• 4 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • I completely agree. The good parts of the web are on the margins, now. Everything is hyper-surveilled otherwise. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to avoid that, too. Even if you don’t own a smartphone or use a computer, what are the odds your face has been digested by a company like Meta to train their AI? Or that your car’s license plate has been picked up by a Flock surveillance camera?

    When I was young I thought more technology would lead to better, liberated lives. I studied computer science because I’m genuinely interested in programming and computers.

    Now I think we have passed an inflection point. More technology will worsen our lives. It’s harmful to the planet and climate.

    Also, the people who get into programming now seem to lack curiosity and are only in it for a paycheck (for which I cannot blame them, because the avenues to a good, stable life are receding rapidly). And the places we are putting the most collective effort, as directed by our capitalist overlords, is either in furthering surveillance technology to be used against us or otherwise vulnerable populations like Palestinians, or toward unchecked society-rending technology like generative AI.















  • I have to use Windows 11 for work. Maybe this is because of CrowdStrike or something, I don’t know, but I often encounter a problem where the main section of explorer, where you can actually click files and stuff, just breaks. That entire region becomes unclickable and unusable, even though the rest of the Explorer window (like the icons on the top part) all still work. So I just have to close the window and then reopen Explorer, re-navigate back to where I was, and proceed from where I left off.

    Never, in the decades I’ve been using computers, have I ever encountered something as stupid as this with this amount of regularity. Windows 11 is a uniquely bad OS compared to every competitor option, including prior versions of Windows.



  • As for btrfs, I don’t use it because I’m an adult.

    This is a strange statement, because it’s now a mature fs that works. It’s even the default fs of the OS you’re trying to use. But for the sake of experimentation, I can appreciate wanting to try something off the beaten path. And I generally agree about Oracle and, specifically, Larry Ellison.


  • The announcement did not include Copilot? No mention of 300 useless AI features being shoved down our throats??!

    It’s wild how by virtue of the fact that Valve isn’t a publicly traded company beholden to shareholders, the same Valve which has a history of putting out half-baked goods and which has an always-on DRM client called Steam, seems poised to surpass most of its competitors both in the user privacy and hardware hardware spaces with just straightforward products. They have a product to sell, and that’s it. They don’t need to micro-optimize for bullshit like seemingly every other large tech company does.