That's not quite correct. It requires the collection of available metadata only. It does not require that encrypted messages be decrypted, unless the provider holds the keys rather than the user. Still, it's not a great bill.
And I guess VPNs are not end to end encrypted. The provider would still be able to access your data if they want to unlike something like Tor. So, it will be the death of privacy focussed VPNs. But presumably things like Signal and Apple's disk encryption will be fine as only the user holds the keys.
Signal does a lot to ensure they don't actually know much of what is traditionally considered metadata (like their sealed sender scheme which prevents them from knowing who messages were sent by). Do you know if this bill would require them to roll back those protections?
1. He quote two heavily biased right wing media outlets. One with questionable accuracty. [1][2]
2. He cherry picked one month of data. And in fact the data for that month was flagged as bad and the new data for the number of women is not released yet. [3]
The real data for each months looks more like:
Monthly Job Changes — U.S. Establishment Survey (CES), 2026
(Seasonally adjusted, in thousands. Women = BLS Table B-5 / CES0000000010. Men = implied: Total − Women.)
Month ΔTotal ΔWomen ΔMen (implied)
Feb -156 -27 -129
Mar +214 +98 +116
Apr +148 +84 +64
May +63 +49 +14
Jun +31 +89 -58
Jul -10 -32 +22
Aug +133 +145 -12
Sep +29 +14 +15
So no there is not some crazy trend that only women are being hired. This is classic propaganda using cherry picked data.
Yes it is cherry picking. The fortune article above even quotes:
“I think there’s been way too much focus on the month to month—is it men gaining jobs or women?” Long told Fortune. “That moves around a lot.”
You don't need to wait for September, you can already see from historical data that this measure jumps around a lot from month to month. A lopsided month is not news except for people with an agenda to mislead.
Humans are some of the dumbest when it comes to survivability. We've already sealed our extinction by fucking up the environment. Eventually it will be too hot for us to survive. Other smaller animals will probably be able to manage, but we won't.
And instead of averting that we're spending our time worrying about some fantasy villain. Compared to things like bees that have been hear for millions of years, humans are very recent and so far it's not looking good for us.
> We've already sealed our extinction by fucking up the environment
That's no what the IPCC reports say. Even under the pessimistic scenarios, we're on track for "billions of humans die", not "earth becomes literally unlivable" (though some of it depends on how bad some feedback loops are).
Under the "countries respect their current pledges" scenario, we're heading for 2.8°C of warming, which is "floods and heatwaves everywhere, billions of refugees" level, not remotely close to extinction.
I just don't quite get how you can say that because one bad thing is actually happening, then other bad things can't be happening at the same time? This is very odd, irrational, behavior.
Worse, the massive AI spending and energy use is making said environmental catastrophe happen faster.
"Sealed our extinction by fucking up the environment?" Humans are adaptable enough to eat ten times the environmental damage and have it barely budge the line.
The invention of contraception did more damage to human population than all of the environmental damage combined, projected forward to 2100, and then multiplied by 10.
Humans are hilariously resistant to environmental changes. Humans simply adapt too fast for the environment to catch them.
What makes AI a credible threat is that AI is intelligent. AI could play the same adaptation game humanity does - and win.
Because if you can't build the model from scratch you don't have a model. Open weights are nice but fixed in time. This isn't a technology that stays static, it improves, and sovereignty means being able to continue to improve independently.
Mistral's medium is absolutely good enough to help with a ton of coding tasks. I've personally used it and found it very helpful. If hypothetically the US cut off the rest of the world from their models Mistral would be a very useful model to continue to use.
Also, it's not like it's fixed in time, they are continually building more powerful models as well. Simply because you're in second place doesn't mean you quit the journey. Though, I'm sure the US has a huge vested interest of convincing people to "just quit and submit."
I used to be a classic "tech guy." Identified as introverted, said I don't like parties, etc etc. The whole bit. Id' be exhausted after social events, need time alone to cool off, and so on.
At some point my partner told me I should stop saying I'm introverted because she saw me always interacting with people and enjoying it. So I reflected, realized she had a point, and stopped identifying as introverted.
Over time I realized that actually, I love interacting with people, especially closer friends. A "party" can be 4-6 people, it doesn't have to be huge. And sure, after larger events I still need some time to cool down, but stopping identifying as introverted has been a huge improvement overall to my life.
From a Canadian perspective, the US looks like it's trying to destroy itself, not just lose. But yet people in the US seem far more interested in shitting on other countries than fixing their own shit.
Really? I'm more surprised when I see a large company still have design standards. It seems it's all the rage to fire all your UX people and have your devs wipe up a UI because "UI is so easy."
Follow design standards? Fuck no, we need to STAND OUT instead. If you find the design hard to use as a result of not following standards your just an old curmuddgen.
I've seen a couple companies already change their design standards to "best in class Tailwind designs from Claude, use this prompt file/Agent file/skill file combo for all UX work".
Looking at automated emails I get from Microsoft and GitHub it certainly feels like they are one weird layoff from doing it company-wide.
The worst part is these glassification Tailwind heavy slop almost universally fail WCAG guidelines (and personally, seem hard to read to me because of taking the whispy sans serif thing to its foregone conclusion by almost exclusively using what to me are unreadably thin weights of the already too thin Inter font). The slop is going so quickly backwards for companies that invested in accessibility and these companies need to be taken to task for forgetting design isn't just aesthetics but readability and accessibility.
I feel you, especially on the WCAG stuff. It's so damn basic and yet, they refuse to do it. The regressions on usability and consistency across the design space is just so maddening.
And honestly, I'm not even that mad at AI. The way these companies are going I'll take an AI that is taught to follow the most basic design guidelines over what most companies shovel out these days.
Like fine, you want to stand out? Use different colour schemes or unique fonts (but like one or at most two fonts). Change your corner radius from time to time to freshen up. There are so many ways to make your UI "different" but still consistent and following basic best practices.
Some of the stuff throw out now a days would fail UI 101 assignments.
No one thinks we don't know how to cool things in space. Everyone is saying that it's not feasible because you'd have to put too much mass up. Stop derailing the conversation please.
If you have something useful to contribute regarding how to actually reasonably put up enough mass to make this remotely a feasible idea then please contribute. We have the technology to prevent global warming, and doing that is far easier than this, and yet even that is apparently not feasible for humanity.
I honestly don't get that. The current SpaceX design is for a ~4 ton satellite with 160 m^2 radiator with peak 250 kW output. You can launch 25 of those satellites on a single Starship launch. 160 Starship launches and you get 4,000 satellites with peak 1 GW compute.
What's unfeasible about that? SpaceX has already launched 10,000 Starlink satellites. Falcon 9 launches 150 times per year.
And I guess VPNs are not end to end encrypted. The provider would still be able to access your data if they want to unlike something like Tor. So, it will be the death of privacy focussed VPNs. But presumably things like Signal and Apple's disk encryption will be fine as only the user holds the keys.
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