HerbManic

I do think they care but you hit on a point. Governments just keep trying to force this and eventually wear down the resistance to it. They can try repeatedly as it only has to work once.

I'm glad we could get that cleared up.

Sometimes I do that and figure out how much time I work for something. For many, that is only one or two days of work to get a year of minimum calories.

If I decided to go full homestead and grow and process this myself, how long would that take? Way, way, WAY more than 2 days. Scale and specialization has done some amazing things and this is a great example of it.

Reddit has had a bot problem for well over a decade now but the sheer volume of it has exploded. It is also much more difficult to tell nowadays as the "quality" if you will is now at the good enough stage.

Alas, Reddit is basically dead to me because of this.

Reminds me when reality TV came a long. Many folks were convinced that it would be a passing fad and that within 12-18 months TV would return to the way it had been before hand. That because the quality was so low people would eventually bore of it, still waiting for that moment...

No it's Something IS awful.

Sorry, they did an interview about 20 years back were they kept correcting the host to 'Something is awful' I have just called it that ever since.

I heard it said once, "Nowadays the right lives in denial, the left lives in delusion".

It is very reductionist but it does sort of hit on althe flavour of how these things go.

> It also doesn't seem defensible to say we should just slow progress down- isn't that a world where we never get iPhones and AI?

Honestly, that sounds kind of OK. A lot of the things I use a smart phone for are things that have been imposed on me rather than chosen.

Also if we never had smart phones I doubt social media would have such a grip on peoples minds nowadays. It would still be there but toned down a lot.

I see you are playing the role of Cassandra today. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people in tech that are just covering their ears saying "la la la la! I CANT HEAR YOU!!!" as they don't want to hear these things.

They aren't bad people, not even close. We all do this to some degree. Its just that we all think we are the good virtuous people and yet all of us have some form of negative impact on the world, especially in the Western world.

I get why you wouldn't see this as inviting.

But we need to merge the humanities with technology because if both sides ignore the other than both sides will blindly walk into the worst out comes of the other side.

I have argued for a long time that Permacomputing will be seen as the missing part of the Free Software movement. What use is free software long term if you do not have hardware you can control, maintain and repair easily? This will mean a sacrifice in performance and functionality but gaining control and longevity.

With things like Secureboot, TPM modules and ever increasing demands to lock down systems, there is the risk that even libre software will be snuffed out. While not those technologies explicitly, similar less friendly things may come up in future. And when that happens, being beholden to billion dollar hardware companies won't seem so friendly. A little alarmist, but I didn't think we would be were we are today as it is.

One interesting area is about how to make software that is not hardware locked but easy enough to implement with very little work involved.

This is where projects such as UXN come in. https://100r.co/site/uxn.html

A system spec that is only 32 instructions deep, something that a single person could implement in less than a week. Essentially the hardest part is building the hardware Abstraction Layer. It wouldn't be efficient but it is very portable and thus makes it resilient to any future possible shocks.

While not exactly the same, it does rhyme. More a case of suck up to Donny T and hope they give a tax break or something. Keep the shareholders happy.

I suspect you will see the same out of John Apple later this year.

As they say "If it bleeds it leads"

Mentally you tend to equally weigh both good and bad news over a long time span, but negative news gets a much quicker and stronger initial reaction, thus it gets priority. Just an evolutionary trait, don't wait to see if the shadow is a tiger just assume it is about to attack.

This is why social media ends up the way it is, that quick reaction is what the algorithms pick up on even if long term it isn't any different. It is a hard issue to overcome especially when it is a free market race to the bottom.

I get the same thing here is Australia. There is a lot of space with little going on.

I mean we have the Nullarbor plain. The name literally means 'No Trees', and it is very fitting.

If you ever end up there... I hope you don't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullarbor_Plain

It has been called the 4-2-1 problem. 4 people had 2 kids. Those 2 kids had 1 of their own. This means there ends up with a more elderly people with far fewer young to support them. That doesn't look like a recipe for social stability. This is why they are going in so hard on automation nowadays, they are trying to do what Japan attempted in the 90s/2000s but hopefully with more success.

This was originally a side effect of the One child policy, but now it is continued due to difficult living situations. This is not a uniquely China issue.

https://alexatsintolas.weebly.com/the-4-2-1-problem.html

I do wonder about this. With demographic collapse coming for almost all nations, or with a notable trend line for it to come, what would happen if other nations basically prevent emigration? Better to keep their people than lose them. Alternatively, those with large populations can use this as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations.

The coming decades will be interesting.

This is the structure of catabolic collapse. When the mere maintenance costs over run the capabilities/resources of the civilisation.

Funnily enough it may turn out that those nations that just muddled along could have the best long term out comes. Yes, they never got the really good stuff but they also won't have a harder decline.

"You cannot fall out of bed if you sleep on the floor" - Turkish proverb

Not OP. I believe it is from folks like this. It is compelling but it can also difficult to pin down the exact details. They rely mostly on statistics based oddities.

I do appreciate that they are not interested in over throwing the 2024 election, just ensure that any possible gaps are covered for future elections.

> The Election Truth Alliance is initiating a call for hand counts of paper voting records associated with the 2024 U.S. General Election, and is advocating for full hand counts prior to certification for all future U.S. elections.

https://electiontruthalliance.org/

This is why I also like cats. The only reason they don't eat me is that I am 10 times bigger than they are. Other than that, they still seem to be running Lion software on miniature hardware.

Why ruin the surprise ;)

I see your hand and raise you.

Weird Al's straight cover. Al should just do an album like that, would be kinda neat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddju6JMSp7g

Alas RAM is basically a commodity product, unless they could have some design advantage over others like the A and M series chips, there is little incentive to go into RAM.

If Apple had the manufacturing capabilities then sure, but they would still be running into the same resource constraints for inputs that everyone else is having nowadays.

At the moment, there are no solutions only responses.

I suspect a lot of it is just a premptive cache. My daily runner laptop is a 2009 Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and Firefox only uses about 1.5GB max when there is about 20 tabs open. It tries to fit in with whatever system it is running on.

Back in 2006 I remember using Firefox on a WinXP system with only 128MB of RAM, while the start up time was dreadful, once it had finally mapped out the memory/swapped all the right parts to the HDD it was surprisingly snappy. I would guess it is still doing something like that now only it doesn't have to swap it out anywhere.

The only film I saw in an empty theater was 'The Death of Stalin'. That was kind of odd but a decent film regardless.

Being the Vita/360 versions makes this much more usable. I would be having a little panic attack if I had to go back to working on PS2 only code. I mean you came to like the thing but I'm convinced it was a form of digital Stockholm syndrome.

> Turn off the issues tracker and the pull requests or deploy a bare git server for releasing your code. Find a small group of people you really know and trust and work with them on projects, or do it completely alone.

About 10 years back I think it worked out that the average project has about 1.1 people working on it. That is a million projects with a single contributor, and a few thousand that had dozens, hundreds or thousands of contributors.

In years to come you will be so thankful that you took that path.

As they say, better to be a poor master than a rich slave.

Shows what my gaming preferences are when I have never come across these restrictions here. Sonic Mania is not exactly risque stuff.

Alas it is the great contradiction. Federated technologies are brilliant for peer-to-peer but many struggle to scale because the designed redundancy tends to crush their efficiency.

Really depends on the context. Email works because of its limits. Remove those limits and weaknesses start to appear.

Push back to legislation must be on going and any time it is defeated, the success is only temporary. The government can just line up and try again shortly afterwards and they only needs to successful once.

You can win the battle but lose the war. By the time the average folk realize the extent of these issues it will be way too late.

I think back to how the technology space was 25 years ago. When the biggest privacy fear was that a Pentium 3 had a processor ID and Windows XP would send your system specs to get a security update. Look at how far we have fallen since then and the pace is only speeding up.