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Also stylometric analysis of your writing can be used to identify you.

Living off-grid is how I'm dealing with the whole situation nowadays.

Now here in the UK they are using people's passport photos for facial recognition, at least to stop shoplifting. It won't be long before this is expanded to other things due to feature creep.

Time to decentralize everything. I think we are already in the early stages of this new trend. We can run AI locally and hard drives are so large we can have a local copy of an entire library, with millions of ebooks, in our own home now.

That is in addition to generating our own energy off grid (so no smart meter data to monitor), thanks to the low cost of solar panels as well.

Bye bye Big Brother.

This. It was only a matter of time.

And no SJW bullshit or "code of conduct" in the whole SerenityOS project either. So it's free of this bullshit politics. And such politics tends to attract parasites which take over the organization to promote their personal agendas - which is precisely what has happened to Mozilla.

I agree Mozilla should be involved politics to do with software freedom, but it should not be involved in politics to do with our government, etc.

They should stay out of politics completely. This incident is a matter for law enforcement to deal with, not Mozilla. Mozilla is a tech firm, it's purpose is to develop a Web browser, period. It should not be involved in social policies.

I personally abhor Donald Trump, by the way. But I still think deplatforming and censorship are wrong.

Yes, I gave up on Firefox many years ago and use Chromium now. This is because of the identity politics and feminist "code of conduct" speech code being pushed by the organization. I know Google is no better, but I still did it to make a statement to Mozilla. Enough people doing that might get them to stop this nonsense.

That was the turning point for Mozilla, after that it started to become involved in activism, including social justice and identity politics.

I really wish Mozilla would stay out of politics, especially identity politics. And I've seen some pro-censorship advocacy from them in the name of Internet "safety."

This is how I fixed my focus problems (written very hastily as I am short on time):

Watch out for domestic abuse or bullying in your life, if you are a victim of it, the upset from it will knock out your executive functioning for a while and give you ADHD symptoms, due to the effect of the cortisol stress hormone. You might need a few weeks (or even months) of calm to get back to normal. To reiterate, check for stressors in your life and things that are making you upset. That can disrupt your focus.

Also, if you find yourself wanting to get up and walk about all the time it might be due to your mind subconsciously wanting to get away from the sources of distress.

If you find yourself fidgeting, it can be the mind's way of self-soothing yourself, to calm yourself down, so that you can work. Let yourself do it, without micromanaging or monitoring your focus, and you will naturally fall into the process of working, as long as you are paying some attention to the work... So as the days/weeks go by you will find yourself spending more and more time focusing, gradually bit by bit as a positive feedback loop is being built in your mind. You obviously want to work and focus, so let yourself do it, without excessive control or self-monitoring.

Also I found it good to frequently play some quick game on the computer in between the work - and eventually the work will take over and you won't find yourself needing to play the game anymore. Again I think it's a way of calming yourself down.

That is what worked for me. And how I broke out of it.

It's not hard for me, I work with my mind, not against it, on subjects that are relevant to what I want to do. That way, it's easy. That is the natural way of learning. What really ruins this process is cramming in so much unnecessary information, as high school or university makes you do.

Could that be homogenization caused by the rise of social media in the ~2010 timeframe? Where individuality is being eliminated by the stifling conformity of being constantly visible and everyone knowing your stuff? Things which used to be private and personal. And people are playing it safe by conforming to avoid being rejected by their peers. Thus creating a hive-mind which has spread to every aspect of life, including design and aesthetics?

Also maybe a symptom of chasing a quick profit in the short term over other considerations, such as product quality. So better play it safe so the valuation rises by the time the manager/designer/marketer has moved on to another company?

The decline of the modern corporation in general, then? Just gets bogged down by bureaucracy and the marketing departments taking everything over? Or some similar malaise.

Some of the AI art I've been browsing is far better than many human artists could create, it totally lacks the blandness and dumb trend-following of human creators.

But there should be a way to lock those fuses before shipping the product to market. Otherwise the device can be permanently bricked and the hardware will need to be replaced. On Espressif and Beken chips these fuses are lockable. Once locked, they can never be written to again.

Those Bouffalo Lab chips are self-destructing, there's no write protect for the EFuse bits, one wrong register write and the chip's locked in secure boot mode and thus dead. Go for Beken instead, they designed the EFuse controller sensibly - and are based on the same CEVA RivieraWaves IP.

Yes, moral Puritans just in a new modern form.

I'm suspecting there are server-side scripts on many sites which relay data to the RTB system? So blocking ads won't prevent this data from being transmitted then?

https://digiday.com/marketing/wtf-is-server-side-conversion-...

https://sanjeev-pandey.medium.com/ad-tracking-in-server-side...

Not on Rockchip platforms as far as I am aware. The RK3588 is one of their highest performing SoCs, it has 4 Cortex-A76 cores running 2.4GHz thus making it somewhat close to desktop performance, without any of these blobs or locked down bootloaders. And mostly complete documentation[1] is available.

1. https://github.com/FanX-Tek/rk3588-TRM-and-Datasheet/tree/ma...

It would be really nice to have Raspberry Pi-like developer board with this chip. At one point Qualcomm released full documentation for their SoCs, with a publicly available manual with near complete register documentation. I think it was for the APQ8064. It even included Adreno GPU registers and some GPS/WiFi baseband related stuff.

* An unfused SoC, so no secure boot etc. The Efuse VPP pin is tied to ground so no possibility of bricking it by blowing the fuses inadvertently.

* Fully open bootloader, e.g. U-Boot based.

* Mostly complete register documentation for the SoC, that would be good enough.

* Mainline Linux support.

Such a board would take the open source world by storm.