We need to keep our surveillance of the surveillance state broad. There’s a lot of focus on Flock right now (rightfully so), but they are merely a single player in the privatized surveillance state architecture.
Palantir, Anduril, telcos, and more are contributing to the erosion of our privacy.
It’s been 2 decades since we learned about the secret NSA room at AT&T. 13 years since the Snowden revelations. This is not new and we need to be vigilant.
Sad, isn’t it? I saw this coming many years ago, as I’m sure many of you did. We create so much metadata in our lives, both physically and digitally evident, that our past and future behaviors can be observed at a level of detail only previously imagined in dystopian fiction.
We learned about the government’s domestic surveillance programs from Snowden over 13 years ago.
About ten years ago, I learned about fiber optic and WiFi sensing techniques that would make the hair stand up on the back of most people’s necks.
14 years ago, stories were written about a pregnant teen whose parents were sent coupons from Target for baby items, because Target had automatically marked the girl as pregnant because of her shopping habits.
Computers, vehicles, and software that we pay for have so many built in tracking mechanisms that I think circumventing them would make you more of a surveillance target at this point than not.
I know people try to rationalize the whole “I said something near my phone and Facebook gave me ad impressions for it” as simply the algorithm finding a strong signal in your browsing data, but I’m fully convinced that Meta apps are listening on iOS, even with the screen locked.
Those who enable these sorts of things should feel shame. You’d have to be a complete asshole to do this stuff to fellow humans just for money.
I think most of us who have lived through many presidents understood that there was a decency required of the holder of the office that acted as the only true limit on their corruption. It's confounding that so many people in the US can't see it for what it is.
Nah. They're all rotten to the core, just in different ways.
The key difference between xAI and Anthropic/OAI/Google is that xAI has the least-likely path to existing as viable business in a decade.
That said, the economics of the entire AI industry are kinda made up at this point, so who really knows; it's quite possible that the players with the best odds of surviving the crash are those that can draw funding from their parent company's other businesses.
>The key difference between xAI and Anthropic/OAI/Google is that xAI has the least-likely path to existing as viable business in a decade.
I don't know, renting out a fleet of GPUs at annualized rate of ~100% of the capex deployed to obtain said GPUs seems reasonably better than lighting hundreds of billions of dollars on fire in order to earn tens of billions of dollars.
They're not filling datacenters with 3090s. With the amount of headache and the amount of infrastructure needed to support those beasts, do they even have a resale price at all? Or just scrap value?
Wasn't thinking of H100s either. I spoke of infrastructure support, and I was being literal. A herd of GB200s needs a building built to stringent specifications to house them.
David was a good vs evil with an order of magnitude fewer resources on the good side. XAi is evil vs evil with comparable resources on each side. Now this is where I know you’re MAGA because as I’ve said a million times you guys don’t do fair comparisons.
Will concede that, if you can get from "there is no proof of not-god" to supporting any claim about the nature of reality according to faith or scripture.
I have a camera, on my phone. I just want to be able to sync my pictures and videos to my own device, not cloud storage. This is becoming especially prudent in these times of nearly monthly major breaches exposing personal data stored in the cloud, as well as companies deciding to change their terms of service and use your data for purposes you might not want it used for.
apple doesn't allow for that. They support their own solution, suppress what they don't like (music syncing) and actively interfere with other solutions, even some they wrote long ago.
non-icloud reminds me of the jackling house
> In 1984 Steve Jobs purchased the Jackling House and estate, and resided there for a decade. After that, he leased it out for several years until 2000 when he stopped maintaining the house, allowing exposure to the weather to degrade it.
You can do some of it with image capture/files to read raw DCIM stuff, carddav/caldav, but that stuff may or may not work.
This is a problem I have yet to see schools tackle. A kid in junior high school has no mental context for the Russian Revolution of 1917, for instance. Having them read Animal Farm is a pointless waste of time.
Poor choice. Animal Farm is way, way more than an allegory of one historical event. It's a broadbrush statement on the kind of people likely to seize power at every opportunity (or if you prefer, the effect unrestrained power has on most people), and a humorous jab at authoritarianism.
The other books mentioned (Gatsby et al.) really require context, but literal pigs sitting down to dinner with powerbrokers is something a 14yo can grasp.
Same with things like (picking at random) The Great Gatsby and a lot of literature having to do with adult relationships and romance. How on earth is a 16-year-old in 2025 going to understand what's happening in Gatsby? I read it, wrote some papers and got As on them, but didn't really make sense of it at the time.
In addition to being a short classic, I think teens could identify with Gatsby being obsessed with getting the approval of people who have nothing but contempt for him. There's a devastating scene at the end where the narrator, Nick Carraway, organizes a funeral for Gatsby and literally none of his friends show up. I think that might resonate deeply for more than a few teen readers.
The Great Gatsby is an Americanized version of a Greek tragedy, I don't think it's too hard for a 16 year old to understand. It's no "Rabbit, Run", at least.
That's more a commentary on 2025 than 16 year olds I assure you. In the 90s adult relationships weren't particularly mysterious to your average 16 year old.
I mean you leave with whatever take suits you but don't expect buyin for some revisionist narrative that casts 90s era 16 year olds as infantilized incompetents. I'd like to point out that the majority of kids that age at that time had cars, jobs to support said, and relationships of their own of varying levels of "adult"-ness.
Palantir, Anduril, telcos, and more are contributing to the erosion of our privacy.
It’s been 2 decades since we learned about the secret NSA room at AT&T. 13 years since the Snowden revelations. This is not new and we need to be vigilant.
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