So yes, you can visit your favorite blog, but its still not the same as it was in the 90s or early 00s.

It absolutely is. I might argue podcasts have kinda usurped the old blogging space (or, at least, supplanted it). But I’ve got an RSS feed full of blogs I follow that are barely different that what I was looking at 30 years ago. The 90s is alive on Feedly.

Fucken computers bullshit, its fucken sick

Lolz.

What, no Microslop?

No way this runs on Windows. It’s Linux or bust.

One method was to lower the quality of inputs. Plywood instead of hardwood. Then fiberboard/chipboard instead of plywood.

In fairness, hardwood is in limited supply. It takes a long time to produce, is expensive to harvest correctly, and typically means demolishing old growth forests to obtain. The “lower quality” products definitely have their trade-offs, but a lot of the quality issues are resolved through engineering improvements and materials sciences.

I would argue the real downside of lower quality inputs is the advent of “disposable” furniture (the IKEA brand crap most notably). Stuff that could have been designed to last, but isn’t, and ends up in landfills after moving day as a result. Rather than a savings yield, what you get is a waste surplus.

And later, CNC machines stepped in to produce delicate and complicated designs in a fraction of the time - and frequently even more precisely and more cleanly - than anyone with a carving chisel could do.

And that is the part which is NOT being effectively duplicated in IT.

Lolwhut? We’ve come so far even in the last ten years, in terms of IDEs, deployment pipelines, and automated unit testing.

dont browse the web Facebook or any modern Google/iPhone Store apps.

The internet used to be a space for weird geeky hobbyists that more traditional plebs couldn’t access or couldn’t be bothered to fuck with. Now it’s still that, but it has a bunch of shit for the rubes, too.

At some point, I feel like I’m talking to someone who says “I fucking hate Florida. Every time I go, I spend a week at Disney World and it’s expensive and awful and loud and stupid.” And here I am, out in the Keys, working on my tan and fishing and hiking and hooking up with cuties, having no problems whatsoever.

We are not at the end of the road. We are not at the beginning of the end of the road. We are not at the end of the beginning.

I definitely get the impulse to doom. And I’m as prone to it as anyone. But when I look at crypto and AI, all I can see is the same analog fuck-ups made in prior generations. Beanie Babies and Labubus didn’t ruin the stuffed animal industry. The Delorean and the Hummer didn’t ruin the automotive industry. The Great Depression of 1932 didn’t ruin the financial sector.

Plenty of things to be excited about in software and tech that lives entirely outside the cloistered hype-beast market. Raspberry Pis, 3D printers, 3nm chipsets built with ultraviolet lithography, solid state drives, lithium and sodium ion batteries with incredibly recharge rates, gorilla glass and carbon fiber, 5G+ radios, full voice recognition, self-piloting vehicles.

How is none of this thrilling? Hell, even just the advent of coding pipelines that can take a project from a funky coding idea to a deliverable feature in a few keystrokes is such a huge step forward in development. I can’t hate the sales goons pushing junk when I’m so immersed in all the novel innovative applications of technology I’ve been watching bud itself up from the ground for the last 40 years.

Even LLMs on their face are such a novel application of graph theory. You can do so much cool stuff off a second hand laptop today. It’s an exciting new frontier.

They trained a tiny patch of neurons to respond to low-voltage electric impulses. The cells don’t know they’re playing Doom. They don’t have any kind of social context or even video feedback.

Imagine if I stuck you in a sensory deprivation chamber, handed you an NES controller, and asked you to hit the buttons. Then, periodically, I said “Yes” or “No” based on the buttons you pressed. And when I pulled you out of the tube at the end of an hour, I told you “the yes and no messages were intended to encourage you to correctly navigate Mario through the first level of the original game.” What if, instead of Mario, I’d been telling you how to play Street Fighter?

It doesn’t matter if its Doom. They likely picked Doom because the I/O is so rudimentary that you can install the game on practically anything. The cellular matter has no idea what it’s doing beyond the “Yes/No” signaling.

I mean, I wish that were actually true.

One of the bleakest turns of the post-war Eastern Bloc was the speed at which they re-incorporated ex-Nazi officers into the Stasi. I’d have to dig it up, but there’s a whole line about a German describing his career as roughly “First I worked for the monarchy to suppress fascism, then I worked for the fascists to suppress communism, then I worked for the communists to suppress capitalism, and now that the communists lost I’m old enough to retire.”

That’s the one.

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

It is a bigger deal in business settings, where one laptop can see multiple hands and you’ve got a team dedicated to repair.

Not typically an issue for the individual user, but increasingly an issue for a team of users as the size of the team grows

You’re going to trigger so many libs with this link.

My motto: Rhetorically cocks gun

ICE Officer: Actually cocks gun

:-/

So many keyboard commandos. Vanishingly few actual leftist militants.

Reminds me of the old (apocryphal) story of Stalin, FDR, and Churchill debating what to do with the Nazi officers’ corps after their defeat.

"The German General Staff, [Stalin] said, must be liquidated. The whole force of Hitler’s mighty armies depended upon about 50,000 officers and technicians. If these were rounded up and shot at the end of the war, German military strength would be extirpated.” When Churchill angrily declared he would be no party to such mass retribution, the President quipped that he would act as mediator, and suggested the compromise of shooting only 49,000. In heat, Churchill left the room. Stalin himself fetched him back, assuring him it was all a jest.

The tendency to treat enemy soldiers as honorable adversaries while foreign civilians are resources to be exploited or speed bumps to be flattened is extremely fascist.

What separates Hitler and Hegseth isn’t their army’s treatment of survivors of a military operation, but their view of their targets as military or civilian. Hegseth knows he’s targeting civilians and treats them just like a German military commander would treat other civilians.

TikTok now that Ellison owns it.

Facebook is also joined at the hip with the Zionists.

Unfortunately, the other half of the people who don’t want it banned have all the political capital.

You’re way too optimistic.

I’m putting my money on Mr. Burns, A Post Electric Play.

2001

I believe we didn’t invade Iraq until 2003.

Although, curiously enough, Iran helped us do it.

Doubly ironic, given that Bush Sr was so instrumental in beefing up the Iraqi military ten years before the '91 invasion… for the purpose of invading its neighbors. (https://archive.is/HwX3A)

What is it about hardline reactionary Islamic governments getting baited by American neoconservatives to spin around, show us their backs, and point to the spot a knife would sink in most deeply?

I’d love to see how Microsoft is gonna convince those cheap fucks that this is the correct path forward

I suspect we’re going to see some kind of sweeping compatibility issues in the next few years. Possibly a really ugly virus rips through the business community to scare people into switching.

What are u even discussing about guys…

Doomerism

I guess you’ll just need to convert to proprietary cloud services