Consciousness is something completely different. It’s what makes you fully feel the present moment. It’s the fact of feeling alive. So it has nothing to do with the ability to crunch numbers or stitch words together into a logical sequence.

And there’s one fact you can’t get around. Consciousness, in every case observed since we started studying it, only ever appears on biological substrate. Never on non-living matter. Never on stone, never on metal and never on silicon. So it’s a fact that looks an awful lot like a law of nature.

This bit strikes me as odd. It suggests we’ve done experiments to check whether consciousness ever occurs in non-biological systems, and concluded that wherever we find consciousness it’s in a loving organism. But has anyone done such an experiment? Could they? Do we understand well enough what consciousness is, what it is for it to be present in an entity, and how to test for that empirically, that we can simply do experiments to test when it occurs and draw conclusions about laws of nature involving it?

You can’t do an experiment until you can say, to a good enough approximation, what you’re looking for and how you’ll tell whether it occurs or not. I doubt we even have a clear enough notion of consciousness to agree on what we’re talking about, let alone how to test whether it’s present, to do empirical experiments and draw lawlike conclusions. And it’s not that we just need to get a bit clearer about the kind of entity consciousness is: it’s not even clear that it is an entity in the empirical world.

Right now if you use encryption the authorities have no proof you’re doing something illegal, because you might not be. But if they make (secure) encryption itself illegal, then anyone they aren’t sure about suddenly becomes a criminal they’re sure about. Then it’s just a matter of selectively prosecuting those whom they most dislike. So it doesn’t matter to them that much whether lots of people find a technical workaround. If they can’t read your messages that’s all they need to be able to silence you if you’re inconvenient.

They won’t understand. 33% of Americans will swallow whatever incoherent excuses he pulls out of his ass on the day. 33% will object. 33% won’t be paying attention.

One calendar year, 10 lived years.

Sure, you may be able to buy a cheaper motherboard for a while. But you’ll pay through the nose to populate it, hence the falling motherboard sales.

There’s going to be a lot of us running 2019-vintage PCs indefinitely.

That’s quite a big downside for a phone.

Casio digital watches.

If only the prices were not so 2026y.

Everyone’s shit sometimes (and some people often), which is why you always need non-shitty processes to preempt and/or catch the mistakes.

It’s never just the developer that’s the problem. There should be a system in place to catch obvious bugs like this before they get anywhere near production. So there’s something not right in the company’s review and testing practices. And a bug like this, if it does sneak through, should be fixed very quickly. This has been up for a while so again there’s a problem with the company’s processes.

VPS hosting doesn’t allow you to pretend to be in other countries to view their TV or sites that are censored in your country (unless you pay again for a VPS in each country). So it won’t replace everything commercial VPNs do.

“The claim that WhatsApp can access people’s encrypted communications is patently false,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said. He added that the bureau had already “disavowed this purported investigation, calling its own employee’s allegations unsubstantiated.”

I can’t help but notice that in response to people’s concern that Meta may be able to read people’s messages, the Meta spokesperson responds that WhatsApp can’t read them. A little bit of administrative juggling on Meta’s end so that the team with access to the messages doesn’t fall within the WhatsApp department, and both claims could be true.

the only way to stop this is for entire swaths of people to quit their jobs.

There’s a middle ground: unionization and strikes. Not always successful but more effective than just complaining.

Age verification done the right way does not require providing any personal info. I 100% oppose forcing people to share personal data with private companies. This is not what we’re talking about here.

Handing your government ID and other personal data to private companies is exactly how current proposals for online age verification work. It could be done without this, but that’s not what governments and corporations are pushing for, because the goal is easier surveillance. Take a look at some of the problems with Persona, for example:

https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/persona-age-verification-surveillance-biometrics-government-reporting-2026/

The next step will be to make more essential services online only, so people have to use the internet.

They probably know this perfectly well. But there are corporations and their lobbyists to think of, and they’d much prefer it if ordinary people weren’t able to build their own devices and spare parts, but instead had to buy them at inflated prices.

Into fascism. But also from fascism.

That has always been true, but the prices are higher for all tiers now.

Yeah but then they wouldn’t get to collect people’s biometric data to sell to the highest bidder.