Everything changes I guess. Good to hear that it’s solid now. There was a time when AOL was not ahead of the pack and was kind of seen as a remnant of the dial-up era and one of those old-folk companies.

Pushing people into echo chambers isn’t even needed because people do that themselves. If you’re gonna profile people, autosubscribe all the libs to r/guns and all the conservatives to r/gender theory. At best people will learn something; at worst we’ll get a show.

Also, fuck Spez and fuck surveillance capitalism.

This is like owning a million pounds of dog shit and making sure you lock your garage so nobody steals it while you are out.

There has to be way more info out there on the internet now than in 2001, but because of these kinds of assholes it’s mostly unsearchable, and locked in walled gardens. I hope someday soon Reddit is met with more laughter, dismissal, and cringing than an AOL email address. I hope Spez eats some of that South American beef and shits himself.

This is true. I am mostly pro-solar and mostly anti-nuclear, but if we decided to build a huge multi-national plant to combat/reverse global warming and it needed obscene amounts of energy to operate, I think that might be a perfect task for nuclear. The same doesn’t hold true for AI data centers though. I hope those guys have to generate their power by daisy chaining potato batteries.

That’s an interesting way to look at it. If it’s not just about the power and the cost, there are actually a lot of other factors that we have glossed over.

Solar is cooperative and local while nuclear necessitates centralization. In a nuclear future, large nuclear generating corporations are the sellers and we are the buyers. In a solar future, we pool and exchange our power depending on current production ability and current electric need… comrade.

I had heard of lake batteries over the years, but never a weight battery. Thank you for teaching me something new today!

You know what else I haven’t heard of in a while? Thermal solar, where they use a parabolic mirror array to concentrate the sun onto a small tube full of water pushing a steam turbine. Even the plain steam could be used for heating and more. Steam can absolutely be concentrated under pressure (more of a capacitor than a battery since the temp won’t hold, but it does provide stability). The steampunk future from comic books is at our finger tips only we will generate the steam using the sun rather than big factories of iron and steel.

Yup. I think the old Pixel Tablet has a few years of Graphene support left. That’s seems like a good option at a much better price point, but check me on those EoL dates.

That would be a godsend. We can only hope.

That’s the good that came out of it for me. We were only able to handle the situation the way that we did because we had a good code of conduct in place. We’ve since reworked and rewritten that to be even more clear. Plus we now have a reputation of not putting up with people’s shit which doesn’t solve the problem but shifts it to less outspoken community organizations.

That’s why I’m a big fan of positively worded codes of conduct. Somehow “We will respect other’s ‘no’ and endeavor to clearly communicate our own boundaries” (an exhortation) rings different than “don’t touch people without permission” (a prohibition).

I think a lot of religious people are happy to bend the rules of their religion to match their desired lifestyle. God will forgive them and Jesus is coming for them on white horse with a choir of angels. As long as you meet your performative obligations and ask for forgiveness later, you can do whatever you want.

Note this is not true of all religious people and while it is representative of my interactions with many American Christians of various denominations, my interactions with Christians in South and Central America and Europe have been quite different.

I grew up in a half-religious home, but it was a very chill “God Loves everyone” kind way. Nevertheless, religion can be dangerous. While my exposure in the home was harmless, just a little casual low-key exposure to a local church put me on a path to being a very devout young Evangelical for a decade or so.

My parents got along well and I barely remember them fighting or arguing. They made it work despite the religious gap. I now consider myself a non-theist/atheist/agnostic/non-religious/Buddhist-adjacent/Satan-loving/philosopher. I dated a few Catholic women (some more devout than others), a non-religious woman, but mostly people who just went to church with their parents or grandparents a few times a year and otherwise just lived a normal life.

Would I date a religious person now? Probably not if their values were tied to it and it wasn’t just a cultural connection. Sounds like hard work and life is difficult enough without intentionally setting everything to hard mode.

No one is to blame for the Democrats failures except the Democratic establishment that betrayed their progressive wing by suppressing Sanders and pursuing faux bipartisanship at the expense of their principles. If the Democrats want those votes, they should take up some more progressive values. Some of my local Dems even traitorously supported age attestation.

With that said, I expect to vote Democratic. The establishment Dems in my area are getting eeked out more and more during primary season every year.

That sounds nightmarish, but not surprising in the least. The gap isn’t a big deal to them because they can just fix it later. If that inconveniences you, they’d like to kindly invite you to die of preventable diseases curled up under cardboard behind your nearest dumpster.

A former employer of mine once sent a notice that a 401k match had been miscalculated and they owed me extra money and they would deposit it in my account. I no longer worked there and had already transferred my 401k. The fee for the 401k company to cut a check was more than the amount my employer paid me, so it’s essentially just stuck there. They did their due diligence, right?

My last employer was better about this. Even though they were an evil megacorp, the benefits were on point and they had swarms of helpful people to explain and assist if you needed to use something. If I didn’t care about how my work effected other people, it would have been a dream.

I’m feeling more and more unity around the idea that the average person deserves a better deal than what we’re getting. I hope we can channel this class consciousness for good.

Fair. I have been a Linux hobbyist for decades. Up until being replaced by AI a year or two ago, I worked tech support and tech billing/contract roles for infrastructure and software giants. I have zero interest in perpetuating purportedly legal but sketchy billing schemes, using or selling AI, or enabling any foreign (or local) genocides or surveillance states with my work. I’d rather make less money and have my ethics a little less shattered.

The main reasons I work are to learn new skills and to get health insurance and money. I can learn skills on my own, I’m doing okay on money because my hobbies are mostly free or pay me a little bit. It’s mostly the threat of financial destitution, homelessness, and dying in a gutter because I caught a cold without health insurance that have kept me working full time, even when my freelancing was a big portion of my income. If we can solve the healthcare issue, everything will change for the better. I truly believe that.

I say hi to almost everyone I pass. This gets me some weird looks when I’m away from home where people are not as friendly. I absolutely understand why women don’t do the same. At least 50% of guys are dangerously delusional in how they view and approach interacting with women. If I was a chick, I would be Lesbian as fuck on safety grounds alone.

I have not. That said, several of my friends have told me their stories, both recent and from years ago and I’m pretty pissed that so many garbage human beings are walking among us and hurting our friends, especially woman.

There was one guy, who hurt multiple of my friends and operates more on the coercive side (still assault). I was asked to ban him from some community events I was running because there had been a recent public incident of concerning behavior. After investigating, I did ban him and eventually made it a perma-ban after having around a dozen women, many who didn’t know each other, reach out to me to let me know they had uncomfortable or worse experiences with him. Some sounded clearly like pressure/coercion for sex, some just remembered being creeped out or setting a boundary only to have him cross it. A lot of the other guys got mad at me for banning him. They said I didn’t have enough evidence or that I wasn’t being fair. I had heard more than enough, but I couldn’t share all of it because some of the women didn’t want to be on-the-record because of domestic violence concerns or because the harassment that they experienced had happened in the past and they were worried speaking up might fan the flames. Some people said it was actually entirely the woman’s fault but they were speculating from the outside in. They didn’t have any of the information I had, they just fell for a charismatic smile from a friendly guy with a lot of hobbies. The guy himself also gave me a lot of grief and tried to undermine me and my standing in the community for daring to rain on his SA parade. A few years later he caught some CP charges and other nasty shit. Up until that point, I only knew of victims of his that were adults. I’m guessing the only reason he didn’t get tried on statutory rape was he plead to the other charges and the most recent victim didn’t want to face him in court so the prosecutor took his plea. I hope everyone who was upset at me for banning him sees his mugshot on the registry and learns that just because we can’t imprison someone without a conviction, doesn’t mean we have to invite them to our parties. Scumbags walk among us each and every day.

Yeah, I sure could use some cheap SD cards now. I feel like a lot of the more privacy conscious gadgets use SD cards to save you from the menace of manufacturer-controlled cloud storage, rightly so!

I remember USB thumb drives hitting crazy lows at one point too, to the point where I was getting some decently sized drives as promo items. I think I paid $40 or so for my very first 250MB USB stick, maybe it was even smaller than that. I also distinctly remember buying a 128GB USB stick for a very similar price in the last decade or two and seeing them even cheaper than that. You do notice a build quality difference between them when you hold them side by side. The old Sandisk feels solid, the led, the cap, the enclosure are all solid and feel super sturdy and like they’re one single piece. The newer 128GB PNY is cheap, rattly, trashy plastic wrapped around a circuit board with a goofy retractable usb connector, but obviously outperforms the old one by miles. Would love to have cheap and quality. :-)

Germany can’t decide. Every few weeks I see an article that says “German city/company/institution is Ditching MS for Open Source”, and the next article is “Germany Cucked by Microsoft for Ten Billionth Time.” Can we just completely ditch all MS and agree to an open standard?