• 0 Posts
  • 85 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle



  • People’s take on this stuff always seems so naive to me. All war ever can be viewed as an attempt to arrest the leader of another group for “crimes”. When you get arrested… that means you lost the war. Winning a war means you didn’t get arrested.

    The ICC is such a silly stupid waste of human attention. It’s like an idea that children came up with after watching Star Trek. It has no utility whatsoever for our species. We fight, we have winners and losers. If you start a fight with somebody stronger than you, you are gonna have a bad time. If you start a fight with someone weaker than you, others will think you are dishonorable. That doesn’t mean you get arrested.


  • It’s the same thing the right does with government. It is a truism that there is all sorts of “inefficiencies” where the money is going to the wrong people for the wrong stuff.

    In both cases, it’s sort of correct and sort of wrong. Corporations, governments, and any human institution beyond a certain scale (a few hundred people), will leak wealth into places it shouldn’t. It’s an unavoidable feature of our species as best I can tell.

    It’s fine to accept it, it’s fine to be angry about it. It’s silly to blind yourself to it in some places and whinge about it in others.


  • I have no diagnosed neurodivergence and I’m looking at that list with surprise. Like, you know how fucking hard I’m working to pretend I can do that stuff?

    A person who can do all that shit looks like a superhero to me. No talent… fuck… if that list had telekinesis on it’d feel about the same to me.





  • The never ending growth thing is complex. But set all of that aside, if your company doesn’t peruse the growth, somebody else will. There is no future where nobody bothers to try and sell to a market that is begging for a product.

    Nobody needs Microsoft to exist, but people want free software and services (windows is functionally free, the last time I paid for it was win7). They can take a privacy purist route and change $3-400 for a license w/ an update every 5yrs but the product will die and everyone will switch to chromebooks.

    Microsoft can “be better”, and then they would stop being relevant. If you want a little better, pay the Apple tax, if you want A LOT better pay the time tax and use Linux.


  • First the money was in the hardware. Then, the money was in the software. Then, the money was in the services. Now, the money is in the data you can harvest from the users.

    If being a sponge for ads, and a source of data to sell and use for training LLMs, is not your thing, using computer systems produced by for profit companies is probably out.

    Enshitification isn’t driven by some new and unique greed. It’s the only way left to earn money in the space. Customers WANT subsidized hardware running free software and cloud services. If MS doesn’t give them that somebody else will and that will be that.

    I don’t want to blame customers for all this. But to most folks trading something they didn’t know had value (their data and attention) for something that they know has value (software and services) seems like an awesome deal. The corps are following the customers to some extent, and we have to acknowledge that.



  • Amazingly native English speakers the world over seem to have this genetic predisposition! All of us just can’t seem to get it together when it comes to becoming multilingual.

    OR… maybe it comes from being born into mastery of the language everyone else on earth is trying to learn. I get three words in Spanish out before my conversation partner asks to switch to English. What am I gonna do? Stamp my feet and demand I get to practice my hobby and deny them the opportunity to work on a valuable career skill. Nah. We’ll speak in English.

    Your ancestors (assuming you are British) created a global language hegemony. My ancestors moved from southern Italy to the US and learned their language.


  • Losing an election = ratfucking!

    You people really are only a few preference away from fiting in with the maga idiots you know that.

    If we want a progressive majority we have to build it. It starts at school boards and city councils. It starts with policy wins that give people what they want but didn’t know they could get. All you lazy fuckers that think you take the shortcut and the American voters just give you senate seats and the presidency have set back the cause by decades.

    Your internet bubble != the voting public!!



  • I’m not sure there are realistic strategies for the region that would be similar. Who is going to take over administration of Gaza when Hamas is out? Israel is. Germans didn’t hate British people. They did not spend generations teaching their children that Americans were subhuman scum. Your average German was able to snap out of the delusion easily. You and I both know that isn’t a plausible reality in Gaza.

    I’m not saying there is a need for genocide. But Hamas could agree to terms tomorrow and the war would end. Then it would start again. There can be no peace in that place. Not while both peoples live there. Maybe when Iran builds nukes? MAD is pretty high price to pay but it might sober everyone up a little. Hard pill to swallow.




  • I definitely did not claim it was braking privacy. As far as I can tell it was just querying an update server but for some reason it was doing it with such frequency (hundreds a minute for hours out of the day) that I deemed it was broken and that the OS was not managed well.

    Other people took a more suspicious view but mostly they just lost my trust that they had any business running a system on my network. If you google around you can get more nuanced takes I don’t actually know if they ever fixed it.


  • HAOS is a managed operating system, which is perfect for people who want to automate their home but don’t want to manage a Linux machine. It’s a little wild to me to see a person in this community advocating a managed OS. Like, what are we even doing here??

    I killed HAOS and set it up in docker because it was phoning home a lot. Sometimes there were hundreds of dns queries a minute to HA servers. No thanks.