In olden days of W2K I would just assume malware is everywhere, and while trying to be as clean as possible, I always have some malware and shouldn’t do anything personal with computers that I can’t accept being possibly compromised.

I was a kid, too.

Then that idea that you can be safe has gotten to me, both through switching to Linux and through stupidity.

OK, a bit before that porn and historical military music became too interesting.

So. Malware is everywhere. Some guy from India’s malware is in a browser extension and a Google Play v2ray client, some guy from China’s malware is in an ebook reader, and some government’s malware is in the operating system you use, and some government’s deep state’s malware is in algorithms and protocols, as a backdoor hidden in the open.

Perhaps the Internet is one big compute cluster operated via such, providing free computation for US deep state, who the hell knows.

But even without conspiracy theories - IRL crooks hide traps in far simpler things.

The whole trust that most of what you use doesn’t have backdoors stealing everything possible, that trust is reminiscent of Soviet people literate in the first generation, who blindly trusted everything printed in a typography. Well, the generation having such has naturally left us. I think that will also happen for attitude to working with computers in some 60 years or so.

But they are powerful. Saying that you don’t like it doesn’t change anything.

Those machines are not in the likeness of a human mind anyway.

You are not refusing it by refusing to use it.

Anyway, rejecting tools is luddism.

And resistance to them is something very improbable in public field. One might think they are resisting, but due to all the power they have be in fact directed by convenient trajectories.

Non human soldiers will not got to war. That’s not how war is made.

Wha-ha-ha?.. t.

Almost certainly will. A human soldier is expensive.

Well, say, in VAEs confusion is one of the reasons it even works. I mean, it’s the mathematical confusion and not what we mean in language, but there might be a parallel.

Good and bad. Just like having language standards.

Bad - it’s already been said why.

Good - because uniformity does help understanding each other, and because conversational interfaces are more efficient and less error-prone with less diversity.

There were a few years of war communism during, well, the Civil War, but due to all the hunger deaths it might not be what your usual USSR fan wants to think about.

Your comment only works for those who don’t live in ex-Soviet countries. Because it’s western rose-tinted glasses of how USSR just had problems, but was generally fine.

Distribution of labor, distribution of misery. Both labor and misery are inherent, but ability to change the kinds of labor and misery is what makes our time more like heaven than something in XV century.

Still, sometimes this also seems to be sliding back as it’s harder and harder to control your movement in that stream.

People seek bland fantasies when they are lost (the poor bastard), other people seek some broken solutions when they are lost (the performer), other people use some way of keeping to exist when they are lost (the tech bro), and other people feel how something they do kinda more normal and honest than the previous variants still feels like a cardboard shape of a person (the unnamed underpaid worker).

I just thought that someone should really make a “moderate modern cyberpunk” movie\story out of this. There’s really no need to show brain chips and holographic UIs in that story. The mood will do, something between Neuromancer, Vacuum Flowers and Blade Runner, but around this picture and even without violence.

“Someone should” might be an indication that I should, except I’ve never done writing, for real. Only descriptions of nature. There’s a person who writes plays sometimes. I’m not sure that person wants to have anything in common with me, though.

It’s quite easy to believe you’re talking to an AI bot.

Depends. If that printer were very expensive, the first part could be true, but they could make ink officially rechargeable, something like that.

I’ve started thinking recently about business practices and printing and “Apple printer” jokes, and, well, Apple was making printers in the olden days when I was a baby.

So, they could be making very expensive, but good printers, with no cartridge DRM whatsoever, now.

That would possibly be a good thing, and with such regulations pressing at the opposing business model, could even be a financially good variant.

OK, I think I’m starting to show fanboyish traits. I sort of really liked Apple when I was a kid, but later I started seeing iPhones around and I didn’t like their change from home computers and iPods to that.

It’s a feature.

F2F might help against bots. “From around the world” becomes harder to achieve, though. Almost requires people traveling, making friends and exchanging QR codes offline.

Because a real living person standing before you is about the only way to know.

There are “pissed off, not the same, Jobs wouldn’ta dunit” sentiments for almost every new product by Apple.

So I don’t think anything will change much.

Anyway, this is a return to roots. They were, you know, a mainstream consumer oriented company at some point. With an implicit but almost explicit claim that “we don’t do the crap others do”.

I’m optimistic. It’s quality attacking quantity. We’ve had a personal computer market with quantity winning over quality every damn year since about 2003, and it has been getting worse and worse. If the pendulum is starting to move in the opposite direction, it’s very cool.

And yes, megabytes of RAM are quantity.

But admittedly I’m a couple weeks’ old convert.

So I’ve recently started using a Mac mini, and it’s very good. But I’ll agree that I don’t like Liquid Glass. I’m using, eh, a 1280x1024 dinosaur display over an hdmi-2-vga adapter, so can’t confirm nausea from it, but sore eyes are a thing.

The quote is funny for me, I can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated application, I don’t speak the language of moisture vaporators deflate, and certainly not fast enough.

I know. The hinges are what naturally wears in all kinds of hands with active use. So that’s what matters IMHO. You open and close them, regularly. You don’t regularly strain that plastic while cleaning it, and you don’t regularly drop the thing or press against it. But opening and closing the lid is normal.

Also, yes, ports, which is why MagSafe is actually a cool technology, both less wear and more certain electrical contact. Anyway, I don’t own anything with MagSafe.

Really rugged is about ThinkPads and really-really rugged special laptops the size of a few bricks.

There was “coding” with diagrams and such, like Scratch but for serious people.

Yep. Genesys IRD is kinda good (well-tested), Genesys Composer I hate, and recent cloud Genesys workflows are not usable for anything but demos without pain.