Next thing you know they’ll be making this guy Secretary of Defense or something

Yeah whenever I set up a computer with dual boot it’s always Windows first, then Linux. Windows assumes it’s the only OS that exists so if there’s something else there it just ignores it and writes over the boot thingy. Linux actually bothers to look for anything else that’s installed and works around it.

Yeah keep the law around in case you need to weaponize it against an individual, but ignore it for corporations. The modern solution!

I think people like her, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Karoline Leavitt are starting to turn because they have inside knowledge and know that the MAGA thing is going to crack soon, presumably because either the Epstein files or Trump’s health are worse than the public knows (personally I suspect it’s the latter, because that’s the one thing Trump can’t really weasel out of) and they want to appear to have distanced themselves from the crazy before it all happened.

I’ve been saying for a while that a few years after Trump dies, you won’t be able to find anyone who claims to have supported him and I think potentially this is the beginning of that.

Our house still has a working landline. It’s there from when my parents owned it and we didn’t shut it off because it’s cheap to run and for some of our older relatives it’s the only way they know how to reach us. We get a lot of those “Microsoft tech support” scam calls on it, presumably because they just assume landlines are all vulnerable old people.

In the UK you could also sign up for a thing where you dialed 144 and then an account number and you could call anywhere without coins and it would charge it to your home phone bill. I still have that ~15-digit phone number memorized from when I was a kid lol.

It really does feel like we’re in the final season of a TV show and the writers have just given up.

Any plan that relies on people not being the absolute worst is not a plan IMO.

As a side note, this is why I think Bush was a worse president than Trump. Like, Trump is undoubtedly a worse person, but as a president I think he’s a symptom, not a cause. Bush is the one who sold the doors and windows, and Trump is just the crackhead that inevitably climbed through the empty hole and started living on the couch.

Edit note: not saying Bush is a good person by any means, but he’s not a pedophile or a rapist as far as I know.

The other day I experimented using an AI to troubleshoot a laptop issue I was having. It produced a detailed step-by-step guide which essentially boiled down to: install this software from the AUR and then make this edit to a config file. Being healthily skeptical of AI, I first searched the AUR for the software, which didn’t exist. I then went back to the AI and said “this doesn’t exist.” It then replied “You’re absolutely right, that’s not a real thing and editing the config file would do nothing.”

The experiment has concluded.

Food is literally free, it just grows out of the ground. If we weren’t such dickheads we could just take it in turns picking potatoes or whatever and spend the rest of our time fucking about doing whatever we want. Probably

Not a thing yet AFAIK, but Trump proposed the idea this week. You can get 30-year ones here in Canada too, but I’m not sure what the lowest fixed interest rate is currently.

Yeah that was my main thought about this and the Steam Machine as well. If it’s a nice cheap way to get a kind-of-mid gaming PC I can see it doing well, but if it’s the same price as a regular PC I don’t really see the point of it.

I tend to just operate on the principle of: I know my setup probably wouldn’t hold up for a second if some sort of organized three-letter government body decided to focus on me, but my threat model is more the kind of general internet-sweeping surveillance fuckery that goes on. I’m not doing anything especially dodgy on the internet and I think messing around with privacy stuff is fun, so my security level is faintly absurd for what it is. I’m sure someone could crack it if they were determined enough, but I assume the amount of effort required relative to what you’d find would just make it pointless anyway.

Iain M. Banks is a favourite of mine, especially the Culture series. To give an idea of where his head was at, from his essay A Few Notes On The Culture:

Concomitant with this is the argument that the nature of life in space - that vulnerability, as mentioned above - would mean that while ships and habitats might more easily become independent from each other and from their legally progenitative hegemonies, their crew - or inhabitants - would always be aware of their reliance on each other, and on the technology which allowed them to live in space. The theory here is that the property and social relations of long-term space-dwelling (especially over generations) would be of a fundamentally different type compared to the norm on a planet; the mutuality of dependence involved in an environment which is inherently hostile would necessitate an internal social coherence which would contrast with the external casualness typifying the relations between such ships/habitats. Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without. This broad result is - in the long run - independent of the initial social and economic conditions which give rise to it.

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.

As a European person I don’t want to drive an exploding car built by a nazi, so this company has nothing to offer me.

I think, AI quality aside, it’s mostly a matter of timing - IMO the AI bubble is obviously going to pop, NVIDIA’s market cap is now 16% of the entire US GDP and OpenAI is trying to IPO at a trillion dollars, which seem like ludicrous numbers to me. But I learned from the last few years that you can also never really underestimate society’s ability to just say fuck it and kick the can even further down the road.

And of course, SOMETHING is going to have to be the final straw that brings it all down, and it could very well be this. But I also didn’t think we’d get this far - the 2008 crisis didn’t do it, COVID somehow didn’t do it, but these things are are also all compounding as we don’t deal with them properly. And if AI is going to be the last straw, how long can we put it off for? Could it pop next year or can we still hold it off for another decade with even more ludicrous number-fuckery? I think that’s where the trick is going to be.

TBH this is just how petitions in the UK work: enough people sign it, it goes to parliament, they say a bunch of stuff about it that often sounds reasonable enough, then they do nothing about it. It’s just a way to give the public the illusion that they’re being listened to without having to actually do anything. It was the same with the digital ID petition, which I still signed but with 100% expectation that it wouldn’t actually achieve anything.

Any of the Minds from Iain M. Banks Culture series, because that would mean the Culture was real and I want to live there.

I guess for a specific one, maybe the Arbitrary? That one seems pretty chill and knows where Earth is:

Also while I’d been away, the ship had sent a request on a postcard to the BBC’s World Service, asking for ‘Mr David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.’ (This from a machine that could have swamped Earth’s entire electro-magnetic spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn’t get the request played. The ship thought this was hilarious.

Yep. As fun as it is to see this headline, the fact is that he was complicit in war crimes and in the torture and murder of countless thousands of people, and got to live to 84 years old in fabulous wealth and comfort not giving two fucks what we all thought of him. Unless there’s some sort of cosmic retribution waiting for him in the afterlife, he fully won.