servers are really no harder to operate, but propaganda has convinced people that they should leave it to the experts, as a means to capture their data and make them dependent. reversing that belief seems hard. OTOH, keeping data stable (safe against loss) in consumer devices, especially ultraportable ones, is a bit of a challenge. the best answer to that so far has been live backups. I know a better way to approach this: local apps, encompassing all the logic (no client/server separation), using dumb p2p storage for the data. https://www.fsfla.org/blogs/lxo/draft/decent-computing
he's privatized much of power generation and transmission, so now any efforts to enable rooftop generation are going to be taken as threats to those profits. regulation and public funding could confront that, but I'm not hopeful, it's going to be an uphill battle. which sucks, because our hydroelectric generators are operating at low capacity and a lot of thermal plants are making up. a significant overlap between their owners has led to speculation that reservoirs of hydroelectric plants have been emptied so that they could run and sell the more expensive power from the thermal plants. which sucks for us, because they're not only more expensive, they also pollute more, and the fresh water has not been easy to replenish
meanwhile, in brazil, bolsonaro's government has granted 109 private banks access to citizens' personal records and biometric data collected by government's online services, electoral authorities and by states' identity document issuers https://gnusocial.net/url/7938242
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Saturday, 08-Jan-2022 22:42:31 EST
Alexandre Olivawhen antivaxxers stop believing and spreading lies after over 9e9 shots total, anyone who thinks it's experimental after health regulators everywhere say otherwise is living in an imaginary parallel reality. and whoever claims the vaccine is riskier than the virus must be able to credibly demonstrate at least 9e7 fatal victims
what's most incredible about this date representation is that it was introduced after Y2K. it wouldn't have worked up to [19]99 think about it. someone implemented that after all the many years of preparation and patching decades-old systems for Y2K, knowing (or, worse, without realizing) that it had at most a couple of decades of use. how screwy and irresponsible is that?
I don't have any insights into what Evan meant, but I hope you don't mind if I offer other possibilities of what he meant that are quite different from how you seem to have taken them:
- a companion AI could be something that helps us sort out the info deluge we live in and bring our attention to things that matters for us. the key is for it to serve *us*, not some third party, as I brought up at the end of the Post-Truth Santa speech https://www.fsfla.org/~lxoliva/#santa
- calming could be as opposed to alerting. I've seen this term used in relation to traffic, which doesn't mean the traffic is actually calming, just that it's supposed to avoid inducing anxiety like the constant events we get from non-calming, attention-slavery tech
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Tuesday, 21-Dec-2021 23:34:23 EST
Alexandre Olivayou appear to expect 'freedom' to mean 'absence of requirements'. that's not the case. you have freedom to do or not to do something, even when you are under limitations that don't substantially prevent you from choosing either alternative. the GPL is written so that you have permission to distribute the program, even as object code, if you so wish, but you're only allowed to distribute it in specific ways, namely, ones in which the object code is accompanied either by complete corresponding source code, or by a commitment to offer it. that's hardly a substantial limitation to that freedom, so you do have freedom to distribute. the last sentence you quoted appears to be mistaken as a restriction, but it's not, it's merely a statement of fact about behaviors that copyright reserves to copyright holders, and that the GPL doesn't license out because they do not stand in the way of the essential freedoms, and limiting them actually defends the freedoms of other users from abuse
Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Tuesday, 21-Dec-2021 23:26:11 EST
Alexandre OlivaI have no clue whom you refer to as my compatriots, but that's probably another misconception. I'm a free software advocate, and free software does not restrict users (or anyone else) on what they can do with the software. copyleft cleverly takes advantage of some limits copyright places on distributors to keep them from abusing users, but that's not a restriction on what they can do with the software. there are other groups, that oppose free software, proposing and promoting licensing that purports to limit who can use the software, but we free software people oppose these ideas