Fun fact, we did have a 20 year start on COVID. This was bird flu, SARS, MERS, swine flu… Scientists have been saying this was coming forever

This was basically as prepared as we could get. There were protocols in place for everything

Recently, a bunch of people on tik tok found this “bug” in their banking app where you can write a bad check, then withdraw the funds before it clears… Then started crying about it when their balances updated

Dude definitely thought he discovered a cool new life hack

One of my favorite tweets goes something like “the morals of a society live in the myths they tell. Superheroes, our demigods, show up to fix the problem then go back to their day jobs”

It used to be true… But I think tastes have changed

It’s really simple - centralization = seat of power

The worst flavor of people are drawn to that like moths to a flame. It’s not even a good idea, any potential economies of scale are wasted by communication lag in the bureaucracy

Decentralization is key. You can have a commune easy enough, humans self organize just fine in small enough communities. There’s communes all over the world doing just fine

The question is, how do you knit those small communities together in a way that doesn’t give anyone much power, but still come together when needed?

I think it’s more like the system is built for the oligarchy, and liberals want to preserve the system. They’ll often support things like taxes on the rich or worker protections - but they don’t like the idea of something more direct

Neo-liberals do directly serve oligarchs, because they’re liberals who operate under myths about how capitalism works - the efficiency of corporations, billionaires as innovators and job creators, voting with your wallet. They think if you fix the economy, everything else will work out, and for every social service they make sure to send a pile of money into someone’s pocket. Thank God this seems to finally be declining

I think what makes this topic so complicated is we’re taught a lie - that the political spectrum is a line. It’s not two dimensional or a horseshoe - tankies are leftist authoritarians, but they’re not further left than anarcho-communists. On some aspects they’re pretty close to christo-fascists, but it’s not because they went so far around that they’re curving towards the far right. They just also want their end goal enforced from above, and also are willing to overlook a little genocide of the “enemy”

Meanwhile, anarcho-communists are on the other side of a different spectrum. They don’t believe in a large system of enforcement from the top down, they believe in building community from the ground up. They don’t believe in a system of rules, they believe in social bonds

The end goal is the same, but the methods couldn’t be more different

My point with all this is that the left want change, the right wants the status quo. Conservatives want a hierarchy under de facto aristocrats, liberals want a system of rules, and anarchists want community rule

This doesn’t all fit on a 2d spectrum, but it all makes sense when you break it down in more dimensions - you can nail down any coherent political stance to a point in this multifaceted graph space.

American liberals are different from liberals elsewhere, but what they have in common is they hold the legal framework as sacred. We already live in a world managed by English common law, they all want to perfect the laws, but resist anything that threatens the status quo

I don’t think that’s true. At the heart of it …

Liberals want to fix the system. They want to tweak things to make it fair, to make it work better

Leftists want to change the system. They want to rewrite the rules in a way that works better, the way things are currently be damned

My brother called me the other day, and after explaining how nature isn’t “take or be taken from” when there’s enough to go around. We got more into the myths about humans we’re taught, and eventually he asked how I identify politically, and about the difference between a leftist and a liberal

I told him liberals want the system to work, to be fair. Leftists look around and say “there’s so much food we leave a third of it to rot, why the fuck are people starving? What the fuck are we doing? No one is happy with the world we’ve created, why are we doing it? Why don’t we start with the assumption that everyone gets to live, and figure out the details from there?”

Just to put this in context:

There’s only so many ways to turn a bunch of files into one - mainly, you stick them back to back. Easy.

Then, there’s an infinite ways to compress that file… You could come up with you own method, but what good is that? It’s better and smarter to use a format already supported by your users

So of course most bundles are the same archive type under the hood. Everything from backups to installers - you shouldn’t be inventing new formats without a damn good reason

I wouldn’t…I like the struggle. It’s only fun to dominate when it feels earned, I want to feel like I’m playing at my best more than anything

You guys have numbers? I have the infinity sign on every new device within days

A smarter person would have used a fake SSN then claimed success when it never worked

Just want to say, good on you for bothering to sum up your stance. Comments little this are why I use this format for information…I still have my skepticism of plastics, but clearly you’ve done some petg 3d printing and thought it through

They actually use consultants like McKinley, who are the coordinating force behind a lot of the obviously self-destructive decisions companies are making in lockstep

And by implementing such a system, you take from everyone. By tracking it, you cheapen it. You turn creativity towards making worthless kitche, you turn true moments of connection with Grandma into a chore to justify your own existence.

The solar system and beyond are finite, but not on a human scale. Even if we figured out cheap at-home immortality tomorrow, we’d never scratch the limits

Humans don’t breed infinitely. Already we’re coming up on that limit - the drive isn’t there anymore. We’re falling below replacement levels, partially because we’ve poisoned ourselves (and planet), but also just through lack of desire. It’s hardwired into mammals, if not all Earth life… We limit ourselves at a certain point

If you can’t see a future where you can just live without an accounting sheet justifying your existence, look to the past. They used money - not like us though

Money will always be a part of human culture because we need some kind of default monetary value that says you’ve contributed to the betterment of your fellow man in some way.

I think this is just lacking in imagination. Why does everyone even need to contribute? If we survive along with our technology, we’ll eventually hit full automation for most tasks.

In a world like that, isn’t it enough to just live and be appreciated by someone? Why go around measuring contributions when only the very best and brightest could meaningfully contribute beyond sharing in the experience?

Because they’re using hacktivist groups as a proxy. They just deny all involvement, and probably keep it all isolated from the fancy military grade tools and techniques

And Facebook has some of the best open source work of all time, from the react ecosystem to making php feasible, to LLMs. There’s certainly a ton missing and a lot of it is for their own products, but some of it goes far beyond their own needs

Facebook also did unethical human testing and debatably broke democracy and the social fabric

Just be even handed. Praise the good, denounce the bad, and keep in mind these are monstrously large companies and the people that did the good probably have little to do with the ones that did the bad

Google shouldn’t get a pass because they bought Android and only partially used that ownership to control the ecosystem and push their own products

Nah, I’m thinking much bigger. I’ve got an AI that can transcribe video, I’m working on one to summarize and put facts into a knowledge graph, I’ve got one that can hold a conversation, and I’ve got a script that scrapes sites and does natural language processing. I just need an agent to tie the pieces together and some control scripts to manage the containerized pieces

The idea is, my assistant will go out, read up on programming topics and build knowledge graphs with references to the source, and I’ll fix my biggest issue - shittified searches crippling my work speed

Then, I’ll send it off to find content. It’ll transcribe/summarize videos and rank them, research topics and come back with reports, and trawl my socials to find new things I might find interesting

I plan to take all that, then let my assistant create video channels to watch and additional content to read if Lemmy is slow. And if my friends and family show interest, I’ll add in hosting and an internal social media and convince them to run additional nodes at home

I’ve been working on it for a while because I saw this coming, I’ve got most of the key pieces already.

And that’s the bubble of Internet I’m building - AI curation of my Internet life, it’ll happily work away the hours deshittifying a bubble of Internet

It’s quite possible, although I’m inclined to blame it on turnover and pressures for deadlines

I’ve come to see software kinda like a plant. If you neglect it, it rots, because all software is contextual and the world moves on. If you keep growing it, it starts to rot from the inside. If you carve out down to something smooth and streamlined, it can last a long time and just need TLC to bounce back

Ultimately, if you want something to be big and to last, you have to prune it, transplant it, and continuously work on it. There’s no direct money to be made there though

And it helps a shit ton to have people around long-term. It can take years to learn a big stack, but having someone go “wait, if we do this we need to rexamine how we delete photos” is how you avoid fuck ups like this

Seriously… The closer to three edge we get, the faster enshitification goes. No one is writing algorithms with users in mind… Not for a paycheck anyways

We’re getting to the point where we all need to carve out bubbles of curated Internet for our friends and family