60-70% for a politician or political position is high. For believing in reality it's low.
If you asked "Do cigarettes contribute to lung cancer", you'd expect 95%+. Our evidence for climate change is on-par with that, and yet the rich have run a wildly successful campaign to cast doubt on it for years.
If people really appreciated the gravity of it, we would not have trump, a demonstrably anti-climate president who has rolled back green policies and
slowed decarbonization, and even ran on it.
Apparently spiting the "other side" is more important than our planet's long term habitability.
With e2e encryption, the signals you have are pretty minimal.
Let's say a 40 y/o man finds a phone on the ground, sees a name stuck on it, googles "name + town" and finds the facebook of a 12 y/o girl, and messages "Hey I found this phone, do you recognize it? <photo>"
With e2e encryption, you can't easily tell the difference between that and a creep.
This thread is advocating that exactly that case should result in a police visit with the assumption of guilt.
Imagine no e2e for a moment for FB. Policy can be smart enough to pick up that this communication is not represntative or normal. That's part of detection.
Second, a single message to someone on a random phone is not going to flag anything.
Third - there is no assumption of guilt. Not even an arrest is assumption of guilt.
Finally - those are extraordinary corner cases. They will happen, but the get resolved the moment the guy says 'oh, I found this phone' - because that will be 100% clear in that context.
Obviously - things can go awry. Meta flag something as bad, sends it to police - they do not follow procedure, or don't apply something correclty and arrest a guy at his place of work. But in the scenario you described, its literally not a problem - there are 'common sense checks' through the whole thing. The algo, the human making the notification to the police, the police, the judge if a warrant is required. People are not going to be arrested because they found a phone and texted their niece - if that happens, then we have another set of problems.
We can 100% have our 'friendly community' with Facebook.
Now - with an e2e thing like Signal, well, yes, it could theoretically be a problem, but the likelihood of some rando finding a phone, that's not locked, and being able to text some other 12 year old, an effectively 'pose' as their 'contact' - well that's a rare case scenario.
Ideally the TSA at each airport would measure it and release it. They should be measuring it anyway since they should both have efficiency targets for how much of a delay they introduce, and also so that they can show data about how much or little inconvenience they cause when DOGE finally comes to cut one of the actually utterly useless government expenditures.
Since the TSA doesn't seem to be releasing this data though, apple or google could spy on GPS and motion data for individuals to estimate when people entire the line and pass through security, and derive a better-than-nothing estimate. It does seem like the government refusing to do something, and apple/google stepping in and doing a government-like thing is a norm, so even though I'm joking I wouldn't even be that surprised.
It's not wasted bandwidth; we've reached this level of ads because brands have realized that brainwashing the populace via ads to make them want their brand is cheaper than building a better product, so the bandwidth is a small price to pay for brainwashing people.
If we didn't have ads, people would not only need less bandwidth, they'd buy less physical junk, and quite possibly be happier for it.
The obvious easy fix is to give them unlimited data. If the intent is to give them internet, they should give them internet that functions for the modern web.
There's a very wide band between "2G" and "unlimited" to explore.
Cell phone systems already have some tiering built in, at least based on the fine print I've read about my plans. Once I run out of "official data" I fall back to low-priority usage, but the cell system is generally so well-provisioned nowadays that I hardly notice. In 2026, one must take explicit action to force people back to 2G. Nothing would stop these plans from, say, simply always being "low priority usage" but at full speed, and for the most part this would satisfy everyone.
This sort of clause reeks of "it was written into a contract 15 years ago and nobody has even so much as thought about it since then" rather than some sort of choice.
Because the context is "bottom end of society in the USA." that "are given government provided phones".
If you mean why I don't pay for the publicly provided wifi: well, I would. And all of us. Public services are funded by taxpayer dollars. I would happily accept public wifi for that
Note that many European countries have already got rid of their 3G networks completely [0]. So it's either "you have 4G/5G" or "the internet is pretty much unusable", nothing in between.
As someone living in a European country with no 3G network, my experience with mobile data is that when my phone fails to find a 4G signal and switches to 2G (pretty much only happens in remote areas, thankfully), I can as well send my packets using a pigeon carrier, they're going to arrive to the destination sooner.
2G speeds isn't really full access to "the internet" for some parts of the internet.
My experience with 2G speeds is:
1. Open job application site
2. Upload resume pdf
3. Upload required picture of ID
4. Server's nginx config has a hard-coded timeout after 1 minute. Connection error
5. Try to upload again
6. Connection error
A huge number of pieces of the web have hardcoded timeouts and limits designed to stop slowloris style attacks, and if your connection is slow enough, those will prevent you from ever being able to complete some tasks.
I tried to explain slow loris to a non technical friend, he thought I was joking. The concept of the internet in this day and age is very "cloudy" for a regular user, all pun intended.
This thread is about how a static text article loaded 500 megs in the background. How would someone prepare for that exactly? This is effectively malware as far as your bandwidth is concerned.
I’ve used travel SIMs that only give you about 5GB. You avoid using the web at all, unless you are on WiFi. You can use maps, train and bus apps, banking apps, messaging, AirBnB etc, but not the web. If you go to some place and they want to use a QR code to buy a ticket or use a menu you may as well forget about it.
People on government assistance are just casually going to Starbucks for free wifi? They probably don’t even have a reliable way to get around. Let them eat cake?
There aren't even any Starbucks in these areas :( Best you can do is a McDonald's or Burger King and they hate opening the doors most of the time as they tend to prefer only allowing drive-thru orders.
Data caps are to an extent “fake”, in that telcos’ costs aren’t measured in how many bytes their customers download/upload. Telcos’ costs come from renting bandwidth from tier 1 and tier 2 ISPs. This bandwidth is constant.
And for popular websites, they will cache lots of content on their own network or peer directly with data centers so they don’t have to pay for the bandwidth there. The routers will continue routing and the switches will continue switching whether you download 5GBs or 5TBs.
One more way to understand how much of a scam mobile data caps are, is that the same ISP will sell you unlimited fiber plans even though essentially your traffic goes through the same backbone.
Data caps may help lessen congestion on their cell towers, but they don’t need to be as low as they are today.
> Telcos’ costs come from renting bandwidth from tier 1 and tier 2 ISPs. This bandwidth is constant.
In the long run, all costs are variable. Phone companies lack the bandwidth to provide all their customers unlimited data all the time. Most of them can’t even provide full speeds to their existing customers at peak times. If they gave everyone unlimited data they’d have to get more bandwidth, and they’d pass on every penny of the cost.
> Data caps may help lessen congestion on their cell towers
Data caps make congestion worse, because you are more likely to restrict where you use data and people are predictable. You'll no longer use bits everywhere because you care less, you'll use it where everyone else does.
https-everywhere does indeed prevent transparent proxying by ISPs. Mostly this isn't an issue: site owners are less likely to have their content tampered with by a content distribution network than by an ISP, and have full control over which CDN(s) are allowed to act on their behalf. Larger content providers operate their own CDNs, of course.
In the case of TFA, PC Gamer isn't directly consuming the bandwidth with their own servers on their own domain name. It's an ad distribution network doing that, and odds are reasonable they're already colocated someplace with your ISP and the bandwidth consumed by ads is totally irrelevant to everyone except the poor sap at the home end of the last mile.
Unless we nut up and ban gambling, there will never be a shortage of broke motherfuckers who should be able to make ends meet with their job but simply never will be able to. You have no idea how badly gambling suppresses a large subset of the working class.
I dont think most people here see that, or even have the willingness to see that. The same was true for the opioid epidemic. Had it hit a group with any political capital there would have been laws passed and the sacklers would have been not just painted as villains, they would have been castrated a quarter of a century ago.
Just wait 15 years when the middle class has been struggling with easily accessible gambling and it can't be explained as problem of character. There will be laws passed and people prosecuted or successfully sued.
Many of those targeted by the sacklers did start as white, middle class, etc. or even white, upper class.
Those folks that did fall to it, then became (often) lower class while failing to it.
The thing to realize, is that the upper classes ‘eat their own’ just like any other. It’s why Trump is as frantic as he is, he knows what will happen when he stops being ‘useful’/necessary.
I'm not really affected by it yet (I've been able to resist gambling more than a self-imposed $20 at a time, which I can afford, and one time I realized I wanted to break my limit, I realized it was an important moment to nut up and walk away). But I understand that there are people it's really affecting. So I'm all in favor of "NO more gambling".
But even if that wasn't a thing - the way it's ruined watching sports now, with the constant odds flashing, etc, I'd ban it JUST for that, on top of all the detrimental effects on society.
Which, as a reminder, was the status quo just a decade or so ago.
I don't remember "I can't throw money away on this football play" being a massive society wide problem that needed fixing in 2010, pretty sure everyone could bet with their friends already.
What's more, betting with friends is vastly less harmful than betting at casinos (digital or otherwise.) When you bet with friends, your loss is their gain and their loss is your gain, the money more or less sticks around, the community as a whole isn't impoverished by it. But when people are gambling away their days wages playing rigged slot machines on their phone, that money might as well have been set on fire. It goes into the pockets of investors who might as well be on the other side of the planet and in the long run it will never be won back. The community as a whole is impoverished by this kind of gambling.
Switching to an iPhone will put you in an even worse walled garden that respects you even less. Even simple things like setting your default navigation app in iOS are gated behind moving to the EU.
True, but the point is, once you've sucked it up and given up, you may as well get other benefits back in exchange for turning tail. And the iPhone is unfortunately THE primary platform most applications develop for.
Personally, I am willing to just ditch the Android, get an iPhone as a "contact- and banking-only" device, and drag with me some sort of small computer everywhere. I've already dragged a linux retroconsole to a large number of places and have watched videos and listened to music and even edited code through it. May as well do the obvious and call it quits on phones-for-non-phone purposes entirely if phones will be so dedicated to being shitboxes.
I also had a similar thought after these announcements. The main issue is seamless synching that syncthing provides between Linux and Android. There are alternatives like Mobius Sync etc but what I've heard is that they do app-specific sync, not like e.g., sync all my files in this folder X in Linux to a folder Y on iPhone. I'm not an iPhone user but this has always been the main hurdle for me to switch over despite the increasingly locking down of Android.
For files I use the open source Material Files, which supports SFTP servers. So I just have a little file server. For calendar, because Google doesn't reliably support background services, it's best to use a calendar app with builtin caldav sync. For carddav, I use a background sync app though (davx). Super lame that this is not built into android, not even into lineage.
You'd think someone would implement native caldav/carddav sync? Maybe this is my calling haha.
I'm telling that someone who comes up with a decent file sync setup between iPhone, Android and Linux/Windows without charging a monthly fee will make some good money on one-time buy fees alone. Dropbox etc can do things like these but I'm not interested in paying monthly fees for using my own storage across devices.
For my desktop systems I do a nighly rsync to a central onsite server, which does nighly encrypted ZFS send to an offsite archive. I suppose a script could trigger on file change using Linux file watch features (exposed via CLI and C headers). What I'm not sure about is wether two way sync with rsync is possible. This could run as a simple daemonized bash script. On error the script would just retry. Rsync would have to handle conflicts, it probably has features for it. Paste this comment into a coding CLI and boom, you have your solution :). Does need rooted Android for running shell scripts on boot. But a good coding CLI can log into your phone and set everything up.
Banking and govt. on a cheap, locked Android. The rest (mail, calling?, SMS, web, on an unlocked Android).
You'd need two SIMs, one for the banking/govt google play stuff, and one for the regular phone.
My bank does support a physical reader device though. That may eliminate the main Google Play dependency.
Open Android will still exists right? But it won't have the Play Store and Services. You could also download the APK on the official phone, then pull the APK off it and install that on the open phone. Won't work if the app requires play integrity, but I think there are alternatives for that.
Pretty lame that this is needed, but I'm used to this crap anyway.
> Apple didn't lie about supporting a user's freedom to run anything they like, only to execute a rug pull after they successfully drove the other open options out of the marketplace.
They did execute a rugpull, and they aren't offering safety anymore.
The rug pull is ads in the app store. If I go to the app store now and search for my bank's name, the first result is a different bank. If I search for 'anki', the first 3 results are spam ad-ware tracking-cookie trash.
If I search "password store" I get 4 results before the "password store" app.
I had a family member try to install one of the google-docs suite of apps, and the first result was some spamware that opened a full-screen ad, which on click resulted in a phishing site.
My family can't safely use the app store anymore because they click the first result, and the first result for most searches is now adware infested crap because of apple's "sponsored results".
What's the point of charging huge overhead on the hardware, and then an astounding 30% tax, and also a $100/year developer fee, if you then double-dip and screw over the users who want your app by selling user's clicks to the highest bidder?
Don't forget that Apple is spying on their users even more then Google does (which is gross in its own). Apple controls much more user data then Google does.
At the same time Apple keeps telling their users some fairy-tales about "privacy".
> A disgruntled waymo contractor in the Philippines can remote drive you into a crowd of people.
They cannot. The remote drivers for Waymo offer "nudges" to the robot driver, but they cannot do full remote control.
They can effectively mark a dot in the middle of a crowd of people on their tablet and say "Your best course of action is to drive here", and the waymo very well might decide to try and follow that suggestion, but they cannot override Waymo's brakes nor coded-in "do not hit humans" mandate, and the waymo would stop before hitting anyone.
> Only a relatively small number of these cars have been on the road, in limited conditions, and only for a small number years.
The average uber driver has driven fewer miles on the road than Waymo's software, and hasn't seen all the conditions either. Most uber drivers have cumulatively like 5-20 years driving experience in the city they're driving in.
Waymo has racked up waaaay more miles than the average single human ever gets, and unlike humans, all the Waymos benefit from improvements to the software.
> There will be failures and risks we haven't even imagined yet.
This is pointless fearmongering. Like, ketchup could cause cancer, but we have no meaningful evidence in that direction, so saying "ketchup has unknown risks we haven't imagined yet" is silly.
We know now that waymo is statistically safer than human drivers, I personally know that I haven't had a waymo driver make me feel unsafe yet, but uber drivers often did, so you know, waymo seems to have some pretty nice improvements already.
I'll wait for actual evidence of these "unimaginable risks and failures" before I evaluate them. At this point, it would have to be a pretty bad failure to change the math though.
I mean, they claim they've got 15B consumer revenue and 900M weekly active users.
If that's accurate, that means what, like 11% of the human population is using their product, and the average user pays $15?
That seems incredibly high, especially for poorer countries.
Still, I do know that if I go to a random cafe in the developed world and peep at people's screens, I'm very likely to see a ChatGPT window open, even on wildly non-technical people's screens.
> people have had their entire network compromised by bots they left running overnight
I'm curious if you have references to this happening with OpenClaw using one of the modern Opus/Sonnet 4.6 models.
Those models are a bit harder to fool, so I'm curious for specific examples of this happening so I can do a red-team on my claw. I've already tried all sorts of prompt injections against my claw (emails, github issues, telling it to browse pages I put a prompt injection in), and I haven't managed to fool it yet, so I'm curious for examples I can try to mimic, and to hopefully understand what combination of circumstances make it more risky
No maliciousness or injection required, even the newest and most resistant models can start doing weird stuff on their own, particularly when they encounter something failing that they want to work.
Just today I had Opus 4.6 in Claude Code run into a login screen while building and testing a web app via Playwright MCP. When the login popped up (in a self-contained Chromium instance) I tried to just log in myself with my local dev creds so Claude would have access, but they didn't work. When I flipped back to the terminal, it turned out Claude had run code to query superadmin users in the database, picked the first one, and changed the password to `password123` so it could log in on its own.
This was a sandboxed local dev environment, so it was not a big deal (and the only reason I was letting it run code like that without approval), but it was a good reminder to be careful with these things.
> it turned out Claude had run code to query superadmin users in the database, picked the first one, and changed the password to `password123` so it could log in on its own.
Man, every LLM quirk behavior really is a thing a monomaniacal junior dev would do...
If you asked "Do cigarettes contribute to lung cancer", you'd expect 95%+. Our evidence for climate change is on-par with that, and yet the rich have run a wildly successful campaign to cast doubt on it for years.
If people really appreciated the gravity of it, we would not have trump, a demonstrably anti-climate president who has rolled back green policies and slowed decarbonization, and even ran on it. Apparently spiting the "other side" is more important than our planet's long term habitability.
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