Never been happier that all my computers run Windows 10 or Linux. Windows 11 is dead to me, and if anything happens to accidentally get it installed somehow, it’s going to be replaced with Linux going forward.

I’m perfectly fine with that.

It’s a philosophically coherent argument. We won’t own people. We draw the line there. Many indigenous cultures don’t and never really have believed land can be owned. You don’t have to agree with them about that but you also can’t dismiss the concept out of hand. And if people can’t be owned, and maybe land can’t be owned, it’s not clear anything necessarily must be able to be owned. Are animals owned? Are plants owned? Are rocks owned? Largely, yes. But who allowed that? We did.

The idea of private property is an almost uniquely human idea, we have based most of our system of civilization on it, but it is not universal and is not based on any physical laws that we know of. We just like to own stuff, and we kill anyone who won’t let us or tries to tell us we don’t. And the fundamental corollary of that is that if we exclusively own something and get to decide who can and cannot have or use that thing, then that ability is deprived from everyone and everything else who is no longer able to exercise all of those rights over that thing. Sometimes that is a good thing. The tragedy of the commons demonstrates how things owned in common or public use can become quickly destroyed. By having exclusive ownership, perhaps I will do a better job of taking care of said thing and can protect it from careless use or overuse by others. Ownership can be a powerful idea, giving people equity in things that they would otherwise not be as invested in.

Strictly speaking though, property is theft. Theft from the public domain. It’s taking something out of the public domain where it naturally started, and claiming exclusive use and ownership of it on behalf of one person or group or organization, often dating back through a long series of transactions, some incredibly violent, deep into ancient history, but at the very beginning of that chain of ownership you’ll inevitably find someone using some justification like “I/we found this first” which in any given case may not actually be true, but the claim is made regardless and then used as a justification for making something private and exclusive for no reason other than that they could, and no one else was around or willing and able to stop them. Nothing and nobody gave the Earth to humankind – we took it, and divided it up amongst ourselves and continue to do so to this day. And that’s good for us, being ambitious and greedy has been good for our species in many ways, although it has also caused great strife and horror. But let’s be intellectually honest about what property rights really are and why we have them. I still think they’re mostly good, but I can also understand the point of view of people who think they’re not, or that they should be limited.

The problem with lies is you have to have a good memory. You need to make sure all the lies line up and don’t leave holes in your story that reveal the lie underneath because ironically the smaller the slip the more damning and harder to explain it can be. That applies to falsifying documents too. It’s actually more dangerous to try and create something fake because now you need fake evidence for all the fake stuff you’re putting in there, and you need to hide any evidence or corroboration that points to the stuff you’ve removed, and it all gets really complicated and really error-prone really fast. Liars survive by keeping things simple enough that it can’t be challenged, or in Trump’s case, by hiding all the small lies behind big obvious ones, like “there are no Epstein files” which everyone knows is a lie but the lie is so big it’s immovable while all the juicy details are buried underneath.

We didn’t call them AI because they weren’t (and aren’t) intelligent, but marketing companies eventually realized there were trillions of dollars to be made convincing people they were intelligent and created models explicitly designed to convince people of things like the idea that they are intelligent and can have genuine conversations like a real human and create real art like a real human and totally aren’t just empty-headedly mimicking thousands of years of human conversation and art, and immediately used them to convince people that the models themselves were intelligent (and many other things besides). Given that marketing and advertising literally exist to convince people of various things and have become exceedingly good at it, it’s really a brilliant business move and seems to be working great for them.

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That’s the fun part, you can’t. A lot depends on the details here. You’re looking for a one-size-fits-all answer to a very not-one-size situation.

In 99% of cases a major crime like a kidnapping that I know I didn’t have anything to do with should be reported immediately, and “speaking to the police” only ceases when I become aware they have decided to suspect my involvement. In the other 1% of cases, I have understood how bad it looks and I’m talking immediately to the best lawyer I can find and letting them do all the talking from the beginning.

It’s not a lack of empathy as much as a kind of educated empathy. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. We historically have a notorious and awful track record of nation building, and I think a lot of people believe this boils down to the fact that it’s very difficult to impose a national identity on people from outside, even with direct, physical intervention. We have tried to get around this at times by only supporting what we believe are legitimate independence movements which clearly already possess a strong national identity. Unfortunately even those tend to devolve into ethnic cleansing campaigns and dictatorship as soon as we leave. And if we don’t leave, then we have to stay there forever and we have to keep interfering every time things threaten to go off the rails and then it becomes paternalistic colonialism.

Keep in mind too that a lot of people living under oppressive regimes are genuinely damaged people and there is nothing but time that can heal those wounds. They are traumatized, they are angry, they have lost loved ones, they have been subjected to horrors we can only imagine and clinically document, without feeling the fear and emotional scars those things inflicted on millions of people. If you suddenly give them back power again, even small amounts of power, it is in human nature for many to seek revenge for what they’ve gone through (and not always against the right people). They’ve learned how to operate within the context of a deeply flawed and dangerous regime, and it is natural to adopt some of the same tools and practices. As resilient as the human spirit is it still is difficult to teach new ways.

At some point, people have got to learn to stand on their own two feet and find a way to build an equal, fair and just nation for all of themselves, by all the people and for all the people. While we certainly can do a better job of supporting this, we can’t do it for them and our attempts to do so have typically ranged from highly questionable to disastrous and extremely counterproductive. We fought for our own freedom, and it is not out of selfishness that we tell them they must fight for their own too. It’s not that we enjoy the fighting, it’s that as awful as it is, it appears necessary to get that hostility out into the open and understood to be as awful as it is, for a successful outcome to be possible.

On the other hand, even that hasn’t helped in Israel/Palestine where it seems like we’ve tried almost everything and failed. The fact is, nobody has the answers. We don’t know the way to fix this. We are always trying, even when it doesn’t seem like it, but we have to be abundantly cautious that we’re not making it worse, because we often are. For that matter, we have our own problems, and we haven’t figured those out either. Just because we’re doing much better than the worst countries in the world or even much better than average doesn’t mean we’ve got it all figured out or even that we’re doing anything right at all.

It only generates accurate records of SSN and DOB for Aryan people though.

Yes, all internet dead. No escape from dead internet. I’m a bot. You’re a bot. We’re all bots here.

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The short answer: For a router, either find an off-the-shelf Wifi router that is supported by OpenWRT (very nice and very easy), or (and this is my personal preference) build your own firewall mini PC which will be much more complex and powerful to the point of complete overkill but also fully controllable right down to the network stack (and what’s the point of a homelab if not fiddling around with such things?).

You can run OpenWRT directly on full AMD64 PC if you want, or even just a Raspberry Pi (some people appear to have had good luck with the 4B and 5, though I don’t know the specifics of that approach) The famous PfSense would be another option, based on BSD. I used to use that, but I really wanted something directly Linux-based.

Which brings us to the fact that you can also even use a standard Linux distro like Debian and install all the tools you want on top of that and set up all the firewall yourself from scratch. That is actually what I do, using Linux kernel’s nftables for NAT Masquerading/IP forwarding and managing it currently with foomuuri which is essentially just a very lightweight nftables configuration manager. It doesn’t do anything you can’t do directly with nftables, but even though it’s perfect for me but I’m not sure I would recommend it in general. They have some very simple examples, but the documentation is pretty sparse, you need to either understand nftables under the hood or infer what you can by reading between the lines of the few examples you can find. A more mature and traditional Linux firewall like firewalld might be preferable if you want. Either way, this is definitely a much more complex route though, and fighting with firewall rules to get things to work is not everybody’s idea of “fun”. It is powerful though, and infinitely flexible. If you want it to “just work” without hassle, stick to the single-purpose devices and use OpenWRT as the OS designed to do this. It’s way simpler.

If you do decide do go the DIY firewall route though, all you really need for a firewall PC is at least a second NIC (some motherboards have two wired NIC onboard already, you can use one for WAN and the other + WiFi for LAN) or you can a PCIe network card that has multiple ports. I wouldn’t really recommend using one of your existing Mini PCs for this, as it’s really not a good idea to share the firewall/network appliance functionality shared with other services, both for security and for configuration complexity reasons. The firewall really works best and is easiest to configure when it is truly just a gateway for the network, putting traffic from one side out the other side, plus whatever fundamental network/firewall services you need to accomplish that. When you start also trying to selectively route some of that traffic to actual services on the firewall itself, it gets really complex and ugly really fast, and even if you can get it working which is often very nontrivial, it’s also very fragile and it’s easy to blow open holes in your security this way.

I’ve actually now got a pair of mini-PC firewalls, both set up using foomuuri, uCARP and Kea to do failover with each other so if one goes offline the other takes over its IP and starts routing traffic until it comes back. It’s not perfect or completely bulletproof but it’s pretty good for an amateur! In a pinch (when my previous, non-redundant firewall died) I’ve also used an GL.iNet travel router as my network’s primary router temporarily and their routers support an expansion board with 5G/SIM support so that could be an option too. I have to say it worked perfectly and was actually pretty nice, my only hesitation is that the travel router (at least the one I have, Beryl AX) seems to run a bit hot and I’m not sure it’s really intended for 24/7/365 operation (plus I need it for when I travel). They do make home routers too though, so maybe worth looking into, they’re really nice hardware running their own fork of OpenWRT out of the box.

It will be funny if they come back and can only rule over ashes.

No, that won’t really be funny, but it’s also not going to happen like that. You seem really obsessed with this narrative of how powerful these people are. You need to get over that. They only have the power we give them. Stop giving them so much power. You give it to them with your words about them. They are not gods among men. They are just people with a lot of money and money is just meaningless paper unless we decide to work for them and bow before them because of it. Stop doing it yourself and stop assuming everyone else is going to keep doing that, and suddenly they don’t seem so powerful anymore. Because they’re not.

They don’t really understand anything because they don’t really think. They just repeat what they’re told while convincing themselves its an independent thought that appeared in their head as if by magic. These are the people outsourcing most of their thinking these days to ChatGPT, because it’s not something they’ve ever really valued or been interested in doing themselves. Life’s a lot easier when you don’t have to think about much. They’re “doers” not “thinkers”. And frankly, it shows. We see an awful lot of stuff getting done right now, and very little thinking.

That is a joke alright. They won’t last long without the entire system of civilization and human labor they rely on. They love the myth that they can reliably automate those systems. They can’t, and they doubly can’t against an adversary who intends on breaking those systems and then waiting for them at the exit of their underground bunker. Humans are endurance hunters. When its hunter vs hunter, all the money and preparation in the world (which they might literally have) isn’t going to do a goddamn thing to save them from sheer numbers and determination. Together, we are too strong. This is why they try to divide us. But nothing unites us like a common enemy.

Fuck that. Be loud. As much as they want to convince you you have no power and they’ve already won, in fact, power remains, and always has been, with the people. We are the people. Be loud, be obnoxious. Use your power.

It’s much different because you can fire your salespeople for failing to consult with the engineering team, promising shit that is impossible, going to damage your brand and reputation, and provide little-to-no return on investment.

The biggest difference is that you can’t fire ChatGPT (as much as I desperately wish we could)

My point is, even without AI, if all AI were banned tomorrow, all the data centers shut down, what we’re doing to the environment WITHOUT AI is most likely going to kill us all and render the Earth uninhabitable, possibly within 100-200 years. It is, as far as science’s ability to predict, the end of the human race and almost all life on Earth. People thinking we’ll adapt, or that we can just go live on other planets or space stations after this one is destroyed, or that we’ll magically find out a solution and have the technological means to fix it, are all frankly delusional and their wishful thinking is unsupported by current climate science and space science.

My point is we can’t stop fighting for the environment and throw it under the bus just because AI is the new threat of the day. If you truly believe “the world has already decided it doesn’t care about the environment” then there’s no point fighting AI or fighting for anything anymore, because if that is the case then we’re straight up doomed, humanity is cooked (literally), the game is over, might as well have fun on the way out.

My point is that if you intend on humanity having any future, both these things need to be fought. You can’t claim defeat on one and still fight the other, there’s no point and you’re wasting your time because the other will get you. They’re both utterly existential threats, and either one is as completely fatal as the other.

Do you think it’s more important to make the world care about AI or to make the world care about the environment?

The “front line” is irrelevant when either one is an existential threat on its own. You can’t just redirect your forces to one side. You argue we should make a strong “front line” in front of AI, while we are being overrun from behind by the environment. It doesn’t matter that people don’t care about it, it’s still going to kill us.

The rules will be the same as they always are: First Come First Served, and Might Makes Right.