JTode @ JTode @lemmy.world

Posts

3

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147

Joined

2 yr. ago

The thing about it, though, is that we are all already on a universal network; the internet. We all have email, give or take a few weirdos. We are perfectly capable of reaching our loved ones that way.

It is a question of convenience in this case, not necessity.

In my car example, I can argue - or rather, I used to be able to argue, because I work fully remote now - that I had no choice but to commute, and since I moved to the country with not even a bus service into the city, it was quite arguable on the basis of your comic.

But I left facebook and my friends and family did not change; they had less of me, perhaps, but I had just as much of them.

I have trouble believing that humans can't get by without Facebook. Even in the absence of viable replacements, we got along fine for millenia... arguably, we got along with each other better.

I gotta say, I had zero expectation of anything from Biden, but he has definitely delivered a few pretty good somethings, and this looks like another one. I hope they have a great day today wherever the Bidens are hanging out.

***NDP has never held power.

This is just... wow. The breathtaking arrogance of it.

It's not often these swine can actually get a visceral reaction from me anymore, but wow. Time to get back to work on that Novelty Giant Cigar Chopper I'm working on.

I found that I had to use gluestick for PETG on my bedslinger - without it the print wouldn't even stay in place for more than maybe a 60 minute print. I have heard about PETG fusing to glass beds also, though I have had the opposite problem, and I would just clean it off with some alcohol, but there didn't seem to be much of any kind of residue.

Now, the gluestick, on the other hand, that is a nightmare, until I found the method: spray it with windex or water, let it soak in for thirty seconds or so, then scrape with any spatula-like object. I often take two passes, but wetting the glue turns it into a looser sorta paste that comes right off. Once all the glue is off, go over it with alcohol to dry it all up, clean as a whistle.

if there’s an appointed minister on that spot, that people will vote for them

Ahhh, there it is. I've been skimming reports and asking friends for their take on this, because I could not see the angle, but now, I see the angle. Cheers.

edit: a pretty fucking weak one at that, if that's really it.

It really was, I have a clear recollection of it being one of my top sites for a good year or two. Then the bad times came.

all the requirements for long term housing

It's not long term housing though. He's attempting to build the long term housing, from what I can tell.

I'm on the wajon right now but I had ghoti and shiffs for suffer last nijt.

There was a time when Lifehacker was a place you could go for neat little things that could be accomplished with objects at hand to make life easier. There was such a time for many, many places on this great Internet of ours.

I've been fighting this war for OP's side since 1987. Come at me, I'm on Tijer Guice and shit.

That's cute.

edit: by which I mean, if I am going to align myself with any group in this situation, it is with the fraternity of fellow musicians, and in that world she is my sister, and contains multitudes.

He definitely had the right eye for which props to buy.

Lol don't get me started on crypto, I need to work :>

I do categorically agree with you, but I have, and you might also have had, the benefit of a lot good environment that deliberate fostered my critical thinking, including being plugged into punk in the late 70s by an uncle who knew I would need it. But I've still got my heroes, some of them problematic ones, so I don't hold the mere having of a hero who is not my hero against someone.

I also don't waste my time with Trump fans or that ilk, because in the case of Trump I cannot identify how any of his fans are getting anything from what he's offering, other than literally the much-vaunted "own". Like, to explain the 2023 Trump fan, as far as I'm concerned one needs to reach for Plato or Nietszche and their conceptions of how mental slavery works. I don't think anyone's come up with anything that explains it better than either of those two; the only difference would be the degree to which they apply the principle.

Foucault might have something to say, but y'know, academic Postmodernism is a measurable part of how we got here, so fuck that guy...

But the circa-2020 Musk fan, that person is easier for me to explain to myself. That person has been steeped in capitalist mythology and deprived of a real picture of history, and statistically speaking, has not had their critical thinking fostered very well at all, and they believe that their life happens in a more or less static social world that does not have the upheavals and strife that happen in Those Other Places, because that is the reality that we North Americans have lived in for the last thirty years. We are so bored, in fact, we have nothing better to do than fuck up our own society with convoys and antivax movements that killed children with measles years before Covid came for us all.

So in the end, I see their current silence as indicative of thought taking place, and take good hope from that.

I likewise see the increasing loudness and escalating hyperbole of the right as a sign that they are at least becoming aware that they are losing; at some point, simple ignorant pride/pride in ignorance will explain whoever is left in that group.

I have lamented, many times, the fact that they took SO long to get Super Mario Brothers working on the 64. If they had done that the year after the NES came out, history would look very different, you ask me.

Today, I 100% agree. But I mean, he's been around a long time and has been a couple of different things at different times, in the public eye.

I made a comment a couple pages back in my history (cause this is a very new account) explaining what made me rumble him - the road tiles and roof tiles, a one-two punch of terrible ideas that made me check the receipts and conclude he was a simpleton, the very model of a modern aristechnocrat. My poor wife was the one who showed me the article and got the full force of my visceral reaction to how bad an idea this was, relative to what was already required for our descendents not to perish in fire. Up until then he was just the "founder" of Tesla, who strangely had not been mentioned in the early articles I had read many years before about the battery-powered sports car made by "a bunch of engineers". I had kept a bookmark of one of the articles through the aughts and had offered it up as a retort to smug Hummer owners in forums once or twice. He wasn't in it.

But there is a special and rare animal out there somewhere, cause, you rewind as recently as like, six months ago, maybe nine but no more than that, I could bring you to a few otherwise serious and fairly high-IQ [insert jackoff motion here] spaces where I hang out with other programmers/IT folks, and nine months ago I could have introduced you to people who hold more or less the same progressive [jackoff motion intensifies] opinions as a "hard left Democrat" who would, when I would call bullshit on this or that ridiculous thing he did, talk in very detached white dude tones about how "Elon knows what he's doing, and doesn't bother to tell everyone. I've asked him to coffee but so far he's not answering."

Near as I can tell, because I was not paying enough attention to even taste his PR let alone eat a full serving, the image that was sold to a credulous liberal public was that he was acting on behalf of the good, non-toxic future of humanity at the highest levels, and a lot of people who are smart enough to be the tech workers who make Hollywood go (I am specifically a Technical Director, which is a fancy job title for Python Programmer on Hollywood productions, I am one of many, nothing special, but I am speaking of my peers here), they drank that koolaid up. To say nothing of the executives who put him in the Iron Man movie to have his ass kissed by Tony Stark. A lot of people missed that, apparently, but it's on youtube, "Tony Stark kisses Elon Musk's ass" is the only accurate description.

I have gone into that space once or twice with a link or two in recent months to casually dunk on him, because I have taken my position that he is a simpleton with money for a long time now in clear and public terms and I was curious to see if anyone would speak up to defend him - so far, he has lost every fan I used to personally know he had; I cannot find anyone in my direct circle who will speak on his behalf, anymore.

So the creature, perhaps the cryptid, that I would like to behold and examine, for science, is the person who was an avid Musk fan one year ago, and remains an avid Musk fan today. I think these poor souls deserve both help, and study.

Folks, don't worry, just sharpen up your pitchforks.

Here's the bit that doesn't get talked about much: For thirty years, money has been effectively free for these people, and they've been spending it all to build up this big Orwellian house of cards on the idea that people would never be able to do this without big corporate money. This was a deliberate action on the part of government and capital to "make the internet happen".

Now the thing is, the internet was already happening. It just didn't have video. In 1995, you still mostly got video on physical media or via cable/sat. MP3s weren't there yet, so there also wasn't really audio, to speak of, just little .wav clips that we swapped on irc for amusement.

But there were vibrant communities on usenet talking about every type of interest (EVERY type), there was trolling and DOS attacks on irc and even a bit of friendly chatting, and the good thing that we get from all this - more easily connecting to people we can relate to - was 100% already present for anyone who bothered to get a PC and modem. Believe me because I was there, we already had The Internet in full swing, while we played our CDs and VHS (DVDs if you were affluent).

Got that whetstone wet?

So what did they bring to the internet? Well, not music - MP3s showed up around 1998, and the music industry was taken entirely by surprise. It took them three years to figure out what was going on, by which time Napster had introduced the world to peer-to-peer file trading.

Back in the 8-bit days, we had to have swap meets, people would gather in large rooms, bring their 64s and 1541 drives and a box or two of fresh (or culled from your existing collection and freshly-formatted) 5.25" floppy disks which we had cut a notch out of so we could use both sides, and get a fresh supply of games, demos, sid files, useful software, etc, to mess around with for the next month or so. Napster and Bittorrent, however, represented a far more easy and accessible version of piracy: no need to carry 10-40lbs (cause CRT monitors, remember) of gear to a different place, just load up the program, choose your own adventure.

There was a lost opportunity to humanity around this time, because at some point around 1998, each entertainment industry conglomerate's board of directors, either in groups or individually, had someone (probably from IT, but possibly a child in their family) sit them down and demonstrate downloading and listening to music on Napster.

If only, each time that happened, they had thought to point a video camera at the face of the executive or shareholder or CEO.

These would have been, these SHOULD have been, the world's introduction to reaction videos.

Instead we have a bunch of video of people watching women eat poo.

Anyways the thing is they saw this happen and they found their most badass but cooperative front men to sit on their horses while they sicced the hounds on the uppity peasantry who think they are entitled to have joy in their lives without paying.

They ended up making Metallica look like landed gentry, basically, and nothing stopped, and that's been the dynamic ever since: They have been focusing all this money, which the Federal Reserve was good enough to make available at zero interest (ie. free) on creating the infrastructure for a paid version of the internet where they control it entirely, just like they used to control access to music and movies by doling it out one disc/tape/record/cylinder/music sheet at a time, and just trusting (i'm loling as i type) that people really do want to pay what they used to charge for a single record, and we are all just waiting patiently for them to decide how much our lives they need to cut away from us, and we'll be happy with whatever dregs they leave us, just like that vauntedly docile peasantry of old.

I hope the tines of your pitchforks are shiny like chrome now.

Cause again, we already had the internet working before they got here, 100% functional in all the ways it needed to be, before they got here. We don't actually need them at all. I mean sure, some people can't even pump their own gas, let alone change their own oil, so yes, some people will just need crayon-level functionality delivered with big bright icons, but most of us can figure out how to launch a desktop application and browse a discussion board, we're all doing it right now on Lemmy.

The bottom line is that we don't need them to manage distribution anymore - we actually never did, all we need is bandwidth for all. They are desperately trying to make us not see that.

And meanwhile, since covid, the Federal Reserve has been calling in the bill, and everyone who has a mortgage knows it's gonna cost you more for the next few years at least, if you weren't lucky enough to renew right before covid. But we were already paying interest and used to the idea; we are honest people trying to have a nice place to live. Those without mortgages, please, laugh at us right now because our problems don't even approach the magnitude of the problems faced by rent-payers right now. You have a scumbag trying to skim their life off the top of yours.

I KNOW your pitchforks are ready, and you might even have a few torches in the shed out back.

But, imagine how it must feel for someone who has been pulling free money out of a bag for thirty years, and has now been told that not only is there no more money in the bag, that in fact, they must start putting money back IN the bag now?

That's Netflix, That's Google, That's Elon Musk, That is Zuckerberg and the Metaverse [edit: and let's not forget our very favorite here on Lemmy, u/Spez...].

I'm a little old for pitchfork crew, but I'll be sitting here with my popcorn watching these bastards burn, very soon.

I can't imagine the life of someone who was a fan before and remains a fan today. What would such a person do through day? How would they eat?