> It makes parts of the CIA look incompetent to the public. This is rare.
Iran–Contra? Their cyber espoinage tools getting swiped? The self-admission from the US administration that the CIA failed to properly recognize and prepare for the tactics used in 9/11, in spite of ample forward warning?
Like most intelligence agencies, their unaccountable power often gets mistaken for actual intelligence. That power makes them dangerous, but it doesn't make them smart.
They also totally missed India's second round of nuclear weapon development and were blindsided by the tests:
U.S. Intelligence and India's Nuclear Tests: Lessons Learned
August 11, 1998 98-672
The U.S. Intelligence Community did not have advance knowledge that India intended to conduct nuclear tests beginning on May 11, 1998.
Although intelligence agencies cannot have foreknowledge of every significant development in world affairs, many observers (and senior intelligence officials) believe that, in view of the election of an Indian government committed to "inducting" nuclear weapons, much greater attention should have been given to indications of impending nuclear tests
> glass-walled skyscrapers really aren't complicated either
Until they become a focusing mirror that turns into a gigantic magnifying glass, see: the Walkie Talkie building. Evidently, glass buildings are hard enough that even with hundreds of engineers, there still ends up being second order effects that are unaccounted for in many designs.
Building a skyscraper with glass windows means understanding the physics of light, geography, the spin of the earth and it's rotation around the sun, materials science etc.
Well yeah, designing them is hard, even making the glass is hard. Similarly, ancient civilization was full of buildings whose constructors did very complex things but didn't understand the second order effects and artisans that spent a lifetime honing their skills to work on it. But anyone that can dismiss them as uncomplicated because they're just stone shouldn't need to worry too much about the engineers and digital models and processes behind the glass ones either.
Understanding why pain happens is what allowed for anesthesia and modern medicine, which massively improved the quality of life of our species. Did we need to figure out how to do that? Sure, in the same way we needed to figure out how to create fire, or craft tools.
A stylus is crafted, paper in manufacturered. I suppose you can rip off some bark and scribble onto it, but what are you writing? Words. Do you know every word ever? Do you have comprehension of the meaning of every word? Building a structure of stone requires knowledge, otherwise it'll fall down and the knowledge that allows for that was accumulated over thousands of years. There were people who mastered pottery and nothing else, people who could do a little bit of everything but were master of none.
We only ever think we understand, we never truly do. There's infinite complexity to the universe we live in and there always has been, the illusion of simplicity is a false construct we create to feel more comfortable about our existence.
> You are making benchmarking WAAAY more complicated than it has to be. We're talking about some dude considering a switch to Linux, but isn't sure the performance is on par. Just load up your game and hit the benchmark button. No sane and rational person is going to be clowning around with driver revisions or regedit, because those types of people think that is more fun than playing the games.
Benchmarking is uncomplicated in the sense that you can press a button and watch the pretty things on-screen and get it to spit out a number; but is your room a little hotter than usual today? Was something downloading in the background? Did you have a transient network issue that caused some process to stall and eat some CPU time? Is one of your fans running a little slower than usual? Did you wait for the precomputed shaders to fully compile? What about the ones Steam supplies?
It's not about fun, it's tedious work. But without proper controls in place, data is just noise.
Funny you bring up Gmail as a positive example when they reneged on their promise of unlimited storage 5 years ago.
Most of my media is backed up on my Unraid server, the most important stuff is backed up on an external drive and I also have some things that exist in the cloud, which I do not trust, which is why it's tiered as least important.
Is your Unraid free and unlimited then? Funny argument, indeed.
I'm amazed at the number of people jumping out here to insist that people don't use or value cloud storage because of the existance of one or thirty or whatever kludgey manual solutions. I mean, I know you can store stuff manually. I still have all that junk too! It's fun. But I don't recommend it to friends or coworkers or family or anyone else because... well, duh, as it were.
This forum's cherished (and, apparently, deeply insecure) geek cred notwithstanding, THE MARKET walked straight into the arms of the cloud, and has derived immense value from it. Grandmothers have terabyte archives of their progeny's development and will take it to the grave, without needing to puzzle out (sigh) an unraid install.
I'm grandfathered to get unlimited updates, though if they rugpull on that the drives are just formatted as XFS. It'd be a hassle to move to something like TrueNAS, but I could do it even if the OS stopped working. Even if Lime Technology completely disappear one day and make every Unraid USB stick self destruct, I'll still have physical access to the data.
Cloud services, like everything else in control of rent seeking companies, are getting worse. That was always the obvious, inevitable trap with all of this, with any system where you pay a subscription for remote access to a timeshare computer. Which isn't to say that it isn't useful, I even use it, but I don't rely on it.
You didn't frame your initial post around the market of grandmas, your rhetoric was targeted to those reading your post; "How much of your personal data", "do you still have your email".
> You didn't frame your initial post around the market of grandmas, your rhetoric was targeted to those reading your post; "How much of your personal data", "do you still have your email".
Uh... that's wildly and seemingly deliberately mischaracterizing what I wrote. Seriously? The very next sentence falsifies your interpretation, quite explicitly. Why would you cherry pick like that?
You were talking to an audience of tech nerds, as was the original blog post we're all discussing. All of your counter-arguments in you original post were appeals to that base and merely suggesting that Gmail users outside of the Hacker News sphere exist doesn't really change that.
Given that, bringing up the needs of grandma and her family photos is a non-sequitur. We clearly aren't talking about that, more considering the wider effects of a tech industry having centralized control of and gating access to customer data and processing and the ways that has caused a lot of exploitation and enshittification.
But clearly you're avoiding talking about any of that, which is why the only thing in my post you engaged with is a bunch of handwringing that I misrepresented something you said (I didn't).
I don't think I was and I think that you're focusing so strongly on a perceived strawman rather than the actual topic is an admission that you're just projecting.
I'm an Australian and there isn't a single person I know that isn't anti-america at this point, that includes conservatives. This was reflected in the last election, where the party most aligned with the US got absolutely wrecked.
You're posting in a thread discussing news of a legal outcome that showed that free market competition did not prevent anti-competitive practices and instead required legal/regulatory intervention to solve.
To say that these are "anti-competitive practices" is stretching the phrase beyond all meaning. If you don't like Deere's policies, you can always buy from Case IH or New Holland. There is plenty of competition in farm equipment.
Most can't "always" immediately replace an incredibly expensive business asset that is only retroactively discovered to have been sold under deceptive terms. The free market works well in many instances, but it needs checks to ensure that it remains truly free and not captured by fraudulent actors that harm consumers and society at large.
Iran–Contra? Their cyber espoinage tools getting swiped? The self-admission from the US administration that the CIA failed to properly recognize and prepare for the tactics used in 9/11, in spite of ample forward warning?
Like most intelligence agencies, their unaccountable power often gets mistaken for actual intelligence. That power makes them dangerous, but it doesn't make them smart.
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