Generally speaking, communism usually starts off great for the majority of people. Brings people out of poverty and whatnot. Very, very bad for the rich and upper middle classes but overall the public benefits.

Then authoritarianism kicks in and everything goes to shit really fast. People very quickly lose equality and equal treatment as a result.

Corruption is the biggest, inevitable problem because people naturally want to improve their position relative to their peers. Since that’s incredibly difficult under communism, you end up with lots of quid pro quo. Underground, black markets for anything and everything take hold and become just as important as the main economy.

Basically, it never works out. The end result is authoritarianism and deep corruption every time. Just like other forms of government! Except with communism, the pressures of the system force these sorts of problems to arise much faster.

I know someone who tried this. Their ghost still haunts the simulation.

Within the browser, it’ll work to “protect” your traffic (including DNS) from prying eyes locally. As in, someone on the same network as you or your ISP or whatever networks your traffic passes through to its destination.

Instead, it sends it all to Microsoft Central Data Collection™! By passing all your traffic through Microsoft’s central servers, you can rest easy, knowing precisely who is inspecting everything you do (including the US government and the other countries in the Five Eyes network).

Let’s be honest: It’s yet another unfair transfer of power from local criminals to international ones, increasing the wealth of billionaire pedophiles. Give the locals a chance to rise up, would ya?

Yes! Because cyber bullying can only happen on platforms that are designed specifically for adults. By banning children from social networks, we will have completely eliminated the problem and totally not at all created much worse problems like potentially leaking the identities of millions of people and destroying the entire concept of privacy.

(Nods head vigorously)

https://theforestscout.com/40129/in-our-opinion/how-a-childrens-game-turned-into-an-outlet-for-bullying/

When my kids were young, but old enough that they may inadvertently stumble upon porn, I told them the truth. The truth that so few explain to their children. The truth that many adults don’t understand and many more completely forget.

Porn is fake.

It’s not real. The sounds? Acting. The breasts? Those are fake too. The perfect skin? Makeup (or airbrush).

Even “amateur” porn is fake! As soon as someone agrees to be filmed having sex it ceases to be real.

Also, let me get this straight: Your greatest fear from children being exposed to porn is they might begin to accept mysogyny‽ As in, you think porn is the most likely place kids will be exposed to it and somehow just nod their heads‽ “Oh wow, that’s totally sexist! But they’re having sex so it must be OK. I’ll try to be like that!” (Child nods head).

Or perhaps you think kids will be viewing so much porn—specifically, the mysogynistic kind—that it will somehow carve mysogyny into their minds?

This is so much like the beliefs of conservatives that try to ban books that mention LGBTQ people. Stop and think for a moment: How much porn did you view as a kid? How did that impact your life?

I seriously doubt it changed much. Unless, of course, you were reading Playboy for the articles.

Oooh! Maybe they’ll finally invent an actual reason to use it.

Just think: Without legislation like this, kids will be able to see people having sex! Thus, ending their lives. Not so different from staring into the eyes of Medusa!

The amount of children exposed to sex that have died—or suffered worse consequences like early onset conservatism—may have been zero so far but the dangers are clear! We must skip right over parental involvement in child rearing and go straight to the source of the problem: Computers.

Computers have been giving everyone access to too much information for too long! We must restrict it! The first step is to get an implementation that actually works to censor information—to save the children (wink wink)—then later, we will have the tools necessary to censor whatever we want!

When glorious dictator decides that information about trans-genic mice must be erased from the Internet, we shall have the power to do so!

With this upgrade, he can now log in to work!

That doesn’t seem like much of a cheat. That’s more like a crutch.

My conspiracy theory: The plan is to fail and sell the data centers to Microsoft for pennies on the dollar.

Your friends could be sharing your public phone number! The one that’s listed and accessible to the world via the Internet’s version of the White Pages!

In the US, phone numbers aren’t private unless you pay extra (no one does except celebrities who are wasting their money… Because even if they pay it gets sold to 3rd parties anyway!).

Not a damned thing in that article had anything at all to do with “chatbots”.

This situation is SO DIMM!

Folks here jest, but this business model is coming to PCs next. Bookmark my words!

(Literally, you can right-click the perma-link to this message and have quick access to it later so you can reply, “Damn, you were right!” And post the link to big PC vendors suddenly offering a similar services because DRAM and GPUs have become so expensive, normal people can’t afford to buy PCs anymore)

It’s also pig-headed!

Forbidden chopsticks

Wow! BeOS mentioned. Hello, fellow old person. While you read this comment, imagine two towers of green LEDs, gently rising and falling, based on the complexity of each word while we just Be, together.

Now let’s remember why BeOS actually failed: Illegal contracts from Microsoft to prevent PC vendors from selling PCs preloaded with BeOS. Be, Inc sued Microsoft and settled out of court for $23 million and I remember that moment, thinking, “That’s not enough!”

Microsoft destroyed BeOS. Not any sort of market condition or natural state of economics. The whole, “let’s turn it into an appliance OS” thing was a last ditch pivot in an attempt to save the company. It was doomed from the start.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2003/sep/07/microsoftpays

Aside: Just like Palm’s WebOS which also tried to pivot into an appliance OS. Except in that case, that OS was destroyed by sheer incompetence on the part of HP’s brain dead CEO: Carly Fiorina. To this day, she’s still tarnishing her image by associating with the Trump administration. Very pro-Nazi.

If you ever want to point out an obvious example of how CEOs aren’t any smarter than anyone else and normally only get the job based on nepotism and industry incest, she’s the perfect go-to!

This is why web browsers like Firefox need their own AI. Local AI for not only creating summaries but for detecting bullshit like this.

Yes, creating summaries is kinda lame but without local AI you’re at the mercy of big corporations. It’s a new arms race. Not some bullshit feature that no one needs.

…and burns people’s homes down due to lack of safety features.

…and children choke to death from easily removable small parts.

…and people get electrocuted because of a lack of warning label telling them not to use it in the bath.

RVA23 is a big deal because it allows the big players (e.g. Google, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and more) to avoid vendor lock-in for their super duper ultra wicked mega tuned-to-fuck-and-back specialty software (not just AI stuff). Basically, they can tune their software to a generic platform to the nth degree and then switch chips later if they want without having to re-work that level of tuning.

The other big reason why RISC-V is a big deal right now is energy efficiency. 40% of a data center’s operating cost is cooling. By using right-sized RISC-V chips in their servers they can save a ton of money on cooling. Compare that to say, Intel Xeon where the chips will be wasting energy on zillions of unused extensions and sub-architecture stuff (thank Transmeta for that). Every little unused part of a huge, power hungry chip like a Xeon eats power and generates heat.

Don’t forget that vector extensions are also mandatory in RVA23. That’s just as big a deal as the virtualization stuff because AI (which heavily relies on vector math) is now the status quo for data center computing.

My prediction is that AI workload enhancements will become a necessary feature in desktops and laptops soon too. But not because of anything Microsoft integrates into their OS and Office suites (e.g. Copilot). It’ll be because of Internet search and gaming.

Using an AI to search the Internet is such a vastly superior experience, there’s no way anyone is going to want to go back once they’ve tried it out. Also, in order for it to work well it needs to run queries on the user’s behalf locally. Not in Google or Microsoft’s cloud.

There’s no way end users are going to pay for an inferior product that only serves search results from a single company (e.g. Microsoft’s solution—if they ever make one—will for sure use Bing and it would never bother to search multiple engines simultaneously).