Yes. It’s all over the place, no clear lines really

Oh, you’re missing the most important part of the meta:

CEO: We just did that the consulting company told us

Consulting company: We just make recommendations

Kinda the key to ecosystems in general… How many times do we have to learn this lesson to understand it?

Competition is good… Let them compete with the steam deck. Competition is good, even if it just highlights how much better the existing option is

Lack of competition is why capitalism fails - competition is literally the only good part of capitalism. Cheer it on when it actually happens

True, but the second you can’t buy enough food at the grocery store it all goes poof

If we stop, even for a couple weeks, the system collapses. If a third of people stop showing up for work, if a third of people steal their food rather than pay for it, if a third of people stop paying rent… It all just melts away like a snow flurry

Money means the value assigned to it - if it can’t feed you, it means nothing. If it stops moving, so does ‘the economy’. It’s so much more fragile than it seems

That’s wasteful and dangerous

Harvest the beast for batteries and GPUs

Okay, so like ac in a capacitor smooths current, right? As opposed to DC, where it stores energy?

Imagine a positive and negative terminal with goo in the middle. Atoms move around it randomly in diffusion, but charged atoms are pulled left then right in oscillation. On average, they’d be in the middle

Those ions impart positive charge to the side they’re on, so if your cycle is off in one direction or the other, they’d be pushed to the opposite conductor - smoothing the current

I’m not just talking about an insulator - I’m talking about an insulator fluid enough for ions to travel through based on the charges of the…I forget the word in this context, it’s anode or cathode

Like rubber? Great insulator, but it’s solid - you can’t make a capacitor out of it (or a gate, but that’s more about heat conductivity). So dielectric insulators must be fluid to some degree, right?

Well, at least it’s set for 1/1/2027. By then, free speech will be long gone anyways or we’ll have gotten our act together

I’m sick of this constant fight to stay in place. Fuck the Democrats, we need a party that will do more then slowly cowtow to the fascists

Not really. We don’t have to live in a society where every idea is used to extract wealth or exert power over others… We just happen to live in such a society

I mean, there’s no such thing as a perfect insulator (at least nothing we can build with)

It definitely resists the movement of free elections through… But think a capacitor let’s ions flow, grease is a sort of fluid…

So I’m thinking it must be a material that let’s atoms move around to some degree, but resists the transfer of electrons

What do you mean? It’s a problem in your way, it takes how long it takes to get through it

I love the in between, where you have to actually adapt algorithms to useful situations

It’s like 2% of all the work I do, but those moments stick with me

Perception filters? Absolutely they could be used for good… Being able to put window dressings on your reality is basically the AR version of deep dive VR

Not even that… Kids do it IRL, because they hear it so much online

I’d argue the tech is never the problem - it’s always “how can a bad corporation/government make this neat idea a dystopian nightmare?”

It’s so invasive too… Hearing kids self censor for advertisers, like “unalive” or “pew pew” is deeply disturbing

Our language is being artificially pushed towards Corpo-speak

I mean, yes and no. They just capture device info for a location, which can often be tied back to a person, but they just grab the info the phone sends to the tower. These days with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi you can even do something similar with just your phone

I don’t love that it exists for obvious reasons, but it’s a far cry from looking through your phone

I mean, the cell providers already sell your location info to anyone (including LEO, which is unconstitutional without a warrant as far as I’m concerned), as can Google, apple, and all sorts of apps - so this is a niche thing

FWIW, you can defeat that pretty simply… Just leave your phone behind and/or in a faraday pouch. No signal, no signature, no location data (from your phone at least). It won’t necessarily stop the NSA, but it’ll protect you in a protest where your just another face in the crowd

Rather than locked down, they’re basically a black box - I think they have their own firmware and hook into the OS and hardware in weird ways (part of the reason why Linux phones are so difficult to make work)

If the NSA wants to ping your phone location or even turn on the microphone, they can, supposedly even when the phone is “off”. If they want to side channel load in a rootkit, they probably can

But NSA surveillance comes in two main flavors - broad and focused. If they think you’re a terrorist or of strategic interest, there’s a lot they can do… But that means actual humans are interested in you, personally.

But for everyone else, they’re not going to sift through ten million phone storages - that’s way too much data to be useful, and they already have long collected way more than they could make use of. The broad stuff is about flagging people - the most effective is to look at networks of people. If you have connections to a terrorist, you’re a potential part of the network, and so you’ll be flagged as more interesting. I’ve heard rumors that certain keywords might be flagged on calls too, who knows. Too many flags and they might devote some man hours to looking into you personally

But generally, they’re very protective of their tech. They don’t use the good stuff widely, because it’s not useful, and it increases the chance for discovery and countermeasures. My understanding is they won’t share their surveillance systems either - they might put notes or flags on shared LEO systems or tip someone off, but they really, really, like to play it close to the vest. Even with other 3 letter agencies

So yes, this possibility exists - especially with llms to help filter through this information ocean - but there’s no shot they’re sharing capabilities with border control agents

But again, hacking is a tool when they want to go after something in particular - a single lemmy server is minuscule. Even the full scale of everyone on lemmy is a very small target… They might go after it if they have specific reason to, but they’re unlikely to do so when there’s plenty of work to be done on bigger platforms

The NSA doesn’t generally give access to agencies on the ground like that - at most they flag individuals in the interdepartmental system, they don’t hand over what they have easily

But, if you have physical access to a device, there’s always a way in. Border control or a police department can buy tools to do it or hire contractors