Burning Joint USA

It should really say something about the US that the best time most workers can remember is that time during a global pandemic when they had a little bit of agency surrounding how they would do their work.

Unfortunately I think this frustration is part and parcel to the tech industry. Thats why I moved myself into trades. Becoming a Union Electrician might not be a bad plan to start on while you have the resources to reskill. There is a lot of overlap in both skills and pay potential... I know that's not an answer for everybody, nor the answer you were probably hoping for, but I am a handyman now instead of working in tech (though I did fix one of my clients computers the other day, lol) and I make a similar amount of money, I enjoy what I do a lot more and I don't have a boss asking me to find a way to automate my own position (which is what I saw happening a lot when I worked in tech). My friends and colleagues in tech always thought they were beyond reproach and didn't need unions because the company they work for valued them too much. I like to remind them of what they used to say now that a lot of them are being laid off. I imagine I will have a lot more competition for handyman jobs going forward with all the people I know from tech that are losing their jobs right now. Before AI it was just regular automation... But whatever the new thing is, it is always an attempt to make programmers as well as all workers in the chain worth less and programmers willingly take on the challenge, because... Well I don't think tech minded people always have a great capacity for true critical thinking skills. I suspect what you are noticing in your colleagues using AI and becoming worse at solving problems was always there under the surface. People don't like to dig deeper than what their boss is asking them to do. Most people don't even care why. The why always frustrated me in that industry. I think there was a time where new technology felt like unlocking a new level in life. Things changed a lot when we all got GPS built into our phones. That was a moment we can all look to and say our lives improved dramatically, we never had to be lost again (even that comes at the price of spontaneous discovery in meat space). Now unless it's something tangential to the fediverse I am just worried about how this, "innovation," is going to make my life worse. AI feels like it's gotta be the final boss. Right? I think all of the for-profit parts of the tech industry are fully under the spell and will be for the foreseeable future. Perhaps you could find a paid position in open-source tech, though it seems very competitive and likely to pay a lot less. I am sorry this is happening. It sounds really, really frustrating as somebody who has become disenchanted with working in tech themselves.

I think we are now seeing some combination of FOMO and fear of holding too long competing against each other. The more news these circular deals NVIDIA is making get, the shakier people are getting about the future of AI. What isn't getting enough press is that Meta and Alphabet are inflating the depreciation cycle of the graphics cards they are buying in these deals, claiming they will be viable longer than 10 years in some cases. They won't. Look what happened with crypto mining. Those graphics cards needed to recoup their value in less than 6 months in most cases. So they will have to continue to pen similar deals every 6 months as a best case in order to stay competitive. It's put OpenAI in the hole to the tune of $300 billion already and that number is growing despite their best efforts to try to control it. The justification NVIDIA is using is that, well once they finish parasitizing these companies for their earnings reports and it becomes apparent to everybody that there is no way OpenAI and Anthropic and any of these other start-ups have to ever meet the obligations in these deals to keep buying more NVIDIA gear and they go under, the debt that NVIDIA is holding in the form of these deals will be worthless, the stock options they got in these deals for companies that don't exist anymore are worthless and the assets they liquidated are a bunch of outdated graphics cards you can't even sell to gamers anymore. So to me, it looks like a strip mining operation. Perhaps realizing that Trump is a fickle mistress, they have decided to just get whatever they can before they cut and run, since who can even predict if they will even be allowed to do business in the US at all next year or the year after that. A few people are getting very rich and it's going to make paupers out of the rest of us. As that reality settles in for people (and it is slowly but surely), I am not sure what is going to be left of a hallowed out tech industry in the next few years as the dust of this spectacular collapse settles. It's very possible NVIDIA won't even exist in a few years. I think it's a sure bet that OpenAI won't survive without a massive bailout. One way or the other, every industry that operates on the reliance of government subsidies eventually ends up collapsing when the will to keep endlessly shoveling money into a fire, burns itself clean out of money. Look at whats happening to the solar industry currently. All it's going to take is one US president that isn't sold on AI's benefits, or even just sold on the idea of continuously bailing out start-ups and the whole house of cards comes down.

Also having people have to go through a process to register makes it unlikely they will continue to do this over and over again unless they really, really enjoy wasting days of their lives trying to register on systems that make some attempt to vet users. I think making the project of continuously sucker punching a really time consuming project takes away the very immediate reward they are trying to achieve. Hell they might even forget they intended to sucker punch mark when they get approved 3 or 4 days after they had initially intended to sucker punch mark. They have moved on to more pressing things like paying their electric bill by then. Even if they are dedicated... eventually they are going to run out of steam for the registration processes, when the result is immediately getting bounced after days of effort trying to get in. I know it won't ever solve the problem 100%, but in combination with other tools, like pattern blocking and IP banning... Hell maybe people shouldn't be able to tag other people until they get a certain number of likes on posts. Could also prevent posts from federating until they have done some arbitrary things related to establishing their reputation here. I know of several message boards where they unlock sections of the board after you have established certain reputation criteria, like likes on a post. Perhaps approval from a mod/admin, etc. Making that initial investment in establishing one's self may seem gatekeepery, but I think it is probably necessary to prevent these sort of abuses from cropping up over and over again.

Wow. This is incredible.

This makes me glad I never invested any time into learning ruby. Unfortunately I know that these things are rampant in essentially all online communities. We need to sever ties with this people, regardless of their contributions to projects we care about and if those projects will not sever ties we should be forking them and starting anti-fascist versions. Furthermore I think it is time for a new license that restricts fascists from freely using our code to their ends. We don't need to be building their tools of oppression for them. I know that would make Richard Stallman mad. With all due respect, I don't give a fuck. How many capitalist horrors run on free code written by anti-fascists? I would wager all of them do. That is labor we gave them for free. We should stop doing that. We should have stopped a long time ago. But here we are, at the very crossroads of enabling fascism or opposing it.

This makes me glad I never invested any time into learning ruby. Unfortunately I know that these things are rampant in essentially all online communities. We need to sever ties with this people, regardless of their contributions to projects we care about and if those projects will not sever ties we should be forking them and starting anti-fascist versions. Furthermore I think it is time for a new license that restricts fascists from freely using our code to their ends. We don't need to be building their tools of oppression for them. I know that would make Richard Stallman mad. With all due respect, I don't give a fuck. How many capitalist horrors run on free code written by anti-fascists? I would wager all of them do. That is labor we gave them for free. We should stop doing that. We should have stopped a long time ago. But here we are, at the very crossroads of enabling fascism or opposing it.

I also was thinking about Tolkien today and about how it would be nice if there was a task like throwing the ring into Mt. Doom that would defeat evil, but there isn't really a straight forward task in our story... In our story, behind Sauron is Morgoth and behind Morgoth is another bad guy and behind that guy another one and it seems to go on forever. Evil isn't so much a guy that we defeat, but an impulse we resist... An impulse that the weakest of us haven't been able to resist. I think if I were to name that impulse it would be fear. Or something like fear. Those of us that live our lives guided by fear do the most shameful and horrifying things. The ICE officers that are afraid the white race will be replaced and that they will be treated in similar ways to how they have treated minorities, they go out into Latino communities and kidnap people to prevent that fear from manifesting... Trump is like a child that is scared of everything in the world that is unfamiliar to a person who has been sheltered by opulence their entire life. He is most afraid of just having to be like one of us, so he systematically targets each group of poor people in the US so he doesn't have to face that fear. They are afraid of their own shadow and so they commit these atrocities to try to vanquish the thing they are afraid will happen.

In the Silmarillian, Morgoth was filled with envy for all the wondrous things Iluvitar created and that is where his hatred came from. I imagine there is some of that in somebody like Trump too, who has never created a thing with his own 2 hands in his life. He is the poster child for impotence... Not just in the sexual way, but in the sense that he cannot do anything for himself. He has never had to and so he has never been tested and this has made him weak. I used to live in a van and often hundreds of miles from where I might seek help. I ended up in a lot of difficult situations that I survived and being tested in that way and finding that you can do things and survive hard things, it builds a kind of strength these evil people just don't have. In place of strength a lot of them have put loyalty, which makes them not dissimilar to an Orc. Orcs are kind of fear driven loyalty machines. I definitely think that ICE is analogous to a band of Orcs. Trump is a petulant child with no moral character or strength and so not your typical Tolkien bad guy. Morgoth and Sauron were both very skilled. Trump has no skills. I think our big challenge is to find that task we must do to defeat moron magic. There is some weird spell of moron magic over about half the country and having known these Orcish rednecks, it would be real nice if there were a one ring we could destroy to break the spell they are under.

The funny thing about all this price stuff is... We keep having our $350 million fighter jets fall off air craft carriers and into the ocean. Three that I've seen this year alone. That could have been 7 ships full of rice to achieve the same thing (or more maybe). China is tending to operate through soft power mostly, where as the US only understands hard power. The US doesn't even think there is any other way things could be done... Hence why nothing works here. If the first system we think of can't address a problem, we don't adapt the systems, we make the people adapt to them. The US is kind of just the big, dumb brute force empire and brute forcing things is painful for everybody involved including the one doing the brute forcing... Perhaps about 42% of this country will one day occasion to figure that out. I'm not personally counting on it. We seem to enjoy the act of banging ones head repeatedly against a brick wall, since we choose that over the very short walk it would take to go around to the door.

how much meshtastic data are they scooping up? Are they sending info about current nodes/locations and messages send to the public channel? Or is this just grabbing data from the iOS device itself? My reason for asking is... Should we be discarding meshtastic altogether or is this just a problem of needing a better app on iOS... Is this the official meshtastic app? Because that is some sketchy behavior. I really want to believe in meshtastic... Even thought about getting a t-deck a few times... Probably won't now.

By not advertising accounts. Like I have a matrix account and I don't get spammed... I have never been spammed on IRC or XMPP. If accounts aren't easily brute force able it already limits the ability for accounts to be spammed. I have been spammed more on signal the way it is than I have been on any of those others, because phone numbers are easily brute forceable.

There used to be so many spaces like that, but capitalism can't allow them to exist. I fear even the libraries days are numbered.

I mean, it's pretty much why computers exist... So, yeah probably worth the trillion.

Can we just get signal accounts without the need for a phone number so I can use the desktop app by itself?

I'll support, when you allow accounts not tied to a phone number that can be used with the desktop app without a smart phone.

Not sure I want my snacks that close to D-Con, but I appreciate the idea.

I guess I gotta revive this hobby in my life.