6 characters or fewer passwords, if there were passwords at all. Phreaking still worked into the 90s, and all sorts of really stupid things were done without really thinking about the security at all. They'd print out receipts with the entire credit or debit card number and information on it, or carbon copy the card with an impression, and you'd see these receipts blowing around parking lots, or find entire bags or dumpsters full of them. Knowing an IP address might be sufficient information to gain access to systems that should have been secured. It's pretty amazing that things functioned as well as they did, that society was as trusting and trustworthy as it was, that we were able to build as much as we did with as relatively a tiny level of exploitation that happened.
If the same level of vulnerability was as prevalent today as it was back then, civilization might collapse overnight.
To be fair, back then it was relatively easy for anyone intelligent enough to be able to abuse any of that to have a well paying 'white collar' job with things like full health benefits, a pension, and more than sufficient income to support an entirely family SOLO. They even owned houses!
When your life is set like that why risk trying to defraud someone a the cost of a nice suit when that's something that can be done legally and written off as a business expense on taxes?
It'd have to be locally controlled, or securely siloed in a cloud, with auditable and accountable interactions. Any sort of home robot will have that challenge; I wouldn't trust any company or person with that sort of access. When even the highest security clearance and most secure facilities and job titles in the world frequently involve people randomly scanning around, trolling through mass surveillance, stalking exes or arbitrary targets, rifling through people's private photos and messages, there's no way a mid-tier tech company job is going to be the one where they suddenly behave ethically and respect security.
That said, robots in factories are a no-brainer, you gain a massive margin over human operated manufacturing, and the technology is effectively at an alpha level of rollout, with more or less full capability of doing any particular thing any human can do, with near perfect repeatability and millisecond granular control, and the effective cost at scale is pennies per year over whatever salary you'd have to pay a human. For municipal jobs, you can get multiple robots to do things like street cleaning, building maintenance, cleaning, facilities maintenance, guard patrols, and so forth. There are all sorts of large scale deployments that are much more compatible with low-trust , low-privacy issues than home robot butlers, and those widely deployed factory and janitor bots will help finance the robo-butlers.
Imagine robot street repair crews that operate on a 24/7 basis, with self driving cars that go around town searching out potholes and other safety issues for the robots to fix. Neighborhood robots that shovel snow or clean out water drains, or trot out with safety cones if a hazard appears. That's millions and millions of dollars in savings year over year compared the cost of paying humans, and it gets rid of the perverse incentives that lead to things like sub-standard materials being used, so that you have to replace materials every year in order to keep the union teams employed doing overpriced roadwork.
Robot contractors that learn from Amish techniques to build a well-made house inside 48 hours, or Earth Day citywide robot blitzes where the robots clean everything, and so on. The economics of things that people won't do, or aren't worth paying to do, change radically when it's a mindless robot's time being allocated.
Even if it's not Optimus, the robots are basically here, the next decade is gonna be full of fun politics and figuring out how to cope with radical change.
> That's millions and millions of dollars in savings year over year compared the cost of paying humans, and it gets rid of the perverse incentives that lead to things like sub-standard materials being used, so that you have to replace materials every year in order to keep the union teams employed doing overpriced roadwork.
How does it get rid of perverse incentives? The unionised human workers use sub-standard material so they can do (and charge for) the same repair next year, but the owners of the robots do not have the very same incentive?
Is it because humans are mendacious, fallible, and corrupt, while Elon is honest, reliable, and not motivated by money?
"It'd have to be locally controlled, or securely siloed in a cloud, with auditable and accountable interactions. Any sort of home robot will have that challenge; I wouldn't trust any company or person with that sort of access. "
I agree, but we might be in a minority here. Otherwise roombas etc. would not have had their success. Children toys with microphone and always on connection to the company. Cameras as part of a big network. Cars that can be remote controlled any time, ..
I'm slightly optimistic with the heightened scrutiny on AI and general political turmoil - maybe there's a shot at a reasonable digital bill of rights regulation, and both parties seem fairly universally against allowing China to run surveillance apparatus inside US homes. An Alexa or Roomba is one thing, but a humanoid is too close to having an actual person - there's enough of a subjective difference in vibe that it might reach critical mass in the zeitgeist.
US politics is on the "cannot let China win the AI race" side of things, as well as the "cannot have a chinese/corporation/government robot spy in your bedroom" side of things. Cheap Temu speakers with microphones that phone home, or chargers that connect to wifi for botnets, and so on, that sort of abstract IoT threat doesn't resonate. Commander Data doing your dishes feels like a person in your home.
Yeah, this is the opposite of being your device. This is pretending to own a device as a service.
I'm building a portable pbx on a raspberry pi with some power banks I stick in a backpack and a dual sim 5g unlimited internet hotspot, and switch over to starlink 5g when that happens. I'll throw a media server in there (pirate everything), and use a small portable wireless streaming touchscreen. There are all sorts of useful UI and linux tools that can make it a far better experience than android or phones. If I need a camera, I'll buy a camera. I've got earbuds and bluetooth for peripherals.
2026 is the year I leave "phones" behind - not playing the subscription device game anymore. I left Windows last year. I'll get better service, real control, and no enshittification treadmill.
It's too bad it takes an inordinate amount of tech savvy to break out - Linux is well beyond good enough for grandma or the average user at this point. There's no reason beyond exploitation for profit for the kafkaesque intrusion into people's lives and data. If you've got the capability, break out.
This product is not breaking free. Same walls, different garden.
Re: media server. Yeah. I wish there was an alternative but the modern media landscape is so broken there is no other way to maintain digital copies of your shows and movies, while maintaining your own ability to curate your ow content on a plane that isn’t just another surface for those companies to drive engagement metrics. If you try to escape, you are forced into drm locked down Blu rays or even just shit out of luck in the case of a lot of direct to streaming tv. In which case you have two options, stay on the enshittification treadmill, taking more and more shit from bigass corporations who are actively poisoning the culture, or sail the seas. Or I guess just don’t watch tv. But I like tv.
Pirate everything. Stop feeding beasts and they have no power.
The idea that you need intrusive surveillance in order to make games fair is absurd. If you need fair games, you need referees and moderation, which means you need to train and pay competent people and establish open and transparent rules and tools. You can also give your refs latitude, so if someone is obviously cheating, they have the power to do something about it. You should also require and implement publicly transparent and auditable actions with recourse for players to prevent abuses of power.
That's expensive. It's much easier to create a terms of service with vague guidelines, implement a totally intrusive, absurdly invasive rootkit that does some bare minimum scanning for known cheats and patterns, which establishes an arms race and provides bad actors a nice little point of ingress when the responsible company inevitably fails to protect their users competently.
Just like media platforms, if you cannot moderate at the scale at which you're operating, then it shouldn't be legal to operate at that scale.
People should stop giving money to companies that don't deserve it. No game is worth sacrificing your integrity for. "Just trust us, we know what we're doing" is a huge red flag, and it should be criminal to do what they do.
AI refs are going to be a very real possibility in the near future that can be just as fair and competent as humans, so the "necessity" for rootkits won't be a valid argument for much longer. It'll still be expensive, but multiplayer gaming fairness shouldn't ever serve as a reason for nuking privacy.
Manning makes sense - all the details fit, and there aren't that many. Publishing is a stupid business that makes less and less sense every passing day. Self publishing and going through an outlet, marketing for yourself, or contracting out the relevant tasks, will save you a ton of money for anything publishers can offer anymore. They survive more and more often on grift and network effects that are increasingly irrelevant and often run counter to the interests of a given author or work.
Glad the author got out relatively unscathed.
Self publish - especially with AI available to get you through the stuff where you just need superficial or process knowledge, like which firms to hire and how to market a self-published work, what boilerplate legal protections you need. You'll get 99% of the value of a big publishing firm at a small fraction of the cost, and you won't have to put up with someone else taking a cut just because they know a few things that they don't want to tell you in order to justify taking your money.
> AI available to get you through the stuff where you just need superficial or process knowledge, like which firms to hire and how to market a self-published work, what boilerplate legal protections you need
Putting aside for a moment that nobody should be trusting a frequently-hallucinating AI algorithm with any of the above...
Your world-view is one of those that returns to the old adage "it only works if you value your time at zero".
Its the sort of thing we see in tech the whole time. Some dude saying "oh, I can just fix my motherboard myself".
Or in the automotive sector, someone with experience and kit fixing their own engine block.
Well, sure you can dude. Because you've got the domain expertise, you've got the kit AND you are willing to value your time at zero.
However in the majority of cases, if you do not value your time at zero, then spending even just a few hours waving an oscilloscope and soldering iron over the proverbial motherboard is time better spent on other tasks and the "more expensive" option suddenly does not look that expensive any more.
And that is all before we address the other elephant in the room.... Your suggestion that it is easy to self-market a self-published work.
Maybe if you are a well known and respected author, such as Mr Performance (Brendan Gregg) or Mr Oracle (Tom Kyte) etc.
But if you are just Joe Schmoe. And perhaps especially if you are Joe Schmoe who's just written your first self-published book. The outcome is unlikely to be the same.
You can’t stop it from being mercilessly pirated, and it’s a fool’s errand to try, unless you want to go down the user hostile route much of the ebook industry insists on (vendor specific reading apps/devices serving as DRM).
Bandcamp learned this lesson. GOG learned this lesson. They both provide services users love, without DRM, and just accept that there is no capitalistic scarcity inherent to digital goods like there is to physical ones. An indie ebook publisher would be wise to heed those teachings.
As someone who has sold software online for 20 years, I am very familiar with piracy. It rankles to put a lot of work into something and people just help themself for free. But customer hostile DRM is not great either.
It's about getting as much money from the platform for as long as possible, regardless of the externalized damage done along the way. Anything that negatively impacts the "number goes up" goal, year over year, gets suppressed, ignored, or redirected. They hire a sufficient number of people so as to diffuse responsibility and the sense of wrongdoing by any one person or group within the company, and different aspects of the overall abusive mechanics organically get compartmentalized, so that no one manager or employee or department ever recognizes the wrongs being done.
You end up with a few greedy asshats aware of the harms being done that just don't care, lots of money being made, and plausible deniability all around, with things never getting bad enough for an employee to feel like they have to take a stand or report wrongdoing.
In my desktop Firefox it does not fit horizontally, and it is not scrollable: I had to maximize the window in order to uncover the keyboard completely.
It's a natural extension of the ideas being discussed - the limit in computation per gram of mass has energetic bounds, as well, with configurations nearing the upper limit that start looking more like nuclear explosions than anything we'd regard as structured computation. The extremes are amazing to consider - things that look and act like stars, but are fantastically precise Turing machines, and so on.
It's a theme that sci-fi authors have explored deeply. Accelerando is a particularly fun and worthwhile read if you haven't already!
A bag of fine flour tossed into the clean rooms, and using a taser on all the electronics and control boards makes entire fabs more or less worthless. They probably have multiple doomsday options that wipe out any utility the chip plants might have. I'd probably also have a technology and documentation package ready to be shipped to the US by a secret lawyer - if Taiwan gets taken, the fabs get destroyed, and the US gets the technology.
They're not weak or stupid, the level of retaliation and sabotage in store against any attempt by China to take over would go down in history as some of the most ruthless and savage of all time.
Xi is just beating his chest. China is currently simmering - protests, civil unrest, and dissidence in general is up significantly over the last year or so, and they need to make bold public speeches to look powerful and in control. I don't think there's any risk of widespread public revolt, but they play these games and push propaganda because they have to, not because it makes sense.
China's been threatening to "unify" Taiwan for decades, more or less like clockwork. They missed their best opportunity to actually do it during Biden and covid - the US would likely have just let it happen at that point. With new US fabs popping up, we may reach parity with Taiwan chipmaking capabilities within a decade or less, and that makes the utility of Taiwan even less.
Urban resistance fighters and guerilla tactics from a hostile population makes taking over cities and towns like that more or less completely impossible. Any attempt by China to take Taiwan would end up looking like the US trying to "liberate" Iraq, with constant PR hits, human rights violations, way more money than they want to spend, or risking inciting major unrest if they just wipe out the Taiwanese population like monsters.
I don't think there's any real upside to actually taking Taiwan, it's more useful as a perennial jingoistic narrative than anything else at this point.
The obsession with wars plays a cruel joke with its adherents. China will not go to war with Taiwan unless something really stupid is done against China.
"> multiple doomsday options..." - doomsday for whom exactly? China doesn't import anything vital from Taiwan but the West does. Both Taiwan and the West are dependent on China too.
Moreover, the Chinese have other options: sanctions, blockades, covert military, etc. the precedent has already been established with Venezuela.
If China disrupts Taiwan's fragile economy, the fabs will doomsday themselves and the West will go along with them.
> I don't think there's any real upside to actually taking Taiwan
You're thinking in terms of plunder but that's not how China thinks. China is being pressured economically and threatened militarily - Venezuela supplies oil to China, and the Chinese have investments there - Taiwan is just a pawn in a much bigger, existential game of survival.
China has been promising to retake Taiwan for the last 25 years. Xi bringing this up in a new years speech is practically ceremonial y at this point. What makes you think China is different this time, Trumo hasn’t messed up things on the otherwise that much has he?
Xi isn't Putin and China isn't Russia. Politically they are different like day and night. The real reasons for Putin's invasion of Ukraine bear absolutely no similarity to anything pertaining to China-Taiwan's relations.
Unless your intent isn't making the world a better place in some sort of meaningful way, learn about things and find something to care about that you can affect that actually matters. Bitcoin or AI or whatever is not worth your time. Do something real.
If we ever get to the point where bitcoin or what people are doing on servers is the most pressing problem in the world worthy of our outrage, I will cheer you on.
"Anon yells at cloud" isn't worth anyone's effort or time.
If the same level of vulnerability was as prevalent today as it was back then, civilization might collapse overnight.
reply