Palantir employees are already cancer, C-Suite and the corporate entity triply so.

Gonna go with (metal-tipped) Lawn Darts.

Fussy.

_DWIM

In general I agree, but I’d put any conspiracy higher than AI, that’s just the scam de jour. It would be more along the lines of making conditions favourable for the death of personal computing and other boot on the face of humanity goals. It’s also likely this is a fairly natural evolution of late stage capitalism with technology, no conspiracy needed.

In this case it’s making lots and lots of GPU datacenters, which after a bubble pop will be useful for making compute a subscription for the masses and processing shittons of video feeds for the surveillance state, and the odd bit of AI.

This is why I don’t make much of the ‘the chips will be obsolete by the time they’re turned on’ argument, compute is compute, max efficiency or not. Obsolescence might sink a few (or many) companies, but the centralized compute assets will remain and need repurposing. Way too many of those purposes are harmful to the 99%.

If it’s just a couple of books, Anna’s Archive has your back.

Weird I know, but IMO it’s best to hand curate books and music (I have comics not manga, but same deal there). Automated tools can quickly rack up more books than you’ll read in a lifetime, and enough new music to listen to for a decade fits in a TB (even mostly FLAC). The problem then becomes finding what to read / listen to next, which gets worse with size.

That said, having a large local nonfiction book / journal article library can be useful to grep through, especially given current internet search problems.

Pretty sure there are petty tyrants in every generation, at the very least cops, but I was getting at the fact it’s not for boomer pleasure. It’s because someone in the hierarchy decided it was a good idea, probably to indulge their power fantasies, manager, manager’s manager etc.

boomers managers

I’m starting to say vibe code is write only.

Like they used to say about Perl, indistinguishable from line noise.

Basically unmaintainable without super strict coding conventions, submitters taking personal responsibility, a strong, well thought out overarching architecture, and most importantly, someone with a great knowledge of the project to approve merges. Vibe coded forks to add one or two features have none of that.

This is why GitHub is littered with slop projects that haven’t been touched since they were made. This is why an ungodly amount of technical debt is accruing as managers with a hard on for lines of code or ‘features’ force devs to unwisely use AI coding tools all the time. There will be a reckoning, and it’s not far off.

Yup, also likely first against the wall now NVIDIA is in charge.

ETA: search heretic

I tend to just look at the comments first here for anything even slightly questionable. Seems like some of the dumbed down shit does actual brain damage to read.

Smartwatch: Garmin (Fenix 6 gen and above if you want sleep monitoring) with gadgetbridge on android (preferably GrapheneOS) and selfhosted Endurain. Seeing as this is c/Selfhosted you can also roll your own dashboards with Grafana.

You’re thinking Garmin, really? Privacy? Actually Garmin’s T&Cs are IMO the best of the big names privacy wise, especially if you’re in the EU, but they’re publicly traded and subject to the ‘I have altered the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further’ changing terms at their whim, or just getting bought out and drained dry.

You know what’s better than OK T&Cs? Not giving them any data at all. On gOS I can pull the network permissions for Garmin Connect and still use it to set up the watch, do custom activities and so forth. When finished disable it and enable GadgetBridge. If you want watch faces do that with Connect IQ and then uninstall. Without gOS it’s just a little clunkier, but GB will pull the files off the watch so that when you fire up Connect there’s not data to report. If you didn’t make an account there’s nowhere for it to go anyway.

There are other gadgetbridge compatible devices but none with the build quality, feature set and quality health data. It’s been running for GB for more than a year and they haven’t sicced their lawyers on it.

Also, given their spectacular battery lift (14-20 days or so without hammering music or GPS), 500 charges for the battery to decay takes 10 years+, so secondhand ones are good value. The battery can even be replaced fairly easily (4 screws and a bit of glue), although you might not want to go diving afterwards.

You can also just connect it via USB and use any software that handles GPX etc. files.

For privacy, probably better than Brax, worse than GrapheneOS at the moment. Should be possible to harden Jolla, but at the moment there’s no turnkey Linux phone that’s secure and privacy respecting of which I am aware. Fairphone 5/6 with PostmarketOS is coming along nicely as I understand, battery life notwithstanding.

Fine, whatever. Bloody humans, I don’t know…

peak

No, you can’t take a mountain, what part of ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE was unclear?

Hard agree on Prussian-style education (which had similar goals of wage slavery when it was introduced). Unfortunately the pessimist in me thinks reform will likely have to wait until after this round of fascism has run its course, but it absolutely need to be a high priority when the time comes. Best time to plant a seed is twenty years ago…

The number of Chesterton’s fences getting bulldozed right now is scary to contemplate.

Understanding the layers of abstraction down to the metal is still a useful way of developing an instinct for how compilers, interpreters, languages, and algorithms etc. work and what is possible. If you ever truly need to optimize something you’ll end up descending those layers, it’s why C has inline assembly and with RAMageddon upon us optimization may well return to being a valued skill.

Which is to say you don’t need to know what you don’t need to know, until you do, and you’ll be better anyway if you can.

we were talking about the need for radical education reform over a decade ago

Education, and especially critical thinking, has been systematically gutted by conservative governments for at least 4 decades in the Western world. The goal is the absolute minimum knowledge and thinking skills (preferably without learning skills) necessary to complete the wage slavery tasks.