I'm sure they'll sell this on what it can hypothetically do that is useful to the owner, but I don't think any of us need to pretend this will be anything other than something inimical to our desires in the end. I don't need to give them their deniability.
The plausibility in plausible deniability evaporates instantly with device/service/software provider's accessibility.
But faux plausible deniability seems to be just as good of a fig leaf.
I have always been leery of data collection, but I have my own parallel: there was a lot of optimism about the benefits of personal computers in the 1980's and 1990's. Of course, that was pushed by the industry itself. I have since realized that what was happening then was not all that different from what is happening today. The outcomes were different because the tools were different, but it basically reduced/reduces to a bunch of people trying to enrich themselves by promising one thing and delivering another.
I guess that those days are soon over.
Typos have just graduated from misspellings to sentences randomly being nonsensical.
I’m just waiting for the next iOS release with “Next-gen Swipe powered by Apple Intelligence Pro” (that conveniently only works on the latest 2 generations of iPhone)
For the record, “primarily” took 4 tries, “varying” 2, and “took” 3.
https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_Y...
It’s like going to the 1962 world fair but, instead of optimism, everyone just wants to tell you why everything in the future sucks.
I feel like people expect more from a fox with a lot of tails and I'm definitely look for a personal information manager that can accurately timestamp and geocode all my interactions with very little perceived effort on my part.
An entire generation thereby grew up with personal computing represented by vendor-controlled handheld appliances, and naturally regarded actual PCs in the same manner.
And their skills to manage a PC atrophied too, leading to a feedback loop.
Bit of a nitpick, but this is certainly not true of their userspace, where an `npm install` can just install a keylogger or read your ssh keys, or do whatever it wants -- except for updating your video card driver.
So yeah, don't be so confident in it working out. Unfortunately gnu/linux desktop is severally lacking in security (and by desktop I mean a headless personal use as well)
When I buy a table saw, I don't expect DeWalt to hang around my workshop telling me what I can and can't cut, watching and logging what wood I use and when I use it, what my finished product looks like, changing the features and buttons on the saw in the middle of the night. Why the fuck do we tolerate this from software??
It's gotten to the point that Linux is the only sensible option, and not all distributions! Some of them are letting telemetry and metrics and A/B testing creep in. And some third part Linux software is just as intrusive and demanding as commercial Windows/Mac software.
There’s an invite link there to the chat group, though I need to update it.
This is precisely it.
When I buy a screwdriver, I just want to use it when I need it. I don't want to have an account with Craftsman and give them any PII, etc. No, I just want to use the product I purchased.
It is really the same with any tech product. I bought it, I want to use it. I want zero contact with the manufacturer (even if I like them).
As much as I've loved Linux for over 30 years, even Linux is becoming suboptimal. I'm mostly installing FreeBSD or OpenBSD these days.
> And their skills to manage a PC atrophied too, leading to a feedback loop.
They never built those skills. I know that a lot of us cheered the computer revolution, thinking that everyone born after would understand the things that older generations didn't get, but most didn't care and didn't learn.
When we connected them to the internet.
We should be removing those incentives at every level: legislative, societal, government and private.
You have choices. Make them.
Campaign for privacy laws, open standards, right to repair, interoperability requirements etc.
Evidence sample of native Claudish: “The identity group is the tidy story: same surname, same home address, an iCloud Family flag — and it is the small half.”
Your friend's Mac creating a knowledge graph is totally different because they control it. It gives them power to remember more about their interactions with you, but they would have to actively abuse it to hurt you in any way. If you can't trust someone with information then don't give it to them in the first place expecting them to forget it.
The problem is what happens if you get hacked or Apple decides to sell you out/work with law enforcement. I would only trust code like that if it was fully transparent about what it's doing, open source and strictly opt in. Apple is doing it in the background and that makes it instantly suspicious.
I’m seeing it with polished websites. A polished site used to be a signal that a product was somewhat well thought out—at least it was worth the creators time to polish its marketing page. While now that AI products spit those out with AI speak that signal is lost.
I wonder if we’ll find out that the signal itself was more important than the means of sending the signal.
As this becomes normalized, people will retreat to a safer persona even in private conversations. This does not solve the problem at all; a great many mental illnesses and dynamics around pathological abuse are tied to the details of how each of us has a private and public-facing persona.
Already I see Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha are heavily resenting the demands placed on them to be always in 'branding'/'self-marketing' modes, and are seeking ways to retreat from the relentless expectations of being always in 'public persona', and are suspicious that this way of living is harmful.
People change over time, and those I care about will be part of the journey. We don’t remember each other’s mistakes all the time.
And then, of course, there is the effort we put into these relationships. I’d rather a friend forgets my birthday and apologises than their LLM of choice automatically sends me a carefully crafted messaged based on our interactions.
Maybe we’re the weird ones.
Do most people really remember all the birthdays they acknowledge? For me they must be diarised, or beyond immediate family there's no chance.
A similar discussion came up recently with Siri Recap[1], where some expressed how useful they thought it was and that, as a party to the conversations it summarizes, there was very little moral or ethical concern. But, I have a social concern.
If I'm having a chat with someone, there's a milieu constructed around the fact that not everything will be remembered verbatim. There are all sorts of social and contextual cues that can easily get lost if listening gets replaced by flat transcription.
With Recaps and now social graph (were it to be productized), the informal fluidity in the way we relate to one another starts to go away and the expectations that follow from that becomes artificial and burdensome. How could you ever be forgiven for forgetting the name of your colleague's new nephew or the Italian village that your neighbor took a spontaneous boat trip to while on vacation last year?
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49641401