Return the internet to the pre-“smart” phone era, in which a minimum bar of effort and knowledge needed to be present in order to connect and participate on the web.

Yeah. I think that’s happening now. The public will discover the Fediverse, but I’m not sure if they’ll be welcomed into every community here.

History tells us there’s also a release valve of a swift brick to the side of the head, one brick per billionaire.

It sounds messier than paying taxes, to me. But I’m not a billionaire, so I can’t say I understand their motives.

Lol. It’s not the groundhog we should be watching, then?

They probably mean Open Container Initiative (OCI), the protocol shared by Podman and Docker.

You’re not wrong to give the benefit out the doubt and believe their PR person isn’t lying.

But I’m not inclined to give that benefit of the doubt. I don’t trust these folks farther than I can throw them. I don’t, myself, need proof, to believe they would try this crap.

And this is definitely evidence.

But without hard evidence I don’t believe random apps are just recording clandestinely in the background.

I certainly do. Malware attempts to record you is old news.

We have always assumed voice was off the table for practical reasons - voice recordings are expensive to decode and correlated usefully.

Cox has particularly deep pockets, which makes this interesting.

I do actually agree, this really could just have been a vendor bullshitting. Normally I would say Occam’s razor points there. But Occam’s razor points the other way, to me, when I consider that basically everyone I know has experienced a voice targeted ad.

The big ugly question is which apps are recording voices?

It might just be name squatting spyware. I haven’t seen confirmation that any do this, and I always assumed it was too expensive. Maybe it still is, but my guess is Cox isn’t the only ones who got that sale offer.

The creepy part is, if you’re not inclined to take Google, Amazon, and Meta at their word, then one wonders what other apps are recording voices…

Here’s the conspiracy part:

• Apps by Meta famously ask for more permissions than they should reasonably need.
• Both Google and Amazon publish operating systems that promise us they are enforcing our permission preferences, while definitely collecting more behavior data than most people would feel comfortable with, if they were aware.
• We know that all three companies thrive on tracking our behavior, and selling what they learn.
• One of the three had to change it’s corporate slogan away from “don’t be evil”.

The conspiracy emerges when we look at these data points and squint a little.

Edit: I think many of y’all are in denial about how much you shouldn’t trust Meta apps on your phones.

We know Meta wants to use things you say to build an ad profile. We have evidence they don’t have any moral qualms about doing it. We know they have unfathomable terms of service and closed source apps.

And now we know there’s been at least one closed door conversation about buying the recordings that supposedly don’t exist.

I don’t have proof but I also don’t have any apps by Meta on my phone.

Security researchers would’ve noticed this.

They did notice. Malicious apps that use everything they can to spy on you are old news.

To your point - this isn’t confirmation that any of the big players are listening directly. That would probably have been caught by security researchers, although it would be really difficult in Google’s or Amazon’s case, as they run proprietary software at a very low level.

The news here is two fold;

1. Cox got caught buying that data, and when confronted about it, Google, Amazon, and Meta all failed to deny that they also buy that data from those malicious app makers.

2. This is strong evidence that someone is routinely collecting that data. That’s news. We’ve suspected for awhile that, at minimum, the malware apps do. Occam’s razor says at minimum, we should now assume many malware apps are using microphone to collect speech and submit it elsewhere for analysis.

The unprovable part of this that smells much worse is: a kid in a basement writing malware does not have the computing power to turn tons of raw voice recordings into useful correlated data.

That kid needs an ally with a lot of computing power. Google, Meta, and Amazon all have a motive here and have the necessary computing power.

And all three worded their denials pretty carefully, I noticed.

In summary: Google, Amazon and Meta all deny that they directly access your microphone, and all three failed to actually deny purchasing voice data from third party apps that definitely do use your microphone and pair that with your ad targeting profile.

This is getting more attention because an internal slide deck from Cox Media Group was leaked. Based on the nature of leaks, it’s safe to assume that Cox isn’t the only organization up to this, they were just the least careful.

So yeah, they’re listening to anyone who isn’t incredibly careful what apps they install and what permissions they give those apps.

Exactly as we all have suspected for years, while they gaslight us promising that they definitely don’t.

Notice that they’re still denying it, and trust that as you will.

This is particularly interesting, since modern organizational theory tells us that Boeing’s primary customers would be much better off with a shift in power toward Boeing’s workers, away from it’s current leadership.

Purchasers of huge airplanes cannot afford to purchase airplanes built under leadership that cuts corners the way Boeing’s leadership lately has.

The striking workers may have an unusual ally here - in Boeing’s customer base, which notably includes the US Government and parts of it’s Armed Forces.

Yeah. The idea of an automated C to Rust replacement of the Linux kernel is fascinating. As you say, there’s probably stuff in the Kernel that Rust’s compiler won’t allow.

I imagine it wouldn’t work at all, out of the box, but it might reduce the cost curve enough to make a dedicated team of very clever engineers able to cross the last mile, given time.

As cynical as I am of both Rust and AI generated code, it honestly feels like trying an automated conversion might be less of a long shot than expecting the existing Linux kernel developers to switch to Rust.

And I’m sure a few would kick in some thought cycles if a promising Kernel clone could be generated. These are certainly interesting times.

Lol. If Rust fans want a Rust kernel, no one is stopping them from building one.

and therefore is the one and only acceptable proprietary launcher.

Yep! But that’s only until they decide to enshitify, which they (Valve) will, because they (the humans making the correct choices today) will sell or retire.

Makes sense. I only really replied there to help anyone reading along.

There’s many very basic features of vim that VsVim does not have (like… almost all command line commands), basic features which regular vim users use all the time.

! is supported:

https://github.com/VsVim/VsVim/blob/master/Documentation/Supported Features.md

It sounds like you haven’t tried VsVim in a long be time, or had an unusually bad experience with it.

(Edit: My responses to your other points were my old man energy, and not worth anyone’s time, so I removed them.)

It’s simply false to claim that vscode has more features than vim

Holy shit. I would never claim that. Lol.

Not sarcasm. I’m genuinely satisfied with VSCode’s Vim emulation, and you’re the first person I have heard say otherwise.

I just meant - that means you’re using features that most of us aren’t.

Fair point about evil mode for Emacs being better, but that requires using Emacs, which I have found un-usable, so far.

Also, the vim plugin for vscode is kind of a joke compared to what vim can do.

Dang. Hot take! I don’t think I’ve heard anyone else say that.

You clearly actually completed VimTutor.

I have several complaints about the VSVim plugin, but it’s easily the most feature complete Vim-like plugin I’ve ever encountered.

I’m trying to pay you a compliment, but I am doing it poorly.

As a legend among my Vim using peers, I can see how VSVim can be frustrating, to someone who truly leverages Vim.

Your annoyance with VSVim outs you as one of the true power users.

So you’re basically just paying for the snazzy case. Which is fine of course, but I think they could have done better.

Yeah.

I want to buy this sort of thing to support the overall vibe and product line, but $600.00 goes a really long way on Etsy or EBay for custom cases.

Edit: I am in the market for a desktop running something as close as possible to SteamOS, so I do love where this is heading. I’ll keep an eye on it!

I mean some of us aren’t programmers…

I think…

… Looks around…

…yet.