I think it originated in this piece by Ted Chiang a couple years ago.

If we get a breakthrough moment with quantum, the machines will not be evenly distributed to start with. They will be too expensive to build, power and cool unless you’re a fortune 500 exactly like LLMs right now (aside from small models like llama that can run on consumer hardware). At the moment quantum computers rely on superconductors that have to be cooled near absolute zero which is… somewhat expensive to achieve.

Unlike LLMs (oh no I can’t talk to waifu without cell coverage waah) Not being able to run quantum algorithms on your phone in this scenario would be bad. It either means your personal comms are, for all intents and purposes decryptable by those who control the quantum machines or that you’ll have to pay rent to the people who control quantum machines to have them encrypt and decrypt stuff for you. Of course you’ll have to trust them too. Also, given governments thirst for spying on our encrypted comms, it’s possible that quantum machines are heavily regulated allowing “the good guys” a back door into our chats without giving “the baddies” a way to encrypt their comms

Everyone knows Franz Ferdinand, the indie rock band from Glasgow. Their 2004 hit “take me out” is definitely historical /s

The issue with this is that like 95% of android devices run android with gapps and re-imaging your phone is becoming increasingly more difficult as manufacturers lock down their bootloaders. Normies who aren’t technical are not gonna want to mess with that shit. I’m not saying this to instill hopelessness but highlighting that it’s a challenge.

For censorship circumvention, mainstream tech is gonna continue to be increasingly useless. We need to educate people about these matters and also try to encourage people to lean heavily into decentralised comms like lora/meshtastic

They’re banning non google-drmed app installs

Needs more jpeg

That’s cool! Can you recommend any resources on this? I’ve thought a lot about this sort of thing. I’m guessing semiconductor fabrication requires a lot of complex upstream tasks and isn’t the sort of thing that’s feasible at home. Would love to be wrong!

Eurgh I’m not sure whether it’s worse if he earnestly believes this crap or he’s cynically and smartly playing the game. The only loser here is the human race.

He’s saying it because he is trying to force a reaction from his evangelical republican pals. Either he wants to warn them off AI regulation because that would end the world or (the more likely option I think) he wants the accelerationist bastards to go full steam ahead and regulate because they want the end of the world and he wants to “pull up the ladder” on new emerging competing AI companies.

veilid is a framework designed for hosting completely anonymous P2P apps. They already have a chat app reference implementation - (think P2P signal) and there are others popping up like vdrop

100% ageed. We seriously need to normalise compassion for colleagues and pushing back on overwork and entitled clients. I’ve been a senior manager in IT for a decade and whether one of my reports’ kids is sick or someone just needs half a day out due to a migraine, I’ll let them do what they need to do. Turns or if you treat your colleagues like actual fucking human beings they actually appreciate you and often return the favour by working late or going above and beyond somewhere else when the crisis has been dealt with.

Some of the horror stories in this thread of people phoning into zoom calls from the doctor’s office are insane. The world is not going to end just because Jerry couldn’t join this morning’s scrum or you had to move a call with a client.

“Oh but if underling #148 takes the afternoon off sick we won’t hit our weekly sales goal”. You know what Karen, firstly we sell receipt processing software, we are not saving any lives here get a fucking grip. Secondly, if you deny them that time off they will be doing the bare minimum for the next quarter while they job hunt and inevitably leave.

I truly resent being forced to partake in this ridiculous system but for as long as I have to, I’m going to have the decency to try to protect my team the best I can.