Note that one very simple mitigation for browser fingerprinting is to simply run different browsers for "the business Internet" and "the fun Internet". You may need to do this anyway, because so many business sites only work on Chrome, with Javascript enabled, no VPN, no adblocker, and pop-ups enabled. But then you might use Chrome (which tracks everything you do anyway) for all your banking, SaaS, government tasks, so they all work, and then say Brave or Opera in an incognito window for all your fun reading. You get the adblocker, you get a different cookie jar for each session, you get easy access to Tor to hide your IP, etc.

Also recommended to have a separate sandbox for "projects" - basically things that you do that each might require their own research, toolchain, files you create, etc. I'd highly recommend doing this in a virtual machine though - oftentimes you need to install apps to do your project work, and that presents its own attack vector. Plus if it's all in a VM you can just backup the VM and start fresh on new hardware without having to install all the dependencies, while if you're just saving random files and backing them up they probably won't work as software gets updated and dependencies get out-of-date.

Using your scale? ↑7 or ↑8. That seemed to be the sweet spot in capabilities to me, without getting to the point where engagement eats everything else including productivity and future maintenance.

Using semiconductor process nodes? 45-65nm. That was around the point that Moore's Law broke down. At that point, you could do most of the functionality that we depend upon computers for (eg. GUIs, 3D rendering, networking, basic machine-learning, some speech recognition and text synthesis). It also roughly corresponds to ↑7 or ↑8 on your scale, so it's self-consistent.

Conceptually? I'd like to have multiple checkpoints, so that if the ecosystem gets borked you can roll back further.

"All of these copilots are supposed to make work more efficient with fewer people, but my business leaders are also saying they can't reduce head count yet."

Duh, if they reduce headcount then they will have fewer people in their department, which will negatively affect their chances for promotion and desirability of their resume. That's why they actually offshore the jobs to India and Southeast Asia; it lets them have 3x+ the headcount for the same budget.

If you want to have them actually reduce headcount, make org size the denominator in their performance reviews, so a director with 150 people needs to be 15x more productive than a manager with 10, who needs to be 10x more productive than the engineer IC. I guarantee that you will see companies collapse from ~150,000 employees to ~150, and profit/employee numbers in the millions (and very likely, 90% unemployment and social revolution). This is an incentive issue, not a productivity issue. Most employees and their employers are woefully unproductive because of Parkinson's Law.

You'll never see a manager or even a managing-CEO propose this, though, because it'll destroy their own marketability in the management job market. Only an owner-CEO would do it - which some have, eg. Valve, Nintendo, Renaissance Technologies. But by definition, these are minority employers that are hard to get into, because their business model is to employ only a few hundred people and pay them each millions of dollars.

I wonder sometimes if there's an earlier level of technology that society could basically "checkpoint" at and freeze, and then build off of. Capitalism today feels like it's hit the Red Queen Paradox - it goes around and around to keep the money flowing, but with very little actual progress. Indeed, most people seem to feel like the world is getting worse for all that work, and that many of the innovations of the last ~10-15 years are "fixing" things that weren't problems to begin with while creating new problems. And yet because all the substrate is shifting around, even if you don't break something someone else will. Could we go back to a world of redundant interchangeable parts where if somebody breaks something, you just cut them off and use a substitute that works just as well?

Or maybe that's well and truly gone and we're just fated to another dark age. I'm reminded of the Smarter Scrubber documentary that found that basically the whole supply chain was gone and it was impossible to make something useful in America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY

That's the regime that the vast majority of the world lives under now. You're almost certainly breaking the law in some way; we have a vast corpus of law that is usually unenforced until you draw the ire of some bureaucrat, politician, or law enforcement officer, and then they come down on you like a ton of bricks. The average citizen is usually counting on being boring, nondescript, and non-threatening enough that nobody bothers to call them on it.

Why else do you think actual policies change so much between presidential administrations (assuming a U.S. bias, but other countries have similar issues)? All the laws about cryptocurrency, DEI, greenhouse gas emissions, environmental regulations, etc. that the Biden administration cared about but the Trump administration is choosing not to enforce are still on the books. If Democrats ever get back in to power, people that are casting them aside under pressure from the current administration are likely in for a whole lot of pain. And likewise, during the Biden administration all the laws about immigration and federal control over the federal budget were still in force, and people who relied upon a friendly administration are currently going through a world of pain right now.

No, this is not the way it should be. If I were to rewrite the Constitution, one thing I'd put in is a feedback mechanism between legislation and enforcement, so that laws which are not enforced fall off the books, and it becomes illegal for the executive branch to choose not to enforce a law. That'd force the body of law to converge to what is a.) realistically enforceable and b.) what actually happens in practice, so that people can look at what their neighbors are doing and be reasonably sure that they're not breaking any laws by doing the same thing.

But in the absence of that, your best bet is often to still just look at what your neighbors are doing and do the same thing, because then you blend in to the crowd and don't attract attention.