Those silly, gigantic urban trucks are the modern equivalent of high heels in Renaissance Europe. High heels were a practical invention that let horseback riders maintain a firm foothold on the stirrups, but they eventually became the status symbols of aristocrats. French men in tights wore heels in the 17th century because they were impractical. They couldn’t walk on muddy or cobblestoned streets or for long distances with them on, but that was the point. They wanted to show that they didn’t have to walk like a commoner; society had to accommodate them.

(Women started wearing heels in the 18th century, and men lost interest soon afterward, because…obvious reasons).

I think men driving alone in sparkling clean F-250s, and having trouble fitting into parking spots, even in huge suburban malls, are exhibiting similar behavior: the truck is primarily a flex. The cumbersomeness and socially-maladapted inconvenience of the truck is the point. Society simply has to accommodate them.

• #opinion
• #cars

Client-side scanning is so absurd, so dumb, so easily abused and bypassed by criminals, that the only practical targets that will fall under Chat Control are the masses of casual users who aren’t using encrypted services for anything nefarious.

People sending illicit content will quickly wise up and avoid using endpoint software that perform monitoring, either by building their own clients with modified source code (after all, a server with published API can’t verify that their clients actually performed any kind of scanning), or by building another layer of encryption, so that data sent through the endpoint software are already encrypted, relying on a meta-client to do the actual encryption and decryption.

In short—like every attempt to bypass end-to-end encryption—Chat Control isn’t crime control; it’s surveillance.

Beware of people shouting “think of the children!” as they push surveillance on the masses, because they don’t actually care about the children at all.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/09/chat-control-back-menu-eu-it-still-must-be-stopped-0

Chat Control Is Back on the Menu in the EU. It Still Must Be Stopped

The European Union Council is once again debating its controversial message scanning proposal, aka “Chat Control,” that would lead to the scanning of private conversations of billions of people. Chat Control, which EFF has strongly opposed since it was first introduced in 2022, keeps being mildly...

www.eff.org

• #opinion
• #technology

When considering whether an automation is fit for a task, it’s worth thinking about it this way:

• How often does it successfully do what it’s supposed to do, and how much convenience does it bring when it succeeds?
• How often does it fail to do what it’s supposed to do, and how bad is the consequence of its failure?

The worse the consequence of failure, the lower the probability of failure has to be. When failures cost lives, a one-in-a-billion failure rate means 8 people will die if you run the automation once for every living person in the world.

AI fails to do its job at a remarkably high rate, so it should only be used in cases where its failures are merely disappointing but otherwise inconsequential.

Putting AI into systems where their failures have catastrophic consequences—like using it to target people for pre-crime surveillance, or deny people financial or civil benefits—is a gross misapplication of the technology.

• #opinion
• #AI

Politeness is a shield used to protect the violent.

Politeness is used to silence the exploited, to give an excuse to mute the shouts of the downtrodden. It’s a barrier erected so the powerful never has to hear the complaints of the powerless.

This is a corollary to Insist on good faith and Assume Good Faith.

• #opinion

During discourse, do not insist on civility, but good faith.

It should be acceptable for a person who has suffered a grave injustice to shout in rage, and it should not be acceptable for a charlatan to mislead with eloquence.

This is a corollary to Assume Good Faith.

• #opinion