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> Say I needed to leave the country for some important reason and come back. Say I didn't want my phone searched. What should I do?

Don't take your phone and/or other devices you don't want to have searched. It's the advice routinely given to those planning a trip from the rest of the world to the US.


That's another technical workaround. A good one, when possible, but it doesn't exactly fix fascism.


A lot of people install TikTok. Or Instagram.


Or Claude/etc on their personal computers and then even live dangerously.


I went to look for maximum wind speed this would work in, didn't find it. Maybe it's not an issue for inland dwellers.


YMMV. Likewise, I've been using charge to 80% from the start, the phone is approaching 5 years, and I can't say I'd notice the battery being any worse from new.

Bigger issue is that it's been out of OEM updates for 3 years now, which is complete balls considering it's a reputable brand and came with "Android Enterprise Recommended" or whatever that was.


There's an important distinction: raising / lowering the volume of someone in general, or just a particular thing they just said.

The good old "open discussion" at forums, as I remember it, used to manifest verbal lynch mobs, that would often target specific people instead of what they said.


Obviously, but the whole argument against the regulation is, if they're not free to find out themselves, they'll turn up worse.

We'll lose some, but the surviving ones will be fitter.


I think you're underestimating both the amount of damage Trump has already done for the future ability to negotiate, and the desire of everyone else to be not bombed by the US.

Everyone already knows, any deal with the US does not bind the US, only the other party. But it still might be preferrable to the alternative of no deal at all.


When we continue this line of thought far enough, we get to ask who's going to pay for the hardware and the electricity to run the AI that's taking all the jobs.


This is exactly the missing long-term perspective. All AI creators are focused either on the projected wins or the shiny technology, ignoring societal effects. Not that they should, they are engineers or MBAs after all, but somebody should. Somebody like us, or better somebody with better reach and better knowledge, should figure out a way to offer a future also to former clerks.


I don't get how this didn't become yet a major election topic in most democracies. It's business as usual mostly.


Because humans are bad at reacting to things that might happen; we’re far better once there is a literal crisis.


> Can control of compute be far behind?

How is this going to work? You need uncontrolled compute for developing software. Any country locking up that ability too much will lose to those who don't.


> How is this going to work? You need uncontrolled compute for developing software.

I've read about companies where all software developers have to RDP to the company's servers to develop software, either to save on costs (sharing a few powerful servers with plenty of RAM and CPU between several developers) or to protect against leaks (since the code and assets never leave the company's Citrix servers).


Even for tiny crews doing nothing of fatal significance, this is unironically superior to "throw it on GitHub"


>You need uncontrolled compute for developing software

Oh you sweet summer child :(

You think our best and brightest aren't already working on that problem?

In fact they've fucking aced it, as has been widely celebrated on this website for years at this point.

All that remains is getting the rest of the world to buy in, hahahaha.

But I laugh unfairly and bitterly; getting people to buy in is in fact easiest.

Just put 'em in the pincer of attention/surveillance economy (make desire mandatory again!).

And then offer their ravaged intellectual and emotional lives the barest semblance of meaning, of progress, of the self-evident truth of reason.

And magic happens.

---

To digress. What you said is not unlike "you need uncontrolled thought for (writing books/recording music/shooting movies/etc)".

That's a sweet sentiment, innit?

Except it's being disproved daily by several global slop-publishing industries that exist since before personal computing.

Making a blockbuster movie, recording a pop hit, or publishing the kind of book you can buy at an airport, all employ millions of people; including many who seem to do nothing particularly comprehensible besides knowing people who know people... It reminds me of the Chinese Brain experiment a great deal.

Incidentally, those industries taught you most of what you know about "how to human"; their products were also a staple in the lives of your parents; and your grandparents... if you're the average bougieprole, anyway.

---

Anyway, what do you think the purpose of LLMs even is?

What's the supposed endgame of this entire coordinated push to stop instructing the computer (with all the "superhuman" exactitude this requires); and instead begin to "build" software by asking nicely?

Btw, no matter how hard we ignore some things, what's happening does not pertain only to software; also affected are prose, sound, video, basically all electronic media... permit yourself your one unfounded generalization for the day, and tell me - do you begin to get where this is going?

Not "compute" (the industrial resource) but computing (the individual activity) is politically sensitive: programming is a hands-on course in epistemics; and epistemics, in turn, teaches fearless disobedience.

There's a lot of money riding on fearless disobedience remaining a niche hobby. And if there's more money riding on anything else in the world right now, I'd like an accredited source to tell me what the hell that would be.

Think for two fucking seconds and once you're done screaming come join the resistance.


Damn, now I want one just to de-lid one and put it on a shelf. Looks like eBay has plenty of these.


Tempting.

I wonder what material they used for the platter. I once took apart a 1.8" drive, and got a big surprise when the platter suddenly shattered. I was expecting aluminum, not glass/ceramic substrate.


Yes, glass was the typical substrate used in small HDDs, even in many of the 2.5" HDDs, e.g. in all the 2.5" HDDs that I had.

It is easier to ensure that glass substrates are perfectly plane and without any surface defects than for substrates made of aluminum alloy.

In 3.5" disks the risk of shattering becomes too great, so aluminum alloy is preferred.


I discovered that one day when I accidentally stepped on a removed 2.5" platter in bare feet :)


One of my most delightful discoveries of the early 2000s was that iPod Minis used Microdrives that were pin-compatible with CompactFlash cards. I had a little cottage industry in the back of my office upgrading my coworkers’ old iPods to use bigger, solid state disks. I still have my 256GB iPod Mini. Aside from battery life, it still runs fine, and it is by far my favorite music player form factor.


> ... "and it is by far my favorite music player form factor."

I really liked the old original iPod Nano myself. Had one for years that I was triple-booting RockBox (for extended media formats support and fancier interface), iPodLinux (for playing Doom and other toys), and the original iPod OS (just in case). Still haven't yet owned another device in that size / form factor that can do as much as that little thing did. Apple really did make some sweet devices back in the day... :)


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