It's even worse: the encrypted SD card can be decrypted by anybody who owns the same device. Meaning practically, it's not encrypted at all.

the manufacturer had the decryption key.

Why does this story not make me feel all warm and fuzzy?

Have you seen who's in the White House? Remember: he was voted in. Twice. That only happens in a nation with a widespread case of mental retardation.

if all your customers hate it 10x more than humans?

India should protect its pool of human workers: when the backlash against AI hits full force, they'll be well-positioned to retake the market.

I never thought I'd say I find calling customer support and being greeted by this unmistakable heavy Bangalore accent refreshing and reassuring: at least I know I'm talking to someone who understands my question and not something that serves me the nearest matching boilerplate answer from the support knowledgebase in a sycophantic transatlantic accented tone.

How else will I be able to feel that deep sense of dread when I call any company's customer support and I'm greeted by an overly polite chatbot that's so syrupy it gives me type-2, that doesn't understand my problem and refuses to let me talk to a real person?

Censorship is a big no-no for tech companies. Particularly when it doesn't make then any money.

They can. There are laws that prevent how much they can make based on the percentage of "something-something-whatever" they put into a central banking, so there's a ceiling of sorts. But other than that, it's all magicked up, yes: Fractional-reserve banking.

I've been hosting my open-source projects on Github for years.

Why you ask? After all, isn't every open-source and free software advocate's duty to stay clear away from Microsoft?

Here's my reason: I only use the git part of Github. I don't use any of Microsoft's proprietary crap on top of it.

Therefore, Microsoft has no vendor lock-in on me: my projects are one git-push away from being hosted elsewhere. I waste their resources by making them host my massive files for free and they have absolutely nothing to show for it - no revenue, no private data to monetize, nothing.

But the minute Microsoft starts getting annoying, my repos are gone. I'll move them to Codeberg and I will gladly pay for the hosting in the form of donations.

When you have 32 kilobytes of RAM and a 1 MHz processor, you need all the programming talent you can get to squeeze the most performances out of them.

When you have 32 gigabytes and dozens of cores, any incompetent code monkey can churn out the same application in Visual Basic or Python.

Resources don't make your computer faster. They empower incompetent and sloppy developers, who crucially are paid less than good ones, so their boss can make more money.

I remember in the last 90's / early 2000's discussing with a colleague how it was possible that X allocated 2 megabytes for an empty window, just for sitting there on the screen.

to serve up advertisement and privacy-invadind SaaS at lightning speed. I can't wait!

and low bars for academic performances have been the norm for a long time.

Interestingly, that makes extreme sense. Capitalism in general, and Shareholder Capitalism more intensely, requires exponential growth. A company that makes (I'll throw random number for simplicity) $1 billion/quarter to grow 3%, means increasing revenue by $30 million in that period, whereas a company that makes $1 trillion/quarter needs to increase revenue by $30 billion to meet the same 3% growth. Needing to make $30 million allows for a much larger window of "good enough quality" before enshitification quicks in compared to needing to make $30 billion, so the later is way more prone to enshitify their products as soon as possible, if not before, otherwise they miss that target.

If this is how it works, then enshitification also follows the same exponential curve, and we'll definitely see more, and more, and MORE, AND MORE of it, in the next years, until the entire thing collapses as big corps all around start failing to meet their shareholder's expectations over and over again.

When Reddit announced they would sell user-generated data to AI companies for training purposes, I went back to literally thousands of my old technical posts and inserted subtle nonsense in them.

They look legit, and a competent human being reading through them would very easily realize they're nonsense (you know, things like "Type taskmgr and kill systemd"). But AI doesn't, and I've already read AI-generated "help" pages containing some of the shit I seeded on Reddit.

So if you too want to debase AI, poison the well: it really does works.

I'm sure you won't if there's enough money to be made...