Yes. I’ve had a bare metal setup of tiny tiny RSS setup for ages. I think it changed maintainer at some point, but still gets updates. The thing’s been purring along all this time.

And a lot of modern websites still have an RSS feed. Not all, unfortunately, but it keeps up.

But I thought super capitalism would allow markets to self regulate, motivate competition, and weed out low performer. Isn’t that a good thing anymore?

Also, I’m laughing at “unless things change, we will not survive”. That might be the change happening, buddy.

I generally agree that prohibition doesn’t work, and is bad, but having an absolutist position like this is usually problematic.

Hence the immediate follow-up sentence: “I can see the point for some of these restrictions, to provide a safe basis for other people around”. Basically, the old saying “one person’s freedom ends where another’s begins”.

Laws should be around to protect other people from external nuisance/danger, not for the express purpose of prohibition.

The parts about not being a nuisance for other/imposing onto them is nice. It will take forever to become a new society standard, though. In France, it’s been forbidden to smoke in public places like subway stations and bars for decades, but there’s still a lot of people doing it. But we’re slowly moving there.

However, forbidding people to smoke, period, will not prevent them from smoking, it just makes it illegal. That’s the part I’m not strongly agreeing with. There was the nuance.

And to be clear, my personal opinion on this topic is that smoking is batshit crazy and why would anyone do this to themselves, but I’d rather we go the education route and work toward a better environment for people to live in than going the “NO” route. Unfortunately, that’s not the way we’re going.

I have no idea how that would change thing. I just base myself on previous (and current) attempts at banning things. It never goes well.

Prohibition is never good, removing individual freedom is never good. I can see the point for some of these restrictions, to provide a safe basis for other people around (because we can’t ask people to simply be nice), but more than that… meh.

I will not be up in arms to defend smoking rights, but that’s probably not the way to do it.

Yeah, I stopped trusting service provider with promises the moment they came into existence. “We’re compliant with XYZ” have as much value as “We promise to not snoop, see?”. And that’s not even considering security vulnerabilities. Certifications are merely the promise that at some point, someone maybe did something right (or maybe not), and paid to be able to say so (sometimes they don’t). Not very reassuring.

Data remains on controlled systems, and if it has to get out, it’s encrypted properly, either for cold storage, or for specific recipients. Anything below that is believing random people saying random shit, and ignoring that every time there’s a data leak somewhere people go “oops, our mistake, it won’t happen again, pinky swear”.

And I know there’s already an incredible amount of sensitive, personal data on the loose. That’s no excuse to let this trend keep going.

It depends on many things. The hard line for me would be is this running locally, on a server with the same IT management as my actual data, or on a third party servers. If the doctor either don’t know this, or can’t give adequate proof that it isn’t running on some third party servers, then all the “prioritize your privacy” aren’t worth shit.

But that’s only the point where I give a hard no. The way it is used would also matter a lot. Is it used as a clutch for reference searching, or a full self driving decision making process that will write me a prescription in the end? This part is the same whether it’s for medical advice or for anything else: if the user is skilled enough to be able to evaluate/validate the output of the process faster than it would have taken them to do it manually, then there might be some value. Some usages fits into this. Some don’t. Summarizing large documents you did not read does not work as a safe thing, because, you’d have to read the document to check the summary. Getting the summary of a drug/sickness/whatever that you know about but need a reminder of, could be ok.

tl;dr: it have to run in a privacy-enabled context (no third parties), it have to be used as a clutch (no skipping work), and the user have to keep is brain en mental activity alive enough to steer the system instead of being dragged by it. As things stands right now, I doubt there’s a lot of doctors that would fit all three points, but in the future, maybe.

You keep seeing these as “alternatives”, despite the shortcomings.

I say they are complimentary, and as far as providing power to address these shortcomings, nuclear power is a good solution. How can you look at something that can single-handedly address all power requirements in some area, while providing supports to other, and say “nah”, seriously.

Keep looking at things from a money perspective and the solution become obvious : kill everyone and be done with it.

Today, nuclear energy is a reasonably safe, efficient source of energy. Is it the energy of the future ? Probably not. But is it an efficient option for smoothing the grid while planting renewable all around it? It’s definitely better than the other alternatives. Does it cost money to develop? Sure. Everything costs money. But there are benefits that won’t show up in an accounting book that can’t be brushed aside.