Of course I know him — he’s me!

I’m not against AI as a technology in principle, I’m no luddite.

Perhaps not a luddite, but a Luddite.

The actual followers of Ned Ludd weren’t opposed to technology. They were, in many cases, experts in the machinery — sometimes having built the machines they would later destroy.

They opposed the new social order that seemed to inevitably arrive with the machinery. The capitalists would make more money than before, the workers less, and also endure more dangerous working conditions.

Btw, your note about absorbing and repackaging counter-culture reminded me of Rebel Sell by Andrew Potter. There’s a good episode of You Are Not So Smart about it: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2012/10/08/yanss-podcast-episode-five

The author seems to have fallen for two tricks at once: The MPAA/RIAA playbook of seeing all engagement with content through the lens of licensing, and the AI hype machine telling everyone that someday they will love AI slop.

He mentions people complaining that stock photo sites, book portals, and music streaming services are all degrading in quality because of AI slop, but his conclusion is that people will start seeking out AI content because it’s not copyrighted.

Regardless… The position of those in power has not changed. They never believed in copyright as a guiding concept, only as a means to an end. That end being: We, the powerful, will control culture, and we will use it to benefit ourselves.

Before generative AI, the approach was to keep the cultural landscape well-groomed – something you’d wanna pay to experience. Mindfully grown and pruned, with clear walking paths, toll booths at each entrance, and harsh penalties for littering or stepping on the grass. You were allowed to have your own toll-free parks outside of the secure perimeter, that continue the walking paths in ways that are mutually beneficial, as long as visitors don’t track mud in as a result.

But now? The landscape is no longer about creating a well-manicured amusement park worth the price of admission. There’s oil under the surface. And it’s time to frack the hell out of it. It’s too bad about the toxic slurry that will accumulate up top, making the walled and unwalled parks alike into an intolerable biohazard. There are resources to extract. Externalities are an end-user problem.

Yeah, turning culture into an expensive amusement park was a horrible mistake. But I wouldn’t get too eager to gloat over seeing the tide of sludge pour over their walls. We’ll still be on the outside, drowning in it.

Join, pay, request chargeback from your card company.

When they dispute it: “The position clearly says unpaid. So I won’t pay.”

Use AI to expand this argument to 10 pages. Bonus points for citing nonexistent court decisions.

I used to have the same issue. Electric toothbrush helped. But I still wait anyway.

I look forward to the documentary.

“Mastodon: Victory Through Technical Superiority”, available soon on Laserdisc and Betamax

The extra time is spent mining $TRUMP

Cory Doctorow has a short story about this kind of surveillance hell, and the disproportionate damage it does to neurodivergent kids.

Audio version: https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/09/29/vigilant-a-little-brother-story/

The real question is all the stuff beyond just having the distro installed. The packages, the services, the configs, the application data.

If you leave all that stuff the way it was installed via the old package manager, it may have some bad assumptions baked in and may be incompatible with packages you install with the new package manager.

And if you clear all of it out and reinstall it, have you really gained anything vs. just doing a clean install?

There’s a reason you have a home dir. Just copy that forward along with whatever other config files you might’ve customized.

Btw, if the ability to make drastic changes while still maintaining continuity is an important feature for you, maybe check out NixOS.

It’s not a problem… until it is.

And it has been before.

And probably will be again.

Central American

upower -d can provide some useful info on-demand. I think there’s a daemon component to it too, which may have variable log levels.

It was an autocomplete from co-warlock.

No, not really. I didn’t downvote you btw.

Edited my original comment to avoid suggesting that.

toxic men

Kinda sad and ironic, that the term “toxic masculinity” began as a way to describe how culture manufactures a harmful concept of what it means to be a man, and it seeps into men and damages them like a toxin… but now we use it to mean that the man himself is toxic, undermining the whole notion of thinking of the problem as systemic rather than one of individuals.

Anyway, patriarchy is absolutely demolishing men right now, and the political right is saying “women’s fault” while the left is saying “lmao skill issue”. If we don’t get our shit together and start treating this seriously, we’re gonna have big problems.

Hot take: you’re both right.

Right-wing spin machine had been after Hillary for years. It severely damaged her campaign.

Hillary had no appeal to 60% of the Dem base. It severely damaged her campaign.

AOC faces the same threat from the right-wing spin machine, but she has good policies to sell to the base.

Sexism and racism will factor in, of course, but the strongest opposing force is the billionaire news outlets.

Portal though?

Also: mobile games? Flash games? FarmVille left a helluva mark.

Easy. Google doesn’t sell search. They sell ads and consumer data. The longer you spend searching, the more they make from both. The ideal scenario for them is to give search results that feel helpful enough that you keep coming back, but are actually so useless that you never find a link that takes you away from the search results for good.

Not really. There are barely any chips out there.

Oct 2021: 200 billion ARM chips

Nov 2023: 1 billion RISC-V chips, hoping to hit 16 billion by 2030

Nov 2024: 300 billion ARM chips

Fantastic post!

I just wanna emphasize that last part.

If you have persistent pain, and you’ve already checked the obvious stuff, you absolutely need to see a doctor. It’s not just about maximizing your fun. Chronic pelvic pain can indicate serious problems.