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.

Oh boy. I don’t suppose this is November, Liam, and Rocz, and they’re off taking $2/subscriber to make WTYP episodes?

A couple different ways to read this.

• Amazon marketing team turned an “oops, we just handed some rando $7,000 in valuable equipment” into a “you, too, can get rich quick buying our trash”

• The pallets aren’t random, there was an insider who knew exactly what they were getting, and Amazon operates at such high volume that they don’t really care.

• It’s a totally fake story that’s been churned out by one of those AI news story engines, stumbled upon by some weeb who didn’t know what they were looking at, and recirculated into Reddit Lemmy, when it deserves to be a pop-up on CNN that your grandmother doesn’t know how to close.

Amazon Lootboxes

But I’m not talking about that.

You and the rest of the US national media.

Despite all the bombs you drop, you fail to achieve anything in the end.

Tell it to Raytheon stockholders. Hell, tell it to Facebook stockholders.

More importantly, tell it to every single Palestinian rendered homeless by the Nakba and the subsequent seventy years of genocidal policy. Israel exists in its current state because they slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and took their homes, their farms, and cut off their access to Arab neighbors.

Meanwhile, your equating human lives to grass

Mowing the grass (Hebrew: כיסוח דשא) is a metaphor used to describe periodic Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip to manage the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The term was coined by Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir, two columnists for The Jerusalem Post and strategic studies researchers.

Naftali Bennett referred to the idea in a speech in 2018 when he said “מי שלא מכסח את הדשא, הדשא מכסח אותו” (‘He who does not mow the grass, the grass mows him’)

Person: “Vegans won’t shut up about being vegan”

Vegan: embarrassed sigh

Person: “They’re constantly telling me about it.”

Vegan: hiding behind something

Person: “I just don’t get it! They’ve got leather clothes. Where do they think wool comes from? Protein is nutrious! Are they too good for eggs?!”

Vegan: Slinking out the back door

I’ve seen plenty of data points to suggest the IDF is running America and this is one of them

Out of curiosity, how do you mean?

The correct way to fire her would be out of a cannon.

Unfortunately, there’s a correct way to remove Kristi Noem from office and this ain’t it.

Built to Fail: The story of 21st century consumer technology.

where they spoke about the “high-tech arsenal of the United States” during the operation in Iran, they used video of the Ukrainian interceptor drone STING from the manufacturer “Wild Hornets”.

Was genuinely skeptical of this being a pure Ukrainian invention, given how much tech has been crossing the border from the NATO states. But… fuck me, I can’t find anything to suggest this isn’t 100% home grown. I’m sure if you got your hands on the tech specs, you’d find some kind of cross-over (not like Ukrainians invented VR googles or remote telemetry and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if folks outside Ukraine were involved in the design). Past that…

I do wonder how secure this technology is, if its something you can gin up with a 3D printer. Like, are there Sting specs out in the wild at this point? Or is this something they keep under lock and key?

I think it did place limits on imperialist behavior

:-/

It has literally been in the news since Khanna and Massie introduced the bill for 2 weeks.

“What do you even want the Democrats TO DO about it?!”

points to a thing they should do

“Fuck you! That’s not serious. It would never work. You’ve been baited into believing a utopian fairy tale!”