If we get a breakthrough moment with quantum, the machines will not be evenly distributed to start with. They will be too expensive to build, power and cool unless you’re a fortune 500 exactly like LLMs right now (aside from small models like llama that can run on consumer hardware). At the moment quantum computers rely on superconductors that have to be cooled near absolute zero which is… somewhat expensive to achieve.

Unlike LLMs (oh no I can’t talk to waifu without cell coverage waah) Not being able to run quantum algorithms on your phone in this scenario would be bad. It either means your personal comms are, for all intents and purposes decryptable by those who control the quantum machines or that you’ll have to pay rent to the people who control quantum machines to have them encrypt and decrypt stuff for you. Of course you’ll have to trust them too. Also, given governments thirst for spying on our encrypted comms, it’s possible that quantum machines are heavily regulated allowing “the good guys” a back door into our chats without giving “the baddies” a way to encrypt their comms

Everyone knows Franz Ferdinand, the indie rock band from Glasgow. Their 2004 hit “take me out” is definitely historical /s

Presumably it’s selling snake oil and convincing people to trust them?

In the United Kingdom yes because of our authoritarian Online Safety Act that came into power earlier this year. If I join a discord channel marked as nsfw I get a prompt for id which I bypass with a VPN in another country.

The issue with this is that like 95% of android devices run android with gapps and re-imaging your phone is becoming increasingly more difficult as manufacturers lock down their bootloaders. Normies who aren’t technical are not gonna want to mess with that shit. I’m not saying this to instill hopelessness but highlighting that it’s a challenge.

For censorship circumvention, mainstream tech is gonna continue to be increasingly useless. We need to educate people about these matters and also try to encourage people to lean heavily into decentralised comms like lora/meshtastic

They’re banning non google-drmed app installs

Same take my friend. I agree - Tim’s personal politics are kinda irrelevant in this context. Best for apple=compliance with whoever is in charge so they get to keep their money printer. Corpos gonna corpo

You’re giving apple too much credit. Tim Apple literally gifted trump a golden statue. The press are reporting that this is directly in response to a request from the DOJ. This isn’t apple having a moral epiphany and thinking they’re doing ice targets a favour. Corporations don’t do that sort of thing unless it will make them $$$

Needs more jpeg

That’s cool! Can you recommend any resources on this? I’ve thought a lot about this sort of thing. I’m guessing semiconductor fabrication requires a lot of complex upstream tasks and isn’t the sort of thing that’s feasible at home. Would love to be wrong!

My Gmail account is old enough to buy drinks in a bar in the US (21)

Eurgh I’m not sure whether it’s worse if he earnestly believes this crap or he’s cynically and smartly playing the game. The only loser here is the human race.

He’s saying it because he is trying to force a reaction from his evangelical republican pals. Either he wants to warn them off AI regulation because that would end the world or (the more likely option I think) he wants the accelerationist bastards to go full steam ahead and regulate because they want the end of the world and he wants to “pull up the ladder” on new emerging competing AI companies.

Not sure when exactly but some banking apps in the UK refuse to run if they detect developer mode is enabled and, given the general trend towards locking everything down, I expect many other mainstream apps to enforce these checks at some point.

I guess one could run two phones, an official phone for banking etc and another one with dev mode for pissing around but these rules will reduce the number of people who install unverified apps to a very small number

Yes they are, for all intents and purposes, making it impossible to turn off advanced protection. The only way to install unverified apps will be via developer mode and if you turn that on a bunch of apps refuse to run until you turn it back off

At the lower end of the budget you could consider libreboot - it’s a one person band who ships refurbished Lenovo thinkpads with Linux pre-installed

In the UK we already have a law where isps block porn by default (blacklisting) the adult who took out the plan can contact the isp and ask them to opt out of these blocks. That’s been a thing for about 10 years. You can own a Pay-as-you-go sim as a minor but you have to send government id to prove you are over 18 to get the adult content filtering turned off.

That’s one of the things that made it clear to me that the new law is an authoritarian data mining operation and blatant power grab. Like… We already have these tools in place. If you don’t want your kid accessing porn, don’t opt out of the filters provided by your isp.

You could argue that putting the onus on the platform is more effective at “protecting kids” than having the isps maintain blacklists but there will always be small sites that don’t comply and enterprising kids who find a way around any block. Just like the law requires you to be 18 to buy alcohol or tobacco here but there are always dodgy shops who sell tobacco to underage kids. There are older siblings and relatives willing to buy cigarettes and alcohol for underage teens.

This was never about protecting the children. That was the Trojan horse used to justify these laws to the technically uninformed.

We don’t have geforce experience on Linux (afaik). Ubuntu has a built in “proprietary drivers” app that just pulls the Nvidia drivers for you on first boot after install. Very low effort (on the happy path at least. If you use unsupported/brand new cards, you’re probably going to have a much less fun time)

I can’t imagine any sane person who lives their life guided by marketing hype instead of direct knowledge and experience.

I mean fair enough but also… That makes the vast majority of managers, MBAs, salespeople and “normies” like your grandma and Uncle Bob insane.

Actually questioning stuff that sales people tell you and using critical thinking is a pretty rare skill in this day and age.