> This makes the privacy purists angry, but in my opinion it's the reasonable default for the average computer user.

Absolutely not. If my laptop tells me that it is encrypted by default, I don't like that the default is to also hold a copy of the keys in case big brother wants them.

Call me a "privacy purist" all you want, but it shouldn't be normal to expect the government to have access to a key to your house.

It is startling to me how much we disregard water scarcity. It seems like there's a persistent attitude that because we haven't run out of water to a dangerous degree before, it will never happen, even as the numbers suggest we are marching directly into a significant drought event.

I worry that the gears of capitalism will refuse to stop turning even as we face significant mortality as a result of dehydration, because our biggest and most profitable industries rely on a mindboggling quantity of fresh water.

It’s a good thing that a mindbogglingly large amount of fresh water falls on us every year, for free.

2 billion people rely on quickly melting glaciers, a lot of water tables that depend on rainfall aren't being replenished at the rate they're being emptied.

You can cover your ears and ignore physics all you want. If you take out more water from an ecosystem than what is coming in, eventually you run out.

> If you take out more water from an ecosystem than what is coming in, eventually you run out.

That's fine, people will move elsewhere. Unless the water is literally disappearing from the planet.

Sure, and the people who live near oceans can just sell their houses and move as sea levels rise.

People forced to migrate due to fresh water scarcity will migrate to where fresh water can be found, which is likely where other people already are, increasing pressure on the increasingly scarce water and other resources in that area, driving conflict, disease, famine, further migration into increasingly stressed areas and leading to social and ecological collapse across the board.

Access to reliable fresh water is foundational to stable society.

> That's fine, people will move elsewhere

That's how one creates a refugee crisis. All those thirsty people fleeing an area where the lack of water has made their property worthless...

They will need somewhere to go, and housing and jobs when they get there - and if they don't find it, that's when things get dicey all round.

Look at what's happening in Sri Lanka or the middle east (drought causing famine was a catalyst to the arab spring) for an example of what happens when people try to move elsewhere.

It seems unlikely to continue if the local water table is dry

Is this statement a version of "actually, there isn't a problem"? Because if you're dismissing what's happening, all I can do is implore you to look into this issue with a curious and open mind.

We have a virtually infinite amount of water. The oceans are full of it. When the time comes (if the time comes), we will build desalination plants at scale.

So no, water will not run out, it will simply cost more to use.

On Android, you can download replacement launchers in the form of an App. That app replaces your default launcher.

In this case, KISS is the app drawer, because it is the default UI of your phone once installed and configured. It's a really good app drawer at that!

In the USA, the loneliness epidemic is compounded by isolation. A large portion of our society has moved into suburban communities that are largely impersonal. There is very little in the way of in-person community outside of churches or political movements that only certain kinds of people want to be involved with.

With the Internet giving us the ability to interact with our chosen niche with little effort, we are willing to accept this still-impersonal alternative to our stagnant communities.

I have found that, as a city-dweller, I benefit from separating myself from social media and going out into the world looking for more personal connections, but this is somewhat of a privilege afforded to those people who live in more densely populated areas. Even then, my distance from social media can sometimes be a handicap when you interact with people who are still reliant on it to coordinate everything.

For most people, the social opportunities that existed in the 70's through the 90's simply doesn't exist anymore. If you aren't using social media, you're practically being anti-social, but there is something inherently anti-social about social media to begin with, so you're screwed if you do and screwed if you don't.

> the social opportunities that existed in the 70's through the 90's simply doesn't exist anymore

Does it have to be that way?

Is there a way to bring back "the social outdoors" of those days? To recreate it?

1. You don't deport millions of undocumented people, you find a way integrate those who are willing to work (most of them) into your society.

2. Obama and Biden didn't get the same level of attention because they weren't being publicly antagonistic and racist, or using deliberately cruel tactics to accomplish their goals. Or breaking the law / violating the constitution to meet their ends.

Example: Kavanaugh stops. Racial profiling is now legal thanks to our Supreme Court.

Trump referred to Somalis as "garbage". If that's not publicly antagonistic or racist then what is?

Okay, but then what? Host your sites on something other than 'www' or '*', exclude them from search engines, and never link to them? Then, the few people who do resolve these subdomains, you just gotta hope they don't do it using a DNS server owned by a company with an AI product (like Google, Microsoft, or Amazon)?

I really don't know how you're supposed to shield your content from AI without also shielding it from humanity.

Don't have any index pages or heavy cross-linking between pages.

None of that matters. AI bots can still figure out how to navigate the website.

The biggest problem I have seen with AI scrapping is that they blindly try every possible combination of URLs once they find your site and blast it 100 times per second for each page they can find.

They don’t respect robots.txt, they don’t care about your sitemap, they don’t bother caching, just mindlessly churning away effectively a DDOS.

Google at least played nice.

And so that is why things like anubis exist, why people flock to cloudflare and all the other tried and true methods to block bots.

I don't see how that is possible. The web site is a disconnected graph with a lot of components. If they get hold of a url, maybe that gets them to a few other pages, but not all of them. Most of the pages on my personal site are .txt files with no outbound links, for that matter. Nothing to navigate.

how? if you don't have a default page and index listings are disabled, how can they derive page names?

Good luck. Americans won't even differentiate Washington State and Washington D.C. Even the AP guidelines say that "Washington" is ubiquitous shorthand for "Washington D.C." and recommends against shortening it to "D.C."

The most hilarious thing is that I learned recently that when they applied to be a state, the people from WA requested to be the state of Columbia. But a Kentucky rep said that would be too easily confused with the District of Columbia, and Congress changed it to Washington.

> when they applied to be a state, the people from WA

Western Australia?

Yes. Little known fact, it was renamed Washington by Congress.

Americans do! If you are west of the Rockies, Washington resolves to the west. If you are east, it’s DC, and you have to say “you know, where Nirvana is from.”

Don’t get me started on east coast dumdums pronouncing Oregon as “Orry-gone.”

AI-generated music is novel, but like images and videos, I think of it almost exclusively as a novelty. I haven't heard any AI-generated music that I like in a real way. Just stuff that sounds like something I like.

The real value AI has for music is discovery. I've been using Gemini and ChatGPT to build playlists based on music I already like, and discovering lots of fun new tracks. I can be really specific about what kind of music I like and don't like. I can show it a playlist I already made, and ask it to make one like it, but with completely different artists. It's insanely useful!

But these kinds of tools would just expand how many different artists Spotify has to pay from my streaming, and that doesn't do the same thing as shoving cheap mass-produced slop down our throats, so it isn't surprising what they offer us.

The people who really want to stop paying for streaming are going to turn to piracy, don't worry. Physical media will still be accessible for people who are willing to pay with space instead of money.

"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" - Gabe Newell

He'd probably be flattered, Mao was one of histories greatest influencer of minds after all.

Of nothing else, he was impressive at melting down.