Anyone in the IT Ops side of things knows the adage that you don't run ".0" software. You wait for a while to let the kinks get worked out by those who can afford the risk of downtime, and of the vendors to find and work out bugs in new software on their own.

Are conservative, uptime-oriented organizations "free-riders" for waiting to install new software on critical systems? Is that a sin, as this implies?

The answer is no. It's certainly a quandry - someone has to run it first. But a little time to let it bake in labs and low-risk environments is worth it.

I'm not saying that's what's happening, but that's what I thought was happening before reading this thread, and now I have to go and run through their policies.

Either way ALPRs and AI-facial scanners in public are a huge violation of privacy and I loathe them, but I hope it's correct that Flock customers cannot easily share information with one another.

Are you saying Flock itself does not have access to any of the data, and that the data they store on behalf of local governments is not fed into any central datalake? That every organization's data is completely, unalterably separate from everyone else's?

If so, that makes the panopticon slightly less powerful.

Also notable: as of last year, OnePlus allowed mobile and WiFi network toggle, effectively doing the same thing.

Wealth inequality isn't just about economic wellbeing but political power. Separately, the US legislature is almost entirely crippled, only able to pass one major bill per presidential term, while the dominant political party celebrated this and cedes all power to an executive whose intention is to tear apart the administrative state and bring about techno feudalism.

I once again note that none of the AI leadership has even tried to address government policies to guarantee a baseline of economic wellbeing for our citizens, while they acknowledge AI will likely have massive, disruptive impacts on society and economy. Anthropic is the only one that has shown any public concern for the dangers of AI by insisting on some moral baseline of AI use in the Defense department.

In arch Linux, I trust the base repositories more than AUR.

The masses see an incredibly small number of people making huge amounts of money, and gaining massive political influence, by developing technologies they intend to use to replace almost all human economic worth. And they are doing very little if anything to show concern for the fates of the millions of people that may be put out of work.

I see this different than the discovery of oil or electricity or the Internet. It's bigger than that, and they are telling us to remain calm in a burning building while they walk toward the exits.

I think that he may genuinely believe that ai will produce a net benefit for humanity in the long term, but I am increasingly worried that they are absolutely fine testing their creation on the world without any consideration to the harm it can do to millions of individuals.

The assertion that he is benign would be more believable if he spent a shred of time lobbying for universal economic rights of citizens, or some model for redistribution of wealth in a world where most people don't need to work to provide the necessities of society.

Oh, and he's willing to let the government use his technology to mass-spy on Americans and to create autonomous lethal AI.

Pearl-clutching about ambivalence to his fate and comparing it to the barbarism of a mob gets shrugs from me.

What is the documentation about spy agency collabs? I've literally not heard of that. I've heard about them complying with requests that give away metadata and payment info based on court order.

At this point I see more suspicious rants from the people claiming proton is compromised than from the people who say "eh".

He says "look at me I love my family" - so do the millions of people who think his company may destroy the economy and help corporations and the trillionaires put a boot to our children's necks.

3:45am in the morning - no dip, that's what AM is.

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Someone here asked "How do we get to post scarcity from here?" and someone else said "no one knows".

The AI barons are loading up their bank accounts and political capital, driving us off a cliff and promising we'll learn to fly by the time we get there. But they're going to tuck and roll out of the driver's seat.

Sam, why do you expect us to believe anything you say when you have done nothing to lead the discussion about universal rights for citizens in a post scarcity society?

My main beef was with the writing style, which is so over the top and repetitive and seemingly AI-generated that I couldn't stand it.

Proton Meet relying on a bunch of US infrastructure is something they should call out themselves loudly when they advertise it, to be sure.

Ironically, I ran this AI-generated post through AI to summarize and isolate the claims of fact. TLDR: The complaint is largely about Proton Meet, which is hosted by a US-based company and is underpinned by a lot of US-hosted companies. Other core Proton services are not part of the complaints, though it's noted that sometimes Proton has given up user metadata from US court orders (such as payment and contact info, not actual VPN or email contents).

I may be downvoted for acknowledging I used AI to help add context with my comment, but the essay was truly painful to try to read after a few paragraphs.

As for desktop, I suppose the only major European options are Ubuntu and SUSE with corporate backing.