is one that concerns me quite a lot. I can see some arguments in favour or retaining DNA on file for a longer term in certain cases - persistent sex criminals comes to mind - but I really think there should be tighter controls about just indiscriminately gathering DNA, and if you’re not found guilty of anything that info should be expunged and this should be independently audited IMO.

Also facial recognition for similar reasons. This feels like it should be the sort of thing to me that needs a warrant to be used, like searching a person’s home. Governments shouldn’t be allowed to just endlessly trawl through the faces of everybody who’s out in public for whatever reason they like. And using it to just sweep protests to (presumably) make a database of protestors should be a big no-no.

Yeah I like Strawberry too. It’s not flashy looking but it does everything I need.

Yeah that’s true, I think when we look back at his first era we do filter out some of the nonsense and remember the highlights. I’m mostly just miffed about Space Babies TBH lol.

It’s such a weird spot for the show to end up in, and I definitely wasn’t expecting this at all. When they announced the Disney deal and RTD returning I was sure the show was getting back on track. RTD can still bring the goods when he wants to IMO (Years & Years and It’s A Sin were both great I thought, and he did do some genuinely really good episodes like 73 Yards and The Well in his second run), but he also seemed to make some really weird calls like not having 14 regenerate wearing 13’s clothes, retconning Davros, making the sonic not look like a screwdriver because it looked too much like a gun etc. Just like, going out of his way to fix things I’ve never heard anyone say were a problem.

And the big one for me was opening the season with Space Babies. For the life of me I don’t know how that episode got greenlit at all, let alone put right upfront as the season opener that was supposed to sell people on the new series. Anecdotally, my SO has watched all of New Who with me and pretty much liked all of it, but they bailed on that episode and almost quit watching altogether. Luckily they’re a big Drag Race fan so I managed to save it with Jinx Monsoon in the next ep, but yeah. I’m sure that was a drop-off point for a lot of other people.

That makes it sound like I’m saying it was all RTD’s fault, which I don’t think is entirely fair. I think Disney had a big hand in it too by essentially jamming the show up for a year or so by not announcing what was going on with the deal, which seems to have caused Gatwa to quit, which in turn caused all sorts of knock-on problems. Plus we don’t really know if some of the weird decisions were due to Disney meddling. Maybe not, but anything’s possible I guess.

Either way, whether RTD stays on or not, I’m glad he’s doing the Christmas special. Like I say, he can still write a banger when he wants to, and hopefully some of the criticism of the new series and going back to a BBC budget will get him to rein it in a bit. Also get Carole Ann Ford back and finish up that Susan thread properly!

I really liked the first game, hoping this one doesn’t take forever to come to Steam.

Satisfactory has me fully in it’s grasp right now lol. Current project is a giant vacuum tube to take me back and forth to where the coal miners are, because the steel ingot supply has become erratic.

My cat will lock in on that stuff if you do it just once! I have to be really careful not to feed her early even if she’s being a pain about it, because if she gets fed ten minutes early once, that’s the new time forever lol.

One time she was being bonkers at 5am so I gave her some treats to keep the peace, it took about 2 weeks to get her out of the “I get treats at 5am every day now” mode.

Yeah TBH I’m just glad that Disney have finally decided, instead of stringing it along until after the spinoff airs (next year?) which is what I thought they were gonna do. At least now the BBC can just get on with it.