The hard part would be doing it in a way that pulls in the kind of people who listened to Alex Jones.

The funniest thing to do would be to turn it into either a legitimate leftist new site or a leftist themed nujob conspiracy mill (though I don’t know how that would work).

A friend of mine had an alarm clock with big rubberized wheels on it that would drive around the room as it went off, so you had to get out of bed to turn it off.

That lasted a few weeks before he grabbed it and chucked it as hard as he could against a wall while still half asleep, then went back to sleep.

10 is the last version of Windows I’ll be using, and I don’t want to have more full screen ads for 11 pop up on top of whatever program I’m trying to use. The previous time it happened is what prompted me to do it in the first place, and I’m definitely not gonna let them force update my Windows version like they’ve done in the past.

Stuff like this is why I disabled the TPM on my computer. No TPM means that you’re “not eligible” for 11, meaning I don’t get nagged by the random full screen pop-ups.

There is an alternative that I wish I could think of the name of that communities have been using for a number of years now to set up cheap, small-scale satellite internet networks. I looked into it once as an alternative for my neighborhood to dealing with the bullshit that is Comcast and Verizon, and ended up getting an ad for milsec strategic level network infrastructure from Boeing or something. Regardless, it’s a known and proven alternative that’s cheaper than the big guys and has hit a point where some places have set it up as a part of local government run infrastructure.

The best a resistance group can hope for is being damaging enough to choke their enemy little by little while also being hard to root out without causing collateral damage. Because what are AR-15s or whatever else you can get your hands on going to do against the army’s helicopter drones armed with sniper rifles and 360 degree cameras that can detect a target within milliseconds in a kilometer radius just through the reflection on their eye.

As George Washington once said, “A bunch of farmers armed with guns will never win against a trained army.”

Yep. See also: sea-lioning, the gish gallop, and a myriad of other tactics used by the far-right.

Also, another of my favorite quotes:

I’m not doing homework for you. I’ve known you for 30 seconds and enjoyed exactly none of them.

Self-curating my social media experience is self-care.

I’m reminded of a quote that goes something like this:

I’ve been thinking about the free exchange of ideas recently and come to the conclusion that it isn’t an open market - it’s a potluck.

Everybody brings something to the table and you’re free to pick and choose the things that you want to try, but you’re not obligated to try everything. Just because Karen put a piece of shit on the table and calls it a sandwich doesn’t mean that you have to take a bite to know that it’s shit. Similarly, we are not obligated to take white supremacists and other extremists’ ideas and seriously debate their value. They’re shit and can and should be treated as such.

The beauty of a self-curated experience is that you’re free to engage with the things that you want and can ignore the things that you don’t want to deal with. The risk of people isolating themselves is simply a part of having the freedom to choose your own experiences, the same as the real world.

Personally, one of the reasons that I’m here is because I have no choice but to deal with right-wing extremism in my daily life, and I don’t want to deal with it online as well. Reading news articles? That’s fine, but I don’t want to see chuds screaming about DEI or woke or whatever in the comments.

There’s a nuance here that you’re missing - self-curating your social media experience is vastly different from the algorithm hellhole that is the modern corporate social media landscape. You can filter out any dissenting opinions or facts, but you can in real life, too. And like in real life, it takes a lot of active effort to get to that point. Whereas the algorithm will do that for you without you even knowing it.

I’d say that self-curated social media is like going off to college or moving to a new city while the algorithm is like living in the town you grew up in. I grew up in a very liberal state, but there were about 3 non-white kids in my entire high school the year I graduated, and it wasn’t until I was introduced to Tumblr in college in the late 2000s that I first heard words like “transgender.” And Tumblr is the most self-curated social media that I’ve ever seen. Back then, you couldn’t even follow hashtags - just people. So your front page was exclusively people that you followed and the posts that they reblogged from people that they followed.

The worst I have to do is use a different proton version or add in a launch option.

And therein lies the problem that keeps most people from switching to Linux. It’s a super simple thing to do, but Linux users fall into the same fallacy that experts in any field do: just how little the average person knows about the subject. The fact that something doesn’t just work when you try to open it would leave many people stumped. Especially with tech literacy rates declining thanks to kids growing up using mostly cell phones as their daily driver rather than an actual computer and the plug and play nature of Windows and Macs. Asking your average gamer to add command line arguments to a launcher would probably be like telling them they just have to hot wire their car if it doesn’t start when you turn the key.

I disagree that Armstrong didn’t approach that situation in good faith. I think he meant every word he said. Armstrong was a caricature of American Individualism and a diehard fanatic. If you watch his speech now, there’s a lot in there that sounds familiar to modern politics. Including “they’ll make America great again!”

He’s a villain who comes off as a “might makes right” true believer. It doesn’t matter if it’s physical strength, underhanded tactics, cleverness, or sheer endurance. So long as you win, you make the rules.

He believed that the strong should squash the weak, while Raiden believed that the strong should protect the weak, and they both used violence to enforce their beliefs. In his eyes, neither of them were right. Who would decide the rules merely came down to which of them was stronger.

Raiden is Armstrong’s beliefs made manifest. From surviving as a child soldier up to the very moment that he kills Armstrong, he’s enforcing his will on the world around him through his strength. A shift in perspective, which side of the sword you’re on, and Raiden’s justice becomes the same as Armstrong’s oppression.

This is the danger of a true believer of “might makes right.” Because even when you beat them, you didn’t prove them wrong - you merely played by their rules and beat them at their own game. Your might made you right, and nothing more.

You should listen to Senator Armstrong’s speech from Rising and ask yourself if he’d get votes in today’s political landscape.

I think he’d have a noticeable percentage of the voting base of America.

It already is as far as I know. I’ve heard before that ChatGPT is strictly trained on data from before, like 2018 or so for this reason.

By “abrupt,” I mean that Windows 7 ended service updates just last year, and Windows 10 will end next year. And by “current,” I mean that Windows 11 overtook 7 as the second most used version of Windows in 2022.

We’ve known that they’re ending support for 10 next year for a few years, but that end of life timeline is very short compared to previous versions of Windows. If 10 had the same end of life timeline as 7, we’d be seeing service updates for 10 ending in 2030. And 11 may be the newest version of Windows, but it is by all means not the most used version and is most likely not the version currently being used by most people that this article is relevant to.

Fixed it for you:

Company renders 60%+ of computers running current software incapable of running new software due to niche hardware requirement, abruptly ends support for current version next year, and tells users to throw away their computers and buy new ones.

Oh, and they’re promoting their cloud storage option. Which may or may not have anything to do with their data harvesting? I don’t really know on that one.

They’ll be useful for gamers, at least. With the increasing trend of companies caring less about properly optimizing the size of game installs and expecting gamers to have SSDs for texture loading on the fly, these drives will definitely see use. I currently have a 4TB HDD that has over 2.3TB of Steam games installed on it right now (roughly 100 games from tiny indie games to big AAA releases that are 40-80 gigs in size), and several newer games have an SSD listed as one of their minimum requirements.

See the rest of my post: the people who are making it and why they’re making it.

I have no complaints about the people making LLMs that can spot tumors better than humans can, but I 100% agree with every single one of your points. The grifters and the AI fad of venture capitalism are ruining a useful technology and ruining the world and society along with it for a quick buck.

The underlying point misses why people have problems with the current AI bubble. I’ll cheer when they replace CEOs with AI - it seems like the best job to be replaced with LLMs and would save companies billions of dollars that could be used to improve the lives of workers. There’s tons of AI being used for all kinds of cool things already like spotting cancer in MRIs.

The issue people have with AI isn’t the tech. It’s who’s making it and why. It’s not being used to make life easier and better, it’s being used to cut decent paying jobs and commodify part of the human experience, all while making big profits without paying the people whose work was stolen to make those profits.

It’s just a different flavor of the fast fashion industry stealing high fashion designs and churning out their cheap knockoffs from factories in China where they don’t have to worry about things like safety standards or paying their workers a living wage.

Fun fact: After the adoption of electric lighting in homes became common, there was a massive increase in the demand for maids and cleaning services because people simply couldn’t see just how dirty their houses were when everybody was using candles.

Another fun fact: With the introduction of the computer and similar technology into many jobs, productivity skyrocketed, but wages didn’t rise to match the increase in company profits. However, it was still viable for the average American household to live off of the wages of one 40 hour per week job. Today, the average American household requires at least 2 full-time salaries in order to survive, despite technology continuing to push productivity even higher and companies continuously reporting their most profitable year ever, year over year. Despite technology, the amount of work per household has effectively doubled or more over the past 60 years.