Well, that’s the second part of my theory but I didn’t went into it to avoid muddling the point I was making:

• I think the “neutral” majority shift more to one side or the other depending on who dominates society and the main sources of culture and information in it.

So in present “Greed is good” (very much a Sociopath slogan) times with mainstream media and a large section of the Culture production and distribution (in the form of TV, but also TV Show and Movie making) in the hands of extremelly wealthy people and when those we are told we should look up to are people like Musk (well, him specifically maybe not anymore) and Bezos, the “neutral” majority has shifted significantly towards the asshole side of things.

The World would be a lot different if our “heroes” were Scientists and Environmentalists.

Clearly you’re not thinking of the poor genociders and genocide-enablers whose feelings were hurt by the evil demonstrators!

The anti-Terrorist legislation is worded in an extremelly broad way and abused like crazy to do things to people that a mere two decades ago would’ve been considered extreme abuses of power (such as holding people without charge for long periods and suspending habeas corpus and the right to the presence of a lawyer during interrogation in airports) even in the UK which is a country with strong know-your-place autocratic tendencies compared to most of Europe.

Further, there has long been “disturbing of public order” legislation that is so broadly defined that shouting is enough to fall foul of it, so that’s what they tend to end up charging anti-system demonstrators (such as environmentalists and anti-war protestors) with, but not before they did the whole “holding them without charge and the right to a phone call thing” (basically psychological torture when applied to people who aren’t hardenned criminals) to try and get them to confess in an “interview under caution”.

By the way, the abuse of this legislation was more than forecasted back when it was passed in the aftermath of 9/11.

Granted, this article has been spinned to make it seem like “Anti”-Terrorism Legislation has been used to do even more autocratic shit than it is already used for.

Haven’t you heard what the governments in the US, UK, Germany and even places like The Netherlands tell us: being against Genocide is being anti-Semitic, which is logically the same as saying that being a Genocider is a Jewish trait.

Whatever is going on here absolutely is extreme racism, only it’s not anti-racists protecting Jews from Racism (otherwise people wouldn’t be repeatedly implying that being a Genocider is a Jewish thing), it’s people with White Supremacist mindsets defending The Last White Colonialist Nation In The World as they finalize their ethnic cleansing of the Arabs that occupy the land they’re stealing, a land which by the way is were all the Whites-That-Aren’t-Quite-Like-The-Rest-Of-Us are all supposed to move to.

This is also why I’m not at all surprised that this happens in the UK: the country is incredibly racist (I lived there and know it first hand and from personal stories from friends with Indian, African, Arab and Turkish ancestry, plus I lived elsewhere in Europe so have something to compare it to) and the elites there are especially so, though they usually disguise it behind a thick layer of learned poshness. The way the “anti”-Racisms laws are made there are all about suppressing the visible side of racism (loudy saying or writting racist things) not the actual acting in racist ways (as long as you don’t voice it as such and hide it with some kind of “it’s procedure” excuse, you can act as racist as you want) and even that “keeping of appearances” on Racism has stopped being enforced by the Justice System (were it wasn’t even properly practiced to begin with) in the last decade or so, especially anti-Muslim Racism.

This comes from way back: for example, the person who was the Greenparty European Parliament Member about a decades ago (whose name now evades me) used to be under police surveillance for being an Environmentalist.

It’s long been the case that in the UK anybody who is merelly perceived to threathen the interests of the power elites gets cracked down on hard by the Justice System and surveillance aparatus, and that has only become worse in the aftermath of 9/11 when quite extreme autocratic “anti-terrorism” legislation was passed, doing things like suspending habeas corpous and the right to having a lawyer present during interrogation for those on the wrong side of border control in airports (something used, for example, some years later to crack down on the Snowden Leaks that were bringing to light the extreme nature of digital surveilance of common citizens in the UK for a supposed Democracy - an extreme surveillance which, by the way, the government at the time made legal with retroactive effects, all the while getting the editor of The Guardian that allowed it to come out kicked-out, with the result that nobody ever talked about it anymore).

I immigrated to and lived in the UK for over a decade and by the time I left the country - about a year after the Leave Referendum vote - I was convinced that the UK was the “Most likely to turn Fascist country in Europe”, as it was very autocratic compared to other countries I lived in. Mind you, Hungary and Slovakia seem to have beaten it to it, though maybe it just seems so because they’re loud brutish Fascists rather than the UK’s Posh Fascists that use the “Law” and talking behind closed doors to their peers in the right places of the System to have dissent crushed without directly getting their hands dirty.

Years ago I concluded (wrongly or rightly) that most people are neutral, a small handfull are actually good people (willing to sacrifice their personal benefit for people they don’t know with no expectation of gaining from it, even in the form of social approval) and a small handful are assholes, but the assholes do such a disproportionate amount of damage that they end up having a massive impact on everybody else.

The stuff in computer games that makes NPCs move around the game world from point A to point B has been called AI for ages (and in this case specifically, is generally the A* pathing algorithm which isn’t even all that complex).

It’s only recently that marketing-types, salesmen and journalists with no actual technical expertise have started pushing AI as if the I in the acronym actually meant general intelligence rather than the “intelligence-alike” meaning that it has had for decades.

Salesmanship is the essence of management at those levels.

Which brings us back around to the original subject of this thread - tech bros - in my own experienced in Tech recently and back in the 90s boom, this generation of founders and “influencers” aren’t techies, they’re people from areas heavy on salesmanship, not actually on creating complex things that objectivelly work.

The complete total dominance of sales types in both domains id why LLMs are being pushed the way they are as if they’re some kind of emerging-AGI and lots of corporates believe it and are trying to hammer those square pegs into round holes even though the most basic of technical analises would tell them that it doesn’t work like that.

Ultimately since the current societal structures we have massively benefit that kind or personality, we’re going to keep on having these kinds of barely-useful-stuff-insanely-hyped-up cycles wasting tons of resources because salesmanship is hardly a synonym for efficiency or wisdom.

Soon Twitter will complete its transition to Nazi Bar of Social Media.

And for those on the other side of the Atlantic, there are several computer shops that will just put a computed together for you without an OS.

Here’s a random example “configure your own computer” from a computer shop in France. In this one the OS (Système d’exploitation) is not included and you have to pay extra for it.

In my experience with custom assemblies like this the OS is never included.

When I live in the UK at some point I’ve even used of these kind of stores there to get a custom notebook.

It’s basically an “assemble your own computer” for people who don’t know how to do it and aren’t confident enough to try (understandable given that the parts value of a whole desktop PC adds up to at least €1000 so there generally is some fear of fucking it up if you’ve never done it before).

I don’t think the sensors really matter for a server but the rest makes some sense.

Still, 80 bucks will buy you quite literally a Mini-PC (a really crummy one, granted) which can run more server tasks because it has as much or more memory and storage and isn’t hindered by there being an Android OS layer there doing nothing useful, and which is absolutelly and 100% under your control because it boots into your OS of choice.

Half than that will buy you a crummy SBC which probably de facto has as much capability to run server tasks as that Oneplus (it’s weaker but doesn’t have Android there eating up resources) though in my experience those things tend to be a bit finicky.

I don’t think it’s actually worth it to spend $80 on an used phone to use as a server (unless you do need UPS-like features or built-in mobile nertwork access) since you quite literally have better options brand new for that money, but if you have one around it can make sense even if it’s a bit more work getting it going and is not fully under your control (unless we’re talking about something jailbroken where you can install Oxygen or Lineage on, so a Pixel would probably be a better choice).

That said, there is a certain technical elegance in the whole notion of repurposing an Android Phone to be a home server.

I think you’re seriously overestimating the technical prowess of the average law enforcement officer…

Except the price, which is much lower for the SBC, way much lower if one uses one of the lower end Orange Pi or Banana Pi SBCs.

Also you can put Linux on the SBCs (which always come unlocked) hence do way more with them as servers than if one has to use Android as the OS.

I mean, I can get it if people with the technical chops, love for technical challenges and an old and pretty much worthless Android phone, configure it as a server if only because “why not?!”, but it’s not exactly a great option considering that a 40 bucks SBC can do the same, only better, more easily and with far more possibilities (given that it will be running Linux rather than Android).

PS: Actually somebody below mention mobile network connection, which, thinking about it, would be a good reason to use an old Android phone as a server since it has built-in support for 3G (unless it’s quite old) whilst the SBC needs it add to it which might be a problem for the cheaper SBCs (just wondering about how I would get around to do it, I think you need to connect a USB dongle to it and it has to be something compatible with Armbian Linux)

I’m truly, totally, completely shocked … that Windows is still being used on the server side.

There are gamers and there are gamers.

Some gamers prefer not to have the level of noise of a jet engine taking off right next to them to get a couple percent more frames per second on a game.

I would say there are at least two quite different markets amongst PC gamers who have different preferred balances between performance and the downsides of it (noise, heat, power costs), a bit like not all people who enjoy driving want muscle cars.

Lying and misportraying themselves in social media is nothing for a country were most people are fine with murdering tens of thousands of children because of their ethnicity.

This is nothing given the depths of their depravity.

It’s the most boring thing of the technical side of the job especially at the more senior levels because it’s so mindnumbingly simple, uses a significant proportion of development time and is usually what ends up having to be redone if there are small changes in things like input or output interfaces (i.e. adding, removing or changing data fields) which is why it’s probably one of the main elements in making maintaining and updating code already in Production a far less pleasant side of job than the actual creation of the application/system is.

I’ve done this almost from the very beginning (back in the 90s) and always had very small mobile communications costs because I could easilly change providers and plans and even do things like use a local SIM card whilst abroad to avoid roaming costs.

Indeed.

60 years ago we were supposed to having to work very little by now thanks to automation, then automation came and instead of the productivity gains of it ending up spread across society, what happenned instead was that the extra productivity went just pushed up dividend and CxO pay higher and due to the reduced need for workers due to automation the purchasing power of salaries actually went down (for example, in the US the percentage of corporate revenues that went to pay salaries fell from 23% in the 70s down to 7% by 2014).

Expecting that, under the exact system that’s been moving us more and more towards Dystopia with each wave of automation, AI would somehow end up making things better for most people rather than better just for the Owner Class and worse for part or most of the rest, is pretty ill-informed and naive.

BDY sells their vehicles in Europe.

I do believe the safety regulations in the EU are actually stricter than in the US.