In 1282 AD, an accord followed the disaster later recounted as the Pied Piper of Hamelin myth, in which a warg working with the demonic entity we now call the “Tooth Fairy” walked 200 children off a cliff simply to collect their fresh teeth to fuel their evil orgies. Duke Albert II of Saxony hired a shaman and witch to force a détant with the demon as a response. After some haggling, which cost one advisor his jaw, the demon agreed to effectively scavenge from the local townspeople in the night in exchange for a ceremonial pittance, often a handful of grain or a piece of fruit.

The demon, now overwhelmed by the sheer volume of teeth lost on a daily basis by 7.5 billion people, is doing great 750 years later, playing the long game to success.

Even under the GDPR, an employer can monitor you camera, mic, and keystrokes of they really want on a work device.

Seriously, no one is entitled to unlimited personal use, and explicit trust, of a work device. It’s a work-owned device, it’s not your shit! This isn’t hard. They give you the same “click/sign here” for a use policy that any social media site gives you (900 pages shorter). No one should be upset by this unless they are already behind the curve in general, or are pushing fake outrage.

I can’t help you other than to say MSI is awesome. I wish you luck on your quest.

Also taking gas station pills full of burdock root because you think you might have a drug test.

Pell Grants helped me get a degree that increased my income, made my life better, and made me a better, taxpaying American.

-Actual client testimonial.

I don’t mean compromised, I mean your IT manager has an acceptable use policy, which all staff agree to in writing, and the IT folks have to pass audits that say they can assure management they know what happens in the company network.

I agree that keyloggers are dystopian, and honestly overkill unless you are paranoid about proprietary data. But you should follow the same philosophy as your network architecture: Zero Trust.

When you’re at work and using work devices, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. Just because you take the laptop home doesn’t make it suddenly your personal device. It makes it a liability to you.

Never ever log in to a personal account for anything at work, because you shouldn’t trust your work with your privacy. If you do, you should just know you need to immediately change your password because it’s now on a cleartext log file somewhere where many humans can read it. Consider it compromised.

I’m a moderate user for code. LLMs are not smart, they’re pattern machines. Anyone who cedes critical thinking to them without due diligence, gets what they deserve, and likely didn’t really have much in the way of critical thought in the first place.

These companies are all trying to figure out how to monetize their latest juked benchmark stat and create something with actual value equivalent to the billions in investment they’ve thrown into processing. The industry is awash in startups dong the same thing 90000 ways. Human lust for money and power is the most nefarious thing about it all.

I haven’t lived in the US in a while, and every time I visit and one of these things starts shouting at me, I wonder how anyone tolerates this shit.

Occasionally you’ll see one button that’s more worn, maybe bottom right iirc, that mutes it. Doesn’t always work, though.

The amount of wealth transfer from the poor and undereducated to the wealthy this has already accomplished is devastating. Once the next big recession settles in, it’s going to be terrible.

Clearly these people took this report, flipped straight to the “risks annd warnings” section, and used it as an investment guide.

Honestly, unless there’s a shared currency to keep afloat, regional bodies like this are always a tentative benefit at best. Especially in this neighborhood.

Rwanda is orders of magnitude more just a normal, functional country than DRC.

Because it’s a fear-mongering angle that still sells. AI has been a vehicle for scifi for so long that trying to convince Boomers that of won’t kill us all is the hard part.

I’m a moderate user for code and skeptic of LLM abilities, but 5 years from now when we are leveraging ML models for groundbreaking science and haven’t been nuked by SkyNet, all of this will look quaint and silly.

My condolences.

Can I offer you some egg stew in these cold and trying times?

Because suddenly everyone can shed clothing and be more social. The oppression of winter is over, and the promise of having food and plenty later in the summer is there. Makes sense to me.

You could do a theme potluck that also leans into a decorative theme. So for example, a Tiki theme, tropical drinks, and people bring some Hawaiian food.