“I have nothing to hide, I just question your judgement and motives.”

In a world entirely populated by empathetic, decent, and sane people we wouldn’t need much privacy. Unfortunately that’s not the world we live in. There are countless unstable, stupid, and evil people in the world – some of them are in positions of power or might achieve power in the future. They are absolutely the sort to weaponize “harmless” information against you.

Do you want those people to know your sexual preferences, political leanings, etc?

That’s what I’m running, though I had issues with it randomly requiring a reset. Installing OpenWrt fixed that problem.

Hands you a random laptop.

“The thing doesn’t work.”

Refuses to elaborate and leaves.

I bought an LG microwave a few months ago to replace a dead 10 year old Sharp. My favorite “features”:

• The sticker on the door stating that by using the microwave I agree to LG’s TOS, including binding arbitration.
• The single 4 minutes and 30 seconds of use I got out of it before the magnetron broke.

When I returned it they customer service person asked if I wanted it serviced under warranty – hilarious. Bought a Panasonic instead.

You’re not wrong, but the idea that “plant based” is “safe” isn’t right either. Plants can create all kinds of horribly toxic, carcinogenic compounds – especially when burned or heated.

Wood smoke of all things is mildly carcinogenic and we cook our food with it.

There are jobs where it’s not feasible or practical to pay an actual human to do.

Human translators exist and are far superior to machine translators. Do you hire one every time you need something translated in a casual setting, or do you use something Google translate? LLMs are the reason modern machine translation is is infinitely better than it was a few years ago.

One of the major problems with LLMs is it’s a “boom”. People are rightfully soured on them as a concept because jackasses trying to make money lie about their capabilities and utility – never mind the ethics of obtaining the datasets used to train them.

They’re absolutely limited, flawed, and there are better solutions for most problems … but beyond the bullshit LLMs are a useful tool for some problems and they’re not going away.

I didn’t disagree with that part. Doing what you suggested and using the “vape detectors” aren’t mutually exclusive.

Considering they are only harming themselves

Again, we’re talking about actual children. You know: people that have yet to mentally develop to the point where they can make fully informed decisions on everything and sometimes have to be “coerced” by reasonable adults into doing so.

There’s this wild, outlandish idea that kids don’t have the maturity, experience, or impulse control to make informed and rational decisions all the time. Thus we don’t give kids the exact same rights and responsibilities we give to adults – they gradually gain them as they mature and demonstrate they can handle them.

How would you like this installed in your workplace?

Yes, because my workplace staffed entirely by people 21+ is the same thing as a school filled with literal children. Also, for some unknowable reason we don’t have issues with people vaping in the building despite having people that smoke and vape. Couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact none of us are teenagers.

What if [slippery slope]?

You do know that’s a fallacy, right?

… good?

Everyone (even kids) have a reasonable expectation of privacy, but children using drugs in school isn’t something that falls under that reasonable expectation of privacy.

How dare people cope with something horrible by making jokes. Everyone knows it’s impossible to make those jokes while simultaneously being horrified by and pushing back against the thing they’re joking about.

I tried searching for “BSD memes” but all the results are for some cartoon by the same name.

I’m a 7 minute drive from downtown and my options are satellite, cellular, or fixed wireless. Everyone around me has gigabit ethernet, but due to costs involved in running fiber and the fact my little community is mostly old folks (and thus likely not going to buy in) ISPs don’t want to “invest” in us.

Before any tankies claim the word is a blanket slur against communists: “tankie” was coined by British communists that were disgusted by the attitudes of some of their so-called “fellows”.

Huh, they actually do:

And Matt Monson — who moved from the Dragon project to SpaceX’s satellite internet service Starlink — posted that Starlink uses a lot of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), and that they too have a lot of experience with Linux. “For some level of scope on Starlink, each launch of 60 satellites contains more than 4,000 Linux computers. The constellation has more than 30,000 Linux nodes (and more than 6,000 microcontrollers) in space right now.

https://thenewstack.io/the-hardware-and-software-used-in-space/

Predators? That sounds expensive, complicated, and could negatively affect profits.

Can’t we just spray the trees with massive quantities of something cheap and effective like DDT?

I don’t allow lunix in my house because it’s an illegal hacker operation system. I can’t believe an American hero like Elon would endorse something invented by the notorious Soviet computer hacker Linyos Torovoltos.

One: you can be sued for anything regardless of if it’s true or not. Someone could find some sleazebag lawyer and sue you for drowning hundreds of puppies while laughing about it – does that make you a puppy killer?

Two: We have presidents that we know directly ordered genocides of native people … yet weren’t sued for it.

The tired, old trope of “Every accusation is a confession” tends to be true with conservatives.