Generally speaking for routers, if you can get it at Best Buy, it is of poor quality, and if you can’t, it requires more expertise to use than most people have.

The quality of the router is not the biggest problem, though. Many routers now phone home and require you to provision them through the company portal, which strongly indicates they’ve got a back door to your traffic if they want it, and if you read their ToS, they give themselves permission to use it.

I’m not suggesting they’re hacking you or doing identity theft, but they are looking over your shoulder for things they can learn about you to make money, and in the future, they could potentially make money by collecting government bounties, since they’ll know who millions of people are and where they live.

Its really, really big and populous, and also ethnically, culturally, and socially diverse. I think those combined factors lead to California passing more volume and variety of laws than any of the other American states.

Many of the laws they pass are regulation on business and consumer protection in excess of those provided by the federal government, but the socially progressive side of politics has its villains, too. Their villainy comes in the form of forced trading of freedom for security–outlawing activities that are dangerous to you, or banning objects and knowledge that have the potential to harm you or others even if they have other practical uses.

Its the main reason why it is risky to fight for the victory of one’s own political “team” without further consideration. It is easy for people interested in the public good to be overzealous in enforcement of public safety.

It’s hard to get broad agreement on where to draw that line. For example, I tend to lean in the “natural law” direction, where I think you should be allowed to have and do almost anything you want, so long as it doesn’t materially harm anyone else, even indirectly. Most other people, even on the left, find that relatively extreme and believe in more personal regulation in the name of increased public safety. For example, most Democrats support moderate to strict restrictions on personal firearm, chemical, and encryption ownership, rather than banning the illegal uses of those things themselves. It is more dangerous for people to be able to be able to get dangerous stuff, so it makes sense people would have a lot of differing opinions on where to settle between “Mad Max” and “Minority Report”.

I do think that some projects will fare better than others, particularly ones like you mentioned, where the team is robust and capable of handling the filtering of increased submissions from these new sources.

I believe we are going to end up having to see some new mechanism for project submissions to deal with the growing imbalance between submission volume and work hours available for review, as became necessary when viruses, malware, and spam first came into being. It has quickly become incredibly easy for anyone to make a PR, but not at all easier to review them, so something is going to have to give in the FOSS world.

It is their problem until the second they submit it, then it is the project’s problem. You can lay the blame for the bad actions wherever you want, but the reality is that the work of verifying the legality and validity of these submissions if being abdicated, crippling projects under increased workloads going through ever more submissions that amount to junk.

What is the solution for that? The fact that is the fault of the lazy submitter doesn’t clean up the mess they left.

Sure, but if they can be demonstrated to ever plagiarize without attribution, and the default user behavior is to pencil-whip the output, which it is, then it becomes statistically certain that users are unwittingly plagiarizing other works.

Its like using a tool that usually bakes cookies, but every once in a great while, it knocks over the building its in. It almost never does that, though.

There’s the rub. When establishing laws and guidelines, every term must be explicitly defined. Lack of specificity in these definitions is where bad-faith actors hide their misdeeds by technically obeying the letter of the law due to its vagueness, while flagrantly violating its spirit.

Its why today, in the USA, corporations are legally people when its convenient, and not when its not, and the expenditure of money is governments protected “free speech”.

But now, even the person submitting the license-breaching content may be unaware that they are doing that, so the problem is surely worse now that contributors can easily unwittingly be on the wrong side of the law.

I don’t remember having heard any practical solutions to the problem so far. They work best on real data, but they rapidly grew to the point where they are generating dramatically more artificial data than humans are generating real data, so they have hopelessly polluted their own well.

Its a very difficult problem to deal with no obvious solutions that are at all cheap, easy, or even feasible, so someone’s going to have a really, really smart idea for them to get over that hurdle. Add on to that the fact the types of AIs most impacted by his problem, the LLMs, are the ones that are currently the most heavily subsidized by venture capital. So, not only are they facing increasing technical hurdles, they are about to get increasingly expensive to operate at the same time as the seed funding is used up and they have to switch to a revenue-positive business model.

I don’t think the technological limitations are what are making those AR goggles get poor reception. They face a couple of non-technological hurdles that I think are going to be nearly impossible for them to overcome:

• People don’t like strangers pointing cameras in their face to the point where they may even be brought to violence about it, so using these in public settings will continue to be isolating and potentially even dangerous.
• The companies making things like this are too big to be capable of making a good product ecosystem. It has been an inescapable trend for over a decade+ now that these mega corps have stopped being able to make anything without too much monetization to be good anymore, so adoption is lukewarm, and they kill off everything new after a few years. They are surviving on things they made before that time that they have not managed to mess up all the way yet.

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Its Nintendo. They were already suing them before they even knew about the ad. Most lawyers are familiar with the old “cease and desist” letter method, but Nintendo’s even got “don’t even start” warnings from their legal department.

Good? No.

I think it is telling about Signal, though, that despite being in a privacy-unfriendly jurisdiction, federal authorities can only extract data from it when its users mess up.

I don’t think you’ll get much better until some of these other services mature more. Some of them seem painted into a corner where improving them further seems to involve rewriting big sections of them, like Matrix, so I am less optimistic about those.

I think they will definitely stop when their insolvency catches up to them and they can’t pay anyone to wage the war or make the war machines.

The US is already being effectively retaliated against economically, it is just not abrupt and flashy. As the USA’s global financial power continues to wane, so does their global hegemony. I shudder to think what will rise in its place, but it will have a hard time being worse.

I think you might be surprised. Generative AI has limited utility and costs a lot to operate; so much, in fact that t does not appear there are enough natural resources on the planet we’re on to ramp it up to the scale that is intended. Soon, the hype-based funding will dry up, and the free and subsidized generative AI tokens will all disappear. Only then will we see the true cost of using it and if users will bear that cost. If it costs a lot of money to ask it to do things, people will go back to doing a lot of those things themselves.

Agreed. They run on dump drucks of burning VC capital. I don’t see how LLMs stick around in any meaningful way when the dump trucks stop pulling up.

That’s entirely the fault of the TV cartel. If they could get their collective act together, these TV add-on modules would have gotten off the ground.

You could have a TV monitor with a couple of empty sockets on it to put a streaming module or NTSC antenna card or DirecTV card or whatever.

Consider that things are the way they are because the involved companies are short-sighted, collusive, and uncooperative on standards, and the fact you need cable spaghetti and half a dozen remotes is due to a lack of consumer protections, not a lack of bells and whistles in your TV.

I don’t really agree that is conceptually okay. TVs and computers have drastically different life cycles. That TV will still be kicking probably a decade after the internal Smart TV computer is uselessly underpowered. This same problem is arguably even worse with cars.