If too much of these services are provided by another country, that country could severely cripple your infrastructure by denying you service. In times of international conflicts, this could be a very serious problem.

So when can we stop with this “free markets” nonsense in the third world aswell??

I think pirating scientific papers is a good thing all around. The research isnt funded by the selling of access to those papers, much on the contrary.

im glad that it works for you, but my point is that we should have the right to have a non-intrusive phone just as easily as we have intrusive ones. People shouldnt be expected to learn how to unlock a bootloader, or import one of the few phone models that support these alternative roms with all security features in place. In the process of installing these roms, some people might fall into the trap of installing them from a suspicious source.

Lets clarify this.

Your principle is “The moment your opinion starts to dictate other people’s lives, it becomes invalid.”

My opinion is “People should be prevented from polluting the rivers.”

You say the opinion isnt dictating anything, that its our right to have clean rivers that dictates the prohibition to polluting rivers. Ok, fair, as far as the legislation isnt based on the opinions of the legislators about what should be allowed and what shouldnt. If the opinions that “using AI to judge if a suspected murderer is guilty is not good” or “people should be able to disable all ‘AI assistant’ features on their smartphones and not have their data constantly scanned” become popular opinions, legislature may be passed and the consequence will dictate other people’s lives.

I see what you mean though that using AI or not only concerns/affects the user. But thats not as true as it may seem.

Your example is clearly them violating the rights of others.

Yes, and its my opinon that they shouldnt be allowed to do so. Not allowing people to do something does in fact dictate their lives, so my opinion should be invalid, no?

What if their use of AI affects me? Is my opinion invalid when my opinion is that you shouldnt be allowed to pollute a river that I depend on for accessing water? Have you thought about this for more than 2 seconds?

these negative comments are missing the point. Soon we may not be able to buy a phone that doesnt have an integrated intrusive ai that scans all you files. Android has one, ios has one. Whats the alternative? using lineage os or some other android rom? having to give up using banks apps and stuff that doesnt work in those roms? most people cant say no to having a phone, so lets ensure these phones arent so intrusive. lets legislate something about this…

ohh, thats why i got all these downvotes. youre right, i was trying to deny the original claim that trees would ruin any infrastructure we build around them. so, yes, was just saying that some infrastructure can be made compatible with trees, while most implemented infra is not.

trees dont ruin ANY human infrastructure. But the usual urban infrastructure isnt well thought out enough to exist around trees. But smarter urbanism is possible and in fact does exist.

obviously. you probably misread me.

encrypting matrix chats just protects one step of the process, your data may be leaking in various other ways.

the matrix room may be public, but when you choose someone to talk to via dm, at that point encryption matters. Of course, you shouldnt really trust that random person from the matrix room, but it being an encrypted chat reduces the risk somewhat.

i do backups of my home folder with Vorta, tha uses borg in the backend. I never tried restic, but borg is the first incremental backup utility i tried that doesnt increase the backup size when i move or rename a file. I was using backintime before to backup 500gb on a 750gb drive and if I moved 300gb to a different folder, it would try to copy those 300gb again onto the backup drive and fail for lack of storage, while borg handles it beautifully.

as an offsite solution, i use syncthing to mirror my files to a pc at my fathers house that is turned on just once in a while to save power and disc longevity.

VIvaldi is cool, but its not open source. If you worry about the trustworthiness of you browser, picking an open source one would be best IMO. Among the chromium-based, there are chromium itself, brave, …

not everything in a language is helpful.

what do you mean by “explicitly non gendered”?

yes, i wasnt advocating you should know any specific grammar. and that distinction is a good point. I meant that learning a prescriptive grammar decently is an important tool for reasoning. im not saying that descriptive grammars are bad, just defending that prescriptive grammars arent as useless as people seem to judge them.

yes, its very arbitrary, but these are sets of rules that you can use to structure your thoughts. language helps us reason. it doesnt matter that it is arbitrary. definitions in mathematics are very arbitrary, but they are a foundation we can lean on to reason about abstract ideas. Being arbitrary is not a testament of uselessness. Different languages, lead to different foundations for structuring ideas. But dominating at least one of those foundations can be very important cognitively.

i think that being used to properly structure sentences is important for reasoning well.

i agree that the effects of books and writing were probably beneficial to the brain, although they might have atrophied the memory and something else. But im not sure about tv, radio, internet and AI.