kibiz0r @ kibiz0r @midwest.social

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2

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1,518

Joined

2 yr. ago

“Yesturday”

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.

Sure, but if you’re specifically trying to go South, Spain is about the same latitude as most Canadian cities.

Time for Mexico?

US once again beaten by rest of world.

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

They’re an ad company that just happens to offer search as a way to show ads.

Their ideal scenario is one where you search forever and never find what you were looking for.

Oh the other hand, we’ve seen what happens when regimes get “professional” about sending undesirables to death camps.

Yeah no shit. Dude is not subtle.

Site literally has a popup saying “outrage is not enough — we need to fight back”

I look forward to the documentary.

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

It’s cuz they work as a team. An IT team. Team, team, team. Team players, each and every one.

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/

Underappreciated fact.

I was listening to conservative AM radio (combo of morbid curiosity and masochism), and they talked about a social security warehouse full of documents and how inefficient that is in 2025, and we should get rid of it.

I’m just like:

First of all, there’s no way that’s their primary data source. So if you’re crying for modernization, that already happened a long time ago.

But if you’re saying we shouldn’t preserve paper copies, then you’re opening the door to all sorts of terrible things.

Like, saying we should just trust whatever the government says and not have to prove it in a court of law, or making our systems vulnerable to hackers, or making it so certain government actions can never be undone.

But uh... I guess all three of those things have become hallmarks of this administration anyway, huh?

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.

“I ain’t sayin SHIT until this plane lands.”

No deets on methodology. “Of Democrats”. How many? Where? Registered Dems? Likely voters? 2024 voters?

It matters greatly. In the primaries, Obama was invisible to pollsters that were only looking at prior Dem voters. His support came mostly from first-timers and independents.