As someone who worked at a local roaster, the coffee was objectively better, but the owners were trying really hard to be like Starbucks in every other way.
I wish the employees had a union, but it was a college town.
AI is a venture capital money pit, and they are struggling to monetize before the hype dies out.
If the poison pills work as intended, investors will stop investing "creative" AI when the new models stop getting better (and sometimes get worse) because they're running out of clean content to steal.
I doubt we'll ever be offered a real opt-out option.
Instead I'm encouraged by the development of poison pills for the AI that are non-consensually harvesting human art (Glaze and Nightshade) and music (HarmonyCloak).
Signal supports a manual backup and restore option. Basically, messages are not backed up to any cloud storage, and Signal cannot access them.
WhatsApp
WhatsApp can optionally back up the contents of chats to either a Google Account on Android, or iCloud on iPhone, and you have a choice to back up with or without end-to-end encryption.
iMessage
[iMessage] backups... are not end-to-end encrypted by default. This is a loophole we’ve routinely demanded Apple close.
The good news is that with the release of the Advanced Data Protection feature, you can optionally turn on end-to-end encryption for almost everything stored in iCloud, including those backups (unless you’re in the U.K.).
Google Messages
You can optionally back up Google Messages to a Google Account, and as long as you have a passcode or lock screen password, the backup of the text of those conversations is end-to-end encrypted.
If, like me, you were curious about what "disaster" is referring to, it's basically this:
The flight attendants are told to prioritize guard orders over prisoner safety (aka keep them in chains). And they have no evacuation protocols. If the plane crashes or people need to parachute out, the prisoners will be left for dead.
Banana hammocking is bad for your back.
You gotta lay in it diagonally.