tal

Bonus: people should stop being lazy and learn to setup a server infrastructure instead of using “the cloud”. Your data are safer, you save money and give less power to gargantuan cloud companies.

If change happens here, I'm pretty sure that it's going to be in the form of some sort of zero-administration standardized server module that a company sells that has no phone-home capability and that you stick on your local network.

Society probably isn't going to make everyone a system and network administrator, in much the same way that it's not going to make everyone a medical doctor or an arborist. Would be expensive to provide everyone with that skillset.

Like you, I tend to feel that in general, people need to stop trying to force people to live the way they think is best. Unless there is a very real, very serious impact on others ("I enjoy driving through town while firing a machine gun randomly out my car windows"), people should be permitted to choose how to live as far as possible. Flip side is that they gotta accept potential negative consequences of doing so. Obviously, there's gonna be some line to draw on what consitutes "seriously affecting others", and there's going to be different people who have different positions on where that line should be. Does maybe spreading disease because you're not wearing a facemask during a pandemic count? What about others breathing sidestream smoke from a cigarette smoker in a restaurant? But I tend towards a position that society should generally be less-restrictive on what people do as long as the harm is to themselves.

However.

I would also point out that in some areas, this comes up because someone is receiving some form of aid. Take food stamps. Those are designed to make it easy to obtain food, but hard to obtain alcohol. In that case, the aid is being provided by someone else. I think that it's reasonable for those other people to say "I am willing to buy you food, but I don't want to fund your alcohol habit. I should have the ability to make that decision." That is, they chose to provide food aid because food is a necessity, but alcohol isn't.

I think that there's a qualitative difference between saying "I don't want to pay to buy someone else alcohol" and "I want to pass a law prohibiting someone from consuming alcohol that they've bought themselves."

A major part of that is, I think, that desktop OSes are, "by default, insecure" against local software. Like, you install a program on the system, it immediately has access to all of your data.

That wasn't an unreasonable model in the era when computers weren't all persistently connected to a network, but now, all it takes is someone getting one piece of malware on the computer, and it's trivial to exfiltrate all your data. Yes, there are technologies that let you stick software in a sandbox, on desktop OSes, but it's hard and requires technology knowledge. It's not a general solution for everyone.

Mobile OSes are better about this in that they have a concept of limiting access that an app has to only some data, but it's still got a lot of problems; I think that a lot of software shouldn't have network access at all, some information shouldn't be readily available, and there should be defense-in-depth, so that a single failure doesn't compromise everything. I really don't think that we've "solved" this yet, even on mobile OSes.

Bind mounts aren't specific to Docker. You're asking specifically about bind mounts as used by Docker?

I use, say, bash quite happily. But I will also come down pretty firmly on the side of static typing for large software packages. It lets software handle a bunch of rigorous checking that otherwise eats up human time.

I can believe that LLMs might wind up being a technical dead end (or not; I could also imagine them being a component of a larger system). My own guess is that language, while important to thinking, won't be the base unit of how thought is processed the way it is on current LLMs.

Ditto for diffusion models used to generate images today.

I can also believe that there might be surges and declines in funding. We've seen that in the past.

But I am very confident that AI is not, over the long term, going to go away. I will confidently state that we will see systems that will use machine learning to increasingly perform human-like tasks over time.

And I'll say with lower, though still pretty high confidence, that the computation done by future AI will very probably be done on hardware oriented towards parallel processing. It might not look like the parallel hardware today. Maybe we find that we can deal with a lot more sparseness and dedicated subsystems that individually require less storage. Yes, neural nets approximate something that happens in the human brain, and our current systems use neural nets. But the human brain runs at something like a 90 Hz clock and definitely has specialized subsystems, so it's a substantially-different system from something like Nvidia's parallel compute hardware today (1,590,000,000 Hz and homogenous hardware).

I think that the only real scenario where we have something that puts the kibosh on AI is if we reach a consensus that superintelligent AI is an unsolveable existential threat (and I think that we're likely to still go as far as we can on limited forms of AI while still trying to maintain enough of a buffer to not fall into the abyss).

EDIT: That being said, it may very well be that future AI won't be called AI, and that we think of it differently, not as some kind of special category based around a set of specific technologies. For example, OCR (optical character recognition) software or speech recognition software today both typically make use of machine learning

those are established, general-use product categories that get used every day

but we typically don't call them "AI" in popular use in 2025. When I call my credit card company, say, and navigate a menu system that uses a computer using speech recognition, I don't say that I'm "using AI". Same sort of way that we don't call semi trucks or sports cars "horseless carriages" in 2025, though they derive from devices that were once called that. We don't use the term "labor-saving device" any more

I think of a dishwasher or a vacuum cleaner as distinct devices and don't really think of them as associated devices. But back when they were being invented, the idea of machines in the household that could automate human work using electricity did fall into a sort of bin like that.

Yeah, came here to say this. Soda generally doesn't have a lot of caffeine compared to coffee.

I like scrambled eggs to omelette.

You probably want "I prefer scrambled eggs to omelette".

Scrambled eggs if I'm making it. Slightly less effort. If someone else is, I guess maybe omelette. Not really a strong preference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galago

Galagos /ɡəˈleɪɡoʊz/, also known as bush babies or nagapies (meaning "night monkeys" in Afrikaans[2]), are small nocturnal[3] primates native to continental, sub-Sahara Africa, and make up the family Galagidae (also sometimes called Galagonidae).

They catch insects on the ground or snatch them out of the air...Their diet is a mixture of insects and other small animals, fruit, and tree gums.

Sounds like it might work itself out.

You mean a dedicated hardware device?

If the UK gets its way, operating systems like iOS and Android would “prevent any nudity being displayed on screen unless the user has verified they are an adult through methods such as biometric checks or official ID. Child sex offenders would be required to keep such blockers enabled.” The Home Office “has initially focused on mobile devices,” but the push could be expanded to desktops, the FT said. Government officials point out that Microsoft can already scan for “inappropriate content” in Microsoft Teams, the report said.

"The Home Office, which didn't care much about verifying that its schemes were enforceable if they promised the potential of being able to announce a programme with the potential of winning social conservative votes, plunged ahead. It seemed like this new scheme would work marvelously and herald in a new era of Victorianism in the UK. That is, until a small boy by the name of Edward Woolsey in Liverpool discovered that he could magically manufacture a pornography-viewing device by taking any inexpensive, used Android device and tethering it to his phone. Word spread quickly among the youth."

This isn't a huge increase. It's not on the order of what just happened with RAM.

According to a report from Digitimes Asia (quoting Nikkei), HDD contract prices jumped roughly 4% quarter over quarter in Q4 2025.