Just ran across somebody talking about it on a forum. To be clear, having a consistent id can be useful outside of tracking, which is probably why it got introduced, but clearly tracking potential wasn’t considered fully here.

yeah it’s pretty clever and I love the low tech approach

You could, but there was no machine-id on Linux originally and it was something that got added and arguably shouldn’t have been. Again, I’m really struggling to understand why you’re so invested in defending this decision. Like it’s obviously a bad decision, it’s not necessary, why is it so hard for you to just say that.

I believe liberewolf does hide your machine id

yup, both Chrome and Firefox expose your machine-id by default

I think the example holds up fine actually. The difference is that in the second example the company decided that AI should be used here, and never consulted the worker about the process. That’s the key part in the whole thing, and this sort of thing has been happening long before AI I might add. Business people decide on some arbitrary timeline they pull out of their ass, and then it gets handed down to the workers who’ve never been consulted about the feasibility, then when the timeline can’t be met or the quality is shoddy, it is the workers who are blamed.

The AI itself is incidental to a more general problem that the worker is put in a situation where it’s basically impossible for them to do a good job with the time and resources available. What makes this case a reverse centaur is that AI is the driving force, and the human is expected to clean up after it, but without even having the proper resources to do so. The whole reason the human was in the loop in the first place was precisely because everybody knew you can’t trust AI, so there needed to be somebody to blame in the loop.

It’s low cost compared to trying to take out these satellites by conventional means.

Yup, because Trump was the only one who wanted to attack Iran. There are absolutely no other interests involved here.

It does actually matter. While the US isn’t going to go bankrupt as a result of printing money, there is a real consequence within the framework of the way the system actually works. They can issue infinite currency, but the two problems they have are inflation and debt payments. Inflation devalues the currency, while higher debt payments mean that there’s less operational budget available. So, end result ends up being less money available for productive purposes as more and more of the budget ends up being allocated towards interest.

The government doesn’t just print cash and hand it out either. What actually happens is that they issue Treasury bonds instead with the understanding that private interests buy them and the government will pay back later with interest. These bonds are then bought up by pension funds, foreign governments, big financial institutions, etc.

When the government prints too much money or issues too many bonds, the bond holders start getting awful nervous about their investment because they wonder if the dollars they get back in ten years will be worth the paper they’re printed on. So they demand a higher yield to cover the risk. It’s not unlike a credit card company jacking up your rate when you miss a payment.

Rising bond yields, in turn, make the government’s interest payments go up. Bigger and bigger checks need to be paid to the people who lent the money, which further reduces the operational budget. Today, that sum is already sitting at over a trillion dollars a year. It’s money that’s just flowing out of the treasury and straight into the accounts of bondholders.

And of course, as you note, the other problem will be that the rest of the world will start dumping dollar because holding US bonds will mean losing money as the dollar continues to depreciate in value.

what a weird coincidence https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/07/11/8043595/

Sure, there will be an effect on many countries, but it’s also just going to mean that global economy reorients around trade outside the west. China, in particular, has been actively pursuing a strategy of dual circulation ensuring their domestic economy is the primary driver rather than trade. I imagine once there is a financial crisis in the west, countries in BRICS and ASEAN will increasingly focus their trade on China.

That’s not the analogy he’s making. What he’s saying that if it is a human driving the tool and making decisions about when and how to use it, then it becomes a force multiplier for them. However, if you have the reverse situation where the tool is making executive decisions, and the human is subordinated to the tool, then it becomes a problem. What he is pointing out is that a lot of companies mandate using AI tools because it’s a hip thing to do, and then people are forced to use these tools in a way that doesn’t actually help them do their work. Like the example he provides where the person was given an unrealistic amount of work to do, and then AI hallucinated a bunch of shit that person had no hope of actually verifying in the time they had. So, the person just ended up being a scapegoat for a bad process.

thanks that’s a good talk

basically

It probably does, but I suspect they just didn’t consider the problem in the first place rather than the issue being that not having a persistent id is somehow extraordinarily difficult.

yeah probably, and you can tweak any distro to rotate it too, just most people don’t realize it’s a thing in the first place

oh you can do that with linux, even with systemd, just takes a bit of tinkering

tracking is a core function of pretty much all commercial software at this point

lmao

not necessarily, but it’s definitely easier to avoid having machine id without it