Notice the same people will also talk during the daytime about morals and equality, while then conducting genocide in the evening.

These types of things should stand as big massive red flashing warnings with all these locked down systems - as you point out, in certain situations on iOS you’re just stuffed.

I totally agree with all your remarks btw. I think society having lots of skilled tradespeople is a major win for everyone. Yet we as a society seem to be doing everything we can to stifle and destroy a lot of skilled tradework. Much has already died over the last few decades and either will never return, or will take herculean levels of effort to get restarted.

You have been asked multiple times by multiple commenters to provide a single example of something that reflects this incredible boost achieved by , you have ignored every request for this, and I suspect will ignore this one as well. HN is going to die unless we all start calling these constant deceptive practices out. I’ll leave others to parse your history and make their own judgements.

“Judge them by their fruits”

It’s lead to plenty of good as well, a luddite I am not. I love my tech. I love conversing with people online, I became a happy mIRC user well over 20 years ago, I use telegram & discord daily. I just really, really despise tech’s current trajectory. I grew up wanting this stuff to supplement my life, not control & rule over it. The days where I want to toss it all in the trash and run off to the woods are increasing all the time. I didn’t want an internet where i’m constantly having to ask myself every image… is this real? I certainly don’t want one that’s constantly surveilling me and I definitely don’t want one that’s about to threaten to lock me out, or up(!), the moment I commit wrongspeak.

The analogy would be a 17 year old kid passing his driving test and getting straight in a 500bhp rear wheel drive sports car. We as a society have just collectively done that over the last two decades. And it feels like we’re just about to take it nuclear with AI.

So we can dwell on all of that past or set ourselves some basic goals and ambitions to aim for. Refocus. Change the conversation.

Somebody responded to me earlier that “at least we have reusable rockets”. Do you know what I really want? It’s really quite basic - clean air, clean water and clean energy. Let’s collectively work to tick those three off the list, for every.single.soul here on this planet first, then after that, we can focus on making them free for everybody. Then we can set our sights on the stars.

I recently had 9.2kw of solar panels installed in the SE of England, the actual cost of the panels themselves was ~£1k. I’ve seen new installs going up with standard cheap panels nicely inset, flush into the roof itself. The roofers themselves have told me they are cheaper than a traditional roof due to the decreasing price of panels and ever increasing price of tile. Got a listed property with a slate roof? Solar could save you potentially £10k+ according to one roofer I spoke to.

Panels were and always were going to be dumb commodity items. There’s literal fields literally filled with the things everywhere. Compare to say something like the PowerWall which they still sell bucket loads of and I have one myself, Elon be damned…

However, the PowerWall still suffers from that worst of all tech bro sins of trying to limit YOUR access to YOUR data. I wanted to add an ESP CYD to display all my Home Assistant data when we had solar installed to help us as a family see what was happening in realtime. It’s incredibly useful - In typical HN fashion I rolled my own and avoided ESPHome, making it just how I wanted and I love it! 3d printed case and all! Boots in 2 seconds and just works!

I had obviously and wrongly assumed the PW3 would be easy as pie. Getting realtime data out of the PW3 is a freaking Kafka-esque nightmare… the only workable solution to which was setting up another dedicated ESP32 to connect directly to the PW own perm on wifi and weird custom API and shunt the data over BT. Tesla could break it all at a moments notice with an update and i’ll be out of hours trying to fix it. The whole thing is cat&mouse hoop jumping, the likes of which I haven’t seen since the earlier console hacking days. Tesla will display the realtime data through their servers, through their app, but if you want that…

Anyway, please everybody who’s all gung ho on the Anthropic and OpenAI hype trains remember - every single big tech company has had the exact same disregard for you, your family, your home and your planet since the start. It’s probably more consistent than Moore’s law at this point. Nothing is going to be different this time around.

I’d actually seen the original DB episode years before when it first aired and it definitely had an affect on me through this form of manipulation - it altered my internal understanding of marketing/advertising, which was the actual underlying purpose of the episode.

It’s altered how I internally accept and process information from any 2nd or 3rd hand source. BTW, people aren’t necessarily always aware they’re doing it. We all suffer from our own internal biases and deceptions, and sometimes we spread them unknowingly!

Sorry cloud providers, but you all burnt (nuked) your bridges and I have zero interest in seeing them rebuilt. I’m more than happy on my own little island!

Tinfoil hatted me would wonder if this might be why they are so desperate to try and ensure local LLM’s never become a thing…

McKenna looks more correct everyday to me atm. Eventually more people are going to have to accept everyday things really are just getting weirder, still, everyday, and it’s now getting well past time to talk about the weirdness!

We hit our first MW/h of power today. In England. In April. Total electricity bill for the last 6 weeks is about £30, and that includes our driving (previously £150 to £200 p/m) and most of our hot water. If you have the property for it and available investment, the ongoing savings are instant and obvious! My instant regret was not having done it sooner. Driving around on your own sunshine does feel magical as well!

*Edit - I left this in the wrong place, those extensions behave slightly differently.

In a bustling restaurant, an excited patron recognized the famous artist Picasso dining alone. Seizing the moment, the patron approached Picasso with a simple request. With a plain napkin and a big smile, he asked the artist for a drawing. He promised payment for his troubles. Picasso, ever the creator, didn’t hesitate. From his pocket, he produced a charcoal pencil and he brought to life a stunning sketch of a goat on the napkin—a clear mark of his unique style. Proudly, he presented it to the patron.

The artwork mesmerized the patron, who reached out to take it, only to be stopped by Picasso’s firm hand. “That will be $100,000,” Picasso declared.

Astonished, the patron balked at the sum. “But it took you just a few seconds to draw this!”

With a calm demeanor, Picasso took back the napkin, crumpled it, and tucked it away into his pocket, replying, “No, it has taken me a lifetime.”