• 3 Posts
  • 36 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Apple. Not the most evil, for certain, but they have the highest percentage of high level business choices that piss me off. Just so antithetical to my philosophy and consumer preferences. All closed, all hyper controlled, low customization, anti-repairable.

    Do it their way or go fuck yourself. Something break? Fuck you, it’s your fault, buy another one. Want to play games on their very capable hardware? Grow up, no compatibility. Want to make their OS work on other machines? How dare you. Thief.


  • The only thing happening in the industry is the same thing happening in every industry and most of the first world:

    The wealthy owners and executive leader roles have learned that COVID, COVID supply lines, interest rates, ‘consumer sentiment’, and inflation, are all very easy scapegoats that both the public and investors will easily buy as reasons for lowering product quality and availability, while also firing employees, squeezing the non-fired ones to death, and raising prices. This has lead to almost 2 straight years of corporations showing record profits (even adjusting for the inflation that they are largely responsible for in the first place).

    This downward spiral will continue until some force with nearly as much power pushes back.

    This is typically and ideally a representative government in the form of regulation or taxation. But the US government has suffered decades of regulatory capture and congressional gridlock.

    So the only other potential option is a large amount of highly populated unions. Which have to fight against nearly 100 years of media and political demonization and nearly 150 years of ‘american independent attitude’.

    The perfect modern system has all 3 parties; unions, government, and corporations, equally strong and antagonistic. Just as the perfect modern government would have the executive, legislative, and judicial branches equally strong and antagonistic. Neither could be much farther from the case here.

    Stronger bigger unions. Weaker smaller corporations. And a government that actually functions. All are necessary to fix our current shit show.




  • The fact that it’s Chinese really isn’t even a blip on the radar imo. The censorship sucks and a lot of US platforms do it too ( I mean shit look at YouTubes content rules).

    Their content algorithm being really good at showing you what your brain craves in an endless stream is the real big problem. It’s creating such strange micro cultures. Live streams of people slowly filling balloons with food coloring and water, on a bunch of white printer paper. Teasing the water. Like an hour before it pops. 1,200,000 views. It feels insidious in such a weird way.



  • The country people of the 1890s are not the country people of today. Big city folk were a significantly smaller part of the population then, and the college educated population was miniscule. The ability to become educated is the largest relevant metric here. Now you can hit up khan academy and stanfords YouTube channel and get a world class education for free. Back then you had to be straight white wealthy connected. The excuses for ignorance are gone, for current country people.

    But yes, these problems can and should be reversed, and done best communicating outside of the specific “lie-beral pedo demonrat vs racist Jesus warrior firearm creep” paradigm; placing things in terms of labor vs ownership class.









  • I really dont understand how anyone can look at the modern era of politics without a consideration for game theory, it is so useful for resolving these more nebulous or philosophical idea when it comes to thought conflicts. If your ‘opponent’ is constantly escalating and you arent responding, you are functionally forfeiting. and we all know the fascists are escalating as often and as hard as they can. if you seek peace or de-escalation you have to negotiate, and they wont do that. if you seek neutral ground you have to respond with equal escalation. and if you want to win you have to apply overwhelming force.

    most conflicts in politics are not zero sum like this so its not a useful tool most of the time, but fascists are literally out for the destruction of democracy by definition, its existential by nature.




  • This is a bit close minded and reductive when you can see a large number is examples where these tools beat the shit out of search engines, and search engines have been on a precipitous decline in quality for years now. Not talking shit; the privacy concerns are very valid and i dont think there is anything at all wrong with an anti-ai stance in these areas, I just don’t want novices reading this and thinking these tools are “glorified keyboard autocorrect” when some near version of them is undoubtedly the future of both internet search and internet assistant.



  • The WAN show is a great option for a one stop shop for broad tech stuff. It is often very long but they add very clear chapters to the youtube video that make it easy to jump to the stuff that interests you. Luke is a software developer/manager so he is fairy knowledgeable in that realm, and Linus is a very transparent CEO of a tech media company, so the coverage is actually very good between the two of them. Just dont expect in depth conversations about RHEL forks and node.js code efficiency and stuff, its very much meant to be consumed by regular tech enthusiasts and not hyper deep code monkeys.