And RIP Malcolm-Jamal Warner too. Been a rough week that we’ve lost three loved entertainers.

Joke’s on them, I’ve already been working on that for decades. *pats ublock* This baby can bankrupt so many websites and I always hoped it could collapse the ad model completely.

In all seriousness, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we’re eventually going to have to build a new, free internet out of the wreckage of this one once the corporations are done with it. Technically it’s already there, nascent but ever so slowly growing and taking root, hiding in plain sight. Like the so-called dark web of tor, it already exists in parallel to the existing structures of the internet. Call it the deep web, the indie web, nostalgia web, unsearchable web, I’ve heard countless terms and most of them aren’t terribly accurate, but the web doesn’t need ads and google search to exist, it never did. It just needs humans, which despite the best efforts of big tech many of us still are, communicating directly with one another and documenting our billions of lifetimes of diverse collective experiences and knowledge.

We are the wealth of information in the internet. Corporations don’t own it. We are it.

I can accept that the inverse exists. I can’t accept that they’re running things. Not just running some things either, apparently pretty much ALL things.

I don’t think I will ever forgive humanity for this lack of humanity. Words are insufficient to express my the depth of my feelings. Words are the problem. Words are all these atrocities ever get. Soft empty words for hard genocidal things. There is no action, never action. There are only words, and death, and more words, and more death. I hate it.

Part of the transition from a democratic government to an oppressive regime requires filling the military and police with only your supporters and thugs. This is all part of the plan.

makes it difficult to develop new browsers, giving one company a near-monopoly.

Totally an accident by the way! They weren’t trying to become a monopoly, promise!

I think I missed the part where they said this will all come at no cost to consumers… I’m sure it’s just an oversight.

I look forward to dying at your side.

Don’t worry. Once we are no longer useful to them, something the billionaires are actively working on, and once they have successfully insulated themselves from the resulting conflict, they will start to kill us all off and they will say they are doing it to “save the planet”. They still care about the planet. Just not with all of us poor people still on it. It deserves to be returned to nature. Except for the billionaires and their friends, of course.

It’s literally rotting people’s brains. Like people are having actual mental deficiencies and psychotic breakdowns depending on how heavily they depend on this technology. I used to think it was merely digital pollution. I’m now starting to think it’s actually worse than that, much worse.

That sounds annoying. The old FF7 is also buggy, but mostly in funny and delightful ways.

There are weaknesses and attack vectors, but they are in my opinion more secure than almost all realistic alternatives. If you think you’ve come up with a better system, by all means, implement it. I commend your skepticism of following the herd and may it serve you well. But beware of pursuing security through obscurity. People recommend password managers because they are one of the best solutions available for navigating this complex threat environment we live in and they are appropriate for most people’s situations.

That should just be a general capitalism reminder.

Absolutely true. They’ll buy the data they want from some shitty crawler running from some data broker in some far-flung and lawless part of the world, hallucinate the actual source, and pretend they had no idea their “data partner” wasn’t respecting robots.txt if they have to, which they won’t ever have to do because it’s literally impossible to detect and prove and realistically unenforceable.

This is a company that removed it’s company motto of “Don’t be evil” because it found it too “limiting”. Don’t be naive.

Elevator music is a surprisingly profitable commercial niche. For that matter, there are always going to be soulless, insipid, overused imitations of real art that gets turned into staggering commercial success precisely because it’s bland and meaningless. “Live, love, laugh” for example.

Not everything has to have meaning and significance, but we also have the right to judge it when it should.

The problem with AI is that a lot of artists literally rely at least to some extent on the money that flows from that soulless commercial drivel, either with their eyes fully open to the situation, or by convincing themselves that it does have meaning to somebody, or just themselves if nobody else. They need to pay the bills and put food on the table and a huge source of that comes from commercial art work which has a high bar for visual impact and a very low bar for ideas or meaning.

If AI replaces the meaningless filler content of the art world, how do artists survive if that’s their bread and butter? It’s never going to directly replace real human art, but if it removes their meal ticket, the outcome will still be the same. Soon there will be almost no real human artists left, as they’ll start to become prohibitively expensive, which will drive more people to AI in a self-reinforcing feedback loop until only a handful of “masters” and a bunch of literal starving artists trying to become them without ever earning a penny. The economics of the situation are pretty dire and it’s increasingly hard to picture a future for human art that doesn’t look bleak.

I’m planning to do my part to make sure exclusively human-made art is always the choice I’m going to make and pay for, but there are bigger forces at play here than you or me and I don’t think they’re going to push things in a happy direction. The enshittification of art will happen, is already happening, and we’re just along for the ride.

By the time the artists cancelled the disaster was already in full swing and there was no reasonable possibility of salvaging it. The artist cancelling at that point isn’t doing anything wrong, they have been hired to do a job and they have a right to a safe and productive working environment. They’re victims too, they’re just less impacted because they are successful artists with millions of dollars who probably weren’t relying on this job to pay for supplies or put food on their table.

Take the million-dollar artist out of the equation and imagine that you’re an experienced gardener hired for a very generous sum to plant some decorative plants on this remote island. The organizers are going to advertise the quality of your work all around the world and get thousands of people to come pay to see your work. You’re super of this recognition and opportunity, so you cancel all your other jobs in anticipation of being able to go do this fantastic job on a tropical island, your plane tickets are arranged everything seems great. Then you find out at the last minute that the area where they are building this garden is actually a health and safety hazard. Maybe they want you to plant azaleas on top of a nuclear waste dump. You decide fuck that and cancel. But the organization isn’t even communicating anymore and you can’t find anyone to notify properly, so not everyone even knows that you’re not planning to show up.

Are you letting down the people who have paid to come see your plants? Sure. But based on what we know of the relationship, the gardener/artist has done nothing wrong. Their reaction is totally reasonable and they are not the crooks here, nor are they part of the problem, they were used. Unless we’ve got evidence to the contrary, they were misled just like the buyers were. Maybe they should’ve done more due diligence, but they’re not having a great time either, they’ve had genuine losses (real and reputational). It’s a big mess but they are not obligated to be a part of it and arguably if they did show up knowing their fans are being put in danger, isn’t that actually worse?

Never been happier that all my computers run Windows 10 or Linux. Windows 11 is dead to me, and if anything happens to accidentally get it installed somehow, it’s going to be replaced with Linux going forward.

As a Canadian and Albertan, screw Canadian oil and natural gas too. If it’s going to hurt our economy, so be it, it’s our own damn fault for doing shit-all to diversify. I hope we can supply you guys the transitional fuel you need with minimal additional investment, but it’s well past time for the world to start getting over this and break its addiction to these awful fossil fuels. I’m really tired of the entire country constantly being literally on fire. Fuck the wildfires, fuck the smoke, fuck climate change, fuck fossil fuels, fuck billionaires. Let’s take our planet back.

For any of them starting to ask themselves are we the baddies? It really shouldn’t need to be explained, but yes. You are clearly the baddies.

They don’t really understand anything because they don’t really think. They just repeat what they’re told while convincing themselves its an independent thought that appeared in their head as if by magic. These are the people outsourcing most of their thinking these days to ChatGPT, because it’s not something they’ve ever really valued or been interested in doing themselves. Life’s a lot easier when you don’t have to think about much. They’re “doers” not “thinkers”. And frankly, it shows. We see an awful lot of stuff getting done right now, and very little thinking.