Tootfinder

The US military has always had a massive global advantage against enemies by having bases all over the world. There are bases in every NATO country. This would appear to be a powerful threat to anyone willing to oppose American hegemon, and under normal conditions it would be.
But a lot of those kids serving on those bases joined, not because they love America but, because they needed a ticket out of poverty. They joined for the education, for the money, maybe a bit for the adventure, but, more than anything, to escape the ghetto or podunk backwater that trapped them. Under normal times, this is the best deal they could expect. Maybe they risk their lives, usually they sit around being bored for a few years, and they get to come out with respect and paid college.
But what they are being offered is normal in most of the countries they're stationed in. Free healthcare, cheap or free education, is just what citizens in a lot of countries have come to expect. If the US attacked a NATO country, how many would snap up citizenship if they were given a chance to defect? Bonus points for taking some hardware with you, I'm sure.
But there are some who love their country. There are some patriotic Americans on those bases. Some of them joined specifically to protect the US from all enemies, foreign *and* domestic. Given a chance to fulfill that oath or violate international law, what happens?
There are a good number of former military folks too who now are unsafe in the countries they served, who would do just about anything for citizenship in any EU country and almost any NATO ally. Some of those folks know things they swore an oath to never share, but the country they swore an oath to has betrayed them. Today there's no value in leaking those secrets, but in a war between the US and NATO allies things would be different. Some of those former military folks still believe in their oath, and know exactly who the real enemy is. What happens when there's a real threat of war, when they can use their knowledge to fulfill that oath to protect the US against those domestic threats?
There are a bunch of civilian tech workers who have become targets of the regime. Some of them had clearance, or know about the skeletons in the closet. They know about critical infrastructure, classified systems, all sorts of things that would be extremely valuable to an opponent. But the opponents of the US have always been a frightening *other*, never familiar societies these folks look up to, have visited, have thought about moving to, are trying to escape to.
All I'm saying here is that invading Venezuela and kidnapping the president has a very different calculus than does attacking Greenland. I don't know if Trump or his people are able to understand that, but if he and his folks aren't then I hope European leaders are. But more than that, I hope it never comes down to finding out.
But perhaps we should all think about what we would do to make sure things ended quickly if American leadership ever made such an incredible mistake.

I’m not going to dunk on the author, but I just saw this take:
If you’re still […] “these tools are unethical so I won’t use them”: you’ve not understood how things have already changed.
Yes pal, I have understood how things have changed, thank you.
Standing strong in my convictions about intellectual property rights, doesn’t mean I don’t understand. It means I have principles.

Seeing all the projects go by here, and I can't understand how you all manage to get things done. That isn't, I'm afraid, a skill of mine.

"This single task of managing memory has proven to be one of the most difficult, let alone to grasp and understand, but most importantly, to get right.
Because not getting this right meant crashes, security issues, resource shortages, unhappy customers, and lots of white hair. To make things worse, pretty much every programming language comes these days with their own ideas of how to keep track of things on the heap."

Souvenir
On Monday, June 6th, 2011, after Steve Jobs' last public appearance as a keynote speaker, took place the "Developer Tools Kickoff" session at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, also known as WWDC. That day, Chris Lattner, creator of the LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Swift programming language, introduced a new feature of the Objective-C language to thunderous applause. This feature, still present in Swift, is known as "Automatic Reference Counting", or ARC.

Like all the rest of the nerds, I did a bit of tech support on family computers.
They're all popping up windows from scam virus scanners lying that subscriptions need to be renewed or machines are unprotected. People don't know how to remove these things. Luckily they also don't really know how to pay the subscription.
Their phones are updating on them. Changing where buttons used to be. Removing options. Forcing people to register to use they things they have been doing for years.
They don't know how to register.
Things pop up asking for passwords and they have no idea who is asking or which password to use.
I tell them that I don't really understand why they keep using Windows now it is so shitty and awful. They say they don't know how to use anything else. The fact they don't really know how to use windows either doesn't seem to register.
The tech corporations have given up completely on being user friendly. They are all deliberately user hostile and exploitative now.
Corporate tech is terrible. The industry is failing it's users, abusing them. People don't even know there is any other way. They are just giving up on achieving their tasks until someone can fix the pop-ups and subscription boxes and passwords and 2fa for them.
Tech sucks now. Sucks hard.
#tech #christmasTechSupport

My big gripe with "AI" is that a big reason why it's sold as the second coming of Jesus is that most tech people fundamentally do not understand how it actually works.
Their reasoning goes something like, "It works sort of ok for code generation, and programming is the hardest possible thing in the world to do, every other human endeavor is trivial compared to writing code, therefore it must excel at anything else!".
So it ends up being pushed due to a mixture of ignorance and hubris; and especially being stuffed into things it should never be used for (usually when users don't have a say which software they need to use for work).
The finbros are happily along for the ride because they just need something that can be hyped to pump and dump.

Lockdown Mode is a backstop for people who either do dangerous things or are specifically targeted by high-resource threat actors. Almost no one can *actually* benefit from it but people who need it really need it.
I don’t need it. However, I have it enabled in part to understand what it does to the UX. It interferes with a minority of sites. It forces me to think about whether I REALLY trust the site I’m interacting with & how valuable my interaction really is.

Mysk🇨🇦🇩🇪 (@mysk@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image The Lockdown Mode that Apple introduced in iOS 16 is a nice idea to add extra protection to Apple devices. However, all security bugs we discovered and reported to Apple couldn't have been stopped by the Lockdown Mode either. Perhaps other researchers have a different experience. #infosec #iOS #Apple #security

"Taking small steps is crucial. You might start by just learning about your immediate neighborhood, how things actually work, finding ways to intervene in things that are not working well. Understand the water supply and how to keep it clean. ... Share. Share what you have."
—YDS professor Willie James Jennings in this interview in the new issue of Reflections, focused on building hope for a living planet

This interview with Philipp Ball hones in on the most interesting point of his book How Life Works.
Biological beings are not a kind of machine. Cells would not work if they were made out of tightly coupled cogs like in a mechanical living robot thing. Life on the molecular level is extremely fuzzy and things have multiple purposes all at once. I find that super hard to understand and yet infinitely interesting.
Beings are neither code nor machine but its own thing.