Out of curiosity, when did your doctor tell you this? I ask because standard medical advice changes over time, and if its been a while you might want to ask again.

I’ve had low modestly low blood pressure at times. Never a big deal, but once they turned me away from donating blood because my pressure was a little lower than the standards allow. It was minor enough that my doctor basically said “be sure to stay hydrated and don’t worry about it”.

Could be worse. She could have got a Final Fantasy Cactuar tattoo.

If you haven’t seen, his testimony is hilarious. Clip here: https://youtu.be/0pvJmxe7LdE?t=1217

It doesn’t need to be good to replace jobs, as long as there are no consequences for the people making those decisions.

I’ve lost count of how many “oops, it was AI’s fault, not my fault!” stories I’ve heard, even within highly regulated fields. Like, lawyers submitting documents with completely fake citations, and then…no real consequences. Seems to me like that should be cause for immediate disbarment, but no, apparently not.

For instance, a leaked 2009 Pepsi marketing presentation with language such as “The Pepsi DNA finds its origin in the dynamic of perimeter oscillations…our proposition is the establishment of a gravitational pull to shift from a transactional experience to an invitational expression …”

uhhh okay this is tough. how about:

Pepsi is known for waves (maybe lmao? i genuinely don’t know what perimeter oscillations is trying to say). We want to make people feel like buying Pepsi isn’t just buying something but is an invitation.

LOL that one’s a mess.

“Perimeter oscillations” sounds to me like a way to describe shifts in consumer opinions and preferences. A really dumb way. But who knows? Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of marketing execs?

I get the same feeling from corpo-speak as I get from bad poetry. Like the author runs all their ideas through a few rounds of mutations, out of fear of being seen as simple. The goal is not to be understood, but to make yourself harder to criticize.

Wrong about…what? The direct quote from GrapheneOS? It is a direct quote.

Blocked.

“It will initially be flagships similar to the current generation Motorola Signature, Motorola razr fold and Motorola razr ultra since those will be the 2027 devices meeting our requirements including the expected updates and hardware memory tagging but it can expand over time,”

This is great news in general, but it’s also a bit of a bummer that it will (at least initially) be limited to extremely expensive phones. The recently-announced Moto Signature has “a starting MSRP of €999”.

But MSRP is a joke so I really have no idea what the street price will be in practice.

Yes. Even the more reputable VPNs make ridiculous claims in their marketing.

Like, if you’re worried about hackers stealing your credit card, you don’t need a VPN. You need a chill pill.

You’ll think I’m crazy, and you’re not wrong, but: sneakernet.

Every time I run the numbers on cloud providers, I’m stuck with one conclusion: shit’s expensive. Way more expensive than the cost of a few hard drives when calculated over the life expectancy of those drives.

So I use hard drives. I periodically copy everything to external, encrypted drives. Then I put those drives in a safe place off-site.

On top of that, I run much leaner and more frequent backups of more dynamic and important data. I offload those smaller backups to cloud services. Over the years I’ve picked up a number of lifetime cloud storage subscriptions from not-too-shady companies, mostly from Black Friday sales. I’ve already gotten my money’s worth out of most of them and it doesn’t look like they’re going to fold anytime soon. There are a lot of shady companies out there so you should be skeptical when you see “lifetime” sales, but every now and then a legit deal pops up.

I will also confess that a lot of my data is not truly backed up at all. If it’s something I could realistically recreate or redownload, I don’t bother spending much of my own time and money backing it up unless it’s, like, really really important to me. Yes, it will be a pain in the ass when shit eventually hits the fan. It’s a calculated risk.

I am watching this thread with great interest, hoping to be swayed into something more modern and robust.

There are a million of these out there. Most of them suck. Many are, at best, ethically gray. Even the better ones spy on you in a hundred different ways.

I’d love something that actually didn’t suck, but “185 million dollar AI startup” doesn’t sound promising to me.

The big problem with the concept is that there’s money to be made by gaming the system and nobody is good at that cat and mouse game. AI could theoretically help, but let’s be real: it’s just going to scrape the same 100 identical Amazon referral listicles you’d get in a Google search, with an extra sprinkling of ads.

I don’t want AI in my browser even if I can turn it off for the same reason I don’t want my refrigerator door booby-trapped with an explosive even if I can turn it off.

Bugs happen. Configuration changes happen. User error happens. Software is complex, and I shouldn’t need an intimate knowledge of every goddamn app I run to be sure it’s not siphoning all my data off to god-knows-where. I use hundreds of programs on a daily basis. It is completely untenable to carefully configure every single one, stay abreast of constant updates and changes, and spend 76 full working days reading every TOS I am subject to. And of course, all their policies and defaults are subject to change without notice, so nothing I learn today will necessarily apply tomorrow anyway.

I want to be confident that my web browser is not — either by design, due to a misconfiguration, or due to a bug — sending my data to OpenAI. I do not want a booby-trapped browser, even if I can turn off the booby-traps. I do not want my fridge to explode, so I don’t buy fridges with built-in explosives. Seems pretty simple to me.

I also want to be confident in the same for others. If I deploy a browser to 100 employees’ machines, or even just my mom’s, a little opt-out checkbox under Settings will not give me any peace of mind.

A maximum line length of 80 characters is RECOMMENDED.

This is a terrible recommendation. It defeats the purpose of semantic line breaks if you insert them for non-semantic reasons as well. It also makes editing much more difficult. Let client software handle soft line wrapping, so the user can customize it as it makes sense for them. If your client software doesn’t handle soft line wrapping in a sensible way, find better software.