Beyond my frustration at this being buried in a video podcast, I also would rather promote why people should be worried about privacy in a concrete and direct way.

The Cascading Impact of Privacy Loss

Concrete Example: A 10-Year Timeline

Year 0: You’re a healthy middle-class person who “has nothing to hide”

Year 3: Your insurance premiums inexplicably rise. You don’t know your fitness tracker data was sold and correlated with your grocery purchases.

Year 5: Passed over for promotion. Algorithm flagged social media posts about work stress as “low resilience indicator.”

Year 7: Attend peaceful protest. Face-recognition adds you to databases. Now randomly selected for “additional screening” at airports.

Year 9: Can’t get affordable loan. Your zip code + purchase history + social network = high risk score. The specific formula is proprietary.

Year 10: Chronic condition develops. Can’t get treatment covered - insurer says it’s “pre-existing” based on data you didn’t know they had from a DNA test you took for fun in Year 2.

Your lifespan: Statistically reduced by 5-10 years compared to privacy-protected cohort.

Privacy isn’t about “having something to hide.” It’s the immune system of human dignity, economic fairness, political freedom, and literally - survival.

Without it, you become a data object to be optimized for others’ profit and control, not a human with agency over your own life.

Powell also pushed back on the idea that all that spending is amounting to another speculative bubble. He drew a clear line between today’s surge in capital expenditure and the dot-com era, noting “these companies actually have earnings.” Those projects, he said, aren’t especially sensitive to interest rates, though, since they reflect long-term bets on higher productivity.

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Remember, the industry is spending over $30 billion a month (approximately $400 billion for 2025) and only receiving a bit more than a billion a month back in revenue.

https://pracap.com/an-ai-addendum/

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Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return.

MIT NANDA study – The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025

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So they are firing workers, spending their reserves on data centers that wear out and deprecate fast, on a product that is failing to deliver results and the C suite thinks that this is a way to generate value… Huh?

From the NYT article:

…

According to the patrol report, one officer described what sounded like pebbles hitting his motorcycle and the area around him, and two others saw a two-inch piece of shrapnel hit the hood of their patrol vehicle, leaving a small dent. The report says shrapnel was also found on the road near the motorcycle.

Mr. Newsom had warned that the Marine Corps’ plans to fire artillery shells over Interstate 5, the West Coast’s main north-south artery, could pose hazards for motorists on the stretch between Los Angeles and San Diego. The closure he ordered on Saturday caused significant backups on the portion of the interstate, which is used by approximately 80,000 people daily.

“We love our Marines and owe a debt of gratitude to Camp Pendleton, but next time, the vice president and the White House shouldn’t be so reckless with people’s lives for their vanity projects,” Mr. Newsom said in a statement to The New York Times.

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/us/politics/shell-interstate-5-marines-california.html

(My emphasis added)

A close look at the cases that the administration has brought in court shows that the government’s charges, mostly of assaulting or resisting federal officers, are faltering as they come up against video evidence or lack thereof. In at least four cases that were brought in connection with protests against Midway Blitz, Chicago federal prosecutors either withdrew charges or had a judge declare that they failed to meet their burden of probable cause, per a TPM review.

These cases are important not only because prosecutors are withdrawing them in their initial stages. The administration has sought, largely successfully, to portray these operations in Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, and elsewhere as focused on immigration enforcement. They involve large numbers of federal law enforcement officers ostensibly charged with related missions: CBP patrols the border; ICE is responsible for enforcing immigration law (as administrative as it may be). Showy missions like the Blackhawk helicopter raid on a South Side Chicago apartment building use pyrotechnics to reinforce that impression.

But the reality is that these overbearing operations also affect U.S. citizens. They involve federal law enforcement taking aggressive steps against people who record their actions or who stage protests. The increased threat of facing charges after appearing at a protest can have a chilling effect as well.

Yup (from the same article)

But Johnson made it clear on a conference call with House Republicans on Thursday that he does not plan on passing a standalone bill to pay the troops before Wednesday, when military personnel are set to miss their first paychecks, according to two Republican sources on the call.

During the call, Johnson received some slight pushback from GOP members over his strategy. Two Republicans spoke up to express their concerns over the House’s remaining out of session, the sources on the call said, but several others spoke up in support of the idea.

Like other affected federal workers, controllers are worried about how they will pay their bills during the shutdown when they won’t get paychecks. Duffy and the union’s president have acknowledged the unfairness of their situation, which only adds more stress to their already stressful jobs.

NATCA President Nick Daniels said controllers might have to take time off to work a second job just to make ends meet during the shutdown. But Duffy said that right now, he thinks the controllers who are missing work are “lashing out” in frustration.

“It’s going to eventually be that when people don’t have money, they have time to start making life choices and life decisions. And it shouldn’t be waiting for air traffic controllers to break because of having to take out loans, credit card debt, paying bills, gas, groceries, mortgages. Those things aren’t going to stop,” Daniels said.

So… What if they are actually sick…? I mean not getting paid and still having to show up let alone the stress of being a air traffic controller seems likely to make people prime candidates for low immune systems. Oh, but that’s right sickness doesn’t exist under RFK, right?

While the article itself is a great intro into the engineering history of conductors, this is what the title refers too and is sensationalist at the least. IMO scientists are searching for a bunch of things and don’t necessary think of it as a holy grail.

…

This non-peer-reviewed preprint, boldly titled “The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor,” ignited a firestorm last month—both online and in physics departments around the world—as experts and laboratories rushed to recreate the material and reproduce these amazing results. But even from the very beginning, most condensed-matter physicists, including Mason and Greene, were skeptical.

“Even though they’ve shown levitation and resistance versus temperature curves in their paper … none of those measurements seem to have the reliability that a typical paper reporting superconductivity would have,” Greene says. “For example, one of the papers shows electrical resistance versus temperature, and when it comes to superconductivity there’s a very sharp drop in the resistance … the drop is much too sharp. It wouldn’t happen that quickly.”

Greene and Mason also mention some graph inconsistencies that make it hard to discern if this material is even a superconductor at all.

“I think one thing that’s exciting about this paper is that they were very clear about how they made the material. It’s a material that many people can make and reproduce,” Mason says, but he also points out a few red flags. “The resistivity plot is troublesome to me … if you took their plot of a superconductor, and just put gold on the same plot, gold would look like there was also zero resistance.”

At first, for every validation study that showed promising results, another study took the wind out of Ahab’s metaphorical sails. Finally, two weeks after its arrival, the International Center for Quantum Materials—an influential Chinese superconductor lab—confirmed that LK-99 wasn’t a superconductor at all, but instead displayed a kind of ferromagnetism.

So for now, the dream of room-temperature superconductors is on pause. But despite LK-99’s unfortunate fate, the dream has never been so tantalizing.

While I empathize with the feeling I disagree. The trend is polarization—not a universal rightward shift—and liberal politicians have not systematically adopted more conservative positions. Instead, both parties have moved toward ideological extremes, with Democrats consolidating progressive stances and Republicans embracing stronger conservative positions.

So this is not indicative of a pull to the right, but more that the right is in power.

John Durham, the former special counsel who spent nearly four years examining the origins of the FBI investigation into President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and its alleged ties to Russia, told federal prosecutors investigating James Comey that he was unable to uncover evidence that would support false statements or obstruction charges against the former FBI director, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

Federal prosecutors in Virginia met remotely with Durham in August to understand the findings of his investigation, according to sources familiar with the meeting, and his conclusions raise the prospect that Durham – who was once elevated by Trump and other Republicans believing he would prosecute high-level officials involved with the investigation of the president’s 2016 campaign – could now become a key figure aiding Comey’s defense.

The prosecutors also met with a team of lawyers at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., who had investigated Comey for years – including calling him to testify before a grand jury in 2021 – but were unable to identify any chargeable offenses committed by Comey, sources familiar with the meeting said.

…

I think this needs a different title. This is burying the lead that this is likely or even possibly politically related to the recent rulings as the house is a judge’s.

@Solo You see this. Doesn’t take much. Even your commentors can do it. And he even added emphasize!

It’s worth knowing your audience.

As I write this there are 19 upvotes and ours are the only comments, which is off topic. If you want to react a broader audience you have to entice them. You have a lead in a title and link but no follow up, no insight, and with that very limited engagement about a great topic. Give a paragraph, or copy their lead paragraph. Write a reaction. A little bit of work on your part will generate a lot more interest of lemmy’s, many of who will just scroll on by without clicking without a bit more reason to dive in.

Ah, you mean https://fightchatcontrol.eu/.

I am not aware of anything yet, apart from what the article suggests. https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/contact-dma-team_en

Ah yes, American exceptionalism. Silly me. Have to win as an underdog. If only we had education and learning history as part of our American ethos.

Exactly. I am curious how this has changed since BRICS was created, and also how current Cheeto in Chief policies will impact it over time.

OP, post a damn summary paragraph or something more than a title and a link. Tell me why I give and upvote, and get engaged. Help the author, help yourself.

I always wonder why people venerate Edison so much. He did innovate, but man was he a shifty barron.

For those in Europe, write your representatives.

Fro me f-droid’s post: https://f-droid.org/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html

What do we propose?

Regulatory and competition authorities should look carefully at Google’s proposed activities, and ensure that policies designed to improve security are not abused to consolidate monopoly control. We urge regulators to safeguard the ability of alternative app stores and open-source projects to operate freely, and to protect developers who cannot or will not comply with exclusionary registration schemes and demands for personal information.

If you are a developer or user who values digital freedom, you can help. Write to your Member of Parliament, Congressperson or other representative, sign petitions in defense of sideloading, and contact the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) team to express why preserving open distribution matters. By making your voice heard, you help defend not only F-Droid, but the principle that software should remain a commons, accessible and free from unnecessary corporate gatekeeping.

https://f-droid.org/2025/09/04/twif.html [^antifeatures]: F-Droid Anti-Features overview: https://f-droid.org/docs/Anti-Features/ [^howmanyusers]: How many F-Droid users are there, exactly? We don’t know, because we don’t track users or have any registration. “No user accounts, by design”: https://f-droid.org/2022/02/28/no-user-accounts-by-design.html [^sideloading]: ‘“Sideload” is a weird euphemism that the mobile duopoly came up with; it means “installing software without our permission,” which we used to just call “installing software” (because you don’t need a manufacturer’s permission to install software on your computer).’ — Pluralistic: Darth Android: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/01/fulu/ [^playprotect]: “Google Play Protect checks your apps and devices for harmful behavior”: https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/2812853

Doesn’t she realize how this could backfire on her in the future? If she can do it, then so can others.

Each myth is contiguous in each episode rather than being interweaved. Much more satisfying.