🔗 Senate passes “cruel” Republican plan to block Wi-Fi hotspots for schoolkids - Ars Technica:

The Senate approved a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to nullify the hotspot rule, which was issued by the Federal Communications Commission in July 2024 under then-Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. The program would be eliminated if the House version passes and President Trump signs the joint resolution of disapproval.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) announced the plan in January, saying the FCC program would “imped[e] parents’ ability to decide what their kids see by subsidizing unsupervised access to inappropriate content.” He also alleged that the hotspot program would shift control of Internet access from parents to schools and thus “heightens the risk of censoring kids’ exposure to conservative viewpoints.”

I was just listening to someone I know wonder non-sarcastically why the introduction of AI wasn’t reducing the amount of work he had to do.

I am always amazed when otherwise smart people express confusion about why this or that new time/labor-saving tool or technology does not end up actually giving us any more time.

Like, my guys—so long as we have a bunch of people who own the means of production and view any time not spent working as a waste of an opportunity for them to suck up more money, we will never have these four-hour work weeks and excess of leisure time that everyone is always going on about.

🔗 This is what ChatGPT is actually for:

But I’ve realized that feeling, of wanting to tell it more so that it can tell you more, is the multi-billion-dollar business that these companies know they’re building. It’s not fascist anime art or excel spreadsheet automation, it’s preying on the lonely and vulnerable for a monthly fee. It’s about solving the final problem of the ad-supported social media age, building up the last wall of the walled garden. How do you get people to pay your company directly to socialize online? And the answer is, of course, to give them a tirelessly friendly voice on the other side of the screen that can tell them how great they are.

The amount of time and energy that otherwise smart people spend convincing themselves (and trying to convince others) that made-up science fiction stories and shows/movies with actors playing fictional characters are actually some kind of blueprint for a real future is just astounding.

I guess people think because it has the word “science” in it, it is somehow real?

People read novels about colonies on Mars, and now we are spending billions of dollars on trying to get people to Mars. Never mind that it is basically impossible for humans to live in any meaningful numbers on Mars and we are never going to science our way out of that. No, we are going to keep wasting massive amounts of money pursuing this pipe dream of human colonization of space.

🔗 The Present Migration from Computer Networks to Person Networks | Jared White:

Back in the 2000s, the blogosphere almost became a true social network. person-a.com could “talk” to person-b.com by linking to them from a blog post, and person-b.com could link back in response. We even had technologies like Trackbacks so blogs (people) could get notified of all these mentions. Unfortunately blogs eventually got overrun by spammers and bad actors, and thus everyone disabled trackbacks. And with that, the dream of the blogosphere as a social network died.