valaramech

To extend this a little bit, I’m not convinced “is X conscious?” is really the question anyone is trying to answer. What I think we’re really trying to sus out is “does X require rights?” and where is the line for that.

As another commenter asked, something like “is turning this off equivalent to murder?” is effectively asking if the thing deserves a “right to life” like any human might. At what point does a “thinking machine” cross the line from “person-like” to “person”? I doubt anyone has a satisfactory answer to that question and, unfortunately, I strongly doubt we’ll have one until well after it’s actually needed.

I think grappling with that question is maybe a little more straightforward when we consider other animals we already consider highly intelligent (e.g. pigs, dolphins, or octopi) but that we don’t give the same kinds of rights to that we would a human. At what point would we consider a non-human animal to be equal to ourselves? How many person-like traits does something need before it is a person?

Anyways, all that aside, I think we should start asking the questions we’re really trying to answer and stop using other questions as proxies for that one.

Most of the rest of the civilized world effectively banned individual ownership of guns. Aren’t you more worried about getting stabbed?

In my experience, first-party JavaScript is more likely to be updated so rarely that bugs and exploits are more likely than supply chain attacks. If I heard about NPM getting attacked as often as I hear about CDNs getting attacked, I’d be more concerned.

I actively do this with uMatrix - granted, I only block non-first-party JavaScript. Most sites I visit only require a few domains to be enabled to function. The ones that don’t are mostly ad-riddled news sites.

There are a few exceptions to this - AWS and Atlassian come to mind - but the majority of what I see on the internet does actually work more or less fine when you block non-first-party JavaScript and some even when you do that. uMatrix also has handy bundles built-in for certain things like sites that embed YouTube, for example, that make this much easier.

Blocking non-first-party like I do does actually solve this issue for the most part, since, according to the article, only bundles that come from the cdn.polyfill.io domain itself that were the problem.

Closes the current tab

A PiHole functions has a full DNS server. You can configure it to serve any arbitrary records you like - which is basically how it overrides ad domains to prevent them from loading.

So, if you know the IP address that a particular domain is supposed to route to, you configure the PiHole to respond with that IP address for that domain. So, it doesn’t matter that the major DNS servers return junk because your PiHole never asks them.