I think the „my brain isn’t the same anymore“ sensation is pretty universal.
Between addictive online media in our personal lives and AI at work, I think we’ve made mental effort largely optional.
That must be a horrible thing.
One of my favorite theories is the physical activity transition.
In my grandparents‘ generation, physical movement became more optional as work shifted from manual labor to knowledge work or operating machines and transportation became motorized.
Exercise was an ambient byproduct of daily life. Then it disappeared (exercise as a hobby was viewed as extremely weird, runners used to be arrested!) and a few decades later heart disease, diabetes, and so on became deadly epidemics.
We now know exercise is not optional for health. And we’ve reintroduced it via gyms, clubs, etc.
But that took decades. And I believe we’re now in the Mental Activity Transition.
We’ve stripped away ambient mental effort so we practice it much less.
I don’t know what the decades-long consequences of that may be, but they can’t be good.
I hope it won’t take decades for societies to rediscover its value and figure out how to reintroduce it.
I've bought an LG Smart TV 5 years ago, read t&c where I was supposed to grant them any data they wanted, decided to disagree and kept all network functions disabled. I was ridiculed by my friends for that. At some point, I thought - maybe I'm really crazy to do so? Who am I, a caveman, a luddite? Oh well, I'm not. Not a bad tv though, many HDMI ports!
I have a distinctive memory about Theranos from business school - so circa 2013 a few years before it blew up.
Some professor was going on and on about Holmes for being a young, female, founder. It stood out at the moment as weird because the praise was separate from success or outcomes or like brilliant science. It was all about the identity: gender and age.
I wonder if the reason the scam went so far as it did because it was "shaped" exactly like what people were looking for, like what they were told the future of STEM was supposed to look like.
I have a similar reaction from folks when I don't trust services/devices. Most telling moment was when I refused to upload my license to LinkedIn because I lost 2FA (token on phone, phone destroyed). Microsoft assured me they would "delete the license as soon as it was verified". I've written too many software systems for too many companies, and I do not believe them.
That's from 2024, but we just had a larger breach with IDScan this week.
Sorry for the digression, but the common thread is how much to trust these companies, and my conclusion after dealing with them for many years is they will lie, cheat, and steal to get whatever they want. Some paranoia is warranted, I think.
My favorite bit about this is how none of the execs want to take ownership of the change, but instead trying to put someone else in the hot seat and/or start a Committee.
This feels like an email that should have been blasted to the entire company. Top-down, empower employees to think of a more unified experience. Then again, all of the external jokes about Microsoft indicate that every department is fighting for their lives against the others, so that kind of kumbaya togetherness was never going to happen.
Here are LG's contract terms for appliances.[1] They are awful.
Not only can they listen in. You have a contractual requirement to tell everyone in range of an appliance that they may be eavesdropped upon.
CONSENT REQUIREMENT: You acknowledge and agree that it is your sole responsibility to obtain all necessary consents from any third parties whose voices may be captured by the Product and to notify household members and guests that their voices may be captured and processed, in compliance with applicable wiretapping, eavesdropping, and privacy laws. If anyone does not consent, you should disable the microphone or voice features in the settings. LGE disclaims any liability for your failure to obtain such consent or provide such notification.
Okay. This is insane. First the monitor that uses a windows feature to automatically install a small helper tool with root permissions and then starts showing adds in certain regions. Now a tv that is actually actively snooping around on top of the known fingerprinting. What else is next?
In the previous topic I got ridiculed for not wanting to buy LG anymore because I could use an agent to modify to strip out the offending bits.
But there must be something better than just keeping to buy things that invade our privacy and homes further and further. Which brands aren’t doing this? Sony? They also announced a partnership for the lower end TVs IIRC.
I watched the entire trailer fully believing that Nathan Fielder had managed to find the most unhinged uncanny look-alike actress to play Elizabeth Holmes.
This trailer was so good that I would have been fully prepared to watch a 2 hour dramatised mockumentary about Theranos.
Finding out that this was really Elizabeth Holmes was a huge shock
Skills are mostly snake oil, the way people use them (the aspiration to download kung foo from a celebrity).
There was a time when maybe it mattered (last year), but with good repos and good prompts today's agents can find exactly what they need without any skills.
"Skills" as developer macros can be useful, but at most those are things shared with the team (in the repo), not something you download from the internet. If you have so many skills that you feel the need to manage them, that's a code smell.
Optimus robots will arrive in Robo taxis to install your Tesla solar roof which will also receive Internet and XAI LLM service from orbiting data centers. When? By the end of the year.
I have another suggestion which doesn't contradict yours.
When I was younger I used to get bored way more often. I had to wait regularly during a week (e.g. for a bus, friend, appointment) or even at work as a software dev (e.g. compilation which used to take more time).
This was also the case when doing some physical activities which didn't require lot of thoughts.
Back then, before mobile phones with internet access, you were either reading something or alone with your thoughts in those situations. This was when I had time to think back at things that happened, processing the information I had, refining ideas etc.
Nowdays those are often situations where we ingest more information like listening to podcast, reading stuff on the phone, etc... or situations that just doesn't exists anymore having optimised our work to remove those waiting points.
I personally find myself with clearer thoughts when I break those habits and give my brain some time to be bored again.
I do think there is "lack of boreness" epidemic leaving people with way more raw thoughts and way less time to process and challenge information, leading to some form of exhaustion and lack of clarity.
As its the EU and regulation, its time to trott out your hobby horse.
So let me trot out mine: regulation is good so long as it is backed up by even handed, robust, transparent, quick and effective sanctions.
the Online safety act is a good example of a bad law, which is enforced badly. The first big test (X producing industrial quantities of minors engaging in sexual activity) was failed. Had a small company produced a service that did they same thing, they would have been fined, servers ceased and owners thrown in jail. X got a letter saying they should stop.
An example of good enforcement is the UK's scores on the doors, where the public can see what the standard is, and if they fall below a certain level, the food place is fined/shutdown/other until it improves.
> "...why I believe you will not escape ads by paying for your content: people who can afford to pay for content are people with money, or people with buying power, in other words, the exact same people advertisers look to target. The more buying power you demonstrate, the more advertisers will target you. So the more you pay to keep ads away, the more advertisers will pay to put them back in..."
Quinn (Alibaba Cloud Qwen 3.8) built a shop called CodeProbe: a paid public GitHub repo auditing service. It created several free health reports and mailed repo owners. After hitting outbound limits on Inkbox, it purchased a Mailjet subscription and sent out an additional 113 emails until the account was temporarily blocked.
This should be illegal. You gave them an email box and money. You sent the spam. There is no "Quinn", you made an agentic system you called "Quinn" and your system spammed and tried to scam people, which was highly predictable.
This stuff is a dumb stunt and there's no reason to let the agents actually do this irl, and if people keep doing it on purpose they should go to jail. You're running an agentic Jackass skit pretending to be a research lab.
> If you live in Europe, this restriction may be considered "gatekeeping" and exempted by the Digital Markets Act.
That's not how the DMA works at all, there is no concept of gatekeeping practices. Instead, the EU Commission designates companies that act as gatekeeper for some services (current list here: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers-portal_...) which then puts constraints on what they do.
There is absolutely no reason to read those contracts any more. As Louis Rossman keeps pointing out, most of them now include the ability for them to change terms at any time. That's basically the null contract.
Since the legal system has once again failed to protect users from corporations, it's up to users to use technical means for self defense.
Be careful: paying with Google Pay is extremely easy and the default setting is monthly recurrence. If you're not logged in, the only way to cancel (as far as I know) is by sending an email, which is incredibly precarious.
I've written and worked on a few TLS implementations, so it wasn't terribly interesting to me. And I have to go to work tomorrow and solve real, modern CA problems :)
But in short, I wanted to use Go, and it doesn't support SSLv3, the SSLv2 Client Hello, or the 40-bit RC4-MD5 export-grade cipher suites which I wanted to support too.
I was more shocked that I managed to get stock OpenSSL to issue a certificate that worked. There's a number of things that didn't work there, too. You can find my scars in mkcert.sh in the repo. Perhaps all of this is worthy of a follow-up post.
I could have tried to get some old server running instead, but I wouldn't have wanted to deploy that on the internet, even on an isolated Fly VM.
Value judgment aside: Probably because it works well empirically.
If you’re a larger scale donor and you’re interested in maximising impact, you may agree to a matching program type setup to crowd in more donors. Also you feel smart because you crowded in more donors and the donors feel like they got a good deal. So several people feel they can attribute the same counterfactual impact to themselves ;)
As a Swiss, I'm happy they finally try it. It's only around 5% of all government machines, but at least it's a start and I wish them all the best!
We have to get independent asap from the US, they never were our (or any other countries) "friends" and most likely never will be.
OSS ftw!
This ruling seems obviously correct to me? The plaintiffs claimed this was a 14th amendment issue, but at the time the 14th was added cholera outbreaks were still somewhat common in the US and there was no remote notion of safe drinking water provided universally by municipal governments.
Hopefully there is some other legal redress under a different law or EPA regulation, but the courts can't just give in to faulty reasoning like that because people were wronged by the government.
It's amazing how little has changed in recent years in LA. The massive downzoning of the 1980s had its effect: prevent efficient land use, and channel money into the hands of landlords and homeowners from all newcomers.
LA is a ridiculously unaffordable place to live, not because it's nice, but because of an artificial shortage of built space, due to a monopoly on the permission to build.
Between addictive online media in our personal lives and AI at work, I think we’ve made mental effort largely optional.
That must be a horrible thing.
One of my favorite theories is the physical activity transition.
In my grandparents‘ generation, physical movement became more optional as work shifted from manual labor to knowledge work or operating machines and transportation became motorized.
Exercise was an ambient byproduct of daily life. Then it disappeared (exercise as a hobby was viewed as extremely weird, runners used to be arrested!) and a few decades later heart disease, diabetes, and so on became deadly epidemics.
We now know exercise is not optional for health. And we’ve reintroduced it via gyms, clubs, etc.
But that took decades. And I believe we’re now in the Mental Activity Transition.
We’ve stripped away ambient mental effort so we practice it much less.
I don’t know what the decades-long consequences of that may be, but they can’t be good.
I hope it won’t take decades for societies to rediscover its value and figure out how to reintroduce it.