AI is already having negative impacts on working families. It’s sucking up a huge portion of the money in the economy, and the money is being spent on things that produce very few jobs (data centers). The stated goal of these companies is to reduce jobs, increase surveillance, and to make the war machine more deadly. Some state there’s a good chance what they’re actively working toward will destroy humanity. Some believe one company will create an ASI, starting the technological singularity, which will concentrate immense power into that single company that beats everyone else to it. Arguably, an AI crash is preferable to an AI “success.”

Same, I don’t find “vibe-coding” very useful. It just produces slop. With enough back and forth with an LLM I can usually get something that “works,” but works poorly. I don’t have the motivation to read the slop it produces, so I don’t know if it’s doing things correctly or not (when I do investigate, it often is not). I often feel like the time I spent prompting the LLM in English would’ve been better spent “prompting” the compiler or interpreter in a language designed for software development.

I think it’s illegal to use Reticulum over amatuer radio because it’s encrypted?

LoRa is very low bandwidth, only suitable for short text messages. Radio frequencies are heavily regulated, easy to triangulate, and can be shutdown. People could build a higher speed, planned WiFi mesh; hops just have to be closer. Neighborhoods could build cat6 and fiber into meshes if they wanted to as well.

Presumably, there are other ways to catch them than to allow total surveillance of society. I mean, I don’t think the post office should inspect every person’s mail without a warrant either; and I’m sure there’s plenty of CSAM transmitted through it.

Hyphanet (the predecessor to this new Freenet; possibly superior in some ways) uses an implementation of the “Web of Trust” idea for stuff like this. It doesn’t remove content, but hides it if you and the people you trust, don’t trust that pseudonym (you can assign trust levels in the 0-100 range IIRC). There are also freesite indexes that are curated (multiple levels; a “clean” one that only contains stuff that is unlikely to cause legal problems, an intermediate one that allows stuff like piracy, and a unmoderated one I think). I guess you can say that Hyphanet doesn’t bake moderation into the system itself, but offloads that to individuals and groups. I like this idea, because different people and groups think different things are acceptable and not.

Mozilla changed their privacy policy and terms of use about a year ago in ways that show they cannot be trusted. I think Librewolf offers more privacy/security features than Firefox can with plugins (disabling some canvas features that are used for fingerprinting for example). I think Firefox has some advertising/tracking crap enabled by default too (PPA API?). IDK, I just don’t trust them anymore with their policy changes. Mullvad Browser is even more “hardened,” but less convenient than Librewolf.