If I hadn’t just seen an announcement about gpt-5 that ended with “I guess I’m retiring” this probably would’ve got me

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

Loose lips shouldn’t throw stones

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

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

Be careful what you say - don’t call for violence, definitely don’t make threats of violence against specific figures, especially ones in office, and as a general rule don’t spread personally identifying information

Past that? Let’s say there’s a crackdown. They’re going after low hanging fruit to instill fear. By nature, the fediverse is hard to tie back to individuals… But if they’re looking for you individually, they can find you

I wouldn’t worry too much. Dissatisfaction is insanely high… They’re more likely to do a great firewall and kill the fediverse long before they bother looking into lemmy accounts

I prefer the second picture, but angled back 30°

Oh, things will get worse… We haven’t actually felt hardly any of the effects. When someone loses their job, it sucks, but it’s not actually that bad until they’re getting evicted or can’t buy food. Cutting public health and research isn’t bad until we have the next pandemic. Cutting all these government subsidies isn’t that bad until the farmers go under and we can’t find healthy food

I don’t see that as defeatism, I see it as the working class is about to be very, very angry about the same things at the same time, and that means opportunity for change

Yeah we do too… Just for some reason we never got around to making that actually illegal. It’s just frowned upon

I didn’t realize I missed this. These days newsletters are so full of click bait they barely tell you anything, I just kinda figured the format sucked. But I liked this, this felt like the old Internet

It was weirdly calming to read through this… Maybe it was that it felt like you really weren’t trying to sell me anything, and so for a couple minutes I could let down my guard?

Honestly, it’s scale. It dillutes the humanity to nothing, and all that remains is our worst selfish impulses

Communities become so large that bonds and reputation mean nothing. We create organizations to try to artificially recreate that, and they grow so large their primary purpose is to self purpetuate

It’s hard to muster up the will to hurt people right in front of you, it’s much easier if you can abstract it all to rules and numbers, and separate the actor from the decision maker

I think the only way something like communism works is like the fediverse - we need to find a way to weave ourselves into small communities that can act together. You can’t let power sit anywhere for long, or you’ll draw in power hungry sociopaths like flies - but inside a community they have to keep on good terms with others

We still have to collaborate, but if we shared methods and designs openly we could produce a lot of stuff locally. We don’t have to always be scaling up - if you have a thousand people, you don’t have to produce a 100k phones a year to make a phone. Working at that small scale even let’s you get creative and make better things - there’s all sorts of technologies that we don’t have access to only because they can’t be produced at scale

Plus it means people would be smarter and more skilled… Capitalism wants people to be interchangeable cogs, and that makes for craftsman that require a whole supply chain to be useful. Giving up scale means you have to make things last and be easily reparable. It means picking and choosing between your priorities

You had me at communication. That’s like 95% of any relationship… Literally everything is up in the air … Except being on the same page

Know what? I endorse it. Aside from the cyber truck, if you want to pretend, ok take that as “I was bamboozled”. But the cyber truck… There’s no hiding that. There’s no hiding the timeframe on that. You can’t just call that POS a Toyota

Sorry, but that’s a bridge too far. Deal with the consequences… It’s just spray paint, if anything it’s protective compared to the lack of any kind of paint. Take it on the chin

Yep… My first “career” job was for a mid sized company. In my onboarding they gave me my employee number but said “you’ll never need this, here you’re a name, not a number”. One time I emailed security saying I forgot my badge because it was with my lunch, and one of the founders called me up and gave me his prepackaged lunch because he said he usually doesn’t get through them all. When we closed a big deal, they called us all upstairs to have champagne during the workday. Our mission was unambiguously to help people

Then we got acquired… They gave me my new employee ID and told me I’d be using it for everything. They just milked our contracts and refused wages until we all left

And unfortunately, mid sized companies can give an equally good experience with much better pay and job security… But they’re being bought out to secure contracts and gutted at an insane rate.

It’s late stage capitalism… If you want to keep growing but you’ve already destroyed your ability to complete, buy them out to take over their contracts

Oh absolutely… There’s tons of petty tyrants out there too, which is different, but also bad or even worse. They might also be just staffing something just as soul crushing too, so it could just be worse in every regard

But small business means your boss is probably there to stay. Ideally, you meet the owner in your interview, often they’re the same person. But if you find someone loyal to their people, you can actually give them your loyalty and they’ll see you as a person