This is fair as a criticism of the leading AI companies, but there's a catch.
When you attribute blame to technologies, you make it difficult to use technologies in the construction of a more ethical alternative. There are lots of people who think that in order to act ethically you have to do things in an artisanal way; whether it's growing food, making products, services, or whatever. The problem with this is that it's outcompeted by scalable solutions, and in many cases our population is too big to apply artisanal solutions. We can't replace the incumbents with just a lot of hyper-local boutique businesses, no matter how much easier it is to run them ethically. We have to solve how to enable accountability in big institutions.
There's a natural bias among people who are actually productive and conscientious, which is that an output can only be ethical if it's the result of personal attention. But while conscientiousness is a virtue in us as workers, it's not a substance that is somehow imbued in a product, if the same product is delivered with less personal attention then it's just as good - and much cheaper and therefore available to more people, which is the product is good for them, makes it more ethical and not less.
(I'm making a general point here. It's not actually obvious to me that AI is an essential part of the solution either)
The competitor of Group Policy is not really an implementation of that running on Linux clients. It's that the client doesn't need that level of management because 99.5% of your users only use cloud based services. Microsoft know that, which is why they are keen for everyone to use their cloud ecosystem, but that's not a monopoly today in the way windows was.
I mostly use the square pins from SIL headers, bent into an appropriate shape. I use a pointed tip but I don't think it matters much, as long as it can transfer heat into the pin.
I most recently used this to repair a snapped headband on some sony headphones. I'd previously tried to superglue it, but the glue eventually came undone - but my "staples" are still going strong.
From the talk linked above, they went to considerable effort to design a system with a cheap processor which nevertheless contains an mmu, and so most other embedded kernels, which assume the lack of one, are not applicable. So the point of writing in rust is that they can ensure that some of the guarantees of rust are enforced by the hardware. (It's been a while since I watched that talk, so I don't recall exactly which ones). And this is a microkernel, not a monolithic kernel, so they will be using hardware guarantees even between kernel components.
To be fair, 1) Zephyr can take advantage of an MMU if you have one, and 2) Linux itself scales down surprisingly far. Keep in mind that its lineage extends far back in time and that it retains much of its ability to run on low-spec hardware.
Linux required MMU from the start, uCLinux and nommu patches does work. I used it a long time ago it was great, but there are lots of small things like stack size is set compile time, memory mapped io does not work... You do get lots of functionality from Linux from my short three day experience with Zephyr I like uCLinux a lot better at least on STM32.
Xous seemed very nice together with Precursor which is the only platform I have seen it run on
(Edited on reading more closely) Or possibly some fan work, since this "Extended Rubaiyat" isn't entirely from Omar Khayyam. So this doesn't pin down the provenance of the phrase.
Governments usually switch off the internet when they have a risk of being overthrown. Thats' why it's happening in Iran. They want to disrupt the co-ordination of a coup, and their opponents only need to win in the short term after which it doesn't matter. In the US, the threat is censorship and tracking- suppression over the long term. Mesh networks are not great for that,because if you run a mesh network then you have declared yourself against the regime. Steganography may be better.
An amusing point is that secure steganography depends on redundancy with entropy- noise. A few years ago, it looked increasingly difficult because of lossy compression. Today, we're awash in randomly generated content, so it should be possible to make secure steganography quite high bandwidth. Although, it's not immediately obvious to me how to make use of it,because the randomness is the input to a diffusion model,not the output - you might need to run the model backwards to obtain your steganographic content. Which I guess is possible,although expensive.
There is concern that the US may also go from chronic concerns to acute ones. Opponents of the government accuse it of serious crimes, and are already perceiving violence used to suppress dissent. The administration is not popular and may lose a lot of power in the upcoming election.
It's hard to imagine that shutting down the entire Internet would be taken well even by their supporters, but the point of the exercise is to prepare for the unimaginable.
> no, there is no reasonable concern of this happening in the US in the near term
Non American here observing from outside. Given the move in a few months from a normative western society to one in which heavily armed masked men raid homes and businesses [1] to racially profile [2] for mass imprisonment and deportation. Given the current governments explicit redefinition of political opponents as terrorists [3]. And finally given the extent to which three letter agencies are integrated into US telecommunications infrastructure [4][5]. It seems delusional to discount the possibility of such blackouts in the US domestically.
>It seems delusional to discount the possibility of such blackouts in the US domestically.
I hear that, but we are so dependent on network connectivity for commerce (and entertainment) here that there would be riots from a different subset of the population if they turned that off.
You can harass brown people and murder activists here, but if you turn off the TikTok spigot, disable access to finance, or frankly fuckin' DoorDash or Uber, people are going to have a meltdown. Modern life here just grinds to a halt without data services.
I hear that, but we are so dependent on network connectivity for commerce (and entertainment) here that there would be riots from a different subset of the population if they turned that off.
You're thinking nationally. Think smaller.
It's not tremendously hard to imagine the internet being selectively shut down in a state or city.
Look at the events of the past week. Now imagine the Insurrection Act being invoked in Minnesota, and the state's internet is cut off as Governor Walz's helicopter flees to Canada to avoid being arrested.
If you can't imagine that, remember that nobody could imagine COVID lockdown, either. We've shut down the national air system twice in the last 25 years. Unimaginable in 1999. Yet, here we are.
Trump is Windrip... or at least he would be, if he had his faculties about him. Even if you're a Trump supporter, you can't possibly go on denying that if you read this book.
It only takes a few small steps to slip from still-sorta-normal towards oh-who-could-have-thought. Did anyone expect a mob actually storming the Capitol a month before the events? Did anyone expect a federal immigration agent deliberately shooting and killing an innocent US citizen? Things like that happen "gradually, then suddenly".
I don't expect nationwide chaos and oppression, "Deus Ex"-style, any time soon, but we should be prepared to resist any local outbursts of it. Think local mobile networks blackouts and ISP POPs shutdowns, for instance.
Install the damn Briar app today, while it can be done trivially, and you have no use for it. It's like putting on a parachute before getting into a small plane: you plan to never use it, but if you would, there'd be no time to put it on when you're already in a free fall.
Trump seized 500 million dollars worth of oil, and deposited the cash from it's sale in the country that gave him personally a free jumbo jet. You seem to be missing that perspective has changed greatly. What is OK for a President has changed to an INSANE degree.
He has asked our NATO allies to help take over a NATO country's territory. This is what the American President does now. His delegation left the territory's administration in tears, and the US delegation stated afterwards that the US will take the territory.
He ordered federal officers to terrorize American cities, and a 37 year old white mom was shot 3 times in the face by one of them after she dropped her kid off at school. This is America. You seem to be missing perspective. What line has to be crossed for you?
Trump cares more about tariffing countries that don't support his Greenland conquest than the people rising up in Iran. Trump claims Ukraine is the impediment to peace with Russia, the country that invaded Ukraine. 6 times Ukraine has agreed to a Trump initiated peace process, Russia agreed 0 times.
The President stealing 500 million dollars and stashing it in his illegal bribers banks in the middle east, not enough. Actively working to take allies territory, with his people making their administration break down in tears after meeting with the US? Not enough. Extra-judicial murder of Americans after they drop their kids at school, not enough. DOGE. Refusing to release the Epstein files as REQUIRED by law. Forcing numerous law firms to bend the knee to him. Demanding a criminal investigation into the Fed chair. And on, and on, and on. In les than one year.
The current government can still claim to have a democratic mandate. At least for the moment, it relies on the goodwill (even of its opponents) to at least pretend that elections matter.
If it loses a large number of supporters, and is forced to suspend even the illusion of democracy, a lot of things would change. It's hard to predict exactly what, but it would be ugly.
That's not to say that they won't. As you observe, they will do what they think they can get away with. But shutting down the entire Internet might be something that they can't get away with.
Mesh networks like meshtastic have shown that they can be run on very low power meaning they can continue to route messages with the power from small solar panels. This makes them more useful in disaster or wide scale power outage scenarios than only as an anti-authority measaure.
Who's going to pay to create all the nodes. You need a lot of them in normal times when it is just enthusiasts sending test messages and if large numbers of people start sending real messages you will need more.
paying to create the nodes isn't the hard part. The hard part is the protocol isn't designed for this and is easily overwhelmed. In case of adversarial attack, it's trivially going down because the protocol is easily attacked, as we see at any popular gathering like Defcon.
You raise a good point, and I think USians should do all of it: generally encrypt communication, try to conceal as much metadata as they can AND put up mesh networks. It is not the right threat model until it is.
That said, I never said that my comment was about the US.
Ah, I did assume your were talking about the US; my apologies. My comment applies to the US, and perhaps other countries with the potential to enter a similar situation.
> Governments usually switch off the internet when they have a risk of being overthrown.
They also do so to prevent political violence from spreading, as social media does fan the flame of further violence. This is (in my opinion) a legitimate response to prevent hatred and mob violence from growing.
> Governments usually switch off the internet when they have a risk of being overthrown. Thats' why it's happening in Iran. They want to disrupt the co-ordination of a coup
You are, possibly innocently, carrying propaganda water for a repressive autocratic regime that has killed thousands of its own citizens in the past week alone.
IRI desposts, starting fro Ali Khamenei down to the rest of their ideological "brothers and sisters" in the regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (note no "Iran" in that name ..) are scared shitless that a Mussolini style future awaits them and their parasitical clans.
IRI has cut off internet and phone networks for days now because they know that before they can yet again reach "a deal" with the despicable Western elite who were instrumental in their rise to power (and staying there for all these years) need Media Cover from the audiances in the rest of the civilized world who would be exposed to numerous images and videos of bodies piled in streets and morgues, ARAB ISIS Style goons on pickup trucks with machine guns, and scenes of Iranian men and women of all shapes and ages loudly expressing their utter hatred of this EVIL REGIME from all corners of Iran, and they would not be able to "make a deal".
I strongly suggest, specially if you in anyway believe in any sort of Cosmic Judgment (Karmic or Abrahamic), to not stick your ignorant nose into the Iranian Revolution.
The people of Iran want to remove the yoke of this EVIL REGIME masqurading as God's Government on Earth. Let that outlandish and ludicrous pretention sink in before you get up to be a useful idiot for the Islamic Republic occupying Iran, ok?
My message was in no way intended to comment on the legitimacy of either the government of Iran or of its potential overthrow. There are circumstances in which the overthrow of a government is justified.
You may be passionately in favour of one side, but hastily imputing motives to, and disparaging, people who you do not know, will not aid in convincing anyone of your claims; it merely undermines your credibility.
Bro, relax, this rhetoric and your claims are so extreme and not backed up by reality. Killed thousands? According to the "Human Rights Activists" in London? Or the ones in Washington? Because none of that has actually come from Iran, and the few videos that have come out show people hit by hunting rifles (aka, non-police weapons) or shot in the back by other "protestors". We know Mossad has armed the rioters, nobody in the "civilized world" with an IQ over 80 is falling for your propaganda anymore. Take a chill pill, and stop instigating causing everyone to hate the Iranian expats
dude literally just go search "Tehran hospital" on twitter, there's hundreds of videos and images of endless body bags, and multiple independent major media outlets all reporting casualties in the thousands, not just Iran International
The notoriously reliable source of (mis)information Twitter. I see lots of videos, including people talking about rioters, foreign-backed militias, and lots of inflammatory words, but no pictures or videos of thousands of bodies. I feel for the dead, especially those shot in the back to instigate foreign intervention, they didn't deserve to be harmed. But I lay the blame on their murderers and their backers and funders.
i saw tons of body bag pictures and videos, and unless you want to tell me they're fake and only AI, then it seems you're not trying really hard to find them because you're pretty set in your opinion despite evidence to the contrary
Did you see thousands? Or dozens? I'm not saying there were 0, just that the scale and intensity of the GP's claim, and yours, is unjustified by the evidence.
This is sad, and it doesn't reflect especially well on either party. Here's the thing, though: we evolved in a world where being expelled from the tribe was a death sentence. When people fall out, often their instinct is to try to preemptively convince everyone else that the other guy is the evil guy who should be kicked out. To convince everyone else to take a side.
We don't live in that world any more. You're not gonna die if you don't convince everyone that the other guy is the evil one. It's perfectly fine to decide that you just can't deal with someone else, and you can do that while accepting that you don't need everyone else to take a side or be convinced of your reasons.
When you attribute blame to technologies, you make it difficult to use technologies in the construction of a more ethical alternative. There are lots of people who think that in order to act ethically you have to do things in an artisanal way; whether it's growing food, making products, services, or whatever. The problem with this is that it's outcompeted by scalable solutions, and in many cases our population is too big to apply artisanal solutions. We can't replace the incumbents with just a lot of hyper-local boutique businesses, no matter how much easier it is to run them ethically. We have to solve how to enable accountability in big institutions.
There's a natural bias among people who are actually productive and conscientious, which is that an output can only be ethical if it's the result of personal attention. But while conscientiousness is a virtue in us as workers, it's not a substance that is somehow imbued in a product, if the same product is delivered with less personal attention then it's just as good - and much cheaper and therefore available to more people, which is the product is good for them, makes it more ethical and not less.
(I'm making a general point here. It's not actually obvious to me that AI is an essential part of the solution either)