On one hand, I love GrapheneOS and see it as a cornerstone of digital privacy software. I have supported the project financially for years.
On the other hand, I'm worried that the publicity will only make explicit targets out of GrapheneOS users, and that you would only be using it "if you have something to hide".
The best solution to this is if orders of magnitude more people start using GrapheneOS. Once it becomes fairly normal it's no longer a viable reason to target someone.
With this publicity and the coming Motorola phones, there's reason to be at least a little optimistic.
Say that as they may, it’s a whole different slope to fall down if they want to do anything about that beyond pointing and whining. If we cross that bridge, we probably have bigger things to worry about. So I think it should be fine for now.
I, too, would prefer Google not have their hands in a lot of my stuff. That doesn't mean the federal government won't take it personally that I won't let them look at all of it and take action.
I've been playing around with Hugging Face's Lerobot[0] projects and it has been a lot of fun. To me, it has really democratized the field and has made it much easier to get into the subject without having a mechatronics degree and research lab budget. I've built 2 AI controlled robot arms: SO-ARM101 and Koch. I'm in the process of building a dual armed mobile bot[1] that looks very similar to this one. It will be interesting to see what Xiaomi's engineers push to Github.
They get you hooked on a teaser tariff. Like $100k worth of AWS, Azure, GCP credits. Like a good drug dealer, the first hit is free. Once you've convinced yourself that moving to AWS is the right move, based on the teaser rate, they've got you in their jaws. Most of your IT team is gone, most of your on-prem/colo hardware is outdated, and for tax reasons it's better to lease than to purchase capital intensive equipment. But now the low AWS rate is gone, you can't go back, and you'd look like a fool for calling your decision a mistake.
I really like AWS. But I feel like there is a lot of money to be made in consultants overselling services built on it. And a lot of traditionally expensive IT teams are being replaced with even more expensive cloud "architects".
Does the model account for the blatant favouritism in the refs? We used to laugh about it before but as the cameras have gotten better it has become a lot more visible. And in this case, is turning the tournament into a bit of a joke.
It's not at all surprising: the seeded the winners and the three highest ranked teams to make it impossible for them to meet until this stage if they won their group in the group stage, with the group stage having its own seeding system to make it very winnable for them.
They also missed a potentially tricky first knockout round tie against local rivals Uruguay because Uruguay underperformed and Cape Verde unexpectedly overperformed.
It's quite unlikely football is one of the few sports without a doping problem and with only very few cases where the referee was paid off.
Since ancient times in Rome where they said "bread and games" are needed to keep the commoners happy, many generations of rulers had time to optimize large-scale sports events.
My personal theory is that these kind of extremely unfair decisions in football are a net benefit to stability of society, and there's no incentive for the leadership to aim for full fairness in sports.
Hear me out: When a team loses in unfair manner due to bad decisions of the referee, large masses of people feel the psychological pain of being robbed of a win. This feeling of "unfairness" makes the masses more resilient to experiencing "unfairness" in their day-to-day life, for example when a billionaire is not prosecuted in the same way than a common person.
If we turn the logic around and assume that football would always be perfectly fair, then the masses would demand the same kind of fairness also in their day-to-day lives. Obviously this demand for fairness is not aligned with an establishment class that wants to extract the maximum value possible from their citizens, and push as far as they can without risking stability of the country.
From an establishment perspective, it makes a lot of sense to condition the masses for "unfairness", and sports is the perfect way to do it. I'm not saying that the individual referees are paid off to let a certain country win, just that the establishment who runs each country (and thereby also run international sports organizations like FIFA) have no incentive to actually create total fairness.
This might also explain issues like the IOC re-instating russia for olympic games, even though they have not retreated from Ukrainian territory yet. It triggers people who strongly feel about morals and ethics, and it brings the point home that the world is unfair and it makes no sense to push for fairness in the greater context.
The benefit is psychological conditioning for people to accept unfairness.
Probably because the sport is called [association football] of which soccer is one of the short forms (from the British) same as football, and is generally used to distinguish itself in places where other sports from the same football category are prevalent.
FIFA is an association that governs various association football variants including futsal. Using acronym expansion on FIFA as a canonical source for what to call any particular variant of association football would be misguided.
We already have that in the GAO. We also have personnel who's job is to root out fraud: inspector generals. The budget is constantly audited scrutinized for excess and waste, except 2 departments: defense and Medicare. The former is pork for the politicians' home states. The later is so complex it relies on the healthcare industry to help write the rules. And they can't help making sure they get paid the most.
Yes, the GAO exists. But under the current administration, it's basically like a security guard that just sits there and watches crooks do bad shit, reports it, and then nothing happens.
And the Trump administration would similarly hamstring any newly created transparency organization. Not that the current congress would ever pass such a thing. And anyway, the Supreme Court has made sure that even if congress passed a law to make a(nother) government transparency agency, they can't make that agency truly independent and protected from presidential interference.
Creating an executive agency to investigate the executive would be pretty stupid. It'll likely lead to "we've investigated ourselves and found nothing", even if the president wasn't vested in all executive power, as the executive branch consolidates.
However, creating an agency in the legislative branch is another story. One of the duties of the legistive is to investigate the executive, is it not? (not that this matters when both the executive and legislative are controlled by the same party)
> One thing I loved as part of the Creative Cloud subscription was the Creative Cloud Synced Files service. Basically, it was Adobe’s version of DropBox. I used it all the time to share screenshots and samples of in-progress work. Then, in 2023, Adobe announced they’d be discontinuing the service. There was so much pushback that they delayed the service’s retirement for a year. It makes sense, it was a nice feature of the subscription plan and businesses had come to rely on it.
Okay so this pisses me off because our graphic design team was having constant problems with Photoshop being unable to open assets. They were stored on the corporate fileserver. I opened a ticket with Adobe support who informed that they didn't support opening assets directly from a NAS. They only supported local copy and Creative Cloud sync. That was the official line. Solution I came up with was to restart SMB daemon every morning. Which released the lock on the files.
So Adobe went from supporting SMB/AFS file sharing to pushing customers to use their dropbox like sync service. And then abandoning even that to be replaced with...?
Yeah that's the part that doesn't make sense. Like, Adobe, if you want to be a cloud SaaS company, you need to sell SaaS services. It's like Google spelling off their domain services to square space. Makes no sense, but what do I know.
Well the alternative is people do rational things like self emolate, self defenestrate, suicide, and familicide. During the ‘08 financial crisis I was reading horror stories of Spanish debtors topping themselves because financial fuckups in NYC, London, and Madrid caused a problem other people had to pay for.
The NASA Langley stability wind tunnel [0] is now part of Randolph Hall at Virginia Tech. You can visit it in Blacksburg, VA. Beautiful campus, btw. The stability tunnel is the biggest, they also have smaller hypersonic tunnels and
I worked there as a work-study student. Part of the job was wiping down the tunnel chamber after their test runs. The smoke you see used in wind tunnel videos is not actually smoke, but a white oil. And for a FWS job the pay wasn't bad, had to put on a bunny suit and crawl around tight spaces, LOL.
Took that nonsense to Capitol Hill, trying to tell a bunch of politicians who knew damn well they are only there as long as they can keep their voters employed. They could have asked their own AI what happens when employment reaches 40-50%. Hint: it's never good. They were going to become another problem the government had to solve.
Also, UBI is non-starter no matter what Sam Altman believes.
Sam Altman doesn't BELIEVE in UBI - but he knows it's the only way to SELL his product, therefore he pretends he believes in it. None of these guys want one cent going to anyone but themselves.
It won't work because it's unnecessary. If these boneheads are right AI will drive the price of goods down. Price of labor goes down. It's deflationary. UBI is a backstop against inflation. And really just there so that rich people's money is worth something.
UBI can also be a backstop against deflation, can't it? If no one has income, it doesn't matter if bread costs $1 per loaf instead of $3-5 now - no one will be able to afford even $1 eventually, after they've sold their house at a loss, sold their car, sold their laptop, iphone, etc.
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