It’s the tech oligarchs. They’re doing their own gilded age. Their empires exist in the tech domain. Mostly IT services. They’re going after the whole pie. They want the entirety of American industry.

What they have in mind exactly is anyone’s guess. We’re not going back to the times of railroad or oil barons. We’re not necessarily going back steel and auto manufacturing. The future is in things like robotics, renewable energy, semiconductors, or whatever the future holds.

I think crashing the economy just to buy stock is old news too. The saying has become rather mindlessly echoed. They have relatively little to gain from this. The rich hold 90% of stocks. There’s little to extract from the remaining 10%. Plus I think people have believed too much in the idea that stocks are a shell game. It’s not as much as people think. The markets are still based on tangibles meaning actual industry. That is what the oligarchs are after. What’s better than owning stock in the industry is owning the industry itself. Complete total monopolies just like the gilded age and just like they’ve monopolized IT services sector.

I’m posting this from Mars colony. Amazing isn’t it.

There was definitely a time when people were smarter. I read a comment on r/xennials that stuck with me. They were lamenting the loss of a the culture of their youth. I’m not sure I can rephrase it as well as they said it.

Basically they were describing how it used to be about how we questioned things. Like the show The X-Files. It was about seeking the truth. They noted how that show was reflective of how reality was. There was this common mindset that the answers are out there. That we can work together even to seek the answers and we will find them inevitably.

You see that doesn’t make much sense in 2025 because everyone has the answer to anything and everything. Except it’s their own answer. Not the answer. More than ever their answer is one which is derived from their internet / social media bubble.

There is no longer some big unknown out there full of mysteries to unravel. Not anymore. The zeitgeist right now is that I have my own world view and that’s the one. I know how the system works. I know the way. It’s the way I see the world. So why doesn’t everyone else come join my world view??? Are they stupid?

In the past we didn’t know everything. Nobody knew anything. Nobody had any illusion that they did. Nor could they whip out their pocket rectangle and find answers immediately.

In the past people had to be more open minded. They had to be honest about not knowing. Without modern media they had to be seekers of knowledge. As opposed to over confident purveyors relying on a quick internet search (these days a simple GPT query). The modern zeitgeist is one where everybody talks. Nobody listens. 8 billion deaf ears listening and learning nothing. Just waiting for their turn to talk. Everyone learned everything and they’re so damn sure of it.

Stupid people think they know it all. Smarter people are unsure of what they know. Of course there were stupid people before. But they knew they were stupid. Today the stupids can mask it by repeating words from the podcast, the tiktoks, the youtube videos they just watched.

It’s not uniquely an American problem. The American symptoms are quite a sight to beheld though.

I wasn’t making a political statement about Flatpaks.

I downloaded the tor browser binary which runs standalone. Why does it need to be a flatpak?

The old meme was to “hide your power level”. Meaning don’t reveal the extent of your right wing beliefs. That has reversed in the past 10 years.

You don’t even have to question how it used to be. People were out in the open before too. Another popular meme was that women belong in the kitchen. The “make me a sammich” meme was a common joke. Programming was only possible to be learned by white men. Never mind that women pioneered the field in the early days. Also anyone of Asian descent in the field were merely cheaters or just proficient at copying.

They all drank this weird koolaid about how leftist they were (they still do). It’s strange. I think because many guys never left their podunk town. So being exposed to the slightest bit of different things through the internet made them very different from everyone else their christian conservative home town. They supported rather milquetoast things like legalization of pot and carried an affinity for anime. So that meant they were very progressive relative to the god fearing cross burning klan shit happening all around them in real life.

It started with gmail IMO. That was an early milestone of the evil empire. They announced mining your emails to build an ad empire. I remember being bewildered that nerds on forums were going nuts over 1GB of storage. What a shit trade off I thought. But what did I know then especially relative to the expertise of internet nerds.

Gmail was launched around 2005 which means the concept was in development several years before. That puts the timeline around 2000 probably. Google was evil from very early on.

Where did this come from? Is this a precursor to pushing some blockchain shit or something?

Dear Penthouse Forum reddit, I’m a 20 year-old college student and I never thought I’d be writing to the Penthouse Forum reddit, but…

It’s the lowest common denominator of smut entertainment. The tech companies have managed to veil it all in prestige. It should be called gossip media or something.

Instead people think there’s some kind of real human connection. Some kind of deep discussions happening.

Well bluetooth doesn’t carry enough bitrate to accomplish this. Besides. Apple won’t and doesn’t need to because their AAC encoder is superior. There is no other bluetooth codec that comes even close. Every codec that claims to be the best one yet is more marketing than anything.

Vendors reframed the narrative for SBC to be dog shit so they can push their own as cutting edge new tech. In reality SBC isn’t that bad. The vendor codecs aren’t that good. And Apple has some kind of secret sauce in their AAC encoder that results in really good quality reproduction of audio.

As far as I’ve seen most of the gimmicky codecs are spins of existing old technology. AAC itself is old too but at least one vendor Apple has focused on making their implementation good. We don’t need another standard+1. We just need a common standard done well. If only Apple would open theirs.

Their bullet points are spin-doctoring.

Also the comment got a few dozen upvotes almost immediately. Suspicious.

It’s not pretending if that’s what you want. It’s just what you are.