On the other hand, its good to design systems where it wouldn't even matter if the hostile nation state knows exactly how it works.

This is a principle in cryptography, but carries nicely to other things.

I feel like this is always the best design whenever possible.

I think it's cool, and completely necessary. No need to be compatible with old email, really.

It's a great write up thankyou. I propose we build and distribute easy to use services designed to run on our own devices, in our own homes, to take full advantage of 1st and 4th amendments, then distribute these services widely with billboards so that people have alternatives and can take advantage of these protections.

We are trying, but the interop of these self hosted services currently suck. Fediverse is hard to get in to unless you have many users or you just have to join a popular instance. Who knows what they do in this instance, and it turns back into a loop.

I just don't think it's gotten to the point that anyone is interested. I wonder if we did do a better job that the aggressive filtering and monitoring wouldn't naturally move down the stack.

for example we could completely obviate Facebook by having a standard mechanism for something like an rss feed. individuals or organizations could publish my stream(s) from their own leaf connections, set up cloud instances, or pay someone to host them. there could be a whole ecosystem of readers with various UIs and policy filters. people/organizations could add value by aggregating trusted streams or filtering them for content some people might find offensive. and at the end of the day it doesn't require people who just want to use it to set up persistent networking and storage.

in any case we just got suckered into handing the keys to the internet to companies like Meta and Google, which make vast amounts of money to control the discourse in corrosive ways. all because we bought into the notion that nothing is real unless someone is making a buck off it.

having a standard and a whole space of compatible programs doesn't preclude people from making lifestyle money selling filters and aggregators and content, but it kind of removes the Meta-style leverage over the whole system.

How about this, but also send them usb sticks with loads of data available on them that they thought was "private" including surveillance footage taken from flock cameras etc. That might be good motivation to be more aware. Not sure about the legality of this though lol

You mean the 3rd amendment, right?

Third Amendment is about not quartering troops. Fourth Amendment is protection against warrantless seizures.

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-3/

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-4/

I'm pretty sure 1st and 4th are the ones GP meant.

The 1st amendment (free speech) in order to protect the right to host the service in the first place and the 4th one (unreasonable search and seizure) to protect against surveillance.

Not sure how the 3rd (lodging of soliders in peacetime) would be relevant.

I mean 1 and 4. But you have me thinking about what 3 could mean in the future....and....I would be thrilled to provide a service with my compute to usa solider in need if that's what the future holds. Providing quarters meant food and beds back in the day, but I could see how this could translate to general web services, coms, ect in the future.

>Meanwhile, human researchers are losing the ability and the will to take true ownership of model-driven research. Researchers and engineers in all parts of the stack are rapidly increasing their dependence on the models even to perceive the world. I myself barely look at raw code anymore, and struggle to maintain the discipline to engage deeply with the model's explanations and proposals throughout the day. Due to the large amount of agent activity data involved in the OpenAI/HuggingFace Incident, even the third-party investigation needed to rely heavily on models to analyze what had happened, and note in their report that their subjective impressions are likely colored by the analysis agent’s biases. The AI labs are far ahead right now in this kind of cognitive offloading (due largely to the gigantic internal token subsidies) but it is easy to imagine the phenomenon spreading throughout the world, until civilization is modulated entirely by the models. It is also not hard to imagine this being superficially positive and coinciding with a scientific and economic renaissance.

The catalyst was the former employee saying it might kill us all. A lot transpired since then. The warning reached a very wide audience and now you see a scramble to put the top back on since it's having such a negative effect on AI outlook for the general public.

I found it interesting one of the guys denied to sign an agreement and waived getting his 2m at open AI. He seemed genuine in my opinion...but who knows maybe it goes deeper than that.

Simultaniously the former employee at anthropic had a similar take that the companies were not doing enough to keep everyone safe from the dangers.

Either way the net effect seems to be a negative impact on longterm AI outlook.

It's really not any easier at all, and really not a wide labor market for it... and an ICF house still needs framers.

It's a really expensive and laboruius way to increase the R value of your home basically.

I feel nerd sniped.

Onion services. Just make it normal. Some may say that's overkill. It's really not today.

It happens to be the best way to self-host with privacy by default.

I don't buy that they are too slow. Its not. It's perfectly adequate.

Onion services never came in my mind tbh, but I think the core problem with onion services is the same with most NAS products and self hosting services out there. Most of the average consumers don't know what Onion services are, plus the technical knowledge barrier is still there, which is the main reason average consumers don't adopt self hosting. Which leaves us with the main question again, which technical barrier has to be removed to make the average consumer even consider self hosting in the first place?

Three commands and you can transform the old phone, computer into a usable service and access it worldwide and its costs nothing.

Perhaps it's just the knowledge that that is possible. People want digital sovereignty. They just don't know how easy it can be.

Most people have an old Mac, used phone in the drawer collecting dust already. The barrier is extremely low.

> which technical barrier has to be removed to make the average consumer even consider

that would be all technical barriers removed at once in an affordable, expandable and good looking personal server device i guess

Sorry, IBM made this?

Yes, I apologize; it's much smaller than what we typically deliver ;-)

Is it that difficult to make an unbreakable cipher anymore?

Very cool! Can you reveal how much this custom board cost you?

> For five fully assembled boards I paid 130 Euros, ordered the E-ink displays from a local shop

I built a project board nearly identical to this one a few years ago, and this seems about right. I don't think the displays themselves are included in the 130 euros. They can vary a lot in price depending on spec and supplier.

I sent in a larger, slightly more complex board to JLCPCB over the weekend and it was $175 for 5 boards with components and assembly. Shipping, tariffs (ouch), and sales taxes added another ~$100 or so.