In the spirit, I’m here to tell you that I just made this up. I have no formal training in AI or LLMs. Although, I do know a little about computers and writing. I mostly wrote this in 30 minutes while making coffee so I could trade it for the little dopamine numbers in my doom square.

The propensity of the average person to simply believe what they’re told is staggering, and I know because I do it all the time. It takes effort to seek out information, vet it, consider it, and then make a determination on the next information to seek or the next course of action. Deterministic, trustworthy information and abstracted concepts are extremely valuable to the brain, an organ that consumes roughly 20% of our body’s energy.

Before, computers performed tasks that were impossible for the human mind. Machine learning has been automating tasks impossible for humans such as computer vision or large dataset processing, but chatbots are the first technology that has really enabled automating human thought. In this new sense, directly offloading this cognitive work to a computer is literally letting it think for us.

The more reliant on this mode of thinking we become, the easier it is to transfer cognitively expensive work to a device that externalizes that energy cost. However, the trade-offs that are emerging are:

• Internal electric brain energy is traded for relatively inefficient external electricity production to feed circuits.

• The words generated by LLM’s must still be verified and combined into coherent, dependable ideas and actions.

• The drive and skill required to develop good ideas that have value is degraded without constant practice.

In the end, it becomes only a slightly less amount of work to perform the same thinking process for checking and mentally processing the output of an LLM chatbot, which defeats its purpose. If you skip that step of contextualizing it as possibly representing corporate interest and diluting meaning while offering a juicy cognitive shortcut, you’re becoming willingly complacent in your own digital brainwashing. This effect is also emergent and automatic; it doesn’t even have to be of nefarious purpose, it seems to be a procedural consequence of this mode of thinking.

What I really fear, and what is also emerging, is that eventually AI agents will become so advanced and trusted that their end-to-end capabilities will make mistakes and ulterior motives impossible to spot, and that they will become completely above the capability and desire for human scrutiny.

These digital brains we trained on all of human knowledge are now in the process of training us.

Microsoft Gave FBI Keys To Unlock Encrypted Data, Exposing Major Privacy Flaw

They don’t want you to be able to use encryption they can’t control.

They get to abuse public infrastructure to build their stupid little robots tax free, and we get to pay for the repairs with our tax dollars.

Privatize the gains, socialize the losses.

It delays the problem for six more years, and it also gives me the satisfaction of pirating testing the only decent version of Windows free of Microslop bloat and vibe coded react.

Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC is supported until 2032 and free to activate.

Can I get a full list of features on the Iran war after all these cryptic posts?

They made a fifth one?

Windows 10 IoT Enterprise is maintained until 2032, de-bloated, and free.

And, in Alex’s ending, he marries and impregnates his second cousin and step-sister, Patricia.

How can someone be your second cousin and also your step-sister?

These are great points and are important to consider for mental and sexual health. I also think that the risks accompanying age verification’s mass surveillance and capitalism’s exploitation of America’s institutional sexual repression have a far greater and more harmful impact than porn and masturbation.

Of course, it’s not a bad thing that there is support for people in the form of this app, but I fear that legal policy is expanding to suppress sexuality without consent. For example, data from period tracking apps has already been used to persecute women who seek abortions. If the extreme religious right in America gets their way, could data from anti-masturbation apps or age verification services be used to help prove you accessed “illegal” pornography?

It sounds insane, because it is, but I believe this is where we’re headed in a fascist, sexually repressive America. :/

“Porn addiction,” like “sex addiction,” isn’t recognized by the DSM-5, which classifies mental disorders. While porn-viewing can be compulsive, like other behaviors, research suggests that perceived porn addiction predicted distress over actual porn use itself. Yet, the idea of “porn addiction” persists in the U.S., which lacks comprehensive sex education requirements in many states; only 37 percent of states require sex education to be medically accurate, according to Boston University.

What a perfect example of how sexuality is suppressed, controlled, then monetized in the US, and the harm it causes.

Get ready for age verification data breaches like this, except on a worldwide scale.

If you’re not ready to switch to Linux:

Windows 10 Enterprise IoT is supported until 2032, works great, contains almost no bloat, and is free to download and activate.

You can configure just about anything else you want or need using Chris Titus’ Power Shell Windows Utility.

Rufus is simple and easy to use for extracting the ISO to a USB drive, and has built in options for setting up a local account and automatically disabling telemetry options during installation.

Microslop is rabidly, desperately, sprinting-on-fire towards a closed mobile-style system paradigm, frothing at the mouth and glowing radioactive iridescent green with envy at Apple and Google’s silicon to application device and software ecosystem control. They want you to purchase the edge tensor hardware they need to run and train the LLMs and machine learning algorithms that will be used to analyze everything you do on your computer, perform deep learning recognition on every photo, video, and file on your hard drive, and securely export that model to themselves, advertisers, and the government at a premium, paid for by our tax dollars.

They’re burning down their own company to do it, that’s how bad they want it.

The law does not require photo ID uploads or facial recognition, with users instead simply self-reporting their age, setting AB 1043 apart from similar laws passed in Texas and Utah that require “commercially reasonable” verification methods, such as government-issued ID checks.

What even is the point of this then? To make shitty parents feel better?

This man is literally insane.

deleted by creator

Magnetic platter drives still have the highest storage density per dollar and so they are still heavily in use. Theoretically, overwritten data can be recovered from them by analyzing the magnetic fields directly from the platter. However, this is extremely time and money intensive and requires specialized equipment and expertise. Overwriting a partition multiple times severely complicates this process just by performing multiple overwrites.

Realistically, overwriting once with random data is enough, especially if the drive is to be physically destroyed. You can also use a powerful magnet (top end neodymium in direct contact) to scramble the delicate magnetic fields that encode the data on the platter, but at that point you may as well shred the drive anyways.

SSDs are a fundamentally different storage paradigm that make this kind of recovery essentially impossible. Due to the limitations of NAND memory, data can be written to blocks inaccessible except at the hardware level. To make SSDs secure, modern drives usually implement processes (TRIM) that erase blocks marked for deletion. Or, all data written to the drive is encrypted by onboard hardware (SED), and “erasing” the drive simply deletes the encryption keys.

From the article:

Nest cameras, by contrast, can send clips to Google’s servers even without a paid subscription. Google offers a small amount of free cloud storage — older models store clips up to five minutes long for three hours; the latest models store 10-second clips for six hours. That means some footage is uploaded and stored, at least temporarily, whether you pay or not.

According to Nick Barreiro, chief forensic analyst with Principle Forensics, deleting footage from the cloud doesn’t necessarily mean it’s immediately gone. “When you delete something from a server, it doesn’t get overwritten immediately — the file system is just told to ignore this data, and this space is now available to be used. But if no new data is written over it, it’s still going to be there, even though you can’t see it.”

This is more or less how local storage works as well. The creator of BleachBit, a file cleaning tool made famous for being present on Hillary Clinton’s email servers, has some great insights in their documentation about the methods for destroying data on hard drives. As it turns out, data “deletion” is just a series of operations on your hard disk like any other, and retrieval depends on the methods used - de-indexing, metadata and file structure removal, and overwriting to name a few.

Once, I accidentally formatted the wrong drive in Windows and it ended up being my 20TB platter (oops). I was able to recover 99% of the files on the drive with some free recovery software just because I disconnected and stopped using the drive immediately. The only files lost were large ones partially overwritten by the new blank file system created when I formatted the drive. Windows had only deleted the file system indexing the drive, and all of the file data and metadata was intact, waiting to be randomly overwritten. I had to string together four cheap failing 4TB SATA drives I bought used on Amazon, but it worked.

The point is, if I could do this as an amateur, and storage technology operating on the same principals is in use at enterprise scale, what are the lengths that the likes of the FBI and Google are willing to go to recover old data that has been “deleted”? I’m frankly surprised that Google does not overwrite their discarded data, and it’s probably for reasons like this, beyond the additional processing time it would take. Given their vast resources and storage capacity, it could be some time before “deleted” data is at least partially overwritten, if ever.

If you ever have data that you absolutely need destroyed, overwrite the entire drive with random data more than once, then physically shred the drive completely. And never connect your devices to a cloud storage service. It’s the only way to be sure.