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And put it on what? A NAS where a buggy vendor update (or just having it stolen) also has no recourse?

Just a Linux box on a board with a bunch of SATA headers some sort of RAID ?

Still don't understand why people use NAS boxes with all the limitations you describe.


3 copies, on 2 different media, 1 offsite.

A hard drive.

Sorry, AI companies have bought all the hard drives for years 2026 and 7. And RAM. And SSDs.

NAS consists of these components.

I think the statistical odds of your hard drive failing unexpectedly, being dropped, or being stolen is much higher than a Google ban.

Then two hard drives.

> Require browsers to respect the device's policy for site allow/blocklist

But then HN would still riot, because you would need to require all apps to be approved by a central authority (no unauthorized browsers) OR you need to lock down browser engines to those that respect the list somehow (maybe by killing JIT, limiting network connections).

I've learned long ago, as have politicians, there is zero solution that makes tech people happy... so move forward anyway, they'll always complain, you'll always complain, there is no tolerable solution but the status quo, which is also untenable.


> But then HN would still riot, because you would need to require all apps to be approved by a central authority (no unauthorized browsers) OR you need to lock down browser engines to those that respect the list somehow (maybe by killing JIT, limiting network connections).

The owner of a device could prevent the installation of third-party apps or app stores. That does not require having central approval.


> But then HN would still riot, because you would need to require all apps to be approved by a central authority (no unauthorized browsers) OR you need to lock down browser engines to those that respect the list somehow (maybe by killing JIT, limiting network connections).

I don't think you need to do that. You can pass a law without creating a technical mechanism that automatically enforces the law. The law doesn't even need to be perfect.

So what if you can still patch a browser yourself. Kids can steal cigarettes but laws against selling cigarettes to kids are still broadly effective.

So what if its technically possible for a vendor to ship a violating browser. Go after violaters with the legal system, not with the OS.

So what if there's a foreign vendor with a violating browser out of the reach of the law. You'd still have made the ecosystem vastly better even if there's gaps and loopholes.


Right, I assure you that no kid who wants to smoke weed or cigarette have any trouble finding it and isn’t saying “I was going to smoke weed/cigarettes but since it’s illegal, I guess I won’t”.

See also in the 1980s Nancy Reagan: “Don’t sniff glue to get high”, Kids: “You can sniff glue and get high!”


Funny that you understand what the problem would be, then you still insist that the authoritarian approach is the correct one. I’m sure people like you would gladly goose step into a 100% locked down surveillance hellscape, but the rest of us will keep working to ensure that this future never happens.

... this is just Linux binaries. It's humorous to me that we literally do exactly this, for Linux, with even less stability, but heaven forbid we do something approaching that on Windows despite the snobbery against Windows.

I don't know, everyone here seems plenty okay to tolerate worse levels of instability from Linux binaries. :)

im too much of a mac user to understand what this references :p

Take a random Linux binary which does anything non-trivial (has a GUI, does system monitoring, etc.), try running it on a different distribution from 3 years earlier without a packaging system, and tell me how it goes.

What confuses me the most is the kernel goes actually to great lengths not to break userspace, but if you rely on anything else than the kernel stuff breaks all the time, and distributions never update a released version to a newer kernel but just patch old kernels for years. So why do the kernel developers even bother?

Zig is proposing the opposite problem: future versions of windows wont run even trivial zig programs from today.

I can tell you that old Linux binaries run just fine on current distros.

Looking at how many times you repeated your misunderstanding in this thread it's clear that, not only do you not understand the solution, you don't understand the problem either.


> I can tell you that old Linux binaries run just fine on current distros.

Simple: I don't believe you. Grab this copy of Firefox from 2022, https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/96.0/releasenotes/, and run it on a modern distribution in 2026. If you fail, my point is made.


Does Debian Stable count?

The page didn't include a download link, so I found it here: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/96.0/linux-x86_...

And yes, it runs perfectly fine on Debian 13.


He doesn't understand the problem.

You aren't going to convince him because he doesn't know what the problem is.


I dunno about firefox (newer crypto libs wont work) but I ran a gimp compiled in 2018 on a 2025 distro.

Why specifically FF? Software without TLS does run just fine 5 years later on 5 year newer distros.


I’m here before some pedantic person replies “correlation without causation.”

People repeat that phrase constantly forgetting that the lack of proof of correlation is not proof of no causation. It means it could go either way, not that it’s been debunked.


I’m sick and tired of people forgetting that with every field, the first 95% is easy, the last 5% is almost insurmountably hard and what people get paid for.

Yelling “it’s 95% there, we’re so cooked” when anyone can be 95% there for any field since Google was invented doesn’t show much.


That may be true, but it can mean layoffs of 95% of the employees.

You completely missed the point.

Technology, Google, all of it, makes it easy enough to learn how to do 95% of many common roles and fields. However, you will never be hired, or replaced, until you master that last 5%. Every role, even some of the lowest ranking, has its own insurmountable 5%. How well has fully replacing cashiers with self checkout gone, after… two decades… of trying?

If we can’t fully replace a cashier yet, the most automatable role in existence, politely stuff your pie hole when saying AI will replace skilled roles.


Heck; show me anyone who is not more productive with a boring old UI once they learn how to use it. Maybe with a chat interface as a how-to assistant.

There's probably legit uses in finance for LLMs, in exploring potential scenarios and strategies, spit-balling ideas, summarizing financial news. Sure. Great. Maybe even as a trading agent, questionable, but I'd buy that as maybe happening.

But replacing Bloomberg terminals with "Chat with NYSE", that is no exaggeration one of the most out of touch ideas I think I have ever heard in my life!


I blame HN and Silicon Valley in general for consistently treating keeping children online safe as a parental responsibility only, rather than a government-parent team effort like every other regulation.

This loophole, “think of the children,” would not exist if SV had gotten over itself and not called very solution unworkable while insisting that any solution parents receive, no matter how sloppy or confusing, is workable.


Yeah exactly, had it not been for Facebook and the rest of social media not taking children online seriously, The Simpsons wouldn't have had to mock the cultural meme of blaming everything on saving children back in 1996 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RybNI0KB1bg

Aren't most of these problems directly caused by the government claiming to do these things to protect children?

Yes; and you can also find a bear that dances, if you visit a circus. Therefore saying bears can't dance is a lie.

I don't really understand what you are trying to say with this comment.

Something can be factually true; but in so rare a circumstance, that the claim is simultaneously true and so misleading it's practically a lie. Just like AIs that think for hours without guidance. That implies full automation is imminent, when the reality is it only works about 20-30% of the time correctly.

Do you think can they work for 5 minutes without guidance? Because that's something Ed said would not and could never happen, and the people who said it would were dupes and idiots.

Link?

I use AI for an hour+ without interference fairly regularly, typically once a day, sometimes more. Why would you doubt that to the point that you call people like me a liar?

I don't know whether Ed Zitron is telling the truth.

I do know that Suleyman, Altman, and Amodei have lied, lied, and lied repeatedly, whether intentional or not.

For that matter, I do not believe AGI will happen in our lifetimes. https://timdettmers.com/2025/12/10/why-agi-will-not-happen/


However, it already did? Interesting how everyone seems to have a different perspective on that.

There's a good article about why AGI is not happening rather it's the religion of Silicon Valley: https://fluxus.io/article/alchemy-2-electric-boogaloo it's good despite written by a promptfondler.

I've only skimmed the article so I may have missed something but they seem to be equating AGI with consciousness, or that consciousness is required for AGI. I'm not convinced it's required. I'm also not convinced that matching the biology of neurons is required for AGI, which this article seems to assume as well. That said, a really close match to human-style intelligence might be tricky if we simplify the model too much, as we're doing. Perhaps we'll arrive at a different sort of intelligence, that is just as general.

A good sign AGI is coming is that the arguments against it are so weak:

>[AGI impossible because] a researcher in cognitive science at Middlesex University - explained to me why we currently can't even model a single biological neuron, and it is unknown whether we shall ever be able to. The maths doesn't exist yet.

is about on the same level as aircraft are totally impossible because a bloke down the pub said we can't mathematical model one bird feather.


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