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@gerrymcgovern

I like how he labels our predicament "modernity" instead of "capitalism" or "consumerism", sidestepping any possibility of imagined political "fixes".

@mjg59 Dude paying 10$/month to the worlds richest man to have blue check on a website complains how unpaid volunteers don't fix the bugs he found fast enough.

What an amazing society we have.

the way our societies are heading WRT requiring all humans to carry portable telescreens running freedom-depriving software, it creates essentially two new artificial disabilities that should probably be contemplated in future issues of the paralympic games:
- those who refuse to carry such devices end up facing insurmountable accessibility barriers, and being denied essential and nonessential public and private services because of the artificial disability imposed on them, namely, missing an artificial appendage that, to ableist eyes, turn them into subhuman
- those who agree to carry them end up deprived of another invaluable and essential feature that humans have historically pursued, fought for and even died for. having their freedom taken away, they endure another artificial disability, that is horribly debilitating, but whose normalization is well underway despite its being a mostly invisible disability.
after this development, every person has become a person with disability, so the olympic and paralympic games are expected to merge

#suggestions requested: I have a long-neglected #WordPress #blog (self-hosted). Mullenweg's recent assholery makes me want to switch, and decouple from any weirdness he might pull later. What systems do you recommend?

What I want:
- Simple (I just hold on with self-hosted stuff)
- Not a full CMS (it's just a blog)
- Some kinda anti-spam or securesomething
- Not WP

#ideas ?

#software #selfhosted #help

it's too bad corporations, unlike individuals, don't die of old age

just got a royalty statement for Your Linux Toolbox and apparently since it was published in 2019 I've made $14,707.16 in royalties, on 6,314 sales. So I guess around $2/sale on average.

Not mad about it at all (my goal was to learn about how traditional publishing works, and I did!) but those numbers definitely made me want to stick to self publishing, which pays a full-time salary for me, plus two employees part time, with some left over

(post when it came out: jvns.ca/blog/2019/10/21/print-)

Slavery doesn’t become freedom just because you’re owned by a class as a corporate actor rather than an individual person.

@vosje62 @gerrymcgovern The fact that "burn rate" is considered a positive thing in startup valley is just plain ridiculous.

@tetrislife Probably true. But there are also huge mining and transport cost in the materials required for building solar and wind machines. It takes lots of petroleum to make them. And the mining waste is massive. Wind requires major amounts of rare earths. One ton of rare earth = 2,000 ton of toxic waste, much of it radioactive. We are being sold the illusion that we can keep on consuming once we change the power source.

The truth is uncomfortable.

Google has proven that giant corporations can leverage open source to build monopolies and destroy competition.

The 'median' is a well-known statistic that tells you where the half-way point of your data is.

Its lesser-known dual statistic, the 'comedian', is a statistic that tells you when there's something funny about your data.

EVs are not the way forward. I don't give a fuck what their manufacturing footprint is vs lifetime tailpipe emissions for gas-powered vehicles.

The problem is the infrastructure required for these absurd things. The infrastructure itself is unsustainable.

Reduction in demand for cars is critical, and you get there by incentivizing bike purchases and replacing multi-lane roads with bike paths and parks.

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Here's a way to turn anti-AI rage into action:

Normalize crediting.

I can't tell you how many times an invite, email, blog post, random bit of social media content goes out with some kind of unattributed lovely art.

CREDIT ARTISTS. ON EVERYTHING. It's easy. And if we normalized crediting enough, the generated images would stand out on their own for absence of credit.

#AI #art #GenAI #artists

I'm specifically referring here to the kind of 'FAQ' whose author takes the name literally, and wants it to consist of the questions that people actually do frequently ask.

The marketing notion of a 'FAQ', consisting of 'questions I _wish_ I was frequently asked because I really want to tell people the answers to them', is an impostor falsely using the same name.

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So Jacky is talking about the limits of the microblogging and I had a terrifying realization...

You know how you're not supposed to read the comments?

Microblogs are nothing but the comments.

Apparently wanting to avoid non-deterministic programming tools with an unpredictable error rate is being a luddite

At this rate, next week we’ll be hearing from “AI” fans that wanting to avoid bugs is elitist and gatekeeping

@teledyn @loshmi @dk
Gmail dominates because you get "Free Email" when you buy a phone. You can't provide "Free Email" to 1.5 Billion users, they obviously get paid.

It is not difficult to operate a secure email service, it is difficult to compete with those that have million dollar advertising budgets.

@yesfreenet #Telegram mini-apps are real webapps, you can't even play them offline, they just open a 3rd party website in an embbed webview, the mini-apps in ArcaneChat&DeltaChat are real in-chat p2p app attachments without any 3rd party involved or spying! and hence can be used even offline! ex. playing while bored in bad public connectivity and your scores will be synchronized with the other groups members when you come back online! 🤯

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