Random Dent

It really does feel like we’re in the final season of a TV show and the writers have just given up.

The other day I experimented using an AI to troubleshoot a laptop issue I was having. It produced a detailed step-by-step guide which essentially boiled down to: install this software from the AUR and then make this edit to a config file. Being healthily skeptical of AI, I first searched the AUR for the software, which didn’t exist. I then went back to the AI and said “this doesn’t exist.” It then replied “You’re absolutely right, that’s not a real thing and editing the config file would do nothing.”

The experiment has concluded.

Food is literally free, it just grows out of the ground. If we weren’t such dickheads we could just take it in turns picking potatoes or whatever and spend the rest of our time fucking about doing whatever we want. Probably

Not a thing yet AFAIK, but Trump proposed the idea this week. You can get 30-year ones here in Canada too, but I’m not sure what the lowest fixed interest rate is currently.

I don’t really remember TBH, I got into Linux at a pretty young age, but that was more about hating Microsoft than privacy. Then got into VPNs because of downloading stuff, gradually drifted down the Ubuntu > Manjaro > Arch pipeline, started hanging out on privacy forums and now I’m one of those people who needs a Yubikey to decrypt a chain of LUKS-encrypted drives to boot into a laptop that has nothing of any value on it at all lol.

I’m legit interested in that anti-camera hoodie that was in the new series of Dexter, but I’m not sure if it’s actually real or not lol.

Yeah that was my main thought about this and the Steam Machine as well. If it’s a nice cheap way to get a kind-of-mid gaming PC I can see it doing well, but if it’s the same price as a regular PC I don’t really see the point of it.

I can see the UK doing this, they love to implement ludicrously restrictive and impossible to enforce anti-privacy laws. My working theory is that they’re lobbied to implement them by IT consultancy firms, who then get hired to consult on, say, banning VPNs, take 10 years to investigate it at eye-watering cost to the public, then go “Yeah turns out you can’t ban VPNs, I don’t know what the previous government was thinking” and then use that money to lobby the new government to ban encryption or some other nonsense, then repeat.

As a person from the UK, I am fully expecting them to implement this in the next year or two, because ruining the internet seems to be the government’s top priority rather than say, fixing the economy or preventing Reform from taking over for some fucking reason.

I’ll bite!

https://xkcd.com/2347/

I think you could make an argument that being compensated for your labour, but way under the value your labour produces and also under the constant threat of homelessness and starvation if you don’t do it is still an unethical system.

Iain M. Banks is a favourite of mine, especially the Culture series. To give an idea of where his head was at, from his essay A Few Notes On The Culture:

Concomitant with this is the argument that the nature of life in space - that vulnerability, as mentioned above - would mean that while ships and habitats might more easily become independent from each other and from their legally progenitative hegemonies, their crew - or inhabitants - would always be aware of their reliance on each other, and on the technology which allowed them to live in space. The theory here is that the property and social relations of long-term space-dwelling (especially over generations) would be of a fundamentally different type compared to the norm on a planet; the mutuality of dependence involved in an environment which is inherently hostile would necessitate an internal social coherence which would contrast with the external casualness typifying the relations between such ships/habitats. Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without. This broad result is - in the long run - independent of the initial social and economic conditions which give rise to it.

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.

No no, we need a completely fresh and original take on the same dozen or so characters in the same ship following roughly the same plot points as last time.

I do KDE with Karousel, which is similar to Niri I think.

As a European person I don’t want to drive an exploding car built by a nazi, so this company has nothing to offer me.

I think, AI quality aside, it’s mostly a matter of timing - IMO the AI bubble is obviously going to pop, NVIDIA’s market cap is now 16% of the entire US GDP and OpenAI is trying to IPO at a trillion dollars, which seem like ludicrous numbers to me. But I learned from the last few years that you can also never really underestimate society’s ability to just say fuck it and kick the can even further down the road.

And of course, SOMETHING is going to have to be the final straw that brings it all down, and it could very well be this. But I also didn’t think we’d get this far - the 2008 crisis didn’t do it, COVID somehow didn’t do it, but these things are are also all compounding as we don’t deal with them properly. And if AI is going to be the last straw, how long can we put it off for? Could it pop next year or can we still hold it off for another decade with even more ludicrous number-fuckery? I think that’s where the trick is going to be.

TBH this is just how petitions in the UK work: enough people sign it, it goes to parliament, they say a bunch of stuff about it that often sounds reasonable enough, then they do nothing about it. It’s just a way to give the public the illusion that they’re being listened to without having to actually do anything. It was the same with the digital ID petition, which I still signed but with 100% expectation that it wouldn’t actually achieve anything.

I just checked and I apparently have 137 apps on my phone. I think most of that though is just reading about some FOSS app, installing it to try it out and then just forgetting. I seem to have 4 different maps apps for example lol

Any of the Minds from Iain M. Banks Culture series, because that would mean the Culture was real and I want to live there.

I guess for a specific one, maybe the Arbitrary? That one seems pretty chill and knows where Earth is:

Also while I’d been away, the ship had sent a request on a postcard to the BBC’s World Service, asking for ‘Mr David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.’ (This from a machine that could have swamped Earth’s entire electro-magnetic spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn’t get the request played. The ship thought this was hilarious.

I exercise ultimate security by just having no money. If anybody manages to open the Pandora’s Box that is my bank account, best of luck to them.