Billionaires doing what a billionaire does: feign a reason to kneecap a service, force complaints about its ineffectiveness, then use that as an excuse to dismantle it entirely. I am so tired of this.

Creatives hate AI, full stop. As a musician, I notice that a huge majority of musicians despise that shit. It’s such obvious copyright infringement, but whereas I get a life-crippling fine for using a 2-second sample of someone else’s song, these companies walk away unscathed after scraping every fucking song on the internet. You and me would go to prison for doing that.

You notice how incredibly often failed or failing creatives end up grifting to the right? Nicki Manaj at the Charlie Kirk event. Steven Crowder’s failed acting career. Every dipshit comedian on Joe Rogan scraping for a semblance of relevance. Hitler himself was a failed artist, and it should come as no surprise that fascists and fascist-sympathizers are gung ho for AI in creative fields; they want to control the culture, control the narrative, and ultimately control the public sentiment in their favor.

It’s a fools errand. Art represents individual expression beyond their control and reaches the culture organically and not with an ironclad fist. The kids will be alright.

Have you visited LinkedIn in the past year? Those people will say anything if it means corporation and AI glazing

I settled on Mint and now want to hop to CachyOS. I’m not sure I’m a fan of Cinnamon; setting up the panel (aka taskbar) on multiple monitors was an absolute nightmare and I ended up just giving up. There were other hiccups getting things set up here and there, but that’s the Linux life, baby.

I dual boot Windows because I need it for a few professional applications, but I swapped it to Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, have a local account, ran the ChrisTitus WinUtil to debloat and remove telemetry, and completely blocked all Microsoft-owned domains using NextDNS. It’s stable, does what I need, and Microsoft doesn’t need to know every time I turn my computer on.

Not strictly Linux but relevant to ditching Microsoft, I’m currently in the process of moving my projects off Github and into Codeburg for public repos and into Keybase (fully E2EE) for private repos. Fuck Microsoft’s AI data-scraping bullshit.

Bonus, I also recently completely degoogled, and installed GrapheneOS on my phone. It is awesome, and was absurdly easy to set up.

I swear man, people don’t hate neoliberals enough. Complete traitors to our country, and for what? Hard times require strong, courageous people to take charge and lead. The average American that voted for Harris in 2024 has more love for this country and bigger balls than these people ever will. Absolute cowards.

I recently tackled a full degoogle. I still have my email running, I really wouldn’t recommend deleting it for legacy purposes. But the tens of thousands of emails I had are fully deleted from gmail. I unsubscribed from basically everything, and hardly get emails there anymore.

I used Google takeout to get the emails exported. I had to do this per gmail account. They give you something called a .mbox file. I now use proton mail and pay for their service (I think paying makes sense for the service given the alternative is getting your data scraped for advertising revenue). I stored a backup of the .mbox file in my proton drive, and loaded the file in thunderbird (on linux with an encrypted drive) for whenever I need to search those old emails.

Overall it’s pretty easy. The hardest part was a bit of Thunderbird jank for first time setup. This guide was helpful: https://www.howtogeek.com/709718/how-to-open-an-mbox-file-in-mozilla-thunderbird/

Good luck :)