The concept is valid, it’s just the implementation that is the problem. This seems approachable as a DIY project. With a few more iterations on something like this
I bet something could be created that is relatively easy to use, inexpensive, and privacy-respecting.
Building something on top of Meshtastic or similar could be interesting, but would be less straightforward due to bandwidth limitations and the relative scarcity of LoRaWAN as compared to the Internet.
That implementation lacks robustness over longer distances, I’m afraid…
And I’m not convinced of the privacy-respecting either, as someone who did in fact play with that set-up as a child.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete
AI can’t do your job, but an AI salesman (Elon Musk) can convince your boss (the USA) to fire you and replace you (a federal worker) with a chatbot that can’t do your job
ETA (cuz learned a new word! empahsis mine):
AIs want the future to be like the past, and AIs make the future like the past. If the training data is full of human bias, then the predictions will also be full of human bias, and then the outcomes will be full of human bias, and when those outcomes are copraphagically fed back into the training data, you get new, highly concentrated human/machine bias
I have found many stray animals, mostly cats, wandering in my neighbourhood. I once had a dog come right to the front door, but the oddest was a homing pigeon on the front porch. I knew of two people in the area who owned them, but I wasn’t sure of the house numbers, so I put it in a box and went door to door asking people “Is this your pigeon?”. I finally located one of the the people, who grabbed the bird out of the box, looked at the leg tag and said; “This is one of Joe’s”. So I was able to return it. Turns out this was it’s first race, and it got a little lost; from the air, my house and yard resemble it’s coop and yard, but a block north.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/19/selling-out/#destroy-the-village-to-save-it
[Fuckface von Clownstick] and his fascist movement won’t let up on their assault against institutions that support free inquiry, care, justice and openness. Rolling over for them now will not keep you safe tomorrow. But with every betrayal, these institutions alienate more and more of the public, without whose support they are ultimately doomed. Supporters will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no supporters.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/20/birchpunk/#cyberspace-is-everting
Book review.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374615369/wheretheaxeisburied/
In Naylor’s world, we there are two blocs. “The west,” where the heads of state have been replaced with chatbots called “PMs.” These PMs propose policy to tame, rubberstamp legislatures, creating jobs programs, setting monetary and environmental policies, and ruling on other tricky areas where it’s nearly impossible to make everyone happy. These countries are said to be “rationalized,” and they are peaceful and moderately prosperous, and have finally tackled the seemingly intractable problems of decarbonization, extreme poverty, and political instability.
In “the Republic” – a thinly veiled version of Russia – the state is ruled by an immortal tyrant who periodically has his consciousness decanted into a blank body after his own body falls apart.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/24/whats-good-for-big-tech/#is-good-for-america
The sight of the CEOs of Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Tiktok arranged in a decorative semicircle behind Trump on the dais on inauguration day was the final repudiation of the Obama-era notion that tech was somehow committed to democracy (or the Democrats).
For fucks sake, everything everything is meant to be a fuck you to BO and HRC.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/25/communicative-intent/#diluted
It’s not that AI artists lack for the big, numinous irreducible feelings. I firmly believe we all have those. The problem is that an AI prompt has very little communicative intent and nearly all (but not every) good piece of art has more communicative intent than fits into an AI prompt.
Also:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/28/street-pricing/#sportball-analogies
The reason Facebook was once a nice place to hang out and talk with your friends and isn’t anymore is that Mark Zuckerberg is no longer disciplined by competitors like Instagram (which he bought) nor by regulators (whom he captured), nor by interoperable tech like ad-blockers and alternative clients (which he uses IP law to destroy) nor by his own workforce (who have become disposable thanks to workforce supply catching up with demand). It used to be that Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t really move the enshittification lever in the Facebook C-suite because these disciplining forces gummed it up. He had to worry about losing users, or about users installing alternative technology, or about regulators hitting him hard enough to hurt, or about workplace revolts. Now, he doesn’t have to worry about these things, so he’s indulging the impulses that he’s had since the earliest days in his Harvard dorm, when he was a mere larval incel cooking up an online service to help him rate the fuckability of his female classmates.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/29/jane-mcalevey/#trump-is-a-scab
I gotta go. I’m on my way to a Tesla protest. Maybe you could find one near you to join, too:
TeslaTakedown — join the March 29 GLOBAL DAY OF ACTION - Action Network
But if I don’t see you at this one, I’ll see you on the picket line – with the LA teachers, the federal workers, and everyone else who’s taking a stand against this scab presidency.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/31/madison-square-garden/#autocrats-of-trade
Wilhoit’s definition is an important way of framing how conservatives view the role of the state. But there’s another definition I like, one that’s more about how we relate to one-another, which I heard from Steven Brust: “Ask, ‘What’s more important: human rights or property rights?’ Anyone who answers ‘property rights are human rights’ is a conservative.”
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/01/doctor-robo-blabbermouth/#fool-me-once-etc-etc
I’m not an expert on psychotherapy, but I am an expert on privacy and corporate misconduct, and holy shit is the idea of a chatbot psychotherapist running on some Big Tech cloud a terrible idea. Because while I’m no expert on therapy, I have benefited from therapy, and I know this for certain: therapy requires confidentiality.
These companies lie all the time about everything, but the thing they lie most about is how they handle sensitive data. It’s wild that anyone has to be reminded of this. Letting AI companies handle your sensitive data is like turning arsonists loose in your library with a can of gasoline, a book of matches, and a pinky-promise that this time, they won’t set anything on fire.