On the face of it, this should be relatively benign: a video about designing and making an accessory for his onewheel. I started typing up a comment about that, but then erased it all when I realized what was so skin crawling about it:

This video is not about a hobbyist making stuff. This video is content. And every decision made was made with content in mind. Everything from his weird design choices, to his unnerving personal affect, to the cheeky call for mass production partnerships, is an artificial construct designed to keep as many people as possible engaged with it as a piece of content. It’s a real person doing a real thing, but the artificiality of it makes it drop into the uncanny valley.

It’s really our fault, for envisioning the torment nexus in the first place

Discord will eventually go this route as well, as it’s investors start demanding their pound of flesh. But yes, it’s possible that the users will then move to yet another walled garden, in and endless cycle of enshitification.

When libertarians describe their ideal minimal state, they begin with “well, of course first we must have cops”

I actually prefer some of the revolutionary aesthetic and culture of our actual existing cyberpunk dystopia as compared to the very specific punk inspired aesthetic of 80s and 90s cyberpunk.

qBittorrent Just Works. I also use transmission sometimes, as it’s just the default installed client on some distros.

I’ve been using a Zowie EC1 for years. It mimicks the shape of the old MS intellimouse explorer 3.0,

Commiefornias aren’t creative, they only know how to steal ideas

I used it at work to ask questions about various engineering standards, and it often provided good answers without having to slog through forums or blog spam (or, god forbid, actually reading the standard directly). I don’t use it so much anymore, because of how much it gave subtly or very wrong answers. You can definately encounter wrong answers from online commenters, but you might at least get some pushback from other commenters, so it’s sort of self correcting.

I also found it weirdly good for asking questions about Marxist theory while reading through Capital. Unlike most people with an opinion about Marxism, ChatGPT actually appears to have read the source material. Still, it can’t help but editorialize sometimes.

Worth more than Amazon + Tesla combined

Napster was a godsend, as I couldn’t afford to buy music. I installed it on the school computers, and I had a sneaky little hidden folder with my mp3s. I’d plug in my headphones and listen over lunchtime. I eventually figured out how to use multipart rar files to put them onto floppy disks, so that I could get them back home and listen on my parent’s computer. I was eventually able to buy a portable CD player that played mp3s on CD-RW, which really opened up the possibilities. Without piracy, I don’t think I would be into music in the same way - I simple never would have had the opportunity to listen to most stuff.

lol

lmao even

One thing that makes it more tolerable is to use Universal Android Debloater to get rid of the obscene amount of bloatware that some makers cram into their phones. But the era of unlocked bootloaders and rooted phones has come to an end, and these are basically just appliances now instead of universal computers. It’s really sad how shitty and locked down everything has gotten. Ten years ago, I was rocking a Samsung Note 2 with custom firmware, and the world was your oyster, I could do anything I wanted on it. New phones are… they have nicer cameras, I guess. The CPUs are faster, but that only just barely keeps up with the insanely bloated software.

Wait till the workers figure out that they can just get rid of the owners

That’s me. I hate discord, but it’s literally the only way that I can communicate with some people, and do hobby stuff. So I just have it set up so that only @mentions will rouse me.

It really challenges the idea that nations ultimately are purely rational actors driven by resource competition. I have to remind myself sometimes that there are in fact some religious whackos tugging on the steering wheels. I don’t have a very good understanding of Iran, but I assume they have their share of that too (how could they not?)

The Space Shuttle is to Space Exploration what Monopoly is to Board Games. Not merely bad, but so bad that it held back the entire field for decades due purely to it’s bad reputation.

They’re going to figure out how to reanimate your neurons after you die so that you have an afterlife working a call center job

For me, the Year of Linux on the Desktop was 2021. There’s literally only one computer in the house running Windows anymore, and that’s simply to run some of the pro-level software I use for gig work (and so I’ll never be entirely rid of it).

Proton’s improvements were a big step in transitioning my PC gaming to Linux. There are still a lot of games that won’t run on Linux, but… there are so many that do, so I don’t feel like I’m missing out.