From the linked System76 blog:

New York’s proposed Senate Bill S8102A requires adults to prove they’re adults to use a computer, exercise bike, smart watch, or car if the device is internet enabled with app ecosystems. The bill explicitly forbids self-reporting and leaves the allowed methods to regulations written by the Attorney General. Practical methods for a bill of such extreme breadth would require, in many instances, providing private information to a third-party just to use a computer at all. Privacy disappears.

That’s appalling, and NY won’t be the only government trying it. This is going to be one of those battles we need to fight again and again.

Also, Microsoft create many vulnerabilities by using AI on their own code. AI can do it all!

Venezuela needs to sit tight for a week or two until he forgets.

Over the many decades I’ve been alive, there have been regular articles saying “scientists discover that such-and-such an animal may feel pain.” And then its forgotten and people continue to treat animals terribly, until a couple of years later a similar article comes out. I can’t see where the thought would even come from in the first place that these animals wouldn’t feel pain, except for religious dogma and a desire to continue abusing animals while telling yourself it’s OK. There’s no reason to even suspect most animals aren’t feeling pain.

Yes, the obvious solution is to avoid it. I use it only for the most boilerplatey things. Anything else, I want to make sure I can still do it myself.

May his wish come true, and soon.

Also endless bullshit.

Restraint or a realistic sense of how easily they could figure out who did it.

It makes sense if it’s a party of rich, comfortable, conservative-leaning liberals who aren’t really all that bothered by rich fascists running the country, and aren’t at all keen to hand any power to poor lefties who hate them and might challenge their privilege.

I know some older Canadians who still spend every winter in Florida and plan to retire there. They are, of course, white and reasonably wealthy. Myself, I’d rather not live under fascism no matter how sunny the beach is.

Consciousness is something completely different. It’s what makes you fully feel the present moment. It’s the fact of feeling alive. So it has nothing to do with the ability to crunch numbers or stitch words together into a logical sequence.

And there’s one fact you can’t get around. Consciousness, in every case observed since we started studying it, only ever appears on biological substrate. Never on non-living matter. Never on stone, never on metal and never on silicon. So it’s a fact that looks an awful lot like a law of nature.

This bit strikes me as odd. It suggests we’ve done experiments to check whether consciousness ever occurs in non-biological systems, and concluded that wherever we find consciousness it’s in a loving organism. But has anyone done such an experiment? Could they? Do we understand well enough what consciousness is, what it is for it to be present in an entity, and how to test for that empirically, that we can simply do experiments to test when it occurs and draw conclusions about laws of nature involving it?

You can’t do an experiment until you can say, to a good enough approximation, what you’re looking for and how you’ll tell whether it occurs or not. I doubt we even have a clear enough notion of consciousness to agree on what we’re talking about, let alone how to test whether it’s present, to do empirical experiments and draw lawlike conclusions. And it’s not that we just need to get a bit clearer about the kind of entity consciousness is: it’s not even clear that it is an entity in the empirical world.

Right now if you use encryption the authorities have no proof you’re doing something illegal, because you might not be. But if they make (secure) encryption itself illegal, then anyone they aren’t sure about suddenly becomes a criminal they’re sure about. Then it’s just a matter of selectively prosecuting those whom they most dislike. So it doesn’t matter to them that much whether lots of people find a technical workaround. If they can’t read your messages that’s all they need to be able to silence you if you’re inconvenient.

They won’t understand. 33% of Americans will swallow whatever incoherent excuses he pulls out of his ass on the day. 33% will object. 33% won’t be paying attention.

Looks like they’ve changed it now.

Pedantry: plummets, with an e. I miss the days when newspapers employed people to catch stuff like this.

Sure. Just do this cheek swab, let us scan your retina and fingerprints, show us your government-issued ID, provide a little blood and a stool sample, and unlock your phone so we can review your social media posts and messages for the last 5 years. We’ll need bank statements and a credit history too. If you’re approved you can rent shared space on a Chromebook for only $30 per month. Terms and conditions apply.

Sure, you may be able to buy a cheaper motherboard for a while. But you’ll pay through the nose to populate it, hence the falling motherboard sales.

There’s going to be a lot of us running 2019-vintage PCs indefinitely.

That’s quite a big downside for a phone.

Casio digital watches.