This comment was the faster of the two comments and therefor won. The other was simply discarded.

I had to manually delete it.

> It does feel like a bizarre moment, where the AI companies are deliberately trying to scare us about their own product

That is direct CEO to CEO marketing. They're working really hard to convince high up decision makers that these tools will lower their head count and reduce costs.

Just like how people never cared about lead in their tap water.

you missed the full jab -- "most people" did not care about lead pipes for drinking water. It does not take much effort to blankly state that the public "does not care" and proceed to spend less than one minute of thinking capacity to self-confirm and move on. IMHO That is what you see in some of the comments here -- "ignorance" in true form, on display here in a erudite and modern forum. Functional definition of "ignorance" for this topic? I do not know that and I do not care, end of discussion.

> on display here in a erudite and modern forum.

I wouldn't overestimate the quality of this forum. It certainly has its uses, but I wouldn't overstate the quality of discourse here. It's not that great.

Because lead doesn't readily leach into water. Your water supply has to be real fucked up for that to happen.

Anectodal but my tap water in downtown Budapest, in an old house, had lead. I had the tap water tested and lead levels were multiple times the limit.

That's from the source then. Drinkable water does not dissolve lead.

> I ended up being a student of the great Frieder Nake

That is quite wonderful.

> Sadly, AI-generated imagery sort of killed the mojo of algorithmic art for me,

I am surprised you did not specifically mention Nake's provocative writing "There Should Be No Computer-Art" : https://dam.org/museum/essays_ui/essays/there-should-be-no-c...

His argument is still 100% relevant in the age of AI.

> The police department told me it was odd. They are just following up on Microsoft complaint.

Since when does your local police department respond to a "Microsoft complaint?"

they dont. and microsoft doesnt contact local police. this post is dubious.

if its CSAM related (which is implied via photodna involvement), microsoft does not contact local police. they contact NCMEC (or the appropriate equivalent), who then coordinates the law enforcement response.

if it isnt CSAM, microsoft does not contact local police to aid with support, because that would be ridiculous to coordinate over a billion accounts across tens of thousands of police departments around the world. and police forces would obviously not tolerate acting as microsoft support personnel.

there has to be a substantial amount of missing context, or this story is (partially? fully?) fabricated, or the user is mistaken/wasnt talking to microsoft.

That's what I'm saying! That is WILD.

PD - Hello Police department MS - Hello officer, this is Microsoft. We're calling to report a user trying to access their system unlawfully...

Love the Thinkpad line. It's kinda the hackers laptop of choice.

> X220/X230

These are pretty solid with dual batteries. Also popular for OpenBSD and 9front, the latter of which I run on an x230 (it stopped charging the removable battery :-/) You can get about 2 hours off the internal and 6~8 with a big fat removable battery, maybe more if the OS and drivers can properly throttle hardware power settings.

I have an X1 carbon 5th gen and it's quite light but not useful for 9front without some Ethernet driver tweaking (likely some phy bits need twiddling.) Instead I tossed Debian on it and run 9front in a VM if I need a local CPU. So far it just seems to work including Ethernet (via a dongle) and WiFi.

You need to take into account all the anti-competitive shenanigans MS pulled.

> I'd ask if you would support a similar ban on new factories for, say, car parts.

Those factories employ people.

> Like data centers, factories use a lot of power -- which drives up electricity bills

No. They have nowhere near the power consumption density unless it's a metallurgical facility doing aluminum smelting or scrap recycling in arc furnaces.

You don't need CNC for speed if the job is fixed and simple. You can make simple jigs and holding fixtures which firmly hold the object with features to help guide tooling. A number of these can be made to speed up all sorts of operations.

> which has cited Flock as a primary driver of its 10x reduction in car break-ins, and 30% reduction in burglaries

Are there reports or studies released which explains how the flock system influenced these reductions?