Encore un kudo pour Fabrice Bellard, cette fois de John Carmack.

About the movie Avengers, weeknotes, stickers, BuJo (the brand is bad, but the system has a lot of good ideas), Tacos.

We could have machines sending raw QUIC packets directly over the physical link or with minimal encapsulation + metadata for routing, in some case bypassing the need for a networking stack (i.e. directly talking to the optic fiber driver).

As John Quiggin writes, the pre-2020 Musk was the Musk of Tesla, batteries and Starlink. The post-2020 Musk is the Musk of Starship, robotaxis, Cybertrucks and Twitter – a string of commercial flops and assets that literally exploded.

It matches the "Dead Economy Theory" from https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory.

The actual dead economy risk is that our institutions and markets will continue to move capital from productive activity into memestocks, vibes, and bubbles.

That's not just a dead economy – it's one that'll kill everyone you love and everything that matters.

The idea is to die young as late as possible

Distributing Rust crates via git URLs instead of crates.io

First of all, this essay is researched and argued. There are many sources accross the texts.

Landgon Winner wrote an essay

• the technology is designed to have certain political effects
• the technology is inherently political

Technologies and machines tend to profeit. For example, the mechanical tomato harvester by UC Davis in the 1950s.

Once the tech­nology arrives and becomes entrenched, the conver­sa­tion gets reframed as one of tech­no­log­ical inevitabilism vs. anachro­nism, and dissent is discour­aged. [...] The adaptation of social life to technical requiremetns pop up spontaneously.

Liberal democracy is sustainable as long as "the balance of power of democracy is premised on the average person having leverage through creating economic value. If that's not present, I think things become kind of scary."

In prac­tice, certain people in a capi­talist liberal democ­racy tend to get increas­ingly rich. Absent coun­ter­mea­sures, the wealthy gain control of the polit­ical appa­ratus, thwarting liberal-demo­c­ratic norms.

The synthesis might be: as more wealth becomes concen­trated in the hands of fewer citi­zens, liberal democ­racy weakens, because whichever citi­zens are losing economic rele­vance will also lose polit­ical rele­vance.

The AI story is a fallacy: the sci-fi discourse is optimized for cinematic impact instead of real daily life changes.
Moreover the paperclip maximizer experiment of Nick Bostrom shows AI has unintended side-effects.

The West was won by AI because we balance water supply between the population and AI. Water is a biolog­ical neces­sity; AI is not.

Another point is laber replacement. Every CEO is outdoing the next in predicting that AI will replace human labor, which will lead to waves of unemployment.

Capital markets are laready pricing as if AI companies will have the perfect scenarios.
Software programmers, highly paid writers and lawyers are all work with high costs that can be automated.

Zitron has char­ac­ter­ized the AI market so far as a blink­ered conver­sa­tion between AI exec­u­tives and trad exec­u­tives, all of whom “have little idea what work looks like”.

Many CEOs and billionaires argued AI will create an abundance of goods and services. Really?

The persis­tent lack of detail signals that these billion­aires have no idea how, exactly, AI will accom­plish this.

Even if the labor comes down to 0$, resources, enegery and raw materials have a cost. Another contradiction is "Big AI’s promises of world-histor­ical goodies for consumers and world-histor­ical profits for share­holders may be incom­pat­ible".

To improve public acceptance, AI has so far emphasized their fun consumer-facing porducts: generating an image or writing a story. In the goodies economy, as citi­zens lose inde­pen­dence as economic actors, they will also lose inde­pen­dence as polit­ical actors. They will be captured by industry.

Tangible assets are the oppo­site—bricks, mortar, inven­tory, and so forth. According to the WIPO, since 1995 global invest­ment in intan­gible assets has steadily increased, and since 2009 has exceeded that of tangible assets. By wide margin, the US leads invest­ment in intan­gible assets.

If you think about it, it's crazy. It's even more crazy to see the productivity growth compared to the hourly compensation growth: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/#:~:text=Figure%202

“Tech­nology always makes certain jobs obso­lete; new ones will arise.” AI’s predicted labor replace­ment is unprece­dented in three ways: the diver­sity of tasks replaced; its outsize effect on highly educated workers; and the back­drop of 50 years of wage stag­na­tion.

If an AI can replace the output of a company, then every company with an AI can do so.

Currently certain legal-AI star­tups license LLMs from Big AI and repackage them for Big Law at high prices. These star­tups claim to add other special sauce. OK, sure. Where’s the economic equi­lib­rium? If legal-AI star­tups prove that money can be made selling AI to Big Law—won’t Big AI just sell to Big Law directly, and cut out the star­tups?

By the process described above: Big AI essen­tially uses its tech customers as an R&D facility.

As AI makes it harder for workers to capture value from their labor, they will increas­ingly have to rely on goodies from Big AI, priva­tizing what were once func­tions of govern­ment. If Big AI subsumes the func­tions of workers and govern­ment, both will tend to realign polit­i­cally around Big AI’s inter­ests. [...] AI-centered capi­talism risks an extinc­tion of demo­c­ratic possi­bility

Epilogue

Encryption is only a first step: there are others in order to control the devices we use daily. "Sovereign control" means answering yes to each of the following:

• Do you own the encryption keys — not the platform provider?
• Are backups protected end-to-end, by default, without manual configuration?
• Is metadata shielded from external observation, including communication patterns, timing, and participant identity?
• Do you control who can access message content, with no external request system that can override that?
• Do you govern which devices, users, and integrations can access sensitive channels?
• Can the platform be deployed on infrastructure you control, in jurisdictions that meet your data residency requirements?

Vendor the dependencies in the project directly. It will avoid to install the dependencies every time.

So just by not updating dependencies automatically, you turn every single package in an ecosystem into a fire-break for supply chain attacks.

100%

The harder a piece of code is to parse, the more you will tend to rely on LLM-based analysis and generation to maintain and build from it. Illegibility to humans is vendor lock-in. That's the business model.

The enclosure of the FOSS commons may seem like a programmer-specific problem, but it really affects everyone. Privacy-preserving apps like Signal, for example, serve a purpose precisely because they're open and can be audited. Take away that ability to verify the developer's claims by parsing the code, and all guarantees are lost. The more that AI vendors succeed in locking in the FOSS commons, the less transparency we'll have into what our software actually does.

It is 0% coincidence that these technologies are being pushed by some of the least transparent companies on the planet.

Un article à charges montrant que la Silicon Valley a perdu son rôle d'innovation suite à la concentration du pouvoir et de la richesse

Stop complaining, build as much as possible while you can do it for (almost) free, and enjoy the assets for the rest of your life. Code that you build today will still be usable and valuable in 10 years, and if you build stuff that let you reduce your expenses, you could retire early.

Not the mainstream privacy-focused tools like AdGuard, uBlock Origin or Ghostery, but the others having audiences numbering in the millions

That is why transparency should be one of the first things users evaluate before installing any browser extension.

Streaming related extensions under the "dogooodapp" brand

Before installing an extension, it’s worth running through a quick checklist:

• search in the privacy policy for phrases like:
  • “may share”
  • “business partners”
  • “analytics purposes”
  • “commercial purposes”
  • “affiliates and third parties”
• Be wary of extensions with no privacy policy at all
• Check who developed the extension
• Read reviews critically
• Avoid installing unnecessary extensions entirely
• Go for well-established open-source privacy tools when possible

Utiliser les IA et leurs MCP, c'est effectivement donner l'accès total des données utilisées par l'IA aux États-Unis.

De ce fait, le département d’Indre-et-Loire illustre le paradoxe français en matière de numérique. On parle de souveraineté à longueur de discours, mais quand vient le moment d’acheter, l’habitude et la facilité l’emportent. Le réflexe Microsoft est ancré depuis trente ans dans toutes les administrations. De plus, personne ne semble vouloir prendre le risque politique de basculer.

D'autres comme l'Île-de-France utilise cependant déjà des infrastructures européennes.

Pas bête la remarque: un système de DNS européen est primordial pour assurer la sécurité de l'accès à Internet.

dickover n. : a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about.

Similarly there are the dickbar

Implementing raw text is hard on native