FoolishOwl

Stickers on a utility pole in San Francisco.

It's pretty much been known for generations that US college fraternities are about bonding the ruling class together through rape, torture, and binge drinking.

My phone rang. I looked over and, as usual, it was an unknown caller, so I didn't answer it. It crosses my mind that in the 70s and 80s, you always answered the phone if you could. Fraudulent and spam calls were a concern, but a minor one. We usually just assumed if someone was calling, we should answer, because it was a friend, or something important. TV shows would show someone not answering the phone as an indication they were in some sort of crisis. Now, most communication is assumed threatening by default. The long and short of it is that the tech industry has made fear of contact the social norm.

There are good reasons to have moral lines not to cross, and there are good reasons why so many of us are drawing it at LLM usage. You want to avoid a slippery slope? That's how you avoid a slippery slope: with a hard "No".

@SwiftOnSecurity@infosec.exchange For me, it's more like I know how to make sandwiches, I like making sandwiches, and I get home from the egg salad sandwich factory where my job is rolling racks of bread down the hall, and I can finally make an actual sandwich and whatever kind of sandwich I want.

A 125 gram bottle of Marmite, once emptied and cleaned, nicely holds one standard set of 16 millimeter polyhedral dice. #TTRPG #Dice

@FlockOfCats@famichiki.jp Yes and no. No, because that's been the message we've been getting for years on Linux when we use Nvidia proprietary drivers, and it's generally not been a problem in practice. Yes, because it shows that our systems are, in practice, accessible to Nvidia, a giant fraud machine that backs fascism.

@JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange This goes for a lot of things. Like, say, simulations of building colonies on Mars. Or walking around town with a sword.

@overholt@glammr.us I have a lot of ebooks around, but I've occasionally made a point of buying physical books, in part because digital data is so vulnerable. Even the DRM-free epub files are vulnerable to the decay of storage media with short lifespans. The mass destruction of physical books seems like an intentional threat. People talk about this being the result of a grotesque judicial interpretation of copyright law, but I don't think "AI" companies care about law that much. They seem to violate laws pretty frequently. This looks to me like a deliberate act of violence. They actually intend to destroy physical books.

As they say, liberals hate socialists more than liberals hate fascists. And that's even with fascists holding state power and calling for the violent purge of liberals. They love capitalism more than they love their own lives. https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:hf7ezrajxadu7v3tzcyij424/post/3mqz33uinj22y

Linus Torvalds declaring for LLM-generated code is, among other things, an example of why the "benevolent dictator for life" model that dominates FOSS will inevitably lead to disaster.

I hope this wretched nation collapses like an 80 year old fascist getting heat stroke.

@cwebber@social.coop @bremner@mathstodon.xyz I'm confused and my head hurts. But that's consistent with my previous experiences with Guix.

@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io "Nolan’s vision of the world is not quite big enough to include either real gods or real people who might be different from us."

Navigator Franny guides us in to dock.

It seems like a lot of the fantastic wealth of the super-rich is an illusion, a lot of theoretical valuation of financial instruments whose value would collapse if they actually cashed them in. I wonder how far that really goes. This may be stupid of me, but I'm starting to wonder if the rich have grown poorer along with the rest of us, and they're faking a lot. Someone commented that the rich in the 19th century were always trying to promote themselves with civic monumental architecture and so forth, and the modern rich don't seem to be doing anything like that. There are those TV shows about lifestyles of the rich that turn out to be just advertising for speculative real estate, houses that no one has ever lived in. There were stories about how for a long time, Musk didn't even own a house. It's hardly like those 18th century aristocrats with giant houses and armies of servants. (Though in that case the increase in working class living standards might be part of it.)

@Lazarou@mastodon.social Something I've complained about a lot, is that a lot of leftists hold to a stagist model, where capitalism creates the infrastructure for socialism, so they imagine that capitalist infrastructure is "the good stuff" and anything we set up for ourselves is jury-rigged crap to be dispensed with as soon as we can get our hands on "the good stuff". This overlaps with the constructed myth that the far right has huge numbers, or even outnumbers the rest of us, so if you've got mostly left-leaning people, it's taken as evidence that it's a bubble. And then there's the way leftists internalize norms, such that they assume that "normal" people are white cishet men, and that if they're a minority, your community is not "normal", despite white cishet men having always been a minority.

@dramypsyd@ohai.social This is why we invented computer games about exploring caves.

@gwynnion@mastodon.social I've worked in a few factories and I do think data centers are a lot like factories in many important respects, particularly that they're fortress/prisons holding concentrated capital. The thing that's changed is I think that common sense is starting to reject the idea that accumulating capital will ultimately benefit us.

Mark Rubio's argument against the ICC is that the US government is routinely committing atrocities.

@pheonix@hachyderm.io @TheNovemberMan@bookstodon.com There's already discussion of the TESCREAL cult and its influence on Silicon Valley techbros. I think this weird fixation on "AI" is sort of TESCREAL-lite.

@tuv@indieweb.social @wordshaper@weatherishappening.network As I recall, most of the social interaction I'd get in the office was through social media posting on my phone.

@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io I think something like that is often the point.

@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems @lina@vt.social I think it's telling that Tridgell mocked the idea of switching to openrsync.

This is continuing to bother me. Like, I try to cut out of my life a lot of things because they have troubling associations, and I've talked about that more than once. I've wrestled with my enthusiasm for space travel fantasy, since it's a genre that has roots in colonialism, and real-world space exploration has been significantly influenced by Nazis, literally. But, lots of good people enjoy space fantasies, so there's got to be something redeemable about it, right? There's some conservative sentiment among a lot of SE players, in particular a fondness for military imagery. There was a bit of conflict about adding a female character model, but, most favored that, and the publisher eventually did. But, it's really hard to get around the far right allusions in Marek Rosa's biography. The best alternative I can think of, probably better than cutting a hobby out of my life, is to find some way to explicitly express anti-fascism and radical leftism. I'll just have to work out how.

@lzg@mastodon.social Yeah, that makes a difference. I'm familiar with the excitement of suddenly having dental insurance.

@burnoutqueen@todon.nl My first online encounter with "radfems" was with a group that had an openly declared project of shutting down feminist blogs that allowed men to participate. At some point I looked at their "headquarters" blog, and they explained their origin as a group of evangelical Christians who wanted an evangelical Christianity centered on women. (Also they had some transphobic rants, my first direct encounter with that, and an article denouncing the myth of female orgasm.)

@quixoticgeek@social.v.st This has me wondering if I could use FreeCAD.

I've toyed with the idea of refreshing my knowledge of Perl. Nearly all the jobs I apply for ask for knowledge of BASH, Python, and occasionally Powershell; I haven't seen a job listing mention Perl in years. Still, it does seem to continue to be under development. A conceptual problem I have with Perl best practices is that there's a lot of emphasis on writing Perl code that's compatible with old versions of the Perl interpreter. But of course, that means not using newer functionality. I've thought the reasonable thing to do would be to write code based on the oldest version of Perl installed on systems I'm supporting on a job. Is that a reasonable approach? #Perl

@Ronnie@mastodon.social @kevbob@xoxo.zone I watched it for the first time about a year ago and thought it was really good. There are people around who missed the satire, but that's true of a lot of stuff from around then.

@gwynnion@mastodon.social To be somewhat fair, there's been a longstanding contradiction within capitalism that they've straddled, the "common sense" that economic growth means more jobs and people want jobs, so liberals should encourage business growth. (There's a lot wrong with all of this, but think of the classic messaging from conservative labor union leadership for instance.) I think it's a recent and dramatic shift that there's now a widespread understanding that new businesses (or at least one prominent type of new business) are harmful and should be opposed.

@gwynnion@mastodon.social This is one of those things that make me think we've moved past capitalism to something new and worse.

@joejoetom@famichiki.jp That's a good idea.

@CoralineAda@ruby.social Most of the big tech companies have a two-tiered labor force, where only a minority are direct employees and the majority of tech workers are "contract" workers who, through legal fictions and some hostile court rulings, aren't considered employees of the company they actually work for and aren't legally entitled to collective representation with that company. Most labor organizing efforts in tech I've seen, in those companies, only tried to organize the direct employees. I've never seen a labor union articulate a strategy for organizing contract workers; at best I've gotten some organizers to acknowledge it's a problem without a word how they might address the problem.

@kaliranya@vtuber.house @davidgerard@circumstances.run Same here.

@jonny@neuromatch.social The idea that capitalism lays the groundwork for socialism, that therefore capitalism is good, and that what capitalism creates is good, is a terrible set of ideas that the left has followed to self-destruction over and over again.

@astory@tilde.zone @Avner@anticapitalist.party @CoralineAda@ruby.social That's awesome!

@nielsa@mas.to https://chaosfem.tw/@Athena/116578993491995353

@dale@g0v.social This article was helpful. It did have an error with a filename in one of the examples, as the comment at the bottom points out. https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-create-incremental-and-differential-backups-with-tar

@catsalad@infosec.exchange We should go to the living room and chew grass.

@farah@beige.party @hwll@sunny.garden Capitalism is a fundamental threat to humanity, and most jobs exist because they benefit capitalism. People building the transcontinental railroad would probably not have been happy to think that the point was to project US imperial power. But they needed incomes. Agricultural laborers penned in behind ancient city walls ate some of the grain they harvested. We're all in chains. Some of us have longer chains than others.

@tante@tldr.nettime.org I feel a little hope.

@sbszine@dice.camp @catalina@selfy.army @rachaelspooky@cyberpunk.lol I can't make a head-to-head comparison, but I've been using Waterfox on my laptop with Debian, and on Android for about a year. The Android version is updated through F-Droid. On Debian, I think I had to create a .desktop file, and I have to update by downloading and unpacking a tarball. LibreWolf has a Debian repository, available through extrepo. Aside from the minor difficulty of the manual updates, I have no complaints with Waterfox; it works great, and I don't have to put up with "AI" or Firefox's obtrusive advertising.

@nekomimi@sakurajima.moe @i0null@infosec.exchange I'm pretty sure that's how it was originally intended.

@ScottishGreens@mastodon.scot I sincerely wish for your success. A victory for greater democracy anywhere will bring hope to people everywhere.

@dale@g0v.social I'm using an external hard drive and a shell script built around tar. I've used rsync and borg in the past, but they're both using LLM-generated code and have become unreliable. tar also seems faster.

@stux@mstdn.social The point of tyranny is to force us to do what tyrants want.