Nothing I can do to resist?

I admire your optimism, but we are pissing in the wind.

Microsoft is shoving this copilot in all its products? Alright, Linux and open source it is.

Windows 11 is forcing people to throw away functional computers that Microsoft seems "not secure enough" (it's lacking TMP 2.0)

This means you can get a great deal on one of these "inscure pc"... but in the long run your pc now and tomorrow will have TPM. As time progresses, the use of TPM/attestation will become more and more entrenched in application, web pages, everything. ... and Linux, with its 4% user base, will be left out in cold.

Google is bugging with its spyware? Well, I only use a Pixel phone, and ironically, its the best phone to put GrapheneOS on it.

Currently, many banking apps won't run on Graphene (or any custom firmware) due to attestation.

Graphene issued calls for help, because Google is restricting public access to the latest android source code (I cannot find the links atm).

Gmail? I don't remember when I opened mine the last time...

Today things like "email reputation" make it difficult to host your own mail server, so your stuck paying someone who has a better "reputation".

My point is: today, you and I can resist with some (minor) success, but our days are numbered.

Can confirm. The more you deal with people who have climbed to the tops of corporate ladders, the more it becomes clear that it's all vibes. It's all people telling stories to other people who tell stories about those stories.

The peter principle is wrong - in an oversized corporate structure, there is no upper bound for incompetence. You can keep rising for no reason, because after a certain point other people just trust that you know what you're talking about, and the people that know better work around you instead.

The people beneath you can't trust the people above you enough to explain the situation, the people above you don't really listen to the people beneath you anyway, and so plenty of middle managers just muddle through and constantly make shit up to justify their own existence, while everyone above and below is left in the dark about what's really going on.

Decisions are constantly made by people without any real connection to the consequences, and it shows. With the everything.

the fuck does service now even need AI for?

I hate any company I work for that uses ServiceNow. And now it's getting worse??

“Bad” is SN’s claim to fame. Everybody hates it. Apparently, the worse they make it, the more companies will throw money at them.

In regard to Linux users being left out in the cold.. how so? Do you think that distros are going to start enforcing attestation? I doubt that it will be a hard requirement for most, even in the next decade or two. It's an option, yes, but mandatory?

FWIW, all of my banking apps work just fine with compatibility mode enabled on Graphene. Also, I'm not sure saying it's inevitable is the right way to go, it certainly won't make others care about their privacy and security.

You might be joking but I honestly think that's the case. It's wild to me. I've worked for Fortune 500 companies using SNOW and everybody hated it and regularly voiced complaints and issues and yet the company refused to change. Started doing shit like releasing more training docs on how to use it or doing brown bag lunches on SNOW effectiveness.

But ultimately none of that mattered, it is just inherently garbage.

I find this current timeline so confusing. Supposedly we're going to have AGI soon, and yet Google's AI keeps telling you to stick glue on pizza. How can both things be true?

It was actually a really good product, way better than Facebook, unfortunately if you have a social media platform that's invite only then it's never going to succeed. I really have no idea why they did it like that.

It already has script automation and has had for years so I'm not sure what AI is going to bring to the table.

I assume it's big tech that has this weird ai they try to sell while the scientists are using different ai for real useful stuff, like the protein something I heard. Or at least that's what I'd like to believe.

Well one of the big problems with it is it's never properly configured. One of the most annoying things that it does is that it generates tasks only when previous tasks are closed, in theory that makes sense but really the result is that you close a task, and then you have to go looking in the ticket queue for the new task it's just generated, so you can close that one too. Total waste of time.

It actually makes a lot of sense. AI is a good use case for case management. The problem is how much you depend on it without human intervention, but even humans fuck up, especially if they’re following the same rules and processes that the AI tool would. The AI tool just gets through cases faster, so in theory you can sus out root causes sooner.

In regard to Linux users being left out in the cold.. how so? Do you think that distros are going to start enforcing attestation? I doubt that it will be a hard requirement for most, even in the next decade or two. It's an option, yes, but mandatory?

It does not matter if Linux supports attestation or not, because ultimately the application (or website) will determine if it wants to run on Linux. It's up to the company developing it's application or website to determine if they want to support more than windows/Mac.

Graphene has its own variation of attestation (they cryptographically sign requests with their own key - and not googles), but it requires additional hoops for each application - few companies are willing to do this.

Attestation is a wet dream for companies. You don't need DRM (as the OS will enforce it) and you can be certain your competitors/hackers cannot reverse engineer/pirate your code or run the application in an emulator. And the implementation effort to support it, is as simple as "make function call and check the response".

Linux will still exist (especially on the server side) and developers will still use it as a desktop machine. However, (as I implied) non-Linux games will stop working, accessing you banks website from linux will be rejected, emulation will cease - it'll be a corporate paradise... the stocks will go up.

FWIW, all of my banking apps work just fine with compatibility mode enabled on Graphene.

Revolut explicitly goes out of their way to not work on Graphene.

I've complained, they don't care. The bean counters have done their risk calculations and decided that the personal data they collect/mine (and the integrity of that data) is worth more than losing a few graphene users.

Also, I'm not sure saying it's inevitable is the right way to go, it certainly won't make others care about their privacy and security.

You do have a valid point: giving up after trying nothing won't help. However, I fear there will need to be "government intervention" to allow hardware and software to be "open for everyone". I'll admit my bias in wonder how well governments (of late) are representing the best interests of the people. But, these topics are complicated for even technically inclined people - let alone politicians. And the strawman argument against intervention is always going to be "in the name of security".

From my perspective, the writing is on the wall. This apocalyptic future won't happen over night, but it will be a slow boil over the next 10 years (or so).

If you've got ideas for how to avoid this, I'm all ears.

Not sure how far back you’re talking but for a VERY long time they have been and continue to be in the business of what feeds the machine.

Why do you think we have computers in our possession 24/7? Not because we wanted it, but because they told us we wanted it and it enabled us to be available to feed the machine 24/7. You can work more. You can buy more.

Social media? Feeds the machine.

Television? Feeds the machine.

Cars? Feeds the machine.

Phones. Telegraphs. Fucking lightbulbs.

All used to feed the machine.

It's the same reason why they removed the headphone jacks from phones. They don't want to give you a better product, they want you to force youbto use a product, even if it's worse in all aspects

Google just released a video generator that is a ball hair away from perfection. The hallucination rate from their latest models is <1% and dropping you just see cherry picked screenshots.

DuckDuckGo has made A.I. results optional, which is a good move.

Companies that are making it fixed can go swimming in lava for all I care (looking at you Google).

I don't think image generators are really in the same category though. They'll have their applications but they're not going to be a fundamental change to society the way AGI will be.

A whole lot of useful stuff that wasn't publicly labelled AI got relabeled to take advantage of funding opportunities. That doesn't mean it is related to generative AI like LLMs and image generators though.

It’s part of AGI and will be a massive shift. They are to video what punk was to music.