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Federal law enforcement is sounding a new kind of alarm. Documents obtained by Wired reveal the FBI and other agencies are tracking what they're calling anti-tech extremism — a growing movement fueled by anger over AI-driven job losses and data center expansion in local communities. It's a sign that the backlash against Silicon Valley is moving beyond protest signs.
On a more personal level of tech frustration, a customer in Quebec says HP remotely disabled his five-year-old OfficeJet printer through a firmware update, then ran him through weeks of support loops before the company quietly acknowledged internally that an entire generation of that printer line had been effectively abandoned. It raises a hard question about who actually owns a device once the manufacturer can reach into it remotely.
And in the ongoing conversation about artificial intelligence and what machines actually understand, a piece circulating on LessWrong revisits the famous Chinese Room thought experiment, arguing that large language models possess a form of understanding that is real but fundamentally different from human comprehension — not nothing, but not quite what we mean when we use the word either.
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