People used to have social lives and meet and make friends and go out before apps or broadband. In the dialup days the internet was an addition to an already completed life. Facebook and iPhone was where things started to go to shit. Suddenly everyone was permanently online instead of just the cool people. And their brains all went to mush and they forgot how to relate to other people and have a life.

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Despite what their marketing says the service gets worse every time the price goes up. The word enshitification is overused and often misused but not where YouTube is concerned.

I have had premium family since it was red or something. It is my last streaming sub if you don’t count nebula which I never use. I still need to use smarttube and Firefox+ublock and various extensions as modern YouTube is a disaster.

I want to send google a message that here is someone prepared to pay money for a decent experience but they don’t give a shit. Its going to be very tough to win me back as a customer when I go which won’t be much longer.

Never see them inject performance enhancing drugs either but modern physiques are impossible without them.

If you enjoy a small independent band please consider going to their website and ordering physical media or buying a digital copy from their bandcamp or something. You can still pirate content you will never play to to fill up your storage. Small artists aren’t getting hugely rich from their music and touring costs are out of control. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing with the piracy.

The rich have done everything they can to increase wealth inequality and brainwash the public into acceptance. That will not be reversed. If they allow UBI it will be below poverty levels and highly conditional.

The wealthy want slaves. Its a mental illness with them. Black people. Underage sex trafficking. Working poor. Robots. Last thing they want is a utopia where everyone is healthy, happy and financially independent.

One of the wealthiest countries in the world doesn’t even have proper healthcare system in 2026. No way are those dumb fucks getting a UBI. Its a lie.

If I saw them I would call the police. Especially if there are kids around. No 4th amendment here and no local police departments that can easily be bought off. The police might not find something incriminating every time.

Many projects require replicatable builds. Generative AI is driven by noise so I am not sure if it has any role in optimization or code gen. I guess we could share an RNG seed with source but honestly current tool chains are too slow as it is and ML would likely make it much worse. I want faster edit/compile/debug cycles and compilers already do insane optimisations. Ken Thompson’s Reflections on Trusting Trust becomes much scarier if your code generation is being driven by a black box of billions or parameters nobody understands. An adversary could embed anything in there.

The machine translation origins of LLMs make them really good at inspecting text and looking for things that look like known bugs. It must be a game changer for security researchers who already know what sort of problems to look for but don’t have enough hours in the day to search the haystack manually. If some of that knowledge was available in a good quality FOSS local code analysis tool it might be irresponsible not to use it. We can’t be dependent on commercial vendors and closed models.

Using LLMs to analyze code for problems makes a lot of sense. It is just an extension of the rule based analysis we already do. It is very much a better hammer rather than a replacement of labour/thinking/taste. The programming languages we use are often difficult for humans to reason about reliably and hide a lot of errors. Our programming languages still suck (yes even Rust). If one day clang of gcc ships with a local LLM to lint code for security problems I would probably run it occasionally even on my hobby code despite being an AI hater.

If people are identifying errors using LLMs and fixing them by hand I am fine with that. It seems like a good use of the technology. If they start vibe coding drivers I want it declared so I can disable them or move to BSD.

Sounds like a bullshit headline but it is an eternal truth that the owners of capital demand slave labour. Take the work houses away and they demand chattel slavery. Take the chattel slaves away and they want convict labour. Take the convict labour away and they want undocumented foreigners to exploit. Take that away and they casualise work and pay people in tips or commissions. Take that away and they export work to countries that will do all the things they can’t do at home.

The investment in LLMs is purely a scam at this point but much of the initial enthusiasm was driven by the disdain for labour. Highly skilled labour like engineers keep arguing with the MBAs that their cost cutting is going to kill people or destroy the company and that really upsets them and risks the bonuses and share buyback program.

While the drudgery of work isn’t great, I would much prefer the capital class invested in R&D and equipment to make their skilled, specialized workers more productive and improved our remuneration and conditions as happened in previous generations before the MBA apocalypse. Instead they are trying to cut us out. Too many people are living paycheck to paycheck and unable to afford housing as wealth inequality escalates.

Mistreatment of animals or brain cells in a box isn’t the same as putting a child to work in a mine but the mindset that drives us in this direction is.

Working my way through Person of Interest again. Just watched one where a search company was directing suicidal inquiries to ads instead of helplines. And that was before they get bought by the evil AI overlord. Its surreal seeing Palantir, Flock and all the tech companies race to implement a dystopia no sane person would ever want and there is so little push back. What the fuck is wrong with regular people?

It will take ages for them to build capacity and they will probably be wary of growing too fast since demand and prices could drop quickly when the AI boom goes bust. Likely CXMT is already supplying a lot of the consumer market under the stickers. China will be the big winners in the long term. This will be a gift for them.

Not sure it’s possible to fight machine generated slop on the big platforms now. People who invest a lot of time and effort are being squeezed out. Businesses that don’t give a fuck about quality upload multiple low effort videos a week across multiple channels getting massive views, probably most from gaming the system.

Sad for the people who spend months researching, writing and producing videos but this might be the end of the ride as far as making videos as a day job. The platform doesn’t value them or their loyal viewers.

The creators facing burnout who don’t leave out of disgust will join the slop machine and start championing it. Starting to see it already.

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If your so called free society has laws to protect child murderers and racists but nothing to support the right to join a labour union it’s not a free society. Go back to the beginning and try again.

There is no repair without firmware. All hardware needs to be documented and ship with source. It hasn’t been enough to be able to buy physical parts since perhaps the 80s or 90s. Everything is controlled by software. Without that right to repair is a joke. Meanwhile the surveillance industry and their well greased govt supporters are trying to lock down software. Can’t have it both ways.

I have been using Linux for 30 years. Never recommend anything to anyone. It’s their decision to make. I will answer questions if asked but I try and be conservative. Lots of people don’t need computers and would be better off without them or only need something simple to do their jobs or play games. Also my experience doesn’t translate to normies. Inlaw was asking around for laptop recommendations and I just shut my trap. They can buy a Mac or a box store Windows laptop and it will do the job and I won’t be on the hook for support.

I am not a preacher and Linux is not a religion. It is an effective tool for technically minded people to get shit done. Nothing more. If companies want to turn it into a product and an experience like Valve or Google then it will end up in more or less polished consumer ready products but that is nothing to do with why I use it.

Shut them down. It would be a huge net win for people everywhere. It is horrible seeing friends, family, clubs and institutions all captured by meta. They are a blight on society.

Framework have been available in Australia for years. A few years back I ordered one and it shipped from Taiwan to regional South Australia in about a week. I was pissed off because they almost beat an order from PCcasegear. They are manufactured in and ship from Taiwan, not trumpistan.