Bitcoin. A technology trying to circumvent our highly regulated financial system? Which is mostly used to sell drugs online and evade sanctions? Where we knew at the start that it would need more energy than whole countries if it was successful? And then there are those 51% attacks? Yeah, that’s stupid. I really would have expected governments to crack down harsh on everything bitcoin and cryptocoin and would have expected that owning or using them would be as illegal as owning child porn.

There is another battle: There is a fight to open up app installation on phones. The EU recently forced Apple to allow other app stores on iOS and Apple is fighting this as hard as you would expect. Apple & Google are taking 30% of each sale in their stores and are making bank. One of the arguments they are pushing is “safety”. Only apps on their vetted app stores are safe, every other store is unsafe and so on. If they allow a child porn app in their store, all of their arguments in this debate are invalid. And that is also an important fact for that debate.

Does it? It was possible a while ago, but in the last years, we saw train tickets going to apps. There is no ticket machine at my local stop. There are areas where you can only park your car with an app. I need 2FA to get into my accounts. Restaurants have QR code menus. So going to protests or just living your life without a phone is getting harder

You can do most of that without any fancy AI or machine learning: Since you already have your own domain, setup some mail redirects and filter all mails going into them into subfolders. I have a redirect for onlineshopping where all those order confirmation and delivery informations and unwanted newsletters go. I have another I use for creating accounts - all 2FA etc. are going there. And then I have the main mail for actual communication and another redirect for all those interesting substack newsletters and so on.

I kind of makes sense to produce computers that are able to run local AI. People here hate AI, but there are a lot of tasks that make a lot of sense even on a laptop. It’s great to produce tags and descriptions for your images. Google Photo has this - search for “horse” and you will get back all pictures of horses you have taken. And it totally makes sense to run stuff like this locally on your own computer without sending every picture you’ve taken to Trumpland.

But I really do not trust Microsoft to build something like that. That would totally go against everything they have been doing for the last decade and would also devalue their billions they’ve put into OpenAI

A lollipop with electronic waste. Truly a feat of engineering!

You might not like it, but AI can totally give you a recommendation of similar bands.

There are two things hidden here:

1. People totally got killed by doing their own maintenance
2. There is a difference between physical maintenance and, well, you know that people will install some buggy self driving app

It kind of makes sense to not allow people to do that - just imagine what horrors people will create that totally will kill people. Cars are dangerous.