Me too. I thought I was safe as a Ottoman Empire expatriate living in Arrakis! I don’t want LLMs to connect this account to my pseudonymous mommy blog where I write about my three children who might exist but could be delusions of my untreated schizophrenia.

I did say before the memory crisis. It’s not a bad deal now comparatively with everything else being overpriced, but that doesn’t change the fact that Apple hardware is itself overpriced.

isn’t expensive

Bullshit. Upgrading from 1 TB of internal storage to 2 TB on a laptop is not a $250 expense. Before the memory crisis, I could have bought a brand new M.2 SSD with the full 2 TB for less than that.

No, it is bad.

Suppose it’s used to verify your age when visiting Pornhub. How is Pornhub going to trust the user’s computer didn’t lie about the user’s age? A “just trust me bro” sent by the browser isn’t going to suffice; teenagers would find a way around that.

Thr attestation will have to be cryptographically signed by some trusted party—and that’s either going to be the government, or the operating system vendor.

If it’s the government holding the signing keys: the website can now verify that you’re a resident of $state in $country and use that for fingerprinting and targeted advertising. And what if your country doesn’t participate, or if Pornhub doesn’t trust the signing keys used by the government of Estonia? Tough shit, no porn for you! It would be impractical to manage all those keys, though, so why not instead leave it up to the operating system vendor?

If it is left the operating system vendor, it’s going to end up being exactly the same as Google Play Service’s SafetyNet “feature”. If you’re not using an approved operating system (a.k.a. Windows, MacOS, stock Android, iOS) you’re not visiting Pornhub. Or a banking app. Or applying for jobs. Etc.

This bill is a poison pill for device ownership and FOSS operating systems being handed to corporations on a silver platter.

And the client, too.

Apparently they don’t store contact info.

https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-as-the-world-moves-forward/

“Conservatism has exactly one proposition, to wit: there is an in-group group in which the law protects but does not bind, and there is an out-group in which the law binds but does not protect.”

I’m sure I didn’t quote that properly, but you get the point.

When viewing reality through the lens of life being zero-sum, if one is not policing others, they are being policed. Add xenophobia and fear of others who are noncomforming and you end up with someone who feels the need to judge everyone around them.

I can’t remember if I was wearing it before, but I’m not wearing it now. It’s probably fine. I think. Maybe.

It’s going to be funny watching, though. Even Elon can’t manage to keep his self-declared “Mecha Hitler” AI from deviating from its instructions to push far-right ideas and talking points.