In other words, lipstick on a pig.

You mean AI should be rotten to the core with advertisement, surveillance trackers and taken over by Big Data monopolies mostly headquartered in a fascist country?

Yeah, that’s pretty much where it’s headed.

Firewalls don’t hide your IP. Maybe you’re thinking of VPNs.

To be clear: IPv6 IS the correct and elegant technical solution to the exhausted IPv4 address space, and I was very much in favor of it for many years. In fact, I deplored that its rollout, which should have been swift and forceful, never truly happened in earnest.

But that was before corporate surveillance. Now I always downgrade to IPv4, not out of technical necessity, but out of a sense of self-preservation.

Although I’m very well aware that corporate surveillance doesn’t rely solely on tracking IPs anymore. But there’s no sense in giving the sumbitches an easy way to track you when you don’t have to.

you can easily periodically switch to randomly generated new addresses

You can do that in your computer. Not so much in embedded devices.

and like, your mac address is already globally unique, are you worried about those too?

MAC addresses are far from unique (they’re only 6 bytes long). And MAC address aren’t encoded in IP packets.

Here’s how to fix IPv6:

Don’t do IPv6.

And here’s the simple reason why: the IPv6 address space is so huge every device can be assigned its own, easily-tracked fixed IP, which is a bonanza for the techno-fascist Big Data companies.

The very raison d’etre of IPv6 - which is to solve the IPv4 address scarcity problem and do away with all the nasty hacks to get around it - was desirable before surveillance capitalism, when the internet wasn’t a dangerous, adversarial place. Now you want IPv4 NAT and masquerading, to make tracking you a little bit harder.

NT was made by a bunch of VMS engineers that Microsoft poached from DEC. That’s why it wasn’t as shit as Microsoft’s homegrown nonsense.

I have absolutely no faith or reason to believe that this is something Microsoft can do.

You should in fact have complete confidence that this is something Microsoft will 100% not deliver on: Microsoft has been around for half a century and has never put out genuinely good, stable and secure software. They simply don’t know how to do good software - which, after such a long time, is nothing short of amazing.

Did we need confirmation?

I’ve been using a LLM locally (running on my DGX Spark machine) for general low-level programming help (to code simple boilerplate), for simple code samples, various technical questions, general questions and language translation for a few months now. In fairness, when it knows it knows. It starts making shit up with incredible hubris, and it won’t stop making shit up if it doesn’t.

That’s my biggest gripe with AI: it won’t say “I don’t know”. If it did (or could?) acknowledge its own shortcomings, it would be a lot more useful and a lot more trustworthy. But as it stands today, you always have to question what it says, because you never quite know if it’s real or made up.

I’ll tell you what’s going to collapse into a singularity soon: the AI bubble, under its own massive gravity.

Now that agentic AI garbage will wipe your entire hard drive before you even have time to pull the plug.

My point was, any minute you spend fretting about a machine not pretending to behave humanely with you, or reporting them for not pretending to behave humanely, is a minute of your life you’ll never get back.

Just assume your application was rejected after x weeks - depending on your field of work - and move on with your life. Companies will never be humane.

Not all companies use dedicated HR management systems - let alone good ones.

The moment you realize a company is only a machine concerned with turning a profit and not an actual person you interact with and expect politeness and humanity out of, you’ll stop feeling offended by companies ghosting you.

When a company sends you a letter to tell you your application has been rejected, it’s only a courtesy extended to you by a HUMAN HR person who actually cares about behaving decently, not by the company. So enjoy the gesture when it happens, but simply ignore it when it doesn’t.

If I ever need to buy slate, I will make extra-sure never to buy it from Porto Slate Importers.

What I modified was in fact a contactless payment token. It had the form factor of a payment card, but it only does NFC.

I have another card for chip+pin.But I almost never use it where I live, because all limits were lifted on contactless payments a few years ago. If I try to pay something really expensive contactless, it will ask me for the pin - which is specific to the payment token.

I’ll do one better:

My payment card was just a bit too wide to fit in my cellphone’s cover. The phone’s own NFC antenna is at the top - and I use it all the time - so the card had to be at the bottom of the cover to avoid triggering the phone all the time, in portrait orientation so-to-speak.

So I dissolved the card in acetone to extract the NFC chip and its antenna, then carefully reshaped one end of the antenna so it’s a bit less wide (and since I couldn’t modify the length of the wire or the number of turns in any way to avoid de-tuning the antenna too much, I sort of accordioned one side of the rectangle to accommodate the extra length of wire).

Then I set the new shape of the antenna permanently by carefully applying a piece of packing tape over it, flipped it over, taped over the other side to seal everything, then carefully cut around the new, ultra-thin, stubbier contactless payment “card”.

Now it fits really smartly in my cellphone cover!

This is why I quit driving: I won’t want a quarter of my house wasted to store a car.

Other than that, nice floor plan!