Comment by pxmpxm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pxmpxm | Hacker News Reader

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On every new windows 11 box of mine, I spend around 4-5 hours setting it up in a way to prevent any phone-home or auto-update. Group policies, deleting things, setting up fake domain controllers etc.

Preposterous amount of time spent to make sure I don't end up with "bing discover" feature that some product manager rammed through into the Edge or reset my settings because microsoft reaaaaly wants my new tab page for ad revenue. Oh look latest windows release has "microsoft rewards" in every frequently-viewed UX component; wonderful.

There's an army of CVE bros cargo-culting bullshit like "it doesn't work if it's not auto up to date", when the reality is the product doesn't work if the latest upgrade breaks my workflow or I have to stop what I'm doing and spend a bunch of time undoing whatever new "feature" got added for user-adverse but revenue positive purposes. I don't think I've seen an update in the last 5 or so years that didn't try to turn a thing that I own into a grocery checkout aisle for other stuff that I should own.

My HP printer sits behind a NAT and a firewall and the firmware has been feature-complete since they built the stupid thing. The only thing you get with upgrades is operational risk; hedging imaginary "someone's gonna p0wn it" problems is the security equivalent of the $5 wrench XKCD.

All that work to keep your own property from being weaponized against you.

Richard Stallman’s positions on software seem less extreme every year.

Ask 1990s or 2000s me, and I’d say he was interesting but “out there”.

Now, I’m thinking he was just 30-40 years ahead of his time.

Same. r/StallmanWasRight

I see the big fight now is over AI. The talk is over AI ethics and safety … but can we honestly entrust that to Big Tech?

Of course not. The unfortunate reality is on average the larger something is the less it sees you as a person. Any large organization sees us all as walking billfolds. If they don’t see us as human, how can they keep AI ethical or safe?

The reality is they simply cannot, and won’t. While safety will (probably) be assured, because unsafe products bring lawsuits, unethical products that extort customers for money are apparently perfectly legal. We see this in pharmaceuticals, processed foods, and of course Big Tech.

That leaked Google paper on how open-source models will catch up and surpass AIs from Big Tech is interesting. According to that paper, being able to train huge models is not a sufficient moat.

But requiring licenses to construct or deploy AIs would be a sufficiently large moat.

No, and we can't trust it to big government either. This is my belief and fear, the government will or has already implanted itself with open AI exactly like they did with Twitter. So now we will have the most powerful corporation in the world secretly controlled by the US government.

Is there a lesser of two evils here? I honestly don't know, but I don't think we will get a choice.

If you are asking yourself this question seriously, I implore you (whoever is reading this) to explore the incentives the different players have in every decision that is made.

Would we have had GPT, et al. by 2023 without FOSS?

Unlikely, but there are other ways to control who gets to align AIs. Requiring licenses to construct or train models would be one of them. Patents are another.

The fight over ai is the same fight as it was before - user control and freedom over the ai

I should have control over model updates, retraining, the training pipeline, the prompts... Everything. How ethical or safe the ai is is my problem. It's not a matter of trust, but that it gets changed out from under me, breaking my workflows, and not letting me fix problems with it that affect me.

I just wish he didn’t partake in pedophilia apologia

Maybe you can contribute your work to this existing project that is really quite good. For your consideration: https://github.com/builtbybel/BloatyNosy

> On every new windows 11 box of mine, I spend around 4-5 hours setting it up in a way to prevent any phone-home or auto-update. Group policies, deleting things, setting up fake domain controllers etc.

Would that even work on an Apple device?

>Would that even work on an Apple device?

Yupp and it's way easier to do - launchctl list and blow away what you don't want without the bs of looking at registry, then group policy, then domain controller nonsense, then services, then start up items then...

You just have to hope that Apple doesn't do what it's already tried and allow its own apps to bypass the TCP/IP stack filtering and firewalling.

And then backpedal furiously and say that it was "a temporary measure while some apps were getting fixes and updates". Huh - not sure why TextEdit.app ever needed a kernel extension but maybe they're right, and it wasn't just a BS excuse.

Why would you want to do that on an apple device? The point of buying apple stuff is that apple has full control over it

Because I own it. And the idea of apple being in control sounded nice in the beginning but wore off after about a week.

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