It doesn’t really improve productivity much for me. And if you take into account the emails I receive from coworkers written with copilot then I’m actually doing more work to decipher what they are trying to say.

Looks great, can old Google location data be imported?

John Oliver did a deep dive into her recently. It’s not good. She brands herself as a moderate but is essentially in lockstep with most MAGA views. The owners of CBS are gutting everything that’s left of the storied CBS brand to enrich themselves.

It is just advertising. The more I think about it the more I can’t think of any practical use for generative AI that doesn’t involve essentially spamming everyone.

That is a crazy fact. As the article highlights USB-C can do 240W!

The ultimate brainrot comes being rich enough to insulate yourself from ever being intellectually challenged. It’s like the sycophantic chatgpt mode that just yes-ands every idea.

Good read that got me thinking. Donation supported journalism works well for NPR.

I can imagine an ecosystem in which enough people give their $50/month streaming subscriptions directly to artists and journalists.

I hope you ate this with your hands!

I’ve been impressed with F-Droid’s press releases. If they have a snowball’s chance in hell of stopping this, they are certainly giving it a clear and concise effort.

At the risk of sounding like a conservative, most people do find meaning in doing work and would not be content to lay around eating and watching TikTok forever. Just because someone does not find meaning in laboring to make their bosses wealthy does not mean they don’t find meaning in the work itself.

For example I think a lot of “low level” jobs would be quite enjoyable and rewarding if we weren’t forced to do them in order to survive. I’m thinking things like carpentry, running a small grocery store or even waiting tables.

So to answer your question, yes, the Earth can provide far more than every person needs to live a fulfilling life because all we need is food, shelter, community and freedom to find how we can best contribute. Those things are not expensive or resource intensive. But they are kept from us and replaced with plastic things we don’t need in order to further enrich a small few.

Climate change is actually a great example of what I was getting at, because it has a relatively simple and known solution, and humanity has possessed the technology to implement that solution it for essentially as long as we have known about climate change itself.

To put it in context of this conversation: climate change has only increased the “complexity of our times” for working class people, because the people with power and money chose this path. They could have been building windmills, and nuclear power plants and hydroelectric dams to power our electric cars, but there was less profit in that.

The mental stress of “ethical consumption” doesn’t exist in a world of ethical production.

Siri is bad but at least it has natural language processing. I think it’s so funny how CEOs have no idea how LLMs work.

Over a year ago Apple literally ran an ad showing off an “Apple Intelligence” feature that you could tell nobody at Apple ran by the actual engineers before deciding it was possible. It (of course) has still not been released.

Sadly, I don’t think it will soon even matter if the leader is unpopular.

My conspiracy theory is that the Epstein stuff staying on the front pages of social media for long (despite tech CEOs all being strongly MAGA) was an attempt by the Peter Theil / Russel Vought faction to move on from Trump. Which if you think about it is even scarier if they feel they don’t need him any more.

I don’t blame them for feeling either, honestly. But I do blame them for what they do about it.

If you can figure out a better way please let me know 😭😭

Very easy to use… once up and running. But there are other distros out there (Bazzite comes to mind as a good example) that “Just work” on a level even Macs can’t approach. Installation is the only “complicated” part but I’m sure we’ll see some manufacturers installing Bazzite by default in good time.

I agree with all you said, but I also think that “complexity of our times” is whitewashing what I would describe as an “intentionally stressful situation forced upon working class people by the wealthy”.

I believe that humanity has the technology and resources to make our times feel quite simple!

You’re absolutely not wrong.

But I’m still gonna clap.

Not defending the behavior in question, but Linux nowadays is MUCH simpler to understand than Windows or MacOS. It is by far the easiest operating system to change to, and the easiest to learn if you are somehow not familiar with any. From a user standpoint it’s the least “techie” OS now (aside from mobile OS of course).

What you describe about “needing to take courses” was true ten years ago, it was probably true three years ago. It is just simply not true now.