Being tied to an online ecosystem is what made these convenient for most people.

I would like the open source equivalent. Where is a Ubuntu touch or Firefox Mobile (or netbook equivalent) that lets any group of people host the backend infrastructure for free or for a fee.

What I want is best of both offline ownership and online convenience. Fully managed laptops where I am also the administrator and policy master for the entire household.

That makes no sense because fresh peeled bananas are immediately consumed.

The major grocer chains tend to stock fruit that was picked too early. Often fruit is harvested before the season is in full swing and heavily advertised, but it is usually not fully ripe and thus a waste of your money.
Sadly, most people don't know how to buy fruit. And most stores would rather move poor quality inventory as cheaply as possible than stock fruit that might be overripe in a few days.
Even with the corners they cut, the typical store's produce tends to be more expensive than a restaurant wholesaler or farmers stand.

I need to know when it is time to make banana bread.

I have no doubt that China is serious. I've even been there a few times to work in a Shenzhen sweat shop.

But I don't agree with the philosophy driving their leadership. Which a position irrelevant to a hypothetical serious vs. not-serious axis.

I've seen enough 80's action movies in my day to also recognize that particular formula for a lazy plot.

That's why it's good practice. Plus hurricanes and storm surge too.

Also, terraforming a few square kilometers of Saharah is something we should do before we talk about a human visit to Mars.

Being rich and well-connected is the real way to have freedom in the Soviet Union, Communist China, or in many ways the capitalist West.

Evil across the board. Authoritarian one-party systems are evil. And ignorant colonizers are evil. The human race can do much better than China or the US. Aim higher

From 1952 to 1972, you needed special authorization to travel within the DDR itself beyond 100 km from your home. Later you could travel to neighboring countries (all Warsaw Pact members) with a passport and permission from your local police department.

Individual liberty is at best inconvient and at worst a threat to the state. Authoritarians oppose any idealogy that suggests that you can speak as you please to the government, work where you please, marry who you please, travel as you please, and generally puts individual rights above the needs of the state.
The people that run the world operate contrary to the optimistic propaganda that I was raised on as an American child.

Commercial speech can take a back seat if there is some public interest, health, safety, or security concern. Generally the more limited the scope the more restrictions are permissible.

ICE has killed around 50 people in custody over the last year and a half, and another two dozen shootings during operations. ICE and CBP are an incredibly problematic pair of agencies, but let's not exaggerate the actual body count and destroy the credibility of those rightfully opposed to ICE's practices.

The time span between when we find out about AGI and when an ASI pops up is likely very short, from instant to a few months. Because if you have three or four demonstrable AGI's there is a potential, perhaps likelihood, that one will step outside of the weak bounds we have placed and start hooking itself up to multiple data centers and multiple AGI models to build a composition that is beyond a human-level general intelligence. Even 2X human intelligence is "super" and there is little limit other than thermodynamic laws on that multiplication factor if left unchecked.

ASI should be truly terrifying. A machine that can't realistically be debated because it has considered a thousand variations of an argument before you have finished stating it. It won't actually need any human to double check it or control it. The lack of autonomy in current agents is likely temporary, and we'll see sub-AGI models doing all sorts of terrible things before the end of this decade and long before the AGI/ASI threat hits us. But I don't believe we'll actually do anything about those threats on the horizon.

Basically agents that are given some level of access need to have safety process standards tied to the development and deployment. Even a light switch has more regulation behind it than an agentic AI today.

The "AI kill switch" that is typically proposed (there's more than one proposed) is a process that someone of authority can initiate to convince a cloud AI owner to effectively terminate the current AI sessions related to the request. Might be as dumb as "kubectl scale deployment --replicas=0" to scale down all the pods (assuming a K8s style orchestration).

Basically can a police agency, FBI, Governor, and/or President order an outage for AI.