It absolutely is possible to detect and that’s not an urban legend. While it’s theoretically possible to build a totally passive signal receiver, it’s not realistically how any kind of contemporary receiver will actually work. It will broadcast signals that are detectable and with the right knowledge and intuition about how that signal is getting produced can quite conclusively indicate all sorts of things you’d think would be totally private. CRT TVs in particular are well-known for absolutely blasting out electronic signals of all kinds as they seek, process, and display the image. There are many ways to detect not only that they simply exist and are turned on, but also what station they are tuned to and potentially even what’s on the screen without even being tuned to any over-the-air station.

It is even possible to detect what a car radio is tuned to, and it is in fact so possible there are even billboards and advertising companies that actually do this, roadside. For advertising, naturally. This is not new technology either. It has been known about for a long time.

We assume all these things are secure and not getting spied on because they ought to be, in an ideal world, but the reality is far from ideal and security through wishful thinking and obscurity is not security at all. The same kind of wishful thinking and obscurity on the other hand is an absolute playground for people want to detect and spy on things. Obscure tricks like this are widespread and it’s impossible to hide from what you don’t know about. Real security is hard work with diminishing returns, and perfect security is almost certainly unattainable.

And unless you think this kind of obscure observational trickery is limited to spying on us poor ignorant peasants, there was a report just recently that found a significant chunk of space-to-earth communication (including some military communications) is basically plaintext and being broadcast to everyone and anyone who knows where to look. Oops.

You can’t stop the signal, Mal. (Unless you build a Faraday cage, at least)

Replace CEOs with AI. They will be just as crazy and incompetent, but we can pay them a lot less.

In case anyone is misunderstanding, they explicitly say this is not a new phone or piece of hardware at all, it is simply a project (and for now, more of an investigation than a project creating actual deliverables) into the scale and scope of closed source binary blobs being used on phones, so they can start work to address them.

It’s an important and necessary project, and I support the FSF in most of the things they do, but if you’re picturing them riding heroically to the rescue by Christmas with a new phone-of-freedom they’re going to sell to you, it’s a very very VERY long way from that.

Librewolf. You’re welcome.

Some are genuine and trustworthy, but finding them is a needle in a haystack and Youtube will rarely lead you directly to them (because of course, it’s not in their interest to do so). Others are at least transparent when they’re being marketing tools. The ones that try to hide it and pretend to be “organic” when they’re shilling trash are the worst.

I block freely. My time and attention and mental and emotional bandwidth are limited resources, and to the extent possible I intend to spend them carefully.

Nice choice, but personally I always found Terra a bit hard to relate to, very fey and even sort of creepy in her half-Esper form.

Celes, on the other hand, is a bonafide badass, and her storyline was among the better developed ones and more humanizing than most of the other characters in the game. Although romantically I think she could probably do better than Locke. That boy needs some help.

Yes, the famous communist fascist. His name is Stalin. You’ve probably heard of him.

In a world gone mad, you have to be insane to stay sane.

I think that’s overly optimistic. I sure hope the bubble bursts soon so tech giants will stop spending countless billions raping the environment and forcing it down our throats. But the tech is out there now, and it’s a panacea for spammers, scammers, propagandists, and anyone who wants to subtly manipulate people or push an ideology on a massive scale. It’s going to keep being tweaked and adjusted to keep it at least somewhat undetectable on some level, just like spammers have always done, as long as they can still push some of their slop through the filters. The bubble may burst, but the tech is not going away. Even if we outlawed it, that just means only the outlaws will keep using it. And they absolutely will, because the randomness and hallucinations don’t bother them. In fact it’s not even really much different from the tools they have already used to avoid anti-spam and anti-bot filters. Accuracy is not their goal. The barest hint of believability combined with sheer, overwhelming quantity are their goal. And Generative AI is perfect for that goal.

The pearls I am metaphorically referring to in this case refer to examples of genuine human content, whether that is an intelligent thought, a creative flourish, or a call for emotional connection. These still exist, there are still billions of humans on the planet with largely the same minds and the same needs that they have always had. But the way things are going they will be increasingly buried in increasingly harder to distinguish slop, disconnected from each other as the signal to noise ratio becomes progressively lower.

Almost all distant future hard sci-fi settings have banned or severely limited AGI, sometimes proactively, often making it among the highest universally recognized crimes, sometimes after a war, or sometimes unsuccessfully (in which case the story’s going to be about regretting it). Either way, if fiction authors can reliably figure out the inevitable plot line the technology follows, perhaps we will too, eventually.

AI will create jobs, millions of jobs, for intelligent people to sift through the AI slop searching for pearls. It will become harder every year, so they will always need more people to do it. It’s unclear what happens when the AI slop outpaces humanity’s ability to filter it. I guess we can call it “the technological singularity nobody wanted”.

I hear you, and I’m not criticizing you, I’m just pointing out that the hollywood stars aren’t the ones we need to worry about, the whole premise is invalid. Hollywood stars will be fine, of course. It’s everyone else who won’t be.

Assuming every actor gets paid millions is no different than assuming every person who works downtown is a CEO.

AI is not going to replace the CEOs or the A-list actors. It’s going to replace the forgettable workers at the bottom of the staircase, the ones people don’t even bother to imagine, so they can pay the A-listers extra. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. That’s how this economy works, always has.

It’s called a seedbox. Most of the ones I’ve seen support wireguard in some way, but sometimes it’s not part of the basic package.

Free speech issues are not relevant because it’s a private company. Free speech is about limiting the government’s ability to control speech, companies are always free to do so for their own reasons on their own platforms. While that can be problematic when you don’t know whether the government is leaning on the companies behind the scenes, what the first amendment is really written to prevent is the overt fascist gestapo tactics the Trump administration is now using to bully their critics.

It is important to understand the constitution and why it was written, so people can act accordingly. It’s especially important when the government is not acting accordingly.

I am not a fan of platformers and puzzles, in general, and am not too interested in this concept specifically. But I may end up buying it out of spite for hateful people. I also suggest taking a peek at their previous game Semblance which, although also a platformer, looks genuinely sort of novel to me (granted, as I said, I am not a fan of platformers in general so maybe it is in fact not unique at all). Feel free to take my thoughts with a large grain of salt, this is not really my area of expertise.

The moment Trump says any sort of number the event should just end, return to your regularly scheduled programming, no need for any further attention because you know for a fact that everything he says past that point is complete fiction without a shred of usefulness to anybody.

No one’s going to convince me that an accurate numerical figure has ever passed through that man’s lips, and if it did, it was a cosmic accident.

True, that’s what I was trying to imply when I said it’s necessary to progress. I suppose someone could maybe devise a mod to provide evidence to the contrary, but I’m pretty sure the starter deck pool simply wouldn’t have enough scaling to survive at higher ascension levels.

That said, I would absolutely love some kind of mechanic that allows you to control the contents of the overall pool to some limited degree as well. (Too much freedom would essentially trivialize the game and I’m not sure if there’s any mechanic that would provide effective counterplay to a literally stacked deck)

Absolutely. The reason for this is that as you get to understand the mechanics more you’ll naturally start adopting higher risk play which provides access to higher potential rewards, and that is in some ways necessary to progress, and also really incredibly satisfying when it pays off. But the risks will bite you more often, which then feels like you’re just “being worse at the game”. The progression and scaling mechanics of games like these basically force you to adopt riskier strategies to overcome the challenges that higher levels of play bring.

The really experienced high level players do a very delicate balancing act of min/maxing to do get the absolute most they can out of the minimum level of risk they need to realistically have a sensible chance of success. Finding that sweet spot in the ocean of randomness is the real skill, and people will all have their own different sweet spot of risk vs reward, but in almost all cases there will always be a significant risk of losing because that’s just how the game is balanced especially for higher level play. Luck and trying to make perfect decisions with imperfect information are always a factor.