I consider the article’s criticisms of SMTP, HTTP, XMPP, etc. (and IRC which was not mentioned but falls in the same category) to be positive and desirable traits and I think it’s a shame that the article characterizes them negatively. HTTP’s job is not to prevent corporate takeover of the web and I don’t think it should be. That’s our job, as people. The protocol’s job is to remain neutral so that when corporate takeover of the web happens, HTTP is still there, open to everybody, providing an offramp to escape it, because it’s neutral. It doesn’t belong to the corporations. It belongs to everybody. They can try to take it over if they wish, embrace and extend, but they can’t extinguish a fire that’s smoldering underground no matter how hard they try. It will always be there, ready to flare up at a moment’s notice. The original is always still there ready for us to revert to using it at any time.

And many of us already have. Fuck Google, fuck Cloudflare, fuck AWS, they’ll never take the web from us.

You might be underestimating how much damage a .22 round to can do to something, especially when that something is probably at least like 60% lithium ion battery by volume. Yeah, .22s are small by bullet standards and have low stopping power, but they’re still lethal.

That said, if you’ve got a 308 handy, that’ll work reliably too. You won’t be silencing it, but feel free to blow a hole clean through one of these machines and enjoy the fireworks when its battery lights off.

There are plenty of tards out there living really kick-ass lives. My first wife was tarded. She’s a pilot president now.

As much as climate change is an existential threat to the continuation of civilized life on this planet, Trump has somehow managed to become an even more immediate existential threat to the continuation of civilized life on this planet, so unfortunately I guess that leaves us in a position where we’ve got to pick our battles for now. Sucks, though.

Dark Brandon is the only leader I will ever recognize.

As far as I understand it, only your instance can see your IP. users cannot, and other instances cannot.

I subscribe to the George Carlin immunity theory. Your immune system is not a perfect machine, but it’s evolved for thousands of years to be able to defend us against the bad germs we are exposed to. Key phrase there is exposed to. If you are never exposed to at least small amounts of germs, your immune system has no training and will be unable to respond effectively to real threats, or it will freak out and panic at minor threats, making you sick from things that wouldn’t even bother someone else, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In George Carlin’s monologue, which I think is faithfully reproduced in text form here he makes the observation that for his whole childhood he swam in the Hudson River with raw sewage, and he never gets sick. The point he makes is most people’s immune systems cower and hide when they encounter an unknown pathogen, meanwhile his immune system is patrolling his body with automatic rifles and grenades and a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy.

Most germophobia is sold to us by cleaning product companies (through government representatives that they own). It’s all a fucking scam, they want to convince us to do things that make us sick and then sell us the cures and have the cures also make us sick so they can sell us cures for that too.

Thousands of years of evolution may not be perfect, but I trust it more than I trust these fucking corporate fucks, that’s for sure.

I agree, they’re an extremely interesting technology. But laypeople are not going to understand why they’re interesting no matter how carefully you phrase it, I’m not trying to convince people who understand what they are that they’re not interesting and that they don’t have real potential and real applications.

I am trying to convince laypeople that they’re being misled (for profit) into believing these things are intelligent, can do things humans can do, and are capable of making decisions. I would rather have laypeople believing these are stupid atrocities against humanity (which is, in the current situation, closer to the truth) than I would bother trying to explain to them why it is still an interesting technology. If it ends up being completely banned (ha, fat chance) I’m not going to cry for it. I would rather have humanity protected from this vile, dishonest, and dangerous schemes they are using this technology for, even if it comes at the cost of ever being able to use this technology for good. My interest in it does not outweigh the harm that people are choosing to do with it.

You can give Gemini the exact same prompt and context 100 different times and you might get 95 very similar responses and 5 wildly different responses.

I don’t understand why people think a random text generator can ever be relied on for truth. It has no concept of truth. It is a random text generator. A pretty consistent one, but still fucking random. It has no intelligence. It is not intelligent. Stop acting like it is. Its conclusions are meaningless. They do not contain actual meaning. They are random.

Maybe the gold standard had the right idea then, or at least a more right idea than we currently have. When your head has been underwater for half a century, maybe it’s time to accept that the water isn’t really that deep and you’ve been swimming the wrong direction all along. If it takes a complete economic implosion and redesign to realize that billionaires and soon trillionaires are not in fact superior superhumans who deserve all the world’s worship, as painful as that process may be, perhaps it is becoming necessary. And I don’t know how long we’re going to keep going before we all admit that it is necessary, but I think I am ready to admit that it is necessary.

Define “competitor”. Hackernews, Stackoverflow, heck even Slashdot is still around. Contrary to popular belief there aren’t as many techies around as there are “normies” so a site that like Reddit that also caters widely to normies is never going to be exceeded in size by a site that caters exclusively to techies.

A cocksucking child rapist used military force in an act of terrorism to obstruct the lives of millions of innocent people today, starving children women and men a like

I think your headlines are interesting and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

It might be the end of GPL-type licenses. But, at least as far as I’ve understood it, the point of copyleft was to use copyright against itself in the first place, because copyright sucks, and at the end of the day we don’t really want copyright OR copyleft. They’re both asserting “ownership” of stuff that honestly belongs in the public domain free to all humans to use (in an ideal world, that doesn’t contain evil corporations that are considered people for some reason). We already know copyleft open source has been widely abused in proprietary software. This is not new nor surprising. We gave them the richly deserved middle finger whenever we could find out they did it before, and we hate it, but it was never “the end” of open source software because making it publicly available is precisely the defiance we are ultimately aiming for and we will always do that no matter how much they steal it and make it closed source.

People making closed source software are the enemy, and our war of freedom against them continues regardless of what tactics they use to demean our efforts while they make their closed source software. We will never let them win. They think they’ve found a new way around the GPL, that’s a shame, but so be it. The arms race will continue, but open source will not go away, because the point of it has nothing to do with meekly relying on the law to allow open source to exist, that’s just a method that has been used, with some success, and allowed a lot of people to turn it into a livelihood, and it will be a terrible shame to lose that.

Those things are not the true goal of open source though. The intention of open source, is to not let proprietary, hidden software dictate the fate of humanity and we will do it for as long as we have to. We’ll do it if we’re protected by copyleft, we’ll do it if we’re not. We’ll still do it even if they make it illegal, and we’ll call it reverse engineering, hacking, and piracy if we have to. Because the information and code that humanity relies on must be free, not owned.

Just to put that in perspective, that’s enough to pay around a $1 million dollar annual salary to each of these 84,000 lost jobs, or to pay $100,000 salary and still keep 90% for themselves.

Are they rich enough yet? Or do they still need more?

I would respond that it’s almost impossible to thrive in any sort of human society that has ever existed in history without telling even the faintest hint of a white lie sometimes. I don’t think it’s realistically possible to be a successful human, nevermind a lawyer. Everyone thinks they’re being completely honest all the time, until you spend some years having a bunch of philosophers pick apart the entire basis of the reality you think you’re not lying to yourself or anyone else about, then once you’re done figuring out what reality actually is, you might have a totally different idea of what lying even means. But you’ll never get there, because you’ll never actually figure out what reality even is, nobody comes out the other side of existential philosophy. This isn’t new stuff, the ancient Greeks were struggling with it thousands of years ago, and we only know that because they were among the first who bothered to write it all down.

It always gets dark before the dawn. This system sucks and is evil. I expect its collapse to be even more evil, but I’m looking forward to building something better.

Ironic that they have their repos hiding behind Cloudflare, then.

thank god the tiktok jobs will save our economy /s

That may have been the intention but I doubt it ever worked as effectively as they claimed it would. Besides, it will probably cost at least 1 AI data-center of carbon emissions to continuously surveil all these people with TPMS sensors, so the argument could be made that you’re actually reducing carbon pollution at this point by removing yours.

Anything you post on the internet is public knowledge forever. End of discussion. Most people won’t care at all, in most cases almost nobody or perhaps even literally nobody will ever even see it, but the harder you try to hide it, the more the Streisand Effect will magnify it until eventually everyone knows about it.

Anyone telling you they’ll delete your data from the internet without clarifying that it is in fact impossible, is at worst deliberately lying to you usually for their own benefit, and at best making a promise they literally have zero ability to keep.

I would hope that Fediverse services will never lie to you and tell you your data is deleted, because it can’t be.