This thread is like Monty Python's "Life of Brian". Half the people here are the People’s Front of Judea and the other half are the Judean People’s Front.

Or better yet, we're like the Maya Pei Brigade arc from the first few episodes of season two of Star Wars Andor.

Trump, Stephen Miller, Meloni, Orban, Farage, Weidel, Le Pen and the rest love watching us fight each other. It's one of their most effective tactics.

and the original European names are also pretty functional:

I believe Amsterdam is just "River Dam"

And York is just "Yew", presumably named after trees that grew there. (Eburacon -> Eboracum -> Eoforwic -> Jórvík -> York)

But New York in the United States isn't even directly named after the English city of York, but rather a person (James Stuart) who was the Duke of York when England took control of the territory from the Dutch.

I can't say...

That's the comment I was looking for.

Use a Yubikey. It's a small USB Device you can put on a keychain. It is still a second device, but it's not your phone. And you always have your keys with you, anyway.

I have seriously thought about doing this. I believe if your car is stolen, your insurance will not pay out if you have disconnected the antenna. It's probably not enough to stop me from disconnecting the antenna, but it's infuriating how much the whole system works against privacy.

I want to have my cake and eat it too, though (privacy plus electric).

I'm looking at the new electric Slate pickup. As far as I can tell, this is the one EV that might not spy on us.

There's no conscious goal to biodiversity. But over time, life will grow and reproduce to harvest as much of the universe's energy as possible and make as many copies of itself as possible.

Think bacteria on a petri dish, humans on the earth, and really, all living material in the universe.

I haven't read Shroud. I will put it on the list, thanks.

I recently read (listened to the audiobook actually) Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.

It's about the life of Thomas Cromwell. The narration style is not for everyone, but it's the best historical fiction story I've read.

Children of Time is great. I also thought Alien Clay by Tchaikovsky was interesting. Although I'm a little skeptical about how aliens work in that one.

Fuck billionaires.

They're the ones who will profit from using AI to rewrite open source projects or to fire a bunch of developers.

Actions (prompt injections, boycotts, regulation, etc.) have to target billionaires above all or we'll end up fighting amongst ourselves, as usual.